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Destinations

Dana Stamps, II

Going for a two week stay, flying to visit my real father,
I left LAX no problem, arrived in Pittsburg
for an hour layover before Ohio, tired
because I hadn’t slept in 40 or so hours: could not relax
on an airplane
                        and anxious about seeing my father. Love
never stamped out the fear of his judgment,

and I discovered that I was a stowaway. My father
had gotten the bartered-for-tickets
from an employee of TWA, and according
to the Pennsylvanians, only employees themselves
were allowed to use
said tickets, and I shouldn’t have been
let on the plane in Los Angeles in the first place.
They would fly me back to California
because they could see the point that it clearly
was not my fault, but would not fly me to Dayton International

Airport and its adjacent museum where, as a boy, I
had posed for a photo with my blue-eyed father
in front of a decommissioned WWII bomber
called Strawberry Bitch, which could have dropped Fat Man
but didn’t.
                So I called collect, cashless
as I always seemed to be, though I had had enough money
to buy Jim Beam on the flight, and I told my father
about my failure to not have problems.

He listened carefully, and then advised
me to “threaten to break the guy’s jaw” who wouldn’t let me
connect to where the Wright Brothers lived, to Orville
and Wilber dead in their graves in town, who I thought were still
partially to blame for this. I said, “Dad,

if I do that, they will put me in jail,” not the truth, that I
might lose because I wasn’t a fighter, not like my pop
who was the toughest kid
at Northridge High School, not like pop
who had all sorts of stories he’d often told
about kicking ass. I had never
kicked anyone’s ass. My father said, “You’d be surprised,
most people are cowards. Take my word for it,
you’ll be on the next plane pronto, just as soon
as they can get rid of you.” This was his legal advice, too.
My father was a lawyer, successful.

I took the Greyhound, and I arrived in Dayton
in shame, a kind of prodigal son not appropriately returning,
a deserter of the family pride, sleepless, punished
by my father, who refused to talk to me on the drive
to Vandalia which passed right by Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base,
                    on the peaceful hour ride back to his place
from the bus station. So I slept, finally safe.

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