GHOST DAD

In the summer of 1990, Ghost Dad was butchered. The critics all agreed: this comedy, directed by Sidney Poitier, starring Bill Cosby, was dead in the water. The film told the story of Elliot Hopper, a workaholic widower with three children, who were forced to raise themselves in his absence. And this happened all before he became a ghost.

On June 29, the same day the film released, movie critic Roger Ebert wrote, “What kind of ghost is Cosby? The kind of ghost his children can see and hear sometimes, but not at other times, and who can sometimes pick up stuff although at other times his hands go right through things, and who is invisible in bright lights but visible in darkened rooms. In other words, a ghost created under such confusing rules that it can be anything at any time, which means that sometimes in the same scene or even the same series of shots [he] appears or disappears according to no logical pattern.”

If my younger self had met Ebert on the street, I would have told him to “talk to the hand because the face ain’t listening.” I liked Ghost Dad.

Thirty years later, while grieving my dad’s death and the unfamiliar world brought on by a global pandemic, I rewatched Ghost Dad. I wanted to see how the movie held up with age. Despite the poor special effects, would I still enjoy it? By the time the taxicab crashed through the bridge guardrail and plummets into a watery grave with Elliot and his Satanist driver inside, I realized I had really low standards for movies as a kid. Ghost Dad wasn’t the worst film I had ever seen. It’s the kind of film I imagine a tired parent would plop their kid down to watch, before slowly tiptoeing out of the room to freedom.

Curiosity lead me to Ebert’s review. His criticism of how Ghost Dad ignored the “ground rules” resonated. Did Roger Ebert know my dad or something? The critique colored a pretty accurate silhouette of my dad. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn, that he rubbed elbows with Ebert and never shared. Dad was a man of many secrets, and I was one of them for a time.

HEARD, NOT SEEN

An orphan. A brother. A lieutenant colonel. Mortician. Husband. Adulterer. Miserable son of a bitch (according to his first-born). My dad embodied all of these labels and more. On February 16, 2020, he was the ear-piercing, delirious screams stampeding out of Howard County General’s hospital room 4117. Tightening my grip on the railing that ran the length of the stunted hallway, I tried redirecting my focus to the one-way conversation of my older half-sister, D., who hadn’t skipped a beat. Standing face to face, our eyes locked. I scanned her for any acknowledgement of the shrieks pulsing, pressing, pushing their way out of the room in front of us. Nothing. She was not fazed. Isn’t this the part where the final girl, grabbing a nearby blunt object, runs to rescue her loved one, especially one being touched without consent? Nobody tells you how consent gets demoted by dutiful doctors when you’re ninety-two years old with dementia.

Halfway through my half-sister’s explanation for why Dad had been in the hospital for the past two weeks after being relocated to his second assisted living facility within a year, my ability to weed through the screams, swirling around us and fighting to drown out her voice, improved. I tried to listen, catching bits and pieces of what she said. There was internal bleeding in his stomach. Surgery was not an option. He would die on the operating table.

“You need to prepare. He doesn’t have much longer,” she said.

My mind reached out to touch that last statement, as if it were floating dust made visible by harsh sunlight, breaking in through a locked window.

*

I can’t remember exactly when I started to comprehend that my dad had another family, but I got my first clue at eight (I wouldn’t know it was a clue until later). I sat alone in my dad’s Lincoln Town Car, the black interior leather bleeding into the dark spaces missed by the gas station’s overhead exterior lighting. My dad drove a black Lincoln all my life until arthritis forced him to stop by claiming the legs of his five-foot-eleven body. That night, he had agreed to let me tag along on a joyride. He left me in the car to pay for the pump. Boredom overcame my eight-year-old senses. The fidgets ascended, activating my curiosity about anything within reach—the seatbelt, the button that made the faux wood cover for the cupholders snap open, the glove compartment. I reached forward to play with the latch to the glove compartment. It popped open, revealing a photograph of a pretty woman I didn’t recognize. When I heard the clinking of a metal nozzle meeting the metal of a gas tank, I quickly closed the compartment door.

The black Lincoln drove through the streets of Catonsville, Maryland, and back to the new apartment that Mom and I called home. After Dad’s familiar series of heavy-handed knocks, Mom opened the front door to let us inside.

While the three of us sat in the living room, I asked, “Who’s the lady in the picture, Daddy?”

Meeting my question with his own question, he said, “What picture?”

“The one in your glove compartment.”

In seconds, my dad stood and started cursing and yelling. My young mind interpreted his screams as a sign that I had done something horrible. Frightened, I ran out of the living to my bedroom, where I cowered in the corner outside my closet. I stayed there until my mother came to get me, after my dad had disappeared.

SPIRIT WORLD

Before moving to Catonsville when I was in the third grade and before the night I looked in my dad’s glove compartment, my mother and I lived among the willows in Glen Burnie—a simpler time. Or to be more specific, The Willows was the name of our apartment complex, located twenty miles east of the house my dad shared with his wife and two adult children, who were close in age to my mother, a twenty-nine-year-old single mother with a teenaged daughter and now a little baby girl—me. We remained in the willows for about seven years. My dad visited for a few hours every weekend, hijacking my Saturday morning cartoons to watch sports, and he stopped by after work on occasion.

At that time, I was too young to comprehend the truth: I was a secret. His wife and other children didn’t know I existed. That I only saw my dad once or twice a week never struck me as weird, especially because I had never seen my friend Jessica’s dad come around. Jessica and I had been inseparable since the crib when her mother started babysitting me. I never questioned why my dad got to meet Jessica, but I never got to meet any of his friends or his coworkers or his younger brother or any of his family as the years passed. That was our normal until 1992 when my mother decided to crash the funeral of the aunt who had raised my dad, storm down the aisle of the packed church in Pittsburgh, dragging me along like a ragdoll, and announce my existence to Dad's wife and children sitting at the front.

Things changed after that, but as a six-year-old, I didn’t understand the change. Instead of being a secret, I became a known being that needed to remain hidden, unacknowledged, swept under the rug, and never introduced to the people in my dad’s life. My dad faded after his arguments with my mother began to multiply. He faded more when we moved to Catonsville about two years after my reveal at the church. Although ten miles had been shaved off the commute between his house and our new apartment, his visits decreased, but he still made sure we were provided for financially. I saw him at least once a month, when he took us grocery shopping and paid for new back-to-school supplies and clothes. Also, he always drove us to pick out a Christmas tree, but he never stuck around to help decorate it. In the winter of 2001, my mother and I assembled our first artificial tree, six months after she severed all communication with my dad. I was fifteen, and the estrangement would last for eighteen months.

 DOCUMENTED ENCOUNTERS     

The summer before my senior year of high school, my dad began to materialize. I documented various sightings in my journals describing the encounters:

August 10, 2003—My biggest problem is Dad. Lately, he has been teaching me how to drive. Oh my God! I had so much fun the last session I had with him. I actually drove down the street! Well, there weren’t a lot of cars; but still it was awesome. Mom is mad at me about the whole thing. She told me that she never wanted him to teach me, she just wanted him to help her rent a car, so she could teach me. She continuously says I’m selfish because I never considered her feelings when I asked Dad to teach me. She says he is going to try and use this to get back together with her.

 With time, Dad’s presence began to amplify the environmental imbalance at home:

August 18, 2003—Oh my God! Dad let me drive on Route 40 yesterday. I was scared out of my mind, especially when I turned off Route 40 onto Winters Lane. But it was an adrenaline rush. Kind of! I was glad that he took me. Afterward, he drove Mom and me to Owings Mill to go shopping. Mom really makes me angry. Today, I told her I was writing a poem and she said, “Why?” Then, she said I obviously bought into the garbage that everyone has tried to make me believe about my writing. She said writing poetry is a waste of time.

After one of our night driving lessons, I decided to let Dad know I had been working on my college applications in secrecy and was about to hit a wall.

“Dad, I have an issue that I could use your help on.”

“What’s the issue?”

“I’ve been researching colleges and identified some that I think might be good fits for me. I already started working on my applications.”

“That’s great! So, what’s the problem?”

“Mom wants me to wait a year before applying to colleges. Also, she refuses to fill out any documents requiring parental information and signatures.”

“Did she say why?”

“She’s afraid that there are people trying to harm her, and that they will hurt me while I’m away at college, in order to get to her.”

“Oh, c’mon now, dammit! That’s ridiculous. She can’t be serious.”

I asked him to help me talk to my mother and persuade her to reconsider her position about college, and he did without question.

*

Five years later, Dad gave me a red 2008 Mazda 3 for my college graduation gift. Had he known, a year later, I would pack that car with all the belongings I could fit and move to New York to complete two years of service with AmeriCorps, which he claimed sounded like a Mickey Mouse Corporation, he may have reconsidered the gift. During the six years I lived in New York, my parents made no attempts to visit me. For Dad, it was a flat-out refusal. He tried to lure me back to Baltimore by offering to help me pay for graduate school, only if they were Maryland schools. Unfortunately for him, graduate school wasn’t high on my list of priorities, and he came to realize that wasn’t going to do the trick. Then, he threatened to take back my graduation gift if I didn’t move back. Fortunately for me, owning a car in New York City was more of an inconvenience than a necessity. The car was just collecting dust, bird shit, and parking tickets. I told him he could take the car back. But, if he wanted it, he had to come get it himself. He never did.

SEEN, NOT HEARD

Two weeks before Christmas of 2017, Dad and I ate dinner together in his den. I was thirty-one, he was eighty-nine. He sat on the couch, while I claimed the leather recliner closest to him. Both seats faced a wall where two family portraits hung side by side. He angled himself toward the television positioned on a floor-to-ceiling shelving unit that doubled as a room partition separating the den from the kitchen. He never missed the opportunity to brag about how he built that unit with his own hands.

Facing the television made it difficult to see the portraits even when trying to look out the corner of your eye. But I faced forward. My glances jumped from my dinner plate to the family portraits that did not include me. A framed painting of a husband and wife with their two toddlers—a son and daughter—hung on the right side of the wall. Hanging to the left, a framed photograph of that same family with a couple decades under their belt—the husband was my dad. These two portraits of my dad and his family stared down at me while I ate.

“Dad, do you have any words of wisdom about marriage that you can share with me?”

“What?”

I reiterated the question.

“I’ve never been married,” he said.

What? The question rang in my head. For a split second, I began questioning myself and my understanding of my dad’s situation. Of course, he had been married. He had always been married. His wife and my two older half-siblings had his last name, unlike me. His marital status delayed my welcome to his house for more than three decades until after the death of his wife. Prior to visiting his house, I only saw him at the apartments I shared with my mom, at the funeral home where he worked, at Applebee’s or the Rite Aid on Route 40 (Yes, we met at a Rite Aid once during one of my trips down from New York, as he requested.) After being considered dangerous behind the wheel of his Lincoln at the age of eighty-six, his house morphed into the main haunt where he could be seen. As we both sat in front of his family portraits with him and his wife, I couldn’t understand the need to still pretend. Maybe, this was the dementia talking. Nevertheless, I struggled to place all the blame on dementia. I poked the beast.

“So, you were never married to D. and O.’s mother?"

He stopped eating, looked me dead in the eye, and said, “You stay on your side of the street, and I’ll stay on mine.”

“Oh, okay,” I said.

I stared at the television. An unidentifiable, black-and-white western played on the screen. I sat there and thought about my alleged side of the street. An optical illusion separated me from my dad. In that illusion, he had never been a married man. He had been a lifelong bachelor. With three children? Or was he a bachelor without children, too?

To this day, I wonder if Naomi—my Dad’s nurse and caregiver from Liberia—had overheard the conversation because moments later she walked into the den and sunk into the armchair positioned underneath the family portraits.

“Boy, am I tired?” she said.

“Oh yeah, what have you been doing?” said Dad.

“Packing up all your wife’s clothes for Goodwill.”

I took another bite of my dinner, feeling as if this moment belonged to some cliché comedy film.

“Who?” Dad said.

“Your wife, sir,” said Naomi, staring at him for some acknowledgement. “Your wife, sir. Your wife!”

“Oh, that’s what you’ve been doing?”

“Yes, sir.”

I saw all I needed to see. I began to understand that knowing my dad wasn’t an option. He was all of the things and none of the things pulsating through flesh. But that did not mean I needed to stick around when I didn’t want to and be spoken to any old way. I gobbled down the remaining food on my plate, thanked Naomi for the meal, and left to return to my side of the street.

 GONE

My ghost dad crossed over during a global lockdown on May 3, 2020. The news that my dad had less than a year to live had come days after he stopped screaming in Howard County General and returned to the assisted living facility. The manager of the facility told me that my dad had been in high spirits and had been heard singing a song called “Old Black Joe” in his final days. I thought to myself: What the hell is Old Black Joe? I immediately Googled the song hoping to get better insight into my dad’s final thoughts and state of mind. The first hit was a link to a WMV file on YouTube. The second hit was a link to a Wikipedia description. According to Wikipedia, “Old Black Joe” was a “parlour song by Stephen Foster.” What the hell is a parlour song? I doubled back to watch the video link, preparing myself for an old-timey song:

Where are the hearts once so happy and so free?

The children so dear that I held upon my knee

Gone to the shore where my soul has longed to go

I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.”

I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low:

I hear those gentle voices calling, “Old Black Joe.”

The song, especially the part about the children, floored me. I had never in my life seen nor heard my dad sing. I had never even heard him hum a tune. So, the facility staff got to witness a side of him that I hadn’t seen. I imagined “Old Black Joe” escaping through my dad’s parted lips, floating down the halls, and spooking the inhabitants. To me, the song lyrics expressed grief, loss, loneliness, and passing on. I wondered if my dad had thought of my half siblings and me in those last days and if he had any regrets. My dad had made no attempts to unite us into one family. He compartmentalized us and stowed me away, keeping me separated from the life and version of himself that got presented to the outside world. At the end, I pitied my dad. He had roamed the earth for ninety-two years and died among strangers in an assisted living facility that was an eleven-minute drive away from his house. In a way, his isolation could be viewed as a form of karmic retribution, forcing him to spend the rest of his days with his apparitions, alone.

-Tiffany Phoenyx 

Tiffany J. Phoenyx has been in a long-term relationship with writing since the first grade when she attempted to type fiction on her mother’s old typewriter. Fueled by a desire to make a difference—a value instilled in her by her grandmother—Tiffany served three years as an AmeriCorps volunteer, tackling issues in the affordable housing and education sectors. Born and raised in Baltimore, she founded a content marketing agency that helps nonprofits and social entrepreneurs amplify the stories behind their mission and impact on communities. She also works as an associate editor for a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. She received a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Virginia and a M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University, where she earned a 2021 Women’s Voices are Important Fellowship.