the back story

After the tattoo incident, that’s what I refer to these so called calculatingly spontaneous events as, “incidents”, mostly because they end up in some sort of wild display of my father’s wealth. The tattoo was small in comparison to the incidents that occurred over the next several years. Talk of a motorcycle started popping up in conversation my sophomore year in college. I had always known my parents to be wild in their youth; smoking pot and drinking garbage pail punch and doing crazy things like jumping off a silo into a huge snow drift. I knew my dad had owned a motorcycle when he was younger and through college. My mom always used to say that they finally had to sell the motorcycle when my brother was a baby because he would cry every time my dad started it; but I think that it was my parents finally coming to their senses and realizing that you can’t put a car seat on a motorcycle. But the man I know today as my father is a loser. I mean, I don’t mean to be harsh but he is a computer fixing, mustache growing, science fiction loving engineer. I guess he isn’t a loser, definitely a dork or a nerd though. When you look up the definition of nerd in the dictionary, well you’ll get the definition for nerd, but that is what my father is. So when he started talking about wanting a motorcycle again we all thought he was just going through a mid life crisis, it was actually more joking than talking, he never sounded serious. I mean he was in his mid fifties, it made sense for him to be nostalgic for his youth, one dad in our neighborhood got his ear pierced, another dad but a red convertible, so we thought he had it out of his system when he got the tattoo. He joked for a while about getting another on his back of a heart with Debbie ’69 inside of it; claiming that it was not a double ontandre but merely the year they had met. But one day he just up and did it. I came home from school and a brand new Honda Victory was sitting in my garage, for those of you who aren’t motorcycle enthusiasts that is like a BMW of motorcycles, not quite a Bentley but still really nice. Not even a year had passed and he was buying another, as if they were match box bikes and not real, very expensive bikes. This time he went for the bigger, flashier, Bentley of motorcycles, a fire engine red Harley Davidson with chrome piping. So when he started joking about buying a plane we took him more seriously. Though he never did it, every time he ever mentioned, even in passing wanting a new toy we cataloged it in our minds so that we weren’t surprised to see it in the house, or in the drive way, or around my mom’s neck in the form of a $20,000 diamond necklace. All these things, the tattoo, the motorcycles, the jewelry had all been meticulously planned out, he even kept binders full of all the research he had done before making his purchases, but no one knew about them but my dad, so to everyone else they seemed like spontaneous acts.

to be continued...