Papa Was A Rodeo
When I was 11 years old, my father and I couldn’t have been more different. It was 1987 and my dad was a good old boy from Texas who wore trucker hats and tight Wrangler jeans. He was a fiber-optic technician who drove around the deep South in a huge tan RV, a loner following the beat of his own drum.
I was wearing Vision Streetwear zebra-print high-tops, sporting a Nazi-youth/skater haircut with long Sun-In’d bangs, and obsessed with the television show “Silver Spoons” starring Ricky Shroder. I would sit in my mom’s giant Papasan chair devouring handfuls of White Cheddar popcorn as I watched each episode and deconstructed it like a Godard film.
What’s going on with these jump cuts?
Is the obvious synthetic lighting intentional?
What does the choo-choo train really symbolize?
Why do they underuse the Alfonso character?
Why aren’t I making this show!?
I had found my true calling. I rang my dad and asked him for a video camera for my twelfth birthday. I was going to be a director. A few weeks later my dad bought me a “top of the line” VHS video camera. It was a hulking mass of plastic and metal. Using it was like carrying around an 8 slice industrial toaster on your shoulder. The sheer girth of it pummeled my scrawny prepubescent arms. After an hour of filming I was left with what looked like some kind of sex harness bruises on my shoulders. I chalked it up to the “life of a filmmaker” and the next day I began production on my first film- an overwrought psychological thriller about a disenfranchised, friendless 12 year-old boy abducted by aliens whose fear turns to joy as he realizes he’s not with “the other” at all, but back home with his own people who’d lost him as a baby.
It was deep stuff.
The first day of filming was a fantastic failure. The talent and crew didn’t get along… and both of them were me. I wasn’t the most popular kid and making this movie was turning out to be pretty much a “me, myself and I” endeavor. The set was my middle school’s athletic field. I struggled in the wind to balance a foam core cut out of a UFO glued to a yard stick. I started to worry, “What if this doesn’t look just like the final scene from “Close Encounters?” I was a perfectionist 12 year-old attempting to make a 10 million dollar film on a 14 dollar budget.
The experience was horrible. By the time it was over I had huge purple welts on either shoulder. My right forearm had atrophied and my wrist felt as if Carpel Tunnel Syndrome had set in. I stormed home that night and zipped up the camera in it’s case. Throwing it into the back of my closet I made sure to get the last word- “You’re an asshole and I’m never taking you out again!”
I really showed that camera who was boss.
I threw myself on my bed and cried. Craft services entered my room with a tuna fish sandwich and tried to calm me down. Craft services was my mom. I explained my horrible shoot.
“Mom, I can’t make movies. I suck at it and it’s just too much for one person!”
“What went wrong honey?”
“What didn’t?! I didn’t have a tripod. So I just sat the camera on the bleachers. But the wind kept blowing over! I lost the camera manual and my white balance board blew away! And I need to create the landing of a mile-wide UFO that about 100 humanoids come out of and I don’t know how to get that many extras! Even if I found them, how would I make them look like aliens?!”
“Well, honey. Are you sure you even want to make movies?”
“Yeah. Or TV shows like “Silver Spoons.”
“Hmmm. But I thought you wanted to be IN “Silver Spoons.”
A lightbulb turned on.
“What do you mean, Mom?”
“You always change your haircut when Ricky Shroeder changes his. And we got you that red jacket last Winter like the one he wears. Plus, you’re always telling jokes like him.”
Wow. Craft Services really knew me. I didn’t want to direct. I wanted to ACT!
My single mother had a zillion interests of her own and fully supported my dream of performing. Within a week I was enrolled in the John Casablanca School of Modeling and Acting. Located in a strip mall between a TCBY and an H&R Block. It wasn’t exactly prestigious. But to me it was the Lee Strasberg Institute. I was on the fast-track to living the eccentric life of a Thespian in New York City. Soon I was practicing my two-person scene from “Charles In Charge” and my dream of “directing” was long forgotten.
My father was infuriated that I ditched his expensive video camera and thought that trying to be an actor was absurd and hopeless, especially when my Guidance Counselor had described me to my parents as an “antisocial introvert with a complex inner life.” Which, once you’re older translates to “shut-in” or “hoarder” or “guy that travels across the country in an RV repairing telephone service.”
During this time, my dad had begun dating a Korean woman named Young who lived in Georgia. This was the most exotic thing that had ever happened to me. Larry’s last three marriages (and divorces) had been to the whitest women you could imagine. And although I loved (and hated) each of them in their own way, none of them were remotely “exotic.”
One night, my dad called from Savannah to introduce me to Young over the phone. Everything she said was indecipherable. I took the phone into the bathroom, hoping it was quiet enough in there that I could make out what she was saying. I would respond to her saying “I’m sorry I can’t understand you” or “Young, are you asking me if I wear socks?” But she would just prattle on, giggling as she “spoke.” I literally couldn’t understand a word she said outside of my name, which she repeatedly pronounced as “Dabid.” At one point as she attempted to describe what I think was a tea kettle my dad had bought her, I thought she said that it had “a big dong in the clouds of her potty.”
I really could have cared less what language she spoke or how well she spoke it. I was immediately in love with her and wanted her to be my new stepmother. She was foreign and cheerful and sounded just like Nancy Kwan, the host of my favorite infomercials for the skin treatment “Pearl Cream.”
My dad was dating a real-life Asian lady! I would daydream about what their time together was like. I could see them drinking Sake, cross-legged on the ground by a small pond surrounded by Bonzai trees. They would sleep at night on a hard wooden palette beneath bamboo chimes. In the morning Young would make my father dumplings and serve them on a dish decorated with Lychee blossoms. And then, as the sun set, my father would lovingly bind her feet.
I know… it’s awful.
But understand I was in San Antonio, Texas. There was only one Chinese girl in my entire school and my exposure to Asian culture consisted of Mr. Miyagi from “The Karate Kid,” the woman in the mall with terrifying fingernails who dyed my mother’s hair, and the TV show “Kung Fu.”
A few weeks after they’d started dating, my dad came home to visit and asked me if he could borrow the video camera. He was going to be taking a vacation with Young and wanted to film it. So he took the camera and hit the road again. Meanwhile, I continued perfecting my newfound craft with some very complex scene-work from “Kate & Allie.” When my father returned home on his next round, he gave me back the camera. I promptly gave it a dirty look and threw it in the back of my closet to gather the dust of my unrequited dream.
My father left in his RV early the next morning. Late that night he called me at home from Savannah.
“Hi Dad.” “Hello D.J. How you doin?”
His tone was strange, cheerful and forced.
“Um… I’m fine Dad. How are you?”
“I’m hangin’ in there. Hehe. Well, actually…”
He trailed off for a moment and then cleared his throat before settling into the most earnest tone he’d ever used with me.
“You know what? I like to think of us as friends. I know that you’re still young, but I like to think of you as an adult, as a young man. And even if you weren’t my son, I like to think that we’d still be friends.”
I braced myself.
“Well, I did the damnedest thing. I left a video in that video camera. And I just hope you can respect me enough, as your friend AND your father, to not watch it.” I tried to sound as disinterested as I could as I promised him that I would never watch the tape. In actuality, I was testing the laws of physics, stretching the phone cord through four rooms trying to reach the video camera in my bedroom closet. I had the tape in my hands as we said goodbye a few minutes later.
I hung up the phone and pushed the video into the VCR. I sat on the couch with the remote in my hand. Even at 12 years old and with all that curiosity eating my brain, I had a moment of doubt. What am I about to discover? Do really I want to know what my father’s life is like 3 weeks out of the month? I was about to watch something illicit, a secret, something I could never erase from my mind.
And then I pressed “play.”
Open on a hotel room. The camera is set on the nightstand between two full sized beds, aimed at the room’s opposite wall, where the TV and desk are. The room is empty. A trembling bar of tracking fuzz crosses the screen from top to bottom. Silence. I wait. Suddenly, from a stereo somewhere in the room, booms the nasally whine of Willie Nelson. “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys…” As the Country classic blares, my father strolls into the frame from the right. He is wearing the biggest cowboy hat I’d ever seen, a pair of shiny cowboy boots, and a pearl button cowboy short- the type with the gold threads in the fabric that catch the light and sparkle. He is singing into a rolled up magazine like it’s a microphone. He proceeds to, with more vigor and passion than I’d ever seen him do anything, perform “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” like he’s on the mainstage at the rodeo. He scans the room smiling and singing, taking little breaks in between the verses to talk up his stadium full of fans. He tips his hat and winks at a pillow as if it’s an adoring fan. “Well ain’t you a pretty little thing?” Then he points to a lamp and flashes a million-watt smile, asking “Where y’all here from?” He performs the entire song and finishes with a huge flourish, taking off his hat and twirling it above his hat before looking directly into the camera and screaming “Thanks for comin’ out y’all!”
As the song ends my father holds his triumphant pose for a few seconds, balancing awkwardly in his boots. His smile becomes a weird, frozen grimace.
Suddenly, he drops character entirely and runs toward the camera to turn it off.
I sat in the quiet fuzz of TV static for a few moments, trying to process everything I had just seen. It was immediately more unsettling than the bizarre, night-vision, sex tape I could’ve witnessed. Granted, seeing something like that would have been awful and life-changing. But this was just vulnerable and weird.
I gave the tape back to my father like we were involved in an illicit drug deal. Neither one of us looked the other in the eye as I returned the evidence of my father’s “complex interior life.”
I’d wanted to tell Larry several times over the years that I watched the tape. And that he was a good singer. And that he had great stage presence. And that he looks pretty suave in a ten-gallon hat. But I never wanted to embarrass him.
Then, last Christmas in San Antonio, Texas as I helped my dad look for new Western shirts, a familiar song came over the JC Penney sound system.
“Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys…”
The tune filled me with fond memories of my dad’s star-making performance all alone at that EconoLodge so many years before. As Waylon and Willie belted out the sad story of all their hard-drinking years on the road I decided to tell my dad the truth.
“Hey dad. You remember that time you left that tape in my video camera and asked me not to watch it?”
My dad looked at me genuinely confused. “Nope. Not really.”
At first I thought he was bluffing. “Come on, dad. You asked me not to watch that video of you singing alone in your motel room.”
“Huh? What on earth are you talking about?”
“Seriously dad? You were all dressed up in a big cowboy hat and you sang “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” at the top of your lungs like you were at the rodeo or something.”
My dad gazed off for a moment as if he was flipping through his rolodex of memories trying to access the correct file. He eventually shrugged and said “Huh. Sounds like something I woulda done.”
I was flabbergasted. My dad continued to push hangers down the rack, unfazed. How could this decades-old secret be no big deal to him? Did anyone else know he was a one-man Karaoke army? How many nights and in how many motel rooms had he’d performed Country Music hits in full cowboy regalia? Was singing into rolled-up magazines all alone in cheap hotels with a video camera some weird fetishistic obsession that was only the tip of the iceberg? Did he also perform scenes from Oscar-winning films and if so, was there a myriad of costume changes? Did he breakdance in Atlanta? Perform a Mae West-themed drag show in Charleston? Work as a Voodoo High Priest in New Orleans? Handle snakes and baptize sinners in Birmingham? What the hell was happening all those years out on the road? What DIDN’T I know?
As I considered all this, he hummed along with Willie and held a pearl-buttoned shirt on it’s hanger up against his chest. Then he flashed me that million-watt grin and asked “How do I look?”
