Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the short story "My Father's Son" by Steven Corbin (©1996 by The Estate of Steven Corbin), which appeared in the anthology Streetlights: Illuminating Tales of The Urban Black Experience.

When I pick up my father and his girlfriend at Los Angeles International Airport he stops short before embracing me, blinks repeatedly in disbelief, smiles or smirks crookedly and tentatively, judging me, sizing me up through his trademark horn-rimmed glasses and ultraconservative mud-brown eyes, which cut immediately to the wiry dreadlocks bouncing around my forehead, and his glare that screams What kinda weird thing you gone and done to yourself this time? disturbingly familiar yet intimidating and benevolent at the same time, reduces me, as it most often does despite my thirtysomething years, to the little tyke in dungarees and high-top sneakers I once was, in dire need of my father’s love and approval. For weeks I was preoccupied with and vexed myself over what my father and I would possibly talk about for seven days and seven night, constantly being together and sharing each meal, sleeping in the same house day in, day out, after our years of estrangement sealed by an impromptu reconciliation. But now that he is here, and we move toward one another, I suddenly acknowledge that seven days might not be sufficient time to encompass all that we have to say to each other.

His girlfriend Delores scoops me up in her arms, delighted to see me again. My father stands off to the side, nervously awaiting his turn, large, rugged, callused hands thrust deep inside into his pants pocket, as he psyches himself up for a fleeting, ephemeral moment of intimacy with another adult male. Surprising me, he locks me in an embrace that is both macho and compassionate and he doesn't let go first, which is foreign to me since I can count, on one hand, the paucity of occasions when my father has embraced me; and in his touch I can feel, almost palpably, his gratification in seeing his firstborn for the first time since two Christmases ago. Before leaving the terminal, Delores insists upon taking a photo of us, father and son, day one of the arrival, my arm wrapped around him and the rigidity of his pose, the tightening of his muscles and the tautness of his spine, that won't be captured by the camera's aperture and recorded on the celluloid.

As I leave the airport terminal, my father and Delores exchange gut-level reactions and first impressions of Los Angeles, my father in the front seat and Delores in the back. My father leans over and switches on the radio, predictably, frantically searching the dial for the local jazz station. His horrified expression freezes as I explain, in the apologetic tone of a parent informing the child that the ice-cream vendor won't be coming today, that Los Angeles' only jazz station is now defunct. But I believe, I say quickly, in an effort to smooth out the wrinkles in his face, that there is another noncommercial broadcast from one of the local universities. His radar ever intact, he finds the broadcast. His fingers stop moving only when the dial slides into Miles Davis's muted horn blaring out at us. The disc jockey is spinning a recent composition. My father and I inhale deeply, both of us immediately recognizing the signature horn, pretending we don't, my foot and fingers tapping to the rhythm of genius, as we consciously sidestep the potential argument we engage in from time to time regarding the merit of Miles’s contemporary contributions. My father, jazz elitist and purist, firmly and unequivocally and inexorably theorize that the legendary horn blower has done absolutely nothing musically worthwhile recently. He sold out, my father upholds. He's growing, I contradict, we can't and shouldn't expect him to repeat what he did in the fifties and sixties.

Studying my father at red lights and through intermittent glances that punctuate our conversation. I realize, understand, and accept, as I never have before, that he is indeed aging. Still remarkably handsome, even dashing for his middle age, his silky hair, short and black and wavy and parted at the side as it was the day he married my mother at age twenty, is his sole physical attribute that remains timeless. When I became a teenager, then segued into young adulthood, the maturation of my growth having kicked in, shaping and molding the adult face through which I would see the world, a face that that would pretty much stay the same forever and always, people began physically comparing me and my father, a comparison it took me awhile to get used to. Even my mother would look at me, shake her head, smile as she hmm-hmmed to herself at the alleged stark resemblance I could never see. You are your father's son all right, she'd say.