1987

In the fall of 1986, we moved  our family to southern California.  Bill had taken a new engineering position with a small building division of a major national developer. This would be our third time to live in California, and Bill could not have been more pleased.  Housing there was so much more expensive than in north Texas that the perfunctory relocation trip to preview potential homes was deflating.  After several long, tiring days of walking through over-priced housing, Bill and I settled on a new development in a small growing community approximately sixty miles from Los Angeles.  The problem with our choice was, the house was yet to be built.  We put a deposit down on dirt; I went back to Texas to sell our home there; and, Bill searched for a rental.

Despite the packing, cleaning, tossing, sorting and saying good-byes to friends, I was glad to leave the trauma of the past few months behind.  Mother's death, Daddy's arrest and the trial that had not gone well for Bill's company had left me confused, disappointed and essentially emotionally and spiritually disoriented.  I knew my son's safety was in question if my father was anywhere near and I had become hyper-vigilant around him, necessarily.  Every mile away from Texas that the humming tires of the van took us was another deep breath I could inhale.

Daddy had begun to take groups of elderly people to Europe on tours of places he and Mother had visited when they lived there in the seventies. I do not have a real understanding of how he kept his budding tourist business alive; but, he did make several trips across the ocean with his septuagenarians in tow.  He was by then living with the two Cambodian men.  If I tried to speak with him about the appropriateness of the situation, I was immediately cut off with the angry response that it was none of my business.  Actually, it was; if, of course, he wanted a family.  If.

I still found it impossible to actually say "homosexual pedophile," so confronting  him was always very passive-aggressive.  Always at the top of my emotional pile of confusion over his life was the hope that it was just one time, with one young man.  Mother was dying.  He was emotionally barren with grief. He had acted out.  Daddy's living paradigm was, however, counterintuitive to that hope.

Mile after mile on interstate 10, state after state falling away.  The subtle hope I was not dragging behind garbage from the past eighteen months proved a bit unrealistic, as I had not dealt with how any of the trauma had affected me.  I brought the garbage into the car and did not even know it.  And, I could not get away from Daddy.  He came to me.

Daddy loved to watch "The Price is Right" and had written the show for tickets in the spring of 1987.  Out of the blue, the tickets showed up in the mailbox of our rental home one afternoon in May. I am not much of a television watcher and knew almost nothing about the specific games played on the program.  My daughters loved the show and could not believe I had tickets!

"You gotta go, Mom!" they shrieked.

I had no desire to fight Los Angeles traffic to sit around all day and wait to be selected for a television game show I did not even know how to participate in.  It was a shame Daddy was not there to enjoy himself, I thought.  The next afternoon, unannounced, my father pulled up into my driveway - from Texas!  I literally nearly fainted, but not from the sheer joy of seeing him.  My heart and mind, not to mention the schedule of my busy life, needed some preparation in  order to relate to him.  My greeting was stiff - a bit unrelenting.

"Daddy, what are you doing here?"

He had come up to Long Beach for the wedding of a young Cambodian couple.  Of course, he had known all along he was coming to California; thus, the tickets to the show.  It took me a while to put all that together in my confounded state.  I just thought it a happy coincidence, and he made me none the wiser.

Over dinner that night with our family, we decided that Daddy, Bill and I should go to the taping of "The Price is Right" together, and Daddy would return to his friends in Long Beach from the Burbank studio.  In the meantime, I had him to entertain for three days.  My daughters were in school, and my son was at home with me. There were also several other little boys in the neighborhood who were buddies of my son. I would  have been more comfortable if I had owned an AK-47 and walked around with it over my shoulder in order to blow my father away if he looked at one of them wrong.  My son could not sit on his grandfather's lap.  When bidden by my father to do so, my child made it clear to Daddy that Mommy had said he could not.  Daddy found this rule hurtful and offensive. I thought the rule was better than having to use an assault rifle!  If the neighbor children came to the house, I did not let them out of my sight.  They also were not allowed to be near Daddy or alone with him even when we went swimming in a local lake.  Though Daddy felt cornered, I knew he was so lucky not to be in prison; so, it was even more fortuitous that his daughter even allowed him in the same room with her boy!

Next door to us lived a child of nine or so - a bit too old to play with Will.  We knew his parents reasonably well considering the short time we had been living in the lease.  The young man's dad and stepmom both worked, so the boy was a latch-key kid who came home and rode his bike around the neighborhood or shot baskets in the driveway until his stepmom came home around four. He was a nice, gregarious child and Daddy befriended him almost immediately, shooting hoops with him in the evening while I was making dinner.  Then my dad would sit on the front porch in a lawn chair enjoying the "cool down" of the California desert evenings and the boy would come over to chat with the old man next door who paid attention to him.  I could see all the action from my kitchen workplace and felt uneasy about what looked to me like my father's manipulation of my neighbor's son.  After observing Daddy's game plan for  a second evening, my stomach was in knots so I could not eat.   When the dishes were cleared away and my children were  preparing for bed, I went to my father where he had wandered again out onto the front porch.  Certain of my innate understanding of his designs on the boy yet very uncomfortable in approaching my father as his superior, I found myself just standing in the porch light glow, feeling very much in the dark and inadequate to meet the obvious head-on.

I tried to put words together in my mind and practice them.  They would not string together correctly; and, I was, quite frankly, afraid of a confrontation with Daddy over his pedophilia.  I had tried the day before when he went out to golf at a local course to broach the issue of how his counseling was going, and he had all but told me to never talk about it again.  This was not just the "pink elephant" in the room; Daddy had a serious, criminal problem.  I had rescued him from jail, yet I was not privy to information about his healing process.  Of course, there was no healing - or any desire for it.  That was the "rub."

"Daddy, why don't you come inside, now," was about all I could muster.

Maybe it was the condescending tone of my voice or his own guilty conscience, but Daddy rose from the lawn chair, put his hands on the small of his back and stretched, then turned to follow me inside.

"You know, that young man next door is lonely.  I think he's enjoyed spending time with me."  Clueless?  Or was he trying to justify himself?  Maybe he just thought me stupid.

"You cannot help him, Daddy," I seethed. "You, of all people, cannot help him."  Then immediately I ran upstairs with diarrhea, an emotional reflex that had become common for me whenever I tried to communicate with my father.

Driving to Burbank the next morning gave Bill and me a break from Daddy, as he followed us in his van.  Neither of us really felt like talking about my father, and I did not want to relive the evening before.  I absolutely expected Daddy to be a contestant on the game show because the timing for it all worked out so well. The process for entering the audience is rather arduous. We arrived by ten in the morning, relinquished our tickets, then sat around chatting up all the other audience members for literally hours.  Daddy had prepared himself to be selected by wearing a ridiculous fishing hat and a shirt with crazy Texas stuff all over it.  He wanted to be as obvious as possible.  I, on the other hand, was wearing a turquoise sundress and, around my neck, a silver necklace that kept slipping off center.  Bill had donned his usual Dockers and polo.

Over two hundred people were called forward in groups of five beginning shortly after lunch break.  The producer and his assistant interviewed each person, asking some pretty inane questions.  It did not really seem clear to me what the producer was looking for, but I really was not paying much attention.  It was not in my expectation at all that I would be chosen as a contestant.  I did not even reapply my lipstick after lunch.  Nor did I find it odd that I was asked five or six questions to the one question asked of the others in our group, including my father.  So, when the familiar words "Kay Farish, come on down!" blared from the auditorium speakers about half way through the taping, I could not have been more unprepared.  Of course, my necklace was crooked for the entire show, a reflection of my awkwardness in the moment.  I guessed most nearly correctly the price of an oak entertainment center and found myself beside Bob Barker onstage.  He was announcing that I could win a mini-van if I could just guess correctly its price by moving some numbers around on the board that was being shuttled toward me.  I tried and failed.  Guessed too high, I think.  However, as luck would have it, I was the second hour's best chance at the "big wheel" which I spun with gusto and won.  That put me into the "showcase showdown."  Oh, God.  This was way further into the program than I wanted to go.  If you lose the "showcase showdown" you must be an idiot, which I was beginning to think, by then, I was.  Sure enough, not only I, but the other contestant, also, bid too high; and , no one won the showcase that day.

I "lost" a mini-van, a big spa, a sailboat, and trip - and my father was mad at me!  Unbelievable!  He wanted the mini-van to take over to Europe for his tours. He would have won it because he knew the game.  My children were not even that upset!  Adult fathers do not stomp back to their cars mad because their children get to participate in something they do not.  I had stolen his thunder, lipstickless and wearing a sundress; I had played the game poorly!  It was not fair!

Where had my father gone?  Who was this stranger who had emerged from a jail cell months earlier and left my Daddy behind?


"My son should be ashamed of himself," my neighbor was saying to me a few weeks later.  "Your dad has written him a couple of letters, and my boy just has not taken the time to respond."

"Really?"  My stomach was beginning to rumble.  "What did my father say?"

"Oh, just that he wants to be my son's friend and your father cannot understand why he has not written back."

I would have preferred death to this conversation.  Quite literally.  I was finally going to have to verbalize the unspeakable.  Best just to blurt it out.  No practicing in my head - no time to rehearse how to tell her.  "My father is a homosexual pedophile and your son cannot - should not - ever write to him."  All in a rush of breath.  Vomited words born on air.

"What?"  My neighbor was incredulous. Thought she had heard incorrectly.

I had to say it again.  I didn't know if I could. "My father is..."

My friend finished the sentence for me..."a homosexual pedophile?"  Her face froze in its horrified expression as I fought back angry, mortifying tears.  When she finally exhaled, my name came flying out with the force of her breath. "Oh, Kay!"

Rushing to respond, I said:  "I am so very sorry and embarrassed.  Your son can never write my father back, and I will call my dad and tell him never to bother your child again."

Of course, my friend wanted to know the whole sordid story as did all my neighbors by the afternoon.  It was good practice for me, saying "homosexual pedophile" several times in one day.  It was no less horrifying for the repetition, though.  The words themselves had the effect of a nauseating virus each time they were uttered.

Daddy's phone rang several times before he picked up that evening.  After each unanswered ring, I had to force myself to stay connected.

"Hello."  At last.

"Daddy.  It's Kay."

"Hi, Kay."

"Daddy?"  Going over my lines in my head before actually saying them.  Then:  "Daddy, why did you write the young man next door?"

"What?"

"Why did you write letters to the neighbor's son?"

No response. Just Daddy's breathing.

"I told his stepmom she is not to give him any letters from you because you were arrested for having problems with young boys, Daddy."  I still could not call him a pedophile to his face.

"Okay. I won't write again."  His feeble response.

"I cannot believe you put me in this awful position, Daddy.  I felt so embarrassed for you...and for me.  Please do not ever do that again."

"All right, Kay."

What did I expect?  Something more than "All right, Kay."

I hung up the phone and went to the bathroom.