01.06.2003
When I see Harrison Ford in a movie, I can't help but to see my own father. When Richard Kimball in The Fugitive tells the one armed man that he missed his stop, I see my dad. When Indiana Jones beats up on Nazis, I see my old man. When Jack Ryan shows up at the door of a Columbian drug lord with that trademark smile of his, I see the man who I call every June. Some people can't help but to always see the star instead of the role, but I don't even see the actor; just visions of my father over and over and over again.
I called him once to tell him this – I think I was watching Airforce One at the time – and he chuckled in response, but all the laughter in the world wouldn't have changed it. I just don't know why.
I've sat down and actually thought about it a few times – usually after watching one of the actor's movies – and all I can think of is that "gosh-darn-it" trademark smile of his that my own dad gets when he's thinking of something clever, and something about the cheekbones. I have no idea what ethnicity Harrison is, but I somehow doubt that it's the full blood Turk that is my father. Under normal circumstances, this would be nothing more than semi-interesting party conversation told to my bored friends over cocktails in my little studio apartment, but New York is rarely normal.
A friend of mine once told me that Ford lived over in the West Village and that he had seen him wandering down Hudson in full celebrity regalia: a large pair of sunglasses, a coat with it's lapels pulled up and a scarf, no matter how hot and humid the day may be. I'd also heard that he'd once stopped in at the bar I used to frequent on one of the rare nights that I wasn't in residence. New York, being the type of place it is, makes everything two to three degrees instead of the usual six the rest of the country is used to, but non of this impressed me. As I'd neither seen nor had a drink with the man who is the silver screen embodiment of my old man, he might as well have lived in Iowa with my own father. Until a very strange Tuesday...
The day hadn't started well, that much was easy to say. I'd broken up with my girlfriend the night before at the bar we met at, but due to the fact that we were living together in a small studio, we were forced into spending the night together in the same bed one last time. As she got up for work that morning, while I turned over hoping for four or five more hours of sleep, she cursed me with every breath until I could no longer sleep and was forced awake at the same ungodly hour as a morning shift coffee jockey. She cussed me out for my months of unemployment – regardless of the fact that I was still able to pay the rent and my share of the bills – and tried to destroy what little masculinity I had by telling me the truth of our time in bed together. She remarked on how she couldn't believe how long she'd stayed with me and said out loud the things she could have been doing all the while had I not been around. I got up and made a pot of coffee stating that while I was preparing one for my own benefit, she would be making several dozen over the next eight hours for people who cursed her for being too slow. She responded slowly, but with a drama I should have expected. After she put on her scarf, coat, and hat, she took three steps – the maximum number needed to cross from any end of the apartment to the other – and spit in my eye.
For a second I stood in shock and let the spit roll off my eye and onto my morning erection while I comprehended it's meaning. I pondered whether abandoning two years of a relationship was a step backwards and if it was too late to take back the breakup if I decided against it in the next few seconds. I was interested by the fact that her saliva seemed cold – and had always seemed strangely cold, for that matter – as it fell from my eye. I was curious how long it would take my erection to fade and whether my ex-girlfriend's spit would speed up or slow down the process. Then I wiped what was left of her from my eye and penis just in time to see her disappear out the door.
When the coffee machine was finished dripping water through the coffee grinds and into it's pot, I poured a cup, added a healthy dose of half-and-half, a shot of scotch from my stash under the sink, and took it back to my futon where I sat and sipped at it slowly, thinking about much the same as just after I was spit upon. A few hours later I emerged from my trance, just around the time my bar was being opened.
I didn't bother to shower or shave before heading out, just putting on a sweatshirt for a band I liked, pulling on a pair of jeans, and taking my cigarettes. I arrived at the bar, a little place a block or so away with a decidedly aquatic theme and name to go with it, just after the bartender had finished taking the stools down.
"We're not open yet," he said with a bored voice as I entered and the door shut behind me with a slow bang. He looked up, saw it was me, waved never mind, and I took a seat. He hadn't even opened the register yet when he slid a glass with scotch & soda in front of me. I looked at the bar clock. It said noon which meant that it was eleven-thirty. By the time the clock read two, I'd had five more and was on my way to a serious hangover the next morning. It was then that my father walked in.
I hadn't expected to see him. Aside from the fact that he lived fifteen-hundred miles away from where I sat, he also hated the very idea of New York so I figured him being there – much less in the same bar I patronized – was an event as rare as Haley's Comet. Like a ten year-old astronomer through a telescope, I followed him with interest. Who knew when I'd see him next? I didn't go home for the holidays and he didn't come out to see me.
"Could I get a Grey Goose on the rocks please," he said. It was strange, and I had to rest my head on the bar for a second to figure out why. Eventually the fog around the answer cleared and the label to Jack Daniels appeared and I realized that my father drank Jack & Cokes. He'd drunk them before I was born and would probably continue to drink them until either he or I ended up under six feet of dirt.
"You're not my father," I said to him as the bartender handed him his drink saying, "Here you go Mr. Ford. Four bucks."
"Not unless you know something I don't," the imposter said, sipping his drink with a grimace. I liked alcohol, but even I never drank it without something to thin it out a little.
"You look just like my father," I said. "I could have sworn you were him." "That's funny," he said with that shit-eating grin of his. "I'm usually mistaken for someone else."
I tried to fake a smile, but the best I could come up with were my lips pulled up just exposing my teeth. I went back to drinking and smoking and trying to decide what to do now that I was single again when I noticed that I was being looked at disapprovingly by the man who looked like my old man but wasn't.
"What, dad," I asked with bitterness. I felt a pang of anger similar to the one I got when he forgot my eighteenth birthday and told me that I was too young to smoke.
"Nothing," he said, looking down at his drink then back up to me. "I was just thinking that you're awful young to be an alcoholic. Doesn't it take a few more years to build up the bitterness and resentment?"
"Didn't the doctor tell you years ago that alcohol would just make your ulcer worse?"
"What," he asked, seemingly confused by what I was asking. I rephrased.
"You and I both know that drinking will be the end of you, but I don't say anything, do I?"
"Look, kid...," he started.
"Don't 'look kid' me, Dad! I have a name. A name you gave me by the way."
The bartender mouthed my name to him and he confirmed by whispering it back to him. It was funny in some way. It was like a soldier repeating an order to his commanding officer just in case some important word had been carried away by the wind and failed to make it to the soldier's ear. I stubbed out my cigarette in frustration. If my own father didn't remember my name, what was the point?
"Greg, listen," he said unsure of himself. "I don't know who you think I am, but I'm not your father."
"Sure," I laughed. It was the kind of laugh a bitter twenty-something makes after having imbibed liquor in every drink since waking up. "Next you're going to tell me that you never fought Nazi's or kicked terrorists off your airplane."
I saw him looking at the bartender who shrugged in return. He polished off his drink and pointed at it for another before saying anything else to me. The bartender waved off the bill slid to him for the drink but accepted the dollar in tip.
"Actually... I never did fight Nazi's or terrorists or the Empire or anything you think I might have. Those were just movies."
"Of course you didn't," I said bitterly. "Harrison Ford played Han Solo, and you don't look anything like he did back then."
He looked honestly confused.
"They should have had him play the young Indiana Jones though. River Phoenix just wasn't convincing. He didn't look anything like you."
He ordered his third drink in ten minutes.
"You know what I think," I asked.
"I have no idea," he answered.
"I think I should have kicked you ass back then."
"Back when?"
He didn't remember. He didn't remember the time my girlfriend had been over and I took her home at one in the morning. I wasn't in school at the time, I'd taken a semester off after I'd graduated but since it was a weeknight, he figured that I'd been out buying drugs. He said as much when he pinned me to the wall in the hall. He wanted to know where I'd been and what I was on. I laughed at him and his accusations because before then I'd honestly only ever had a beer or two but that confirmed his suspicions all the more. With a solid slap across the face he told me not to laugh at him and that he wasn't going to have a drug user in his house, not with my sister and brother living there, not while he had anything to say about it.
I refreshed his memory in the best terms I knew how.