My Father's Bookshelf
I remember it very well, my father's bookshelf. It was cheap, plywood, and held almost nothing but worn paperbacks.
I remember it very well, my father's bookshelf. It was cheap plywood, and held almost nothing but worn paperbacks. Near the bookshelf was an orange recliner he liked to sit in while he read, which was often. So often, twenty-five years after his death, it’s hard for me to recall my father without seeing him in that chair, holding a paperback. His taste in books informed my taste in books, and later when I started writing, he became my ideal reader.
As a very young boy, I wanted to be like him in the ways most boys want to be like their fathers. He was a good athlete, smart, successful, and likeable. And all of that was important, but the way I most wanted to be like him was through exploring his bookshelf. For years, the bookshelf was largely inaccessible to me simply because I wasn’t ready for adult fiction. I was always a reader, but until I turned ten, I stuck mostly to books explicitly aimed at kids.
Everything changed one Saturday afternoon around the age of ten as I was walked past his room.
Dad was laughing out loud. Cackling, really. So loud, I had to stop to see what was happening. It wasn’t unusual for Dad to laugh, but I’d never seen him cackle before.
He was sitting in his chair, holding a book, as usual, his head thrown back in utter delight. He noticed me standing there, and kept on laughing.
“Sit down,” he said when he finally gained his composure.
I came in and sat down next to him. “Listen to this,” he said, and began to read from a story about a kid called Lardass in a pie-eating contest. Lardass drinks castor oil ahead of the contest so he’ll throw up and ruin everybody’s day. Once he throws up, somebody else feels the need to do it too. Pretty soon, the entire pie-eating contest had turned into one big barf fest. I was hooked. Not just because it was funny. Sure, that was certainly a big part of it, but I was also hooked because it was the first book from my father’s bookshelf that he’d ever shared with me like this.
“What book is this?” I asked.
He showed me the cover. Different Seasons, the title read. But even larger than the title was the author’s name. Stephen King. And the cover art? Gorgeous. I wanted to read this book.
And I did. Eventually, I read not only that book, but many, many more pulled from that plywood bookshelf—Pet Semetary, The Stand, The Shining, Cujo, etc. I discovered authors like Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, Agatha Christie, and Louis L’lamour. I experienced stories and learned how they could make you ache and shiver and hum. I discovered worlds within worlds, reoccurring characters, and a dependable escape when I needed it the most.
In short, I discovered myself, who I was and who I was meant to be.
The very best memory I have of my father also involves Stephen King and Different Seasons, though in this case, we moved from the bookshelf in his room to the movie theater. When the film adaption of King’s The Body came out in 1986, I was 14. Dad took me to the theater to see it. Just the two of us. It was ours, so much so, that he swore me to secrecy if my mother ever asked what we saw since it was rated R and my mother was the type to get pretty intense about such things.
It’s a small moment, but the intimacy of it means everything to me now. It was the culmination of what began when I was ten, and ended that night at the movie theater.
A few days later, he told me he had cancer.
After the cancer diagnosis, things were never the same between me and dad. He had a long, hard road. First chemo, then radiation, then both. Neither did much. As he got progressively worse, my parents heard of a surgeon out in Denver, Colorado who promised miracles. My senior year in high school, they flew out to see if he could deliver.
As far as mistakes go, that surgery is probably one of the biggest I’ve ever witnessed. Dad lost a lot: his eye, his hearing in one ear, his ability to swallow, his looks, and his confidence, but it was what he kept that made it so horrific. The tumor. The surgeon had only managed to get some of it, and now Dad had new problems, not the least of which were his meds. Copious amounts of demerol and prozac made the dad I’d once known a distant memory, as he commenced the slowest most painful death I could have ever imagined.
He stayed a reader until the very end, though not like he’d once been. Pain can do that to a person. When he died, I was twenty-seven, and about to get married. Fifteen years later, my first book was published. It was a collection of short stories called Shoebox Train Wreck, and I dedicated it to him.
It’s a book that I’d like to think he would have enjoyed, a book I wished he could have read.
A year later, I was pleased to see reviewers compare my first novel, The Year of the Storm with King’s The Body. Three more novels followed, all of which I wrote with Dad as my ideal reader.
In December, my sixth book, Holy Ghost Road will be coming out, and again, I find my thoughts turning to Dad. Would he enjoy it? Would he be proud? I tell myself he would.
And when I’m feeling really sentimental, like I am today, I like to imagine something else. I like to imagine that maybe Dad has another bookshelf now, wherever he is. And that bookshelf has all of my novels and stories on it along with the greats Dad loved: King, Koontz, Leonard, Parker, and more. The top shelf holds only five books at the moment. Those are the ones I wrote. As I stare at them, I can’t help but notice he’s got room for more.