Menthol-Guy

An uncle once told me, probably out of shock for five, six long interminable years of longing, with the familial head-to-toe scan, that it took him a while to remember that it was me–not Dad–who’s visiting to review his eldest (my cousin) for the UPCAT.

“Man, you’re just like your Dad. You look exactly–and I mean exactly–like your Dad thirty-five years ago!” I winced out of embarrassment for my uncle and Dad had a massive dispute two years ago, and that meant that if he were to have a gun right now he’d pick a revolver and lock it under my jaw.

It was funny that ever since I was born, I consider stray remarks regarding my resemblance to Dad an insult. A very personal insult. “No, I look like Mom! Right, Mom? I look like you!” Mom would nod and smile, and her dimples would show, and goddamnit I didn’t have her dimples.

In this blog I’ve been very careful not to disclose anything about Dad, though a couple of mentions can be searched but anything close to personal can be considered vague, if not pointless. Backed up with reasons, my mind tells me I should leave Dad. Nest in my dorm, probably work at the coffee shop–the typical teenage runaway scenes where the protagonist embarks on a bus, smokes non-stop, chit-chats some random seatmate, just like old Holden. Catcher in the Rye.

But no, I have to stay in the house for bum weekends. Bum, fruitless weekends where I cook and eat and watch a goddamn TV with only eight channels, two of them have priests in it with their usual deep, didactic voices, half-pretentious while two others show nothing short of what I call the “soap-opera overkill” with actors that can barely put themselves together to act something. My staying in the house for weekends is more of an obligation than a compassionate act, impelled by moral reins (if you can call it that) than by intimacy and the whatnot.

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I was obviously a Mama’s boy when I was young. Dad was busy nation-hopping: Toulouse, Beijing, Honolulu, Sydney, even as far as Vancouver and Dublin. The tourist in him–though those were business trips–was rampant during those years. I grew up remembering him as the guy who feeds me endless atlases and encyclopedias, though I have to say his trips please me a lot.

When Mom fled to New York, though, I was stuck (which means I was left no other option) with Dad. Up to now, I’m still stuck with him, though I hear at the back of his head that he wants to move out and start a single life.

Single! For chrissake, he’s two years shy of sixty and he’d say he’s single!

It’s probably the divorce–oh, here I go again–but seriously, all I want for him is to enjoy his life. I mean, he’s old, and anything can happen. I just don’t like it when he tells people that he’s single, his voice was plain like he never had four children.

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I have to say that Dad is an influential image in my life. Though they say my interest in geography and history is nothing but a feat of “giftedness” (and no, this is not a euphemism but a mere label I had lived with for a decade), I can tell that Dad is behind all of it. (Honestly, I couldn’t remember who taught me which.) Dad introduced me to books. He knows it. He knew it was too late to even insinuate book-reading at High School, but he did it anyway.

Maybe I am a more successful attempt to replicate my Dad. (Were my brother a prototype, he’d have been the phased-out model.) Maybe Dads are wise that way, that maybe fathers have this certain mission nagging at them for years. Maybe it says: MUST SELF-REPLICATE. MUST FEED SON MY INTERESTS. They build their sons from their own virtues, on their own fatherly grounds.

So here I am.

I swear, whenever I look at the bathroom mirror and stare at it for ten seconds, twenty seconds, staring at the bushy growth of my sideburns and the mustache and the beard and the vast expanse of facial hair, I swear, I see Dad. I realized it today. Or maybe last week, yes, when my uncle was insisting that I look like Dad (and I have to buy it since he knew Dad ever since they were teenagers).

I swear I see Dad and my fists clenched out of its want to shatter the bathroom mirror. I commanded it to stop, get loose, cool down. Maybe I have this nagging voice in my ear telling me to prove to the world that I’m a better prototype.

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“There’s this phenomenon, he says, in American writing, whereby every great writer has had a father who was a failure… Well, it’s born of the notion that there’s this national obsession with success, and that a father’s failure is unbearable to a son. So then he makes up for the father’s disgrace by getting the biggest prize of all… the Great American Novel.”

–A quote from “Lit Life”, a novel by Kurt Wenzel

What a theory. In the book it’s called “The Whitehurst Theory“, but only in the book. I analyzed Dad after reading that certain part, hopefully giving away a hint about a glorious writing career that’s ahead of me. Sadly, my mind tells me Dad’s not entirely a failure, and that I have to find another source of motivation.