It’s a shame that, in the 21st century, there are still men of my age who do not know who fathered them.
Setting aside the moral issues, I need to know about my family medical history and bloodlines. What if, unknowingly, I were to end up involved with my half sister? Or hit the lottery only to have my picture in the paper and have droves of unknown cousins appear with desperate requests? How would I know which to dismiss without care? At 48, I still don’t know if I should be honoring the birth of a savior, celebrating the miracle of lights or dancing naked in the woods on the dark of the moon.
But morality has its part too. I never married. I have been very careful not to father a child… for, after all, what kind of man am I? In my cells and down in my secret soul, what am I destined to become? I have held the “nature versus nurture” debate my whole life and, I believe, I have been a good man. I am not deformed or handicapped. My brain functions at the level of my peers and my demeanor is such that I dare not speculate aloud that it is actually slightly superior. My development has been uneventful. I never had a stitch or broke a bone until I fell on my wrist two years ago. So, what was so bad about me that… he didn’t want me?
I thought getting my DNA sequenced would clear up son of the questions – and it did to a great degree. I just didn’t know it would lead… here – to an “Extended Care Facility” next to the V. A. hospital in Los Angeles. It’s clean enough I guess but, like all of its kind, it is a hopeless place, full of pain and need.
In trying to remain true to the idea I have that I am a good man, I allowed my DNA report to be checked against the long lists of people waiting for transplants. Instantly it came back with a match – an exact match.
The request had come from a doctor in Santa Monica. An open request – meaning the anonymity of the recipient was not an issue. There, in crumpled letters on the faxed computer printout, was the name I never knew but that genetics guaranteed was… my father. I only later found that it wasn’t really his name either.
“John Sierra” was the name he’d been given when he was found unconscious. It seems the police brought him to St. John’s on the 18th of December, and they name all unknowns sequentially – starting with “John Doe”, “John Echo” and so on. Having been brought in late in the year, they’d worked their way through the alphabet to the “S’s.” The most recent paperwork shows a correction and gives to him what I had come looking to get from him: my last name.
The urgent tone in his doctor’s voice convinced me to rush. Changing to larger planes at both Indianapolis and Denver, I arrived at LAX too late to do anything but find a room. I did not think myself overly excited or worried, but I did not sleep at all. As I’ve sat in the outer waiting room, I’ve had a chance, between the smells of disinfectants and the rising heartburn of an empty stomach, to think about what did keep me awake. It was anger.
How could he leave Mom and me to fend for ourselves without a word? She filed a police report only to be told that young actors here often change their names and disappear without a trace. She found it hard to imagine at first, but word had come back to her of his unfaithfulness. As the years and rumors mounted, she finally accepted that he’d simply left. We moved from Pico Rivera to the hills of Kentucky in 1959 – I was three years old. She never mentioned her time as a young ”starlet” in Hollywood, and I’m surprised every time I see her pop up in some Sunday afternoon movie filling time on the off-channels. I’m sure he must appear in a few as well….
Did he even bother to check on us? Did he know that she died just two years later and I, having no traceable roots, was passed through two foster homes before settling in with a small horse rancher and his wife? They had cleared all the obstacles to adoption – only to lose their own son just seven weeks before I arrived. He was all the things I was not, but they did their best to make me feel I was more than the poor substitute I saw myself as. After the accident that took Tommy, they didn’t let me get anywhere near a horse.
The doctor finally called me, and we sat in a tiny office just inside the main doors. A large window displayed an emergency room of sorts – curtain walls making room after room. No hospital scrubs here, just ordinary street clothes. The professionals couldn’t be detected from the visitors, if indeed there were any visitors. No one rushed. The emergencies they were here to treat were half-hearted affairs where the outcome would, eventually, be the only ticket out of here that anyone ever gets.
Who was this man? Every image I have of the ’50s is one, if not of innocence, then at least of respect for the status quo. Sure, the job of trying to get acting work is stressful and destabilizing… but the jobs of husband and father are choices too. Very few are ever really forced into these roles, and I just can’t imagine the cowardice it would take renege on those contracts. How could he?
The doctor had been stammering about something while I was lost in thought – apparently my father was no longer in immediate danger and, I think, he was telling me that there was no reason to do anything more for him. He’d also told me that he was not brought in on December 18th of this year, but I rejoined the conversation too late make any further heads or tails of it.
He stood up as if we had finished talking and showed me to one of the cubicles on the ward. I wasn’t really prepared when he opened the curtain. There lay a man half my size – and more than half the way toward becoming a mummy. His body was contorted, wrist and arms bent into the shape that only long illness produces. His sunken eyes and uneven wisps of beard disguised his face but in the mix I could still see the foundations of my own countenance. I hated him.
How dare he disparage my mother, leave me to an unknown fate and then, after all that neglect, allow himself to be found here in this pitiful state? His predicament would have melted the resolve of most – but not mine. “How long does he have left?” I asked without flinching – it was really the only question left.
“Hours.”
“Fine.” I turned from the bed and headed for the door. I would not get the satisfaction of telling this pathetic old man how much of my good life he’d missed and what a lousy human being he was for doing so. Now that I’d thought so much on it, I guess this is really what I’d come all this way to say – and there was no one to hear it.
On the way out, they stopped me long enough to sign off on whatever they wanted to do with him next and how, as a veteran, his burial was covered. They gave me a discolored envelope bound with a string. I had already started the rental car when I decided to look inside.
The string snapped as I tried to untie it. On top of the bundle inside was just the insert from a wallet. It held two faded bus passes, eighty-eight cents in old coins… and a picture of Mom. I confess it stopped me. I didn’t expect to find an I.D. but to have no other picture but this 50-year-old shot of the woman he left was shocking.
Amid the pile of medical notes that were the bulk of this packet was a police report of the “John Doe” who had been brought in. The carbon copy was smudged illegible in many places – and the entire form was poorly hand written – but it told the story of a police chase following a bank robbery. Nothing impressive by today’s standard I’m sure, but it ended with the gangsters’ car crashing through a crowd at a crosswalk at Lincoln and Colorado on December 17th, 1956.
An unattended infant was found in a stroller at the scene. Papers in the diaper bag led police to return the child home. A woman, rushing for the bus, was killed in the crash. The police deduced that, since the woman was a neighbor, that the child was in her care when she was killed - though the mother did not recognize the dead woman's name or photo. This, I assumed, was another chapter of mistakes I had never heard before.
“John Sierra” wasn’t found until the next morning. The impact had tossed him deep into pile of trash around the corner. When the sanitation workers found him, freezing, twisted and discarded, it was a miracle he was still alive. If such a thing can be called a miracle.
Rifling through the old medical exams, I found it was true. The desiccated old man in there waiting to die had been first in the hospital, and then here, ever since. His fits of consciousness never lasted more than a day or two in that first year. An emergency tracheotomy never allowed him to speak again, and although his right hand was crushed in the accident, the notes he had managed to write lead the doctors to the conclusion that his mind had been mutilated as well. He could not give his address… or even his name. His left-handed scrawls only confirmed the diagnosis of mental incompetence. Though none of those writings were included in the envelope, the Psych reports reported that, between incoherencies, he repeated a desire, a need, for finding the “divine.” Always misspelled, and gouged deep in the paper, he repeated it again and again, more demandingly each time.
With my face full of tears older than anything else I own, I made my way back to his bedside and waited for his hour to come. He died at 6:04 p.m. Christmas day.
You might think I lost something that day – that my quest for father and family was killed by a random act when I was still in diapers.
You’d be wrong. While I still don’t know whether my salvation is entrusted to churches or temples or just to me – I do know more than the doctors ever understood. You see, through pain and delusion, an inability to communicate normally and barriers too many to count, he gave me reason to celebrate this day. With that shaking hand he did not demand, as the doctors believed, the “divine” be delivered to him – though seeing the ultimate truth does take a bit of faith.
He was the one pushing my stroller that day.
My name is Devin.
What my father wanted was me.
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