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Dan Kennedy (2:10)
Welcome to the Moth podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy and this week we have two stories for you on the podcast. First up, John Devore tells us about the last lesson that his father taught him. And this is a story from a show that we did here in New York City in 2014 at a venue called Crash Mansion, which has sadly closed since we did the show. The theme of the night was who's your daddy? Stories of Fatherhood. Here's John Devore.
John Devore (2:45)
I have no saliva in my mouth. First off, my father died of cancer two years ago. But don't worry, that's not this kind of story. This is not Terms of Endearment. I swear there will be no emotional pornography. But I want you to know up front that my dad fought for three years. He fought. And even though he lost the fight, the fight was what was important. My dad was 50ft tall. He wore really cheap tweed jackets to the US Capitol. He loved deep fried chicken gizzards. Really bad, inappropriate jokes like, roses are red, violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic and so am I. He loved to sing and he loved to embarrass me by singing in public. He had a voice that was a cross between Roy Orbison and a blender full of gravel. And he was a devout Texan. Now, I was raised outside of D.C. my dad worked for politicians, Texas politicians. And he regarded Texas the way I imagine Jews regard Israel. It was the Promised Land. It was the place I was to return to. So when in my sixth year here in New York, being the one orphan, the one who got away, the one who escaped the gravity of Texas, and he told me that he had lung cancer, I thought, fuck, I gotta go back to Texas. And I did. I went back to Texas. But after months of ignoring it and putting it aside and I finally relented and put in a tour of duty. My brother, my sister and my mother, they really absorbed the brunt of it. But I went for five days. And the first day that I was there, I immediately went with him to a chemo warehouse. Because in Texas they keep these. They have these huge chemo warehouses where bald, dying people are stacked up. And I walked in there with him and sat him down in his little recliner, and they put the IV in him that dripped into him and dripped into him and he dripped into it. And they sat us down to this guy by the name of Rusty was Marine Force Recon. He had a quarter lung. It was his eighth treatment. He was a bit of a chemoethusiast. And without asking us if we wanted to talk to him, he looked at us in the eye with his little, you know, oxygen thing in his nose and went. You gotta think of the cancer as the enemy. You gotta kill it. It's in your head. You gotta fight. And I was like, welcome to Texas. And I put my father there and I ran outside. And for the next two days, all I did was cry and smoke. I was like. Because, irony of ironies, nothing makes you want to smoke more than a chemotherapy ward. And I would run out while I put my dad to sleep to find a 711 ward. The dying Couldn't see me. And that was what happened for two days, until I realized something I'd never really thought of before, which is the process of dying is really boring. And so on the third day, my brother, my dad, was sleeping, because that's what he did now. He asked me if I wanted to go shooting. And I went, sure, yeah, guns. And so about an hour later, I found myself at Red's. Red's is in Austin, Texas. You can go there right now and find that it's a long, rambling shack filled with guys in different forms of camouflage dress, yellow tinted glasses, jingoistic ball caps, beards and sidearms. Everyone who works their dreams, wants, desires, cannot wait for someone to try to rob them. And from the moment I walked in there, they knew I was a poser. They knew I was a big city wuss, which I am. But the thing about rednecks is you can never show weakness. They're like coyotes. They can smell weakness. So my brother, who apparently had been going there often, he went off to go look at the assault rifles. And I sauntered up to the glass case where today's specials were, and, you know, walked up to some guy who looked at me dead in the eye with that sort of, you ain't from around here look. And I, you know, I perused the buffet. They had.22s. They had 9 millimeters against assault rifles and revolvers, and I wouldn't show any weakness. And I just kind of looked and no and no. And I mean, the only gun I knew was from, like John Woo movies. So I picked the 9 millimeter and I said, I'll take that 9 millimeter. And he goes, Smith and Wesson are HK. And I went, Duh, HK. And he gave me the 9 millimeter. And he showed me how to use the gun, and I'd never used it before. He showed me how to pull the chamber back. He showed me where the safety was. He showed me how to load a clip. It was $20 for a gun and $20 for a box of 20 rounds. He told me to keep my eye on the round in the chamber because that's how most people hurt themselves in firearm accidents. They don't count the round in the chamber. Chamber. And he sent me into the range, which was filled in the afternoon. There was a couple next to me, rather a father and son, practicing with hunting rifles. There was a mousy little woman who had a.357 snub nose, which is Dirty Harry's gun, only it's super small. And can only hold five rounds and will flatten anything that gets in your way. My brother immediately took his AR15 assault rifle, which is the rifle you'll see the NYPD walking around with, and he began to unload. And I put on the ear muff plug things. And, you know. And he had told me how to slide it back, put it in, make sure the safety is off, and bang. The bang noise, the crack noise of a bullet is the bullet breaking the sound barrier. If you talk to anybody who's ever been wounded in combat, you never hear the bullet that hits you. And let me tell you, no matter what your ideology is, whether you're pro gun or not, whether you think the NRA are a bunch of fruitcakes or not, it's to be poetic, a cool sound. And the nine millimeter, it held eight rounds. And so, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Oh, it was good. Because shooting a gun is a weird cross between Valium and Viagra. It brings you up and then it takes you down, but makes you up and down. And it felt good. And so I loaded quickly. I took out the clip and loaded more round, clicked it in, crack. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And $80 later, I was in control. I had power. It was like the fucking Matrix. It was. I mean, it was. And let me. If you ever shoot, always remembered to line up the bullseye and to aim a little bit down to compensate for the recoil. And if you're thinking of shooting sideways, don't do it because you look like an asshole. I had found in that afternoon the power and the cheapest, most affordable way for me to tell God to fuck off. And it helped me that night. It helped me in a really weird way, in the way that the booze and the pot and the coke wasn't helping me. And the cigarettes. It helped me deal with my hysterical mother and my morbidly depressed brother. It helped me deal with my dad's. The wheezing, the wheezing, which bothered me even though I would say, everything's gonna be okay, dad, and run outside and go. It helped me. And it was the weirdest thing. I didn't spend that much time there, though, as strong as it made me feel. I was still gone in five days. And I went home. I went back to New York. I came back here to hide because I'm a bit of a coward. And I left the cruel nuts and bolts of caregiving to my family. The dealing with someone who can't control their bowels. They're feeding somebody who can't feed themselves. The staying up with someone who can't sleep because it hurts too much. The watching that 50 foot tall guy kind of dwindle. And you know, Freud said that the death of a father is, well, it's the first evidence or of a parent, rather. Evidence to the child that you know you're next. And I thought about that. But I learned later, in retrospect, that the last thing, the death of a parent, the last thing that they teach a child is how to die. That's the last thing that they did. And they can teach you well or they can't teach you well. But my dad taught me a lot of things. He taught me how to tie a tie and shave. He taught me that, that humility isn't weakness. And that even though Texas lost the Alamo, it was still a victory. He taught me a lot of things. But the last thing he taught me was how to fight and how to die with some kind of dignity, but how to fight. Because he fought determined and outmatched. He fought and he was terrified, but he did it. He was a one man Alamo. And I only hope that one day I can go down like that and possibly show a son or a daughter how to go down fighting. And that's my story.