Subterranean Midwestern Blues

1966 Howard men’s basketball at halftime vs Morgan State

If your dad called you for a favor, what, theoretically, would be his request? Shoveling the driveway? Mowing the lawn? How about driving your grandpa 13 hours from Iowa to Cleveland in his incredibly fucked up van? What kind of John Candy-ass favor is that to be asking your son, who lives 1100 miles away? But I sensed this wasn’t a request and more a politely worded command. and that was that.

The connecting flight to Chicago was mundane but the flight to Bridgeport, Iowa couldn’t have been more telling of the experience I was in for. Me and 6 other people had to walk out on the tarmac toward a plane that looked like it had been rented out by a wealthy benefactor to some struggling regional airline. It probably would’ve given some of you anaphylactic shock. We got onto the plane and I felt as if I was going to be pushed out because of my outstanding debts. The woman next to me was absolutely petrified and needed to hold her partner’s hand across the aisle, so his buddy behind him felt the need to say “This feel like that one scene in La Bamba huh?” Honestly was impressed at the sheer lack of social nous.

Despite the lingering dread, the flight was uneventful and quick. We arrived at the airport equivalent of a rest stop, unassuming and quaint in its Iowan aviation pride. There was only one black man there, and given my hazy decade-old recollection of my grandfather I assumed it had to be him. He greeted me with sort of a bemused demeanor, like it was doubtful I’d even come. Immediately, there was a communication conundrum because I am not a forceful speaker and he had the ears of an average armadillo.

We talked in his car about potentially doing the drive overnight but I concluded my mom would kill me. I didn’t realize it at the time but my grandfather was basically living in his van, a dingy, disheveled hunk of metal, barely capable of passing an E-check. I told him I was a writer. Mostly non-fiction, I said. He drifted more toward historical fiction. I told him that was my brother’s realm. The Bridgeport parking lot is the most liminal space I’ve ever been in, suspended in time coalescing with a stolid conversation that you don’t feel like having. Any sort of annoyance disappeared when I asked about his cats, some of whom he’d lost in an apartment fire. My grandpa, a cat person just like me.

After staying at a Best Western in which my grandpa admitted he was chatting up the elderly waitress just to look at her tits, we headed out to get my grandma’s ashes. The funeral home held a pregnant stillness that was hard to bear. I didn’t really have the heart to tell the director I didn’t know my grandmother and that she was the last of a long line of women who somehow could deal with his incorrigible behavior. But she told my dad, “all I wanted in my life is the mountains and your father”. It’s nice to know that worked out.

Of course it would start raining on the way out of Iowa. If the van was fucked up before, it clearly got mad at God for not putting it out of its misery in the scrap heap now. The front door barely closed and I just had to deal with torrential rain bristling me while on the highway, a jalopy I’ve never driven and wholeheartedly believe shouldn’t be. We kept stopping for this or that, and 12 hours was turning into 13. Why the fuck I was the guinea pig for this. I’m actually going to fight my dad when I get home.

By hour 5 or 6 I got into a rhythm and was enjoying the anecdotes my grandpa had. Our family somehow had old money on a Virginia plantation but it was stolen by white people (and apparently I have Cherokee ancestry, but given my racial amorphousness this is not too surprising.) His father went to Howard and was a prestigious doctor in D.C., and he was destined for it too but opted for Annapolis instead, before dodging Vietnam altogether. I suspect he lived life on a string, unbemused by any consequence or long-term impact–sounds like someone I know. I think the futures my grandpa could’ve lived, ones where I don’t exist, where my father doesn’t exist, where he’s in DC politics or civil society, and then I am struck back to this future of his, melancholy and resigned.

By Indiana it was dark and he passed out. I grabbed my headphones and put on stuff that would get me the rest of the way through that god-forsaken state into Ohio. Blasting prog metal and Spaceghostpurrp, with titles like “I’m Da Dragon of All Dragons” and “Get U A Miami Nigga From Florida Lil Bitch”. On the surface it’s goofy, but underneath there is a sonic complexity that rivals Aphex Twin and Karlheinz Stockhausen, exclaiming “I’m rich like a bitch / fuckin yo bitch” over beats that could open portals to hell. He’s also maligned, tortured and underlooked and kind of shitty. That’s my grandpa, an outsider artist if there ever was one, marching to an oblong drum, always forward. I hope he likes Cleveland.