On one hand, my Dad was the best friend a teenage girl could have. You want someone to buy you beer, Dad was your guy. If a friend got busted for whatever, Dad was always willing to impersonate a parent to get them out. On the other, just don’t ask him to be there when you were sad, needed help with homework or attend a track meet, a play or even a graduation. Mom said his middle initials are M.I.A. She ran out of excuses and divorced him when I was eleven.
When confronted by his inadequacies, Dad would point to the scar on his nose, the result of being pushed down the stairs by the owner of the Doo Drop Inn in Hurley, Wisconsin, DBA his father. If we wanted to see a worse father, Dad insisted, all we had to do was look north. We were all surprised when Dad left his job as a manager of trucking company to take care of his father after he had a stroke.
Grandpa was dead and buried next to his third wife, Dad causally mentioned in one of his rare phone calls. The only question Mom asked him was when he was coming back to pick up the crap he had dropped off in our basement when she was at work. He had a few things to clear up at the Doo Drop and he imagined it wouldn’t be a matter of a couple weeks. Mom gave him three; he missed the deadline by nearly 18 years.
Although Dad lived less than a seven hours drive away, we didn’t see him much. Maybe once a month in the first years, to twice a year after we graduated from college. My older sister, Cindy moved East. I moved to Milwaukee for a job as a lawyer.
When I was 35, I traveled north to visit a client who owned land in the Northwoods. His second wife was arguing with the kids from his first wife and he wanted to settle his estate plans. His house was less than 20 miles from Hurley and I took the advice from the bar’s name and dropped in.
The bar was as dreary as Dad described it, with a dusty long burned-out Hamm’s beer sign as the only decoration. Two truck drivers sat at the bar watching some car race on a small television. I asked for my father. The bartender, mostly bald with an unfortunate pony tail, pointed with his thumb to the stairs outside.
The metal diamond-tread stairs shook under my feel and I wasn’t sure if the bolts attaching it to the crumbling brick wall would hold. I knocked on the glass door with a faded lace curtain. A young woman’s voice told me to come in and the door yielded with the faintest press. The front room looked like a museum piece from the early 70s. Shag carpeting on the floor with a worn path towards the back of the apartment. A couch of brown and orange velvet. Two arm chairs, one of nubby green fabric and the other covered with an old sheet flanked the sofa. A glass ash tray, half full of butts. A three-quarter empty bottle of Wild Turkey next to two dusty glasses, one of them dangerously chipped. A woman who was probably 20, but dressed like she was fifteen, came out from the back, playing with her dirty blonde braid. She narrowed her eyes. “We got blonde and red today. Twenty-five extra cause you’re a woman and I ain’t no lezzy.”
I wasn’t surprised there were hookers at the Doo Drop Inn. For a high school report, Cindy researched Hurley and its rich history as purveyor of vice for the iron miners from nearby Michigan. A web search revealed a couple of arrests and fines bearing our grandfather’s name.
I asked for my Dad. She shouted over her shoulder and slouched through the bead curtain. He came out of the hallway, wearing jeans and work boots under a flannel shirt and fleece vest.
“What are you doing here?” he asked and then: “Let’s talk downstairs.” He blocked my view of the backroom and hugged me out of the apartment. The staircase groaned and shimmied under our weight as we walked down—me first, him following.
Dad opened the bar door and directed me to the least shambled of the three booths. He motioned for me to sit on the banquette that did not have the duct tape repairing the vinyl seat. He brushed the bottle sweat and cigarette ash into his hand.
“Your mother didn’t send you, did she?”
“Nope,” I said, “I have client not too far away.”
“Do you want a drink or something to eat? All we have is peanuts and they aren’t that fresh. I could go next door and get you a burger. It’s a shame it isn’t Friday, they have a fried walleye sandwich that is not bad.
“I’m fine. Do you sleep with that girl?”
“No. Not ever. Not her. Not Veronica. Not Shell. Not any of the girls.” He stopped to consider something. “I did date Shell’s mother a couple years back. But Valerie wasn’t…wasn’t working for me.”
“How long have you been a pimp?”
He didn’t have the creativity to be indignant. “I am not going to make excuses. These are rough parts. Miners and truckers live rough lives and that roughness is deeper than their skins. When they aren’t working, they play rough. My father knew that and he knew there were a lot of girls without a lot of options. He would bring them home when I was a kid. I had a series of ever-changing big sisters. I don’t think he wanted them to be…you know…escorts. He even tried to stop a couple of them. But they got mad and left and ended up on any other bar along Silver Street where the owner didn’t have the same qualms. Some got hurt. Some ran away. One was murdered. After that, I guess he thought he was better than nothing.”
“Is that why you moved away?”
“No, that was my father’s caring for the girls upstairs was his only redeeming quality. He may have been nice to the girls, but that didn’t make him a good person. To me he was just a frustrated old man and he took it out on me like it was my fault his life was a giant u-turn, starting and ending right at those stairs. We used to fight every night. There was nothing I could do to make it right so I moved downstairs and slept on a cot in the back. As soon as I graduated high school, I packed my bags and thought I was gone forever.”
A thousand long-unasked questions vied for pole position. “Why come back? You didn’t have to. You had a good job. You had us.”
He sighed in answer. “I’ve thrown away more things than most men have. When I met your mother, she filled me in away I never thought possible. When your brother and you came along, I had more than I thought possible. But there was the hole in me that no matter how much I added, it just poured out.”
“When Tim called me and told me that Dad was dying, I decided to come back. Not for him, but for me. I wanted to prove I was better than him—giving him more than he deserved. When I arrived, he was already too far gone. I stayed with him until the end. He kept calling me Charlie. I have no idea who that is.
“Tim would have bought the Doo Drop. He would been okay to the girls. But Ally, Kate and Diane were upstairs. They didn’t ask me to stay. I think they expected me to leave them like every man in their lives. I expected me to leave, too. That seems to be the only thing I was good at.”
“I couldn’t make things up with your mother and you girls, but I had a chance to make a difference in these girls’ lives. I give them a place to be safe. I take care of the rough ones. And, yes, I take my cut. My father might have been a simple man, but he knew there was more money to be made in girls than booze. So it is just usually four of us upstairs. When they are all busy, I sleep on the cot. Eventually they either run away with Johns who promise them God knows what. But there is always someone to take their place. When you’ve never had a family, this is as good as it gets.
The outside stairs groaned. My father looked at his watch. “Walter,” he said. “Sure I can’t get you a drink?”