Balling The Jack

He wasn’t always a bastard. In fact, when I was little, he was, like all dads, the Best Dad in the World. He could do anything, knew everything and was the funniest man alive. In truth, he actually was funny; the only things he left me that were worth having were a singing voice and the ability to make people laugh. That and he taught me how to roll with a punch. Back in those days, though, he taught me to play football, how to mend bicycle tyres and how to swear. We watched Match Of The Day together every week. I was too young to follow football; but Match Of The Day was our time. We would sit in the garage together for ages whilst he hid to avoid having to do DIY. He was full of life, and full of fun. I waited like a puppy for him coming home. I always knew when he was coming, too; he whistled everywhere he went, as though he had too much happiness inside and had to vent the excess like a steam engine, and if he wasn’t whistling, he would be singing a strange little song.

“First you put your two knees

Close up tight

You move them to the left

Then you swing them to the right

You do the something something

Something something something

And then you twist around

Twist around

With all of your might”

And so it went on, the middle part sounding different each time, his memory for lyrics worse than his memory for promises, until he stumbled to the end

“…And that’s what they call

Balling the jack”

Whenever he had to go anywhere in the car, I was there with him, soaking up his stories about the War and about growing up in Glasgow. The one I never tired of was about the day Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy star,came to town.

A crowd had gathered at St Enoch’s Cross Station to meet him, but when the train arrived he was nowhere to be seen. Then suddenly, the door of the guard’s van slid open, and out leapt the real live Roy Rogers, on Trigger the Wonder Horse, wearing his full fancy western rig. He gave a performance right there on the platform, then, with a bound, Trigger jumped the ticket barrier, and the two of them rode straight up the stairs which led from the station concourse into the St Enoch’s Cross Hotel. I must have heard that story a hundred times, hearing it grow more dramatic and spectacular every time, while every time I squealed with amazement.

I thought my Dad had won the War, been the most famous footballer in Scotland and single-handedly invented the ‘Pull my finger’ joke, and by the time I realized that none of it was true, it didn’t matter. He was my Dad, I was his boy, and that was all we needed.

Then, when I was twelve years old, my Mum died, and Dad didn’t whistle any more. He was still filled with too much of something, but it wasn’t happiness. At first it was grief. Then it was loneliness. Then it was scotch.

A couple of months after my mother died, Dad drew his last sober breath and a stranger who looked just like him came to live with us.

He embraced drinking as though it was coming home from a war. He began tentatively, as though he couldn’t believe he’d found this wonderful Land of Drunk, but then he threw himself into it like a convert, and ran away from sobriety like it was a junkyard dog. Over the years I’ve know many men and women who found a wonderful friend in drink, only to then find what a terrible enemy it can be, but never anyone who fell so far, so fast, and so hard. Maybe he started because he couldn’t stand being without my mother; but pretty soon he drank because he couldn’t stand being with himself.

At first, it was just embarrassing. He’d be loud, clumsy and stupid and he stank. He stank of booze and stale sweat, of urine and vomit. The man I’d looked up to all my life, the man I wanted to be, fell asleep in front of the TV every night with piss stains on his trousers or his dinner down his shirt.

One night, maybe a year after she died, I took my Dad a tray of food and went back into the kitchen for my own. I turned around, and he was right behind me, purple with anger and breathing as though his chest was being crushed.

“What’s this?” he said, shoving something into my face
“The peppermill” I was confused, and so nervous that I may have laughed.

Then, somehow, I was lying on the floor, my face in horrible pain. I heard a crack as he threw the wooden peppermill and it smacked into the cupboard door beside me. I felt wetness on my face and as I wiped it away, my hand was covered in blood. I stared at it, uncomprehending, and eventually I realized. He had punched me in the face harder than I thought possible. After a while, still sitting dumbfounded on the floor, I picked up the peppermill. It was empty.

So it began.

I could tell you all about the beatings of the next years. I could tell you how he threw me down a flight of stairs and then kicked me back up it, or about the way that the most casual, good humoured conversation could suddenly be ended by a backhand crack across my face for, to anyone but him, no reason at all, but there’s no point going into the details. I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me. I don’t need it. I survived, and came through it pretty much okay. Sometimes things remind me of those times; that strange, metallic smell that comes when you’ve been hit in the nose; the taste of blood in my mouth. There was always that taste of blood when he had his rages; sometimes because he’d split my lip, but more often because I’d bitten the side of my mouth to stop myself crying. Crying made the beating worse, you see. Now, though, it’s over and done and, in some quite abstruse ways, it was part of what made me the man I am today. To deny the experience would be to deny who I am. Suffice to say that for a few years it was like living in a country where it rained rocks. Sometimes you would be caught unawares by a sudden shower; sometimes you could do nothing but wait for a storm that you knew was coming and which might last hours or days.

It ended a suddenly as it began. I don’t know what was special about this day, what was different, but when I was sixteen, he came home in need of someone to batter. I don’t know why. I seldom did. Maybe he’d lost at golf, maybe he’d crashed his car again; who knows? Maybe it was just that there was a vowel in the month. This time though, something inside me snapped, and I flew at him, fists like a buzz saw, punching and kicking and butting and biting with everything I had. He knocked me down again and again but I kept getting up, blind with tears of rage, I just kept throwing myself at where the punches were coming from. Eventually, when I sank to my knees, it wasn’t because of the hammering I had just taken. I was exhausted. I had let go of all the pent-up rage of three years of abuse, and I was spent

He didn’t speak to me for a week, and he never hit me again.

Somehow, years later, we had a reconciliation of sorts. I worked hard to get it – for my sake, not his. I didn’t want to spend my life as a pent-up ball of bitterness like he had; I had seen where that could lead. So air was cleared, apologies made and, in theory, hatchets were buried.
We were never close again though. Forgiving isn’t forgetting, and it’s hard to shake the hand that beat you. I would visit him from time to time, and from the moment I arrived we both counted the minutes until I could leave.

Unwilling to continue to pick at the scabs of our relationship,I got on with my life. Determined to be everything he wasn’t, I became a quietly-spoken and gentle man, soft as feathers and hard as steel, hard-working, dedicated to my wife and daughter, and, of course, sober. I may not have been the best father ever, but God knows I tried to be – I still do - and, over time, I even came to almost like myself.

Shortly before my thirtieth birthday I got a phone call telling me he was dead. He’d played golf that day, gone to the pub, settled down for the night with a glass of scotch and a dirty book and had died in his sleep. All in all, not a bad way to go. My reaction was oddly flat. I don’t know what I should have felt – the most significant relationship in my life was over, the Man Who Made Me was dead, and the brute that had hurt and terrorized me couldn’t hurt anyone any more. Should I have sung “Ding, dong, the bastard’s dead”? Wept and rent my garments in grief at all the time we’d never have? Been quietly sad, but relieved?

None of the above, as it turned out. I just felt numb and dead inside. All I felt was surprise at my lack of emotion. Funeral done, I shrugged my metaphorical shoulders and carried on as before.

Fast forward ten or twelve years and I am driving alone down a motorway, late at night. On the radio there is a documentary about the famous Glasgow Apollo theatre. Talking about the big American stars that played there in its heyday, the commentator tells a story about the arrival of Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, and how, when a crowd came to meet him at the railway station, he came out of the guard’s van on Trigger performed for his fans, cleared the ticket barrier like a showjumper and rode straight up the stairs that led to the station hotel. I laughed out loud. It was true, all of it, and after all those years, I finally had a happy memory of my Dad.

Then the voice on the radio started talking about the great American stars who had played the Apollo decades before. “One who made the Glasgow Apollo his second home was the legendary Danny Kaye, who played there countless times.” Cut to a clip of Danny Kaye singing.

“First you put your two knees close up tight
You swing them to the left and then you swing them to the right
Step around the floor kinda nice and light
And then you twist around, twist around with all of your might
Spread your lovin’ arms way out in space
You do the eagle rock with such style and grace
You put your left foot out and then you bring it back
That’s what I call ballin’ the jack”

Cut to a car, stopped at the side of a motorway and shaking from the sobbing of the man inside, slumped over the wheel, face in his hands, crying his heart out for the loss of the father he had never once stopped loving.