By a small sample may we judge of the whole piece.
—Cervantes, Don Quixote
Anecdote
That last night, we accidentally surprised him. Having changed our minds about staying over at my mom’s after a French Quarter poetry reading, we drove back home to Baton Rouge where Dad was living with us. Perhaps a minor fight between Brock and I earlier that night about my father—that he had no plans to find work or leave our house, ever—precipitated our change of plans. In the beginning, Hurricane Katrina’s devastation was universal and personal: but also, an opportunity for my father and me to rebuild our fraught relationship. That was six months ago; this, now, was a very different time.
After we closed the car doors gently, we didn’t jingle the keys as we’d gotten used to doing, warning him of our arrival. Noiselessly, we opened the front door and entered the living room, and in a moment, Dad had whirled up from the sofa and turned toward us, hand covering himself, zipping up his pants. Bodies fucked loudly, wildly, on the screen. Brock, Dad, me frozen in that instant in the living room.
We’d ignored it the other times, ignored lots. But now Brock threw up his arms and said, “What are you doing, dude? You’re standing in your daughter’s house with your penis in your hand!”
As they exchanged more words, I performed the emotional equivalent of stopping my fingers in my ears. I said nothing. In the morning my father was gone and left no sign of where he went. Though back in touch and reconnected years later, Dad and I have never spoken of this time.
British Gothic
From the halcyon night, Mr. Guthrie and I stepped into the living room, dark but for the colors on the television screen, rays emitting a bluishness, reflecting the sadness of Mr. Champagne, a man who no longer believed in love, who in fact was once quoted as saying, “The idea of my falling in love again, ever, is hilarious,” and I may have remembered this in that instant—love, no longer an option, why might he not explore the variegated ways in which one finds erotic pleasure, if not in warm, tender flesh, then in pixelated two dimensions, though alas, the literal den of iniquity was my den, thus, the seat of impropriety. Within our young couple’s hearts: that growing love for each other, so passionate and full without the need for pixilation, and by extension, our uncertainty, desperation to proceed together into the future on our own. So Mr. Champagne listened to Mr. Guthrie’s mournful words; hours later, perchance within the witching hour, he fled the house, never to return.
Tanka
Left door unlocked, now
we can’t get in. Dad’s there, dick
in hand, porn on, then
shouting—who doesn’t belong,
who does. Spring night. Years await.
Blurb
In her latest essay, the author of several other works about her father makes meaning of the six-month period he lived with her after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city of their births and left him, not for the first or last time, homeless. The work will focus particularly on their last night living together in the author’s home—or is that night more of an afterthought in the essay? Modeled after Raymond Queneau’s seminal Exercises in Style, in which Queneau tells the same pedestrian anecdote about a man on a bus through dozens of forms to show the beauty of seeing the situation differently, this iteration of Exercises seeks to illuminate the prismatic nature of not just situation but story when told in multitude. And here lies what separates the two works: this author’s anecdote is more personal than Queneau’s, thus more changeable. In order to understand it, we must hear it told in many different voices, or not at all. Or at least, this is her understanding of Queneau’s work during the period in question, when reading and rereading the French author’s simple assemblage of exercises was easier that parsing out her big one: Who is father, and who am I? Her resultant attempts to answer the unanswerable many times over becomes an irreverent, Proustian unfolding of the Japanese paper flower in muddy water, a thin slice of their lives in all its mildewed multiplicity.
Apostrophe
O oft-dropped Dell Inspiron 1520, be the humble receptacle of this truthful tale, which like most experiences, lives in the past, present, and future, & let finger flicks & clops of hand heels unfurl words onto that virtual white screen in the Times New Roman stamp of familiarity. O, be the venue for thy lover, future husband, baseball-hatted and beleaguered, and thy father, hunched over, member in hand, one sock pulled high, the other’s errant elasticity amassed around his ankles the night in question, lo those many years ago. O though the details of his stay be too numerous to recount—thy father’s slumped shoulders bearing some infinite anguish, the meals he prepared with unwashed-handed abandon (salty ham hocks, spaghetti topped with hard boiled eggs—foods served by a foreigner, to be politely smiled through), the gallons of liquor purchased in those months to shepherd all three of you across the River Lethe to forget—let now the sins of inebriation wash away so that the truth of this past & selves live on the page, arisen from the murky waters of memory!
Drunk
Dick in his hand y’all, I’m not kidding. Muthafucka stood up quick and was all like, ooh, no, what y’all doing home so early, y’all want something to eat, here, let me go fix some ham hocks for ya, let me tuck myself away right quick. Oh, y’all ain’t hungry, well, I think I’ll go to bed . . .
And Brock’s like, hold on, we’re not having any more of this dick-in-hand shit, you’ve got a daughter, she loves you, you better look like getting your shit straight and get a job, FEMA money doesn’t last forever, what are you doing, dude . . .
And I was like, damn, I’m gonna marry that mutherfucka.
Precision
The address: 1707 Cloverdale Dr., Baton Rouge, LA 70808. The room: roughly six hundred square feet, the television a thirty-inch Panasonic from Walmart, the largest purchase made with the father’s $15,000 FEMA windfall from the flood loss of his mother’s Gentilly Woods home, the bodies on the television clenched on a king-sized bed taking up about half of those television inches. Inside the DVD player, a pornography disk starring Jada Fire, rented from Major Video two blocks down at 3655 Perkins Road. The older man standing in front of the television in the living room weighing 159 pounds, his daughter 141, the boyfriend 182. The couch: full length, cream colored, six feet long. On the coffee table, framing the scene, sits a 1.75 liter handle of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Whiskey, bought (presumably) hours before from Martin’s Wine Cellar on 7248 Perkins Road for $19.97. Approximately 350 milliliters of Jack consumed prior to our entrance, though that’s a difficult thing to measure by looking.
Telenovela
Hijo de la granputa madre! Digame porque vives haci, porque no buscas empleo, porque son tus dias tan secas, sin vida? Por favor, senior, no puedes seguir viviendo haci en esta casa, por diosito santo!
Cross Examination
Q: Did you purposefully sneak up on your father that night?
A: No!
Q: Then why didn’t you jingle the keys so he’d hear you, as you’d done before?
A: I don’t know . . . I think we were getting tired of having to be thoughtful of his needs in our house.
Q: Why didn’t you speak during the incident?
A: I was scared of being angry. I’d never lived with my father. I was scared of his leaving after having stayed all that time. But I was also scared of his staying. Scared of choosing my boyfriend and our future over me and my dad’s.
Q: Haven’t you admitted to being relieved after you woke up to find him gone?
A: Haven’t you ever heard of cognitive dissonance? Feeling two opposing ideas at once?
Q: Don’t be a smartass. Couldn’t you have treated him better?
A: Yes. When I reached out to take care of my father, something pulled me away. It wasn’t the porn, though it was easy to point a finger there. I wanted to be taken care of, be vulnerable, do the hiding from him, rather than having to find him. I was helping him, so I couldn’t call out for help, and I resented him for it.
Q: So why are you telling this story now?
A: I’ve always wanted to tell it, but didn’t know how. I felt we shared a temporary joint custody of this story, me and my dad, and telling it on my own would mean a nasty divorce. I didn’t want that. I still don’t. I just want to know him better. More than that, I want him to know me. Telling the story is my oblique means of feeling closer to him.
Q: Are you certain you want to know and share his stories in order to become closer as a father and daughter, or, as a writer, are you trying to cannibalize him by creating this unique, interesting character?
A: Fuck.
Q: Do you in fact love your father?
A: What kind of thing is that to say?
Q: I’m the one asking the questions here.
Asides
The door was unlocked (we weren’t supposed to be back this soon) and porn was on the TV, and Dad was half-dressed and alone, and later, I realized, lonely (the one woman I’ve ever known him to date was a criminal named Deanna, who was serving time for drug trafficking—and Dad told me once how when she was ten years old she learned how to steal from an ATM using bubble gum and yo-yo string, and I’d never seen him look so proud, and that hurt). Brock yelled at my father—he’d been lounging around too long, it was time to go (Brock and I were married two years later—he was my hero that night for speaking up when I wasn’t able, yet his words released my father into the world again without me, and that hurt too). Dad didn’t say much for himself, and I didn’t say anything (we didn’t speak in those intervening years, either, and right before my wedding, my father—uncharacteristically, I thought—called with an offer to walk me down the aisle). I slowly backed out of the room to cry in bed (I told my father I’d be walking down the aisle alone, that it was symbolic of my independence . . . or something). My father was gone the next morning (I regret that now, my silence that night before he left, and walking down the aisle alone years later. I could’ve used his arm).
Third-Person Past
Before that spring night with the locked door and porn and penis-in-hand, before he reappeared in her life and left again, she missed him. Her father and mother separated before she was two years old, so she missed him during each weekday for about the first 520 weeks of her memory. Then for about the next 520 weeks, she hardly saw him at all. He disappeared not only from her, she gathered, but from himself. She collected sharp little shards of his life from these years, like this story’s lesson in irony: someone shot at him (though, thankfully, they missed) at the Friendly Inn. Otherwise, these became the “don’t ask me about those times” years. Once, during that period, he’d called his daughter in the middle of the day—unaware that these were school hours, and she was skipping them—as she lay in bed with her high school boyfriend, the LSD nearly worn off the neurons, regrettable sex and orange juice sticky on her mouth, to hear her father say he still loved her mother. Laughing at love’s futility all these years later, writing it off as his own drunkenness talking. “Dad, you’re funny,” said the drugs. Father and daughter always had so much in common.
Consequences
For the first ten years of my life, my father bought a new book for me every time I saw him on the weekends. Each visit he’d read a novel, sometimes two, as I read next to him, pointing at each word as I clopped along. Don Quixote was one funny, lascivious fuck, he once said. I wanted to hold such opinions. The consequence is that I grew to be a reader and wanted to be just like him.
In the early 1970s, before they were my mom and dad, both worked at Maison Blanche—she in the women’s department, he in furniture. One May evening he approached her for help looking for a present for his mother. She was charmed. She asked which style his mother preferred, what her size was. My father said, “Style? She’s parachute-sized.” My mother, despite herself, was even more charmed. The consequence was that they went on one date and another and eventually moved in together and broke up and reunited, in the same cycle of not-so-well-matched but physically attracted partners. Then they got married, and despite his insistence on the ruinous nature of everything, that bringing children into the world is tantamount to cruelty, they were elated by her unplanned pregnancy, and subsequently, I was born. The consequence was that they were both changed, though as with most parents, not in the ways they expected. The consequence, one of very many, was that I grew up and became a writer and wrote this essay.
Antiphrasis
Noon on that fall day. It’s sunny. We decide we don’t want to go home yet. We drink Abita Andygators and split a burger at the new Chelsea’s under the overpass. Drunk, we leave our car there and walk home. Brock says the leaves, the dead ones, are the color of my eyes. We unlock both deadbolts and lay on the couch, turn on the TV to watch the 700 Club. My father isn’t home. He’s probably out buying us ginger ale and renting the latest Disney/Pixar film, like he always does. My father lives, and lives with us, forever.
Second-Person Future Perfect
Sometime in it you will have been long gone, as will everyone you have ever loved. Whether you’ll have chosen God or the worms, there will still be so much of the not this there. No more stories, no more hearing from your father and not having been heard by him, all of which you will have missed, until the worms (or God) will have come for you. But until then, you will have created and repeated new stories that will have lived in different incarnations.
But before the worms, your father will have visited your home for the first time in eleven years. Different doorway, couch, television, room, city, father, daughter. By then, you’ll have been more mother than daughter. Your father, by then a grandfather, will have weighed two pounds less than he did eleven years before. You’ll know because he’ll have told you. You will have weighed fifteen pounds more, though you won’t have told him (or needed to). Your husband will have weighed the same and will have remained respectfully distant during the visit. He will have known to cede this time to the ones who needed it most.
You and your father will have watched your two-year-old daughter play on the floor—discrete puzzle pieces in her hand, puzzle board missing, possibly under the couch, though none of you will have cared to look. Your daughter: much more enamored with these pieces than the prospect of fitting them together into a larger whole. You will have wondered: what will happen when she anticipates the pieces making up a whole? And before it’s all over, what will she have done with the pieces of your story you’ll have given her? How much will have been too much to offer, or too little, or just enough, and how will you ever have known the difference?
One afternoon during the visit, two wine spritzers deep, your father will have said you have a nice life, and the way he’ll have looked slightly above your head, to someplace that only he has access, suggests he will have meant it in past/present/future tenses. At some point he’ll have placed his feet up on the ottoman, and you’ll have been so happy he’s comfortable (though you’ll have wondered, and hate yourself for having wondered: is he getting too comfortable?). And you’ll have been silent once again in the knowledge of all you don’t need to understand. You’ll have loved him, and known him, and not known him, in all the tenses. You won’t have had to say a word.
Brooke Champagne is the author of Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy. Her writing appears widely in literary journals and has received various awards, including the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay for her work “Exercises.” She won the 2022 March Faxness National Championship Essay Tournament with her essay on Aimee Mann’s cover of the song “One.” Her essays have been selected as Notables in several editions of Best American Essays. She is the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship in Prose. Champagne serves as Book Reviews Editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction. She lives with her husband and children in Tuscaloosa, where she is an Assistant Professor of English in the MFA Program in creative writing at the University of Alabama.
Photo by: Arek Adeoye