Free Dear Dad by Erik Christian Page B

masterfully crafted interior inside the boat. The boat was a huge eye sore in the neighborhood, with the boat peeking over the fence and grabbing peoples’ attention. My dad’s passion was unknown to me. I was only four and cared only about my next meal and my nap. The day my dad had saved enough money to buy the brand new little silver diesel boat engine, made somewhere Swiss, was an event years in the making and half the neighborhood came over with six packs of beer and watched the giant hired crane lift the engine off the ground and into the boat’s belly. They had to take down part of the fence to do this, as they had to remove the fence for the mast and finally for the boat’s journey to the harbor. Young skinny guys in white T-shirts stood around my dad and laughed and listened to him. I guess my dad was a local hero of sorts.
     
    When my mom held the thick glass champagne bottle, ready to christen the boat, she had mentally walked through the procedure of hitting the boat hard enough with the bottle to break it. It was a big day, five years to the day for this boat and two years for the second. We have some pictures in the family photo album, if I fanned them out on the carpet, would show a slide show of my mom hitting the boat, like Babe Ruth hitting a baseball, with glass flying towards the water like ice flying off of a truck’s windshield. That day marked the anniversary of my terror of boats for the next ten years.
     
    My Dad had to fulfill some part of manhood or an adrenal gland deficiency by sailing to the extreme. That meant keeling the boat over to the point of flipping, I thought. We sailed hard, capturing every wind gust that promised a few miles of great back draft and white capped waves that peeled off the hull like waves of whipped cream. Of course I was on the railing, holding on for dear life and crying as loud as I could to get my dad’s attention over the sound of the rippling sails. I could see he was loving this newfound freedom of sailing. I could slow the movie down in my mind and put a cheesy Bee Gees song to it and it would be the sailing version of “Chariots of Fire”. He was engrossed and I was seasick and later it became something else between He and I, but for this moment it was holding down my sickness. I wailed on and heard the dishes in the Galley crash to the floor as my mom’s beautiful red hair flicked in the wind and a look of complete serenity passed my parents’ faces.
     
    What I loved most were the times when there was no wind and they had to turn on the motor. The sound of the engine rumbling and knocking and vibrating through the sunny, warm teak deck was bliss. I would place my ear down onto the deck like a suction cup and the engine would lull me to sleep, very deep sleep. Saliva always dribbled over my pudgy lips and created a pool. I slept for hours and even slept during a trip to the San Juan Islands, which took four hours at least. I’d like to think that my mind was working on my future during these times, that I was creating Mozart symphonies and Van Gogh art, or at least forming a genius of my own, subconsciously. That diesel engine led to my preference of always sleeping with “white noise”. There’s a giant fan in my room now. It blows through my room and the sound elevates me above the surrounding reality of traffic noise and branches snapping from under deer’s hooves. I feel stifled without white noise. I feel caged, like being an Indian on a Reservation, when they’re meant to roam the land and hunt buffalo. Now, they just get fucking drunk.
     
     
     
     

    THE SLEEPING DOGS & XANADU
     
    When we moved from California to Washington, I don’t recall much. I remember driving up the sun-bleached, oil-speckled highway of southern California. I was part of a small family caravan, consisting of two vehicles and large cardboard signs that we pushed against the window of the car to let the other car know what we needed, large cardboard signs that