Jordan Lett

This Be The Verse

Dad never said much about his dad. I knew Grandpa Johnny as the old man that smoked

Marlboros and fit perfectly in the Johnny-shaped hole of the leather couch. He never had much

to say, often because the lung cancer we didn’t know he had made it painful for him to speak. I

had always felt sorry for him. Every Christmas, he would sit idle in front of the TV, a crocheted

blanket resting on his lap, tuning out everyone’s conversations. His wife, my grandma Judy, has

been on oxygen for the past five years, but she still waddled from room to room and cooked

dinner for everyone.

It wasn’t until the last few months of his life that I started to think about how much my

dad looked like him. They shared the same long nose, puffy chin, sunken grey eyes, and the

same frown lines. He watched the same five episodes of ​How I Met Your Mother​ every time I

visited, and he was a true Duke fan. Before then, that’s all I knew about Johnny. The day that he

died, no one in the family shed a tear except my father.

“Old Johnny,” my Aunt Maggie said to me late one night as she lit a cigarette outside

Grandma Judy’s house. “He had a lot of problems. He never took it out on us kids. Always on

Mamma. She’s been through a lot.” It was then that Maggie blew smoke past my face and

laughed. “He’d beat the shit out of that old woman.”

But I hardly believed it, as Judy has always been so gentle, and Johnny had always been

so sedentary. “There was no love in that house. No validation.” Apparently Dad woke up every

morning to Johnny’s voice booming over the trucks that would pass by, and he stayed awake at

night listening to the TV at full volume until midnight.

“Why?” I asked Maggie.

 Jordan Lett

She shrugged. “Ain’t nothing ever been good enough for him. James used to act out. You know

how much he loves his Mamma. Johnny just turned his hand to James and told him to man up.”

Dad burned down that house on the south side of Statesville after pouring gasoline into a

burning wood stove. Home sick one night, he was tasked with keeping the stove warm. He never

told me why he thought to use gasoline. Maybe he thought it was a shortcut, or maybe they were

out of wood. Sometimes I think about Dad sitting in front of the wood stove, watching the flames

die out, hearing the living room clock tick away the remaining afternoon hours before Johnny

would return.

***

My dad is a Duke fan just like his old man. Sometimes I joke about how I’d love to meet

my dad one day, even though he’s been present in my life for 21 years. In almost every way, we

could not be more different, although he’s tried to make me align with his interests several times.

I served a few aces during my time as a child athlete, but they were all underhand. I was

never quite ready for the ball to return to our side of the net. I jerked my body into action just a

little too late and I had heavy feet as I stomped across the court. All of these things pissed Dad

off. Throughout every game, each time the ball touched the ground on our side, I would look

over to see the progress of Dad’s bald head getting redder and redder. Sometimes he would begin

to sweat, and sometimes he would walk out of the gym. If we’d win the game, he wouldn’t

smile. His frown would sink deeper into the frown lines of his face, and he would dab sweat off

of the crown of his head with a tissue, and he would nod and say, “If you overhanded your last

serve, you wouldn’t have gone into overtime.”

 Jordan Lett

I don’t play sports anymore. Dad had attempted to teach me several tricks to his favorite

sports, and how to play it the “manly” way. He would demonstrate how to hold a golf club and

plant his feet while he twisted his body back, as he had done for over half of his life, before

nailing the golf ball. His ball would soar across the field, landing so far away that we couldn’t

see it in the grass. Mine wouldn’t even get off the ground before he stopped me.

Not playing sports was the first affront to his authority. It began to drive him insane to

see me curled up in the round living room chair with a book in my lap. The nights he didn’t

spend outside, fervently cleaning his golf clubs or pushing his lawn mower across already-cut

grass, he would spend pacing in the dining room and ranting.

“If you’re not gonna get off of your lazy ass and do something,” he’d say, “then why do I

feed you? Get up and clean house or something. If you’re not gonna go outside and play, then

you should clean house-- God knows your mother doesn’t do jack shit.”

We’d fight until our arms and lungs gave out, and at the end of the day we’d let ourselves

be swept away. As I grew older, more tired, I spent my time behind a closed door. Headphones

shielded my ears. One time, the floor trembled, and I thought, “I wonder how Grandma Judy is

doing all alone in her house.”

Life has its refrains.

Still, I don’t speak to him despite the fact that I see him every week when I visit my

mom. I don’t invite him to poetry readings. I don’t look at him very often because I’ll begin to

think about how much I look like him. We share the same long nose, puffy chin, sunken grey

eyes, and the same frown lines.