Despots and Romeos

by Vicki Whicker

We are honoring fathers all week by sharing stories written in our two-day About Our Fathers writing workshops. We begin with Vicki Whicker’s hot young parents…and this is an invitation to write about your own father before he became a father….

My dad didn’t talk much to me as a kid, and I returned the favor as a teen, so what I know about his life before I was born is secondhand, and right now I have no idea who told me the stories. I’d think the first one my mom told me, but it could have been her prim mom, who would have told it with a scold that was more of a laugh in her throat.

The story goes that my mom, newly bleached blonde, teen queen as she was, was at the beach with her parents — it was some sort of resort town, the rich preferred it, the poor showed up despite them — and there was my dad with his bleach-blonde hair, sleeping in the trunk of a friend’s car.

He was much too poor to have a car.

Anyway, he was blonde and hot, and Betty was a Grable-type looker, and between them was electrical magic that even her wealthy and dangerous parents could not de-buzz. They were well and truly hooked, and what a great thing that he was in the poor town in the poor high school, and she was finishing up the year as the May Queen.

Betty’s dad was less than happy. Had he not done what a man had to do to gather wealth and make sure everyone knew? Work hard, yes, but look great while doing it, too. My grandfather was a man made for top hats, lapel jewelry, thick ruby rings, and heat, packed somewhere he could reach.

Anyway, young Romeo that he was, my dad would not be discouraged. He worked hard enough to buy a car so he could drive to her side of the tracks. He had seen the good life, and he meant to claim it. He joined the army for college money, earned straight As, and went into the aerospace industry—not as a mechanic, but eventually as the man who got things done, whether that meant sitting with the Shah or attending a party in Uganda hosted by the man beside him - Idi Amin.

Now this part of the story I know first-hand. I was leaning pretty on his ridiculously atrocious pearlized turquoise and pearl-white pimp-on-payday of a Cadillac — very definitely THE Limited Edition, the biggest, boat-iest, most cringeworthy thing — a teen girl who thought she had a normal Chrysler of a dad and got a white-walled elephant of a pimp thing instead.

Still, I was leaning on that bad bitch when he showed me the Polaroid. Him in a crowd of black men in Nehru jackets.

That’s me, he said. That’s me in Uganda. Next to me is Idi Amin.

It sure as fuck was. And this photo took my breath away. Who is this man who raised me with a firm flat palm? A glare. A dark mood to clear a room.

Dad, you know he is a despot, a mass murderer, that he’s killed his own people? A bird sang in the peony bush. Three motorcycles buzzed down the country highway.

But he was a blank slate that my questions skittered over.

And that was the day I looked him in the eye. I was old enough to see him clearly.

---

Write with us: Write a story about what you know of your father’s childhood from other people’s memories. Or any part of your father’s life before he was a father -share in the comments section!

Vicki Whicker survived LA, a career in fashion, a dilapidated farmhouse, and a string of beautiful disasters. Her poetry chapbook Caught Before Flight was published by Woodland Arts Editions, and her work has appeared in many anthologies. She is currently finishing Chameleon Boys on Ducatis, a memoir about damage, desire, and the magic in her version of Upstate. Follow Vicki’s photography on Instagram and her essays on Substack. Vicki is a student in LITerati Academy and her essays will appear in Literati Academy’s premiere edition of SYNcreation.