Just when Kase Johnstun thought his dad was about to kill him, he received a lesson in how to be a good father.
Not too long ago, young men couldn’t jump on the internet to find Playboy, or Hustler, or anything else for that matter, and if they heard their parents’ footsteps, they couldn’t just close down the browser, clear its history, and click on a sports page to hide their exploration of what many young men are drawn to. Not too long ago, coming-of-age crime scenes left evidence.
In 1993, against the backdrop of northern Utah’s Rocky Mountains, I pulled the key from the ignition of my tiny 1979 Datsun pickup truck, a truck my dad tricked out for my 16th birthday after I had earned enough money to pay for half of it, and I walked up the sidewalk to the front door of our house, carrying only the cluttered thoughts and worries of a high-school junior. My dad, who in his early forties had broad enough shoulders to block the entrance, opened the door and stopped me. He never came home early those days, always working his ass off to give us what we needed. His devotion to his wife and children was not only unfathomable but also unmatched. He was a hugger and a disciplinarian, an enigma of a man. But I knew not to break the rules.
So I stood there surprised, and suspicious. He pointed his finger out toward my truck. “Let’s go talk for a bit before I go back to the office,” he said. Then he moved forward. We walked together back down the sidewalk.
♦◊♦
At the truck, he told me to go around the other side and get in. I did exactly that, even though I wanted to run away. He sat on the driver’s side, and his large frame squeezed into the bench seat. He tried to move the seat back, discomfort showing in his face, while my tiny five-foot-nothing, 120-pound body fit perfectly on the other end.
He shuffled for a bit longer and then shoved his hand into his suit jacket, a nice pinstriped one that my mom had pressed earlier that day. He pulled out a stack of folded magazines and threw them on the seat in front of me. They hit the bench seat and unfolded; naked tits and asses exploded on the braided seat cover. Oh yes, the magazines were mine; as if I were Superman and they were kryptonite, the mere presence of them, with my father in the same space, threw me back against the door of my little truck, made my heart slow down, and my legs weaken. I couldn’t talk—I could only gasp for words and clutch my chest. The last thing I wanted to do was make eye contact with him. And on this rare occasion, for the first time in my life, he didn’t want to make eye contact with me. So we both stared down at the human kryptonite on the bucket seat.
In a house where MTV was banned, where you were grounded for cussing and, in the early years, got your mouth washed out with soap, where rules were established and kept, and where those rules were established by the Bible, the magazines on the seat signified major disobedience. They signified a big fuck you. The rules of the house created a concrete silence, and we sat there together waiting for the other to speak.
♦◊♦
Finally, my dad broke the silence with another shuffle.
“Your mom found these under the couch,” he said. With Jedi-like powers, he pulled my eyes from the magazines, and continued, “She thinks her son’s a pervert.” I could only imagine my mom’s Catholic eyes when she saw the Hustler covers; Playboy is one thing, but I don’t think she’d ever seen a spread eagle in flight. My dad was a letter-of-the-law man, so I expected him to rip my balls off (to be honest). But he did not yell or lecture or rip off the aforementioned balls.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“Throw these out now,” he said calmly, pointed to the garbage can at the edge of the garage. He reached down and opened his door, pulled his body out by grabbing the top of the door seam, stood outside the truck, and shut the door. I breathed. My father never hit us, never abused us in any way, but he never shied away from serious punishment by taking away the things we loved most. The situation could have been far more awkward—he could have talked about masturbation or sin or castration. He just let it go. Told me to get rid of them. Ended it at that. I sat shocked and happy in my part of the truck.
Then he leaned down into the cab of the truck. “Your mom also found hundreds of wadded up tissue papers. She thinks you might be dying of some kind of freak lung disease. So you have to stop blowing your nose down there,” he said.
He stood again for a couple seconds and shifted his hips toward the house as if to start walking that way. He paused a few seconds longer and then leaned down into the driver’s side window to say, “And you know which nose I’m talking about.”
Twenty years later, my one-month-old boy looks up at me from his multi-colored bouncy chair. The ends of his fingers curl into the palms of his hands, and his cheeks shine in the sunlight of late afternoon—he is perfect, he is innocent, and it is obvious that he will never change. But if one day he does change, he does lose his innocence, I hope I can approach him in a way that makes my point clear but does not condemn or chastise. I hope I can let the boy know that it all comes with age, just like my dad did, creating a trust not between a father and a son but between an older man and a younger man. After that day on the bench seat, with the evidence splayed out in front of us, there has never been a topic I wouldn’t breach with my dad.
—Photo bsabarnowl/Flickr
The post Evidence on the Bench Seat appeared first on The Good Men Project.