Prefontaine

            I grew up not knowing my father. My mom, the perfect parent that she was, would occasionally let details slip. “He was a piece-of-shit loser. He didn't care about you girls. But what should I have expected from an alcoholic drug dealer,” she’d say when we were too young to understand divorce.

I grew up terrified of him. My dad. Steve. From all I’d been told, all I’d seen, he was a monster.

            When I was thirteen, I remember sitting in a discussion group in history class. A group of us had pulled our chromed-steel and resin one-piece desk/chair sets into a circle. I can almost hear the treble bass chalkboard scrape they made as we scooted them together. One of my group-mates was lanky. Awkward. Sure, he was socially inept, but he was sort of cute, and being the hormonal and disturbed teenager that I was, I flirted with him a little. I flirted with everyone. I turned my skin-tight acid-washed jean wrapped body toward him and toyed with my teased and aerosoled three-inch-high bangs as I made an age-inappropriate pass at him.

            “I believe we may be distant relatives,” he said in response, adjusting his glasses. His body stiffened with discomfort. He was one of those studious types who actually spoke that way in middle school.

            “What's your last name?” I asked him, knowing immediately what he was going to say, that he had to be a Peterson, this boy who'd somehow been in my class the whole year yet had been invisible to me until that day. He had to be related to my dad.

            “Peterson.”     

            I asked his dad's name, thinking for a moment that he was my brother. How uber-sick would that be if I’d been coming on to my own brother? But his dad's name was Horace. I didn't know any Horace. Okay, not my brother. Good. I asked if he had an uncle.

            “Yeah,” he said. “Uncle Steve. And my grandmother asks about you all the time.”

            I broke down into tears. An unusual reaction, I know. Maybe I should have been curious, or excited, but I was scared. The whole classroom stared at me. Twenty-something sets of pubescent eyes wondering and judging.

            Our teacher pulled me aside and brought me out to the hallway. I briefly recounted every horrible thing I'd heard about my dad. The teacher stared at me in disbelief.

            “Are you sure?” was all she asked.

            Yes, I was sure that my grandmother—this kid's grandmother—had tried to kidnap me and that my dad was a monster who did drugs, drank, and beat women as his pastime. My mom had told me so.

            Years later, I was home from college visiting my mom's sister and her husband, Jane and Jim. Uncle Jim had recently gone through triple bypass surgery and had actually died in the operating room for four minutes, had been revived, but was in a coma for a week. After that ordeal, he lost circulation to his legs and ended up having to have his toes amputated. Despite all of that, they managed to present a facade of relative happiness. I guess they could have been genuinely happy, but that didn't seem logical to me. And nothing in my family was ever what it seemed.

            While I was visiting, my aunt told me that she had run into my dad at the grocery store the other day. To her, he was simply “Steve,” not “your dad.” She said he’d asked about me, which warmed me a little. Then she shrieked, in that uncomfortable laugh-laced voice, that he was missing the tips of all his fingers on his left hand. Yes, he had managed to saw his own fingers off with a table saw, she told me as she shook her mass of amber curls, her voice rising higher with each word. Aunt Janie has a very physical and dangerously audible laugh. Of course it wasn't really funny, but my family–at least on my mom's side–has a habit of giggling in uncomfortable situations. I also inherited that gene. I imagined Aunt Janie's chortle reverberating through the cereal aisle and bouncing off the green and brown speckled terrazzo as Steve recounted his story. She did say that he was probably drunk when he did it, so maybe my mom hadn't been exaggerating about the alcoholic thing.

            Since she’d broached the subject, I asked them about Steve. I knew my parents had lived with Janie and Jim at one point before they all had kids, and I wanted to know what they thought of him.

            “He wasn't a bad guy,” Uncle Jim said from his adjustable hospital-type bed that sat in the den. The master bedroom was upstairs, a place he wouldn't be going for quite some time. “We all used to play music together. Your dad was very talented. He played guitar and banjo quite well.” He said this with the conviction of a man who knew he would be the victim of similar bad-mouthing if he were an ex-husband.

            “We have pictures, if you wanna see them,” Aunt Janie said.

            “I would love to see them!” I didn't hesitate to show enthusiasm. My mom had torn him out of every photo in the house. It seemed so cliché when I thought of it then, as a twenty-year-old. I did think I'd remembered seeing a photo of him at one point, but I wasn't sure. My mom had always said it was her brother in that picture, but who knows.

            Janie brought out the dusty brown albums from a crammed cabinet beneath the built-in bookcases in the den, there were two of them. The rubbery Naugahyde covers with the delicate foil machined scrolling were not of the quality of the good family albums, the ones on the bookcase. These were the disposable memories. I opened the first one and saw my mom and Aunt Janie in bikinis on the beach. My mom had long, wavy hair down to her mid-back. Aunt Janie's hair had the same thick, curly structure as it did that day sitting in her den. They were so young, their bodies fresh and elastic, pregnancies had yet to change their shapes. When I turned the page, I saw my mom with a blond young man.

            “That him?” I asked, and looked to each of them for an answer.

            Uncle Jim nodded.  

            “Way to go, Mom,” I said. “Wow, he was handsome.” After all of the descriptions I'd heard from my mom (beer gut, white trash, redneck, etc.) I had expected something much less than what I saw before me in the sepia, faded photograph. I flipped through the pages of the album, hanging on every shirtless picture of my father. I did the math: I think he was five years younger than my mom who was about twenty-five in those photos. That made my dad about my age. How strange it was to meet him for the first time, so to speak, at my own age.

            I had just watched a movie about the record breaking runner and Olympian Steve Prefontaine in my dorm room at school -- a perk we got for our exorbitant tuition was free HBO in the dorms. The guy in the pictures, my dad, looked just like him. I guess that meant he looked like the actor who played him in the movie, Jared Leto, but that didn't matter. From that moment on, I had someone to identify with as a father figure. And strangely enough, that man was not Steve Peterson. It was Steve Prefontaine. Pre.

            Having grown up with a mother who I had recently come to realize could generously be described as narcissistic and an expert liar, it didn't seem to be a stretch to say that maybe Steve Prefontaine was my dad. Never mind that he died several years before I was born. That was inconsequential. I never told anyone that he was my dad, but I told anyone who would listen that my dad looked like him, and his name was also Steve. That movie ran on HBO for months, so I had the opportunity to tell lots of people.

            Because I had just seen the movie, I felt confident in my judgment. Steve Peterson looked like Steve Prefontaine. I learned later that eyewitness accounts are the least reliable evidence in a court case.

But for me, it was enough.

            Despite my relative youth, I’ve always been a fan of Simon and Garfunkel. At least as long as I can remember. However, I never understood the line “everything looks worse in black and white” until recently. Maybe I had to get to an age at which my memory is fading, or an age at which I actually had enough experiences to look back on with a longing. Regardless, I get it now-- and in exactly the same context as Paul Simon was relating it in his song “Kodachrome.”

            There was a time in my mid-twenties when I wondered if I had already met my soul mate and let him slip slide away. Sitting at my wood and black steel Ikea desk one night, I ran through the list of ex-boyfriends and former lovers. The list was longer than I would've liked it to have been, but the list of those who I would even consider being my soul mate was pretty short. (Does that make it better or worse?) These were guys who, for whatever reason, it just hadn't worked out with. The truth was, I had left most of them for someone else. It's very easy to be a “grass is greener” person, especially in your youth – though I suspect it's pretty easy when you get old, too. So I had this list and tried Googling the guys. One that I got hung up on was Jonathan. I typed his name into Google and came up with nothing. Random Jonathans and arbitrary matches to his last name popped up. I doted on the memory of him, even wrote a letter to him just in case I found his address.

            The letter was simple and to the point. I wrote: I am looking for the Jonathan that I lived with for a couple of months while I was in college. If you are him and would like to catch up, please give me a call or write back. I never sent that letter, because I never found an address to mail it to. So, I moved on from him just like I had five years earlier.

            About five years after that, I got a friend request from Jonathan on Facebook. He also sent a message. It read:

            “Been a long time . . . black cadillac, central cigars . . . just saying hi. Always been on my mind. Hope your well.”

            When I saw in my email that I had a friend request from Jonathan McIntyre, and a message from him, my heart did a little flip flop. I'm married now, and deeply in love with my husband, but I had that same “what if?” feeling I'd had years earlier. What if I let my true love get away so many years ago? I told myself that I was crazy for even thinking that, I could never love a man who confused “your” with “you're,” but I couldn't wait to check out his page. Paul Simon had warned me, but I didn't listen. “I know they'd never match my sweet imagination. Everything looks worse in black and white.”

            Sure enough, there he was, almost as I remembered him, but more. . . real.

I don't think he'd been as good looking initially as my memory had been telling me for all these years. He had arms as thin as mine, and that cigarette still dangled from his lips. Mostly out of vanity and fear of what it would do to my skin as opposed to my lungs, I had given up smoking four years earlier. He apparently did not share those same concerns. The seven-year age difference had seemed so small to me when I was nineteen, but as I compared our profile pictures, I saw a generational difference. I saw Hilary Swank in mine (for some reason, I'm told on a sickeningly regular basis that I look like Hilary Swank. I don't really—but maybe a little) and Tommy Lee Jones, a man who used to be kind of handsome, but now just looked. . . old, in Jonathan's picture.

I found myself fascinated with looking at pictures of Jonathan that night, wondering what had gone wrong in his life or what had gone wrong with my memory. The more I considered it, the more I thought about Paul Simon's apropos words. Jonathan wrote to me how he had often thought of me over the last ten years, how in his mind I was the one he let get away. While I would have returned his sentiments only five years earlier, I now find myself quite amused by them. I wonder if he ever heard the free concert in central park that Simon and Garfunkel did in 1982. Paul Simon changed the words to “Kodachrome” during that concert. He sang that everything looks better in black and white. I wonder if Jonathan agrees?       

            In the age of Facebook, it's impossible to hide. Well, unless you aren't on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, or whatever the social networking site is the site du jour. Recently Steve Peterson sent me a message on Facebook. He wanted to be a part of my life. It was nothing unusual, every ten years or so he finds a way to get in touch with me. His first message was disarming. He wanted to start a relationship with the daughter he had lost touch with so many years ago. I told him I would consider it. Give me time.

Later that night he wrote me an angry message, he called my mom a lying bitch (something I'd learned for myself over the last decade), and insinuated that I was a fool for listening to the “poison” she poured into my ears. Well that just proved what a fool he is. I rarely speak to my mom, and, of my two sisters, I know better than either of them what a nut job she can be. Not only did he assume that my mom has anything to do with my decision to wait before agreeing to meet him in person, but he ruined my image of the young, handsome Prefontaine that had been my dad for so long. Thanks to him and Facebook, I now have an image of a bloated old man with three-quarters of the fingers on his left hand—yes, he had photos of them. His post script in his last message was that, by the way, I look a lot like him. I couldn't help thinking to myself, You don't look anything like Hilary Swank.

Or Steve Prefontaine, for that matter.