Authentics

Dad,

I remembered something I thought I’d share with you.

I forgot plenty, these past ten years or so, however long it’s been. I forget all that I let myself forget. Like…

I forgot what it used to be like when you’d take us to those reenactments, those fairs in the middle of nowhere. Pile us all into the Volvo (the safest car out there, you’d say), Match always getting carsick in the middle seat (so she can look ahead, you’d say), and puking into empty bagel bags or whatever bag or cup we could find in the chaos of her announcement (“ithinkimgonnaaaa”). Then the car (sorry, the Volvo) would smell sour and stale for the rest of the drive, where we’d park off road and walk into some barren or open or whatever field, the edges of which were dusted by tents and folding tables, fair freaks and food booths.

“Come son, come watch the reenactment,” you’d tell me, pushing me away from the booths jammed with appropriated dreamcatchers and wooden windchimes and canes shaped like penises. We’d leave those commercial wonders to the girls, who’d get to stay in the shade touching rocks and asking about their energies, or dipping color changing fabrics into water to see if they wanted to buy t-shirts intended to be wetted for entertainment. And so I went with you, and you began narrating, or rather, criticizing while offering what you considered to be sage advice.

I remember I was first six or so, when you made me stand offsides of an imaginary battlefield with you, watching men pretend to attack other men at wars that actually, allegedly happened, once upon a time. Watching actors go down and die right in front of us.

You were an authentic. (An “Authentic,” you’d say.)

The reenactors before you were all farbs. (You called them something else back then.)

“Guys like me know a thing or two about this,” you’d say, standing tall, thumbs in belt loops and frowning as you began to focus on details. Your commentary was about not just the overall uniforms, but how worn in an authentic’s fabrics (had to be wools), boots, weapons should be. Were those bullet holes or button holes, was that layers of earth, or cornstarch and cocoa powder. If you could see the clean-shaven skin of their face, modern eye-glasses, a chain hidden under a collar or glint of a wristwatch, you cursed them aloud. If they looked well rested or able-bodied (they’d be too sore from sleeping on the ground to move like that, you'd say), you’d spit. If they took a break to go use the Honeybucket, you cursed and spit. Farbs. You wanted to smell their body odor from feet away, as if you were a master somm detecting a varietal’s notes. Earthy. Petrified. Fatigued. Pee-stained. Or, as I understood it back then, you needed them to smell like horse shit, not dog shit.

“And their guns?” I’d asked.

“What about em?” You’d respond, still scanning the scene, the heft of this or that, the degrees of grime under fingernails and inside ears, the way a subordinate deferentially orbited a superior. I’d try to uncling my shirt from my sweat-soaked skin, look over at the other kids holding water bottles all icy-wet in their hands, getting to watch not as mere hydrated spectators. But as other peoples’ kids.

“If they’re authentic, shouldn’t they really be shooting?” I asked once or twice.

I remember you tilted your head, then turned to me. “What the hell kind of a question is that?”

“It’s just confusing where the line is drawn, in the name of authenticity,” I went. I must’ve been nine or ten.

“Son, these aren’t real men fighting out here. They’ve never killed a man, been charged while sleeping, seen a thing or two.” You’d never go into detail. But you’d say, “A real man knows what it feels like, to shoot another, hide surrounded by evil. This ain’t that. Will never be that. Bastards.”

You’d forget there was the sound of music behind us from one of the booths, some wood instrument musician selling his CDs, the cover of which was him with his permed hair blowing in the wind. There’d be the smell of hot-links and onions sizzling atop a grill, the sound of kids who’d fucked up their facepaint snot-crying about the heat.

Or the rain, the cold. But mostly the heat, I remember.

You kept coming back to these reenactments. I remember you were constantly narrating at me, telling me to see how that guy’s pack was clearly not loaded with those metal tins that would’ve been of the time and authentically military-issued, that that one over there’s voice was too smooth. You wanted to give them feedback, tell these reenactors a thing or two from a guy who’d seen a thing or two.

“Wouldn’t that be inauthentic though, for them to engage with you?”

“You’re a real smart ass sometimes,” you’d say, pointing out the soles of the boots of one recently “fallen” soldier nearby. “Fucking nerve of that guy,” you’d say. “New shoe sonofabitch out here. He made too much noise when he went down too, did you hear that son? All that fake moaning, his pack crashing. It’s not actually loud like that.”

I remember as my voice started to change, I almost told you I’d be a loud walking anachronism if I was on that field. And you’d have said, “Huh?” and I’d have said, “Nevermind” or “Nothing.”

I forgot to bring a hat sometimes in the beginning, and would get sunburnt. You were turning me into a redneck in the only way you could, and mom didn’t believe we needed sunscreen back then. I remember how if she wasn’t tanning, she was drinking. Maybe screaming at you.

I remember we’d walk back to the Volvo, covered in dust from all the other parked cars and you’d tell me one more thing or two about real men, real battle. Mom and Match and Jessi would have a bag of kettlecorn the size of a rolled-up sleeping bag, some new trivet or mug or dick flute. Match, her tongue now blue (a precursor to the sour puke to come, to fill the kettlecorn bag and decimate the pack’s remaining edibility) and breath smelling like butter and sugar would smash her fingers into my neck and tell me, “You got hella burnt James!” I’d sit in the back, not saying anything—hot, dusty, and tired—just waiting to turn eighteen.

Eighteen mattered, we agreed. Was when you enlisted. “Real men don’t wait for it to come to them,” you’d say. Sure.

Towards the end, at one of the last ones where I wore one of Jessi’s sunhats and brought my own water, I asked if you thought they’d ever do a reenactment of a school shooting, if real men would watch that, and point out the anachronisms there, while assessing the vibrato in those reenacted death rattles. I forget if I actually said that aloud or not.

I just remember I was aging out of all this, thank God.

So I forgot if that was the very last one, or if you needed one more fix with all of us in tow.

I forget what they say nostalgia is, if it’s missing something or the opposite. Can it be sour? Have bitter notes, dusty tannins?

I also don’t know how to sign this. The way we are now, the old ways don’t make sense anymore.

You used to call me Ace and Buddy and shortened versions of my name then.

Sometimes Asshole and Idiot and Fucking Faggot.

And I’m not even in a program that requires me to write you, reach out, nothing like that.

When you first got sent away, you’d sign letters to me, “Your Father,” and address them to me, “My Son.”

Match says she still can’t bear the ride out to see you, makes her too sick.

You always gravitated towards the places on the other side of winding roads.

Well.

I remembered, just recently, going to those reenactments as a kid growing up. I was out at a festival in a desert somewhere, and there was one there, of all places. I decided to check it out. It was called “American Battle Reenactment,” swear to God. It was the gayest thing I’d ever seen, Dad, truly, though all those fairs you brought us to probably were a close second. Camp makeup and theatrics, camera flashes and poses, the whole thing anachronisms authentics would’ve gone to war over. Lasers and leather collars and, well, I’ll spare you a thing or two. There were women, out and femme, playing the role of butch leaders, or more like doms, and some of the men on the field started stripping and fucking, simulated or not, and it was out of control and loud and violent and, well, one interpretation of war, alright. The crowd, a different demographic than the usual historical reenactment freaks, absolutely loved it, how fucked up and graphic, how symbolic it all was. Nobody on the sidelines talked about the watches or jewelry or obsessed about the aesthetics of it all.

You would have hated it.

Then again, maybe it would’ve been the first one you ever felt really captured the essence of whatever demon it was you were chasing, kept loading us all up into the Volvo for, tried to find on those fields with all those actors you stared at and studied for hours.

It made me laugh.

Signed,

Someone you used to know.