here's a story about: daddy's dodge neon. (2024)

let’s step back to the beginning: when i was a church choir girl, seven or so, practicing future performances with sing-along tapes in daddy’s dodge neon.

we’d take the big bridge to dad’s san pedro apartment, late-night, every other friday. i’d sing out the window towards the dark water and the big blue lights. dad would scold me for adding vibrato, guilt me for nodding off.

he had a vision for us— to pose protestant, him (sober), me (kind), and this meant i’d need to: sing softly.

at church we were: some choir girl and her daddy. in that dodge— we were: screams and a match to be had.

despite how he’d flatten me, i kept singing in alto while he threw insults. we never did learn a different way.

around nine years old, i sang ‘let it be’ in my elementary school’s end of year performance. he sat in the back, flooded with forehead sweat, his toupee hiding all of our secrets.

he loved our rendition of the classic hit; he was a big beatles fan. he was proud of me, beaming that i was his daughter. but, for me, a quick embrace at the end of the show was all i could muster as my friends collected their comments about his disheveled appearance:

should he be here, they’d giggle. how embarrassing, they’d add without intention.

when i hit middle school, dad stood nervous in the corner of an auditorium, drowning in an oversized white jockey tee, as i sang the music man’s ‘til there was you’. this time, i didn’t look for him at curtain.

but i found the dodge— sitting at the far end of the school parking lot. i watched as he slipped out, tall and nervous.

when i made it to the high school of the arts, dad and his dodge were driving that big bridge alone, spending every other friday forgetting that i’d asked him not to come around anymore.

i just wanted to sing with the windows down, but instead i used my over-the-ear headphones as i sat in the backseat of mom’s ‘88 mercedes.

at home, i’d turn up the volume on my latest coldplay CD, sing in solitude.

i studied musical theater at that art high school but i grew to hate it. it was simply: a cacophony of le miserable sung in soprano at the 2nd floor lockers; shakespeare monologues smeared all over my eighth period.

and it wore me down.

dad wrote me from laguna, california, continued when he moved to green lake, wisconsin; his pencil scratch almost limerick on purpose.

i read the letters but i never kept them. all his orange-highlighted sentences made me question what he really needed from me.

when spring of senior year landed, dad wasn’t there to hear how i failed every high school audition; how i didn’t get into NYU (or etc.).

he didn’t see me graduate, lost and un-proud.

he didn’t watch me as i ran from my inner artist, signed up as a biology major at some hot and boring cal state university.

dad wasn’t around when i abandoned my cameras, hid my journals, and stopped singing for a crowd.

for four years, i forgot about being any sort of artist. i forgot about what fed me. and i just thought about dad’s dodge; what bridge it might be driving down this time.

he’d write, i’d read, i’d toss— this went on for ten years.

for ten years, dad and his dodge drove around whatever town they were living in at whatever time that was, always without me. i wondered if he ever started to appreciate the solitude, the quiet calm without our inevitable storm.

one day, i called him. there was something about ten years apart that got me sad and thinking. by this time, he’d missed me driving my mazda 3 up north to some other cal state to study psychology (just like you, daddy).

i curled up in my dorm room closet in a whole-body shake as we tried to fill ten years into a one-hour phone call.

i’ve been reading raymond carver, i tried sharing with him. he wasn’t familiar with the guy. been learning a lot about how to write poetry, by noticing what carver doesn’t say, i tried again.

thought you were studying psychology, is all he could muster. also a creative writing minor, i forgot to mention it, i said quickly.

but, don’t worry, i ushered. i’m hardly a writer, just scribbling some poetry. i’m really: no artist at all.

this is how it started, stopped (for a while), and then kept on with dad (for a bit)— but it’s not where it landed. ‘cus dad and i had drinks at the elephant bar and we also attended his mother’s funeral; he took too many pills at the family card game party, and he died days before anyone found him, curled up on the stained carpet floor of my grandpa’s old flat. the dodge, still stoic, sat alone in the driveway.

in this story, i haven’t made it home to myself yet. i haven’t yet written the book that helps me understand dad and all that time we spent in his dodge. but i do, eventually— eventually, i write the book, and eventually, i’ll tell you about it.

just keep reading.

til next tuesday,

signed // c.s. mee

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