What I Want To Say About My Father - John Fetto

Imagine you’re a really shy kid, say 14. Not good with girls, a nerd, a skinny guy, with thick glasses with black rims, coke bottle lenses. You’ll only be popular if you’re stranded on a desert island and someone needs to start a fire and spring forward, whip off your glasses, hold it above the dry grass, slowly bringing forth flame. It was before cool wire rim, in the middle sixties, which was really closer to the fifties. You’re in the chess club and the chemistry club and the photography club. Every day, you wear blue button shirt, long sleeve, like the blond haired kids (and you’re not blond) that you rolled up twice, even though it’s summer in Los Angeles, with blue shorts, and white socks, wanting not to stand out as desperately as you wanted to fit in, just like everyone else, but now you have to go to the store for some reason---with your father.

Your father doesn’t want to fit in. He wants to stand out. Why else would he have dragged the whole family from the east coast so he could ‘star’ in television and movies? He doesn’t wear a long sleeve shirt with a button down collar. Remember it’s summer in Los Angeles. In the summer, and all but two weeks of winter, your father goes to the supermarket, the post office, the gas station, everywhere, wearing a bathing suit and flip flops so that everyone could admire his fabulous bronze body, a middle weight in the army if anyone wanted to know, so that he could thrill his fans who saw him murder several people last night on the Untouchables, before being machine gunned at the end. He puffs his chest out, sucks in his gut as he walks down the aisle, flip-flop, flip-flop, looking not really for products but for someone, anyone, who recognizes him. Slowly you let him get a few steps ahead, then ten feet, so you can pretend you don’t know him when he does what comes next, dreading it the way a French aristocrat dreaded the guillotine. As you walk, you think maybe, just maybe, this time he won’t do it, but then it comes, and you feel your head pulling inside your button down collar like a turtle as he begins to sing. Sinatra, of course: My Way. His voice resonates through the aisles stacked with potato chips, detergent, and laundry soap.