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My dad died suddenly June 30. His memorial is today. I will not read this out loud there. I’m in no shape to do so. I’m not sure anyone who’ll be present wants to hear my truth about my dad. And I don't want things to become any more tangled or painful than they already are. But I’ve written down these words and read them to my brother, and I’m publishing them here with a sad and heavy heart.

My dad was cool – greased-back, black hair cool; white t-shirt with a cigarette pack rolled up in his sleeve cool.

My dad was cool, and he was charming. And he was, to those who knew him best, frustrating and disappointing and at times, downright awful.

My dad was an alcoholic – and he could be a mean drunk at times. (although the next morning, he’d forgotten all the spite.) People often only saw the cool. They loved his charm. That’s how charm and cool work, of course. All the condolences I’ve received echo this: “Your dad was so funny.” “Your dad was so cool.”

My dad was able to pull off being cool for a long, long time (and I was able to tolerate the disconnect between the charm and the meanness) – until he couldn’t and until I couldn’t any longer.

We had become in the last few years, as they say, “estranged.”


Estrangement – those relationships in which there is strain that finally fractures; a disruption, a refusal, a distance, a break.

Estrangement is a literary term too. It’s one on which much of my work – once upon a time when I thought I would become a literature professor – was based. Verfremdungseffekt in German. Oстранение in Russian. Détournement in French. Defamiliarization. Estrangement. To make the familiar unfamiliar. “To make the stone stony.” To disrupt the spectacle. To confront. To subvert. To force the audience to see the structure – if just for a brief moment. To recognize this is not natural; it is constructed and can be altered. To turn that structure upside down, inside out. This concept predates the Modernists; this is the work of the trickster too: the creator and destroyer of worlds; the maker and the breaker of rules.

When, 15 years ago, I finalized my master’s thesis on political pranks, I dedicated it to my dad and his father. I come from a long line of pranksters, I said. And the two of them had inspired and supported much of my work. They kept me in line, and they encouraged me to rebel. (I don’t think they always intended the latter.)

But that’s what tricksters and pranksters do – in literature and in mythology and in the Watters family.

My grandfather was a brilliantly hilarious storyteller with a drawer full of pranks - trick gum and exploding cans of nuts (snakes!) and hand-buzzers. My dad liked both physical and cerebral humor; he introduced me to Monty Python and to George Carlin and to It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and certainly as such he shaped my own sense of humor. My dad was a prankster in the more delinquent sense – the kind of guy who would light a cherry bomb and throw it down the toilet in the high school boys’ bathroom – just to wreck havoc, just to test the boundaries, just to subvert authority.

Authority looks funny when you are, like my brother and me, the third generation Watters in a small town in Wyoming.

I never felt much compelled to live up to the family name in Casper. (I planned, like my dad’s brother, to leave as soon as I could.)

The name mattered, however, when I was in band.

I wanted to understand music and play it well, in part because doing so pleased my dad. He told me in fourth grade when it was time to pick an instrument that I should choose the French horn. “Orchestras are always looking for French horn players,” he said. I was torn between the cello and the flute. He reminded me that one of those is easier to carry walking to and from school.

When I was in junior high band, I always cringed when Rex Eggleston or Carroll Alexander were our substitute teachers. See, we had this trick we’d play on substitutes where the class would all swap instruments. It meant that the band was unable to play a single song well (a combination of the inability to read the sheet music for a different instrument and to even get that instrument to make the right noise – aperture issues), but we pretended to try so earnestly that often we’d get away with band anarchy, particularly with the non-musical substitute teachers who didn’t really know how to conduct us or respond other than, I’m sure, think “Wow, the East Junior High School band sucks, bless their hearts.” But Eggleston and Alexander had been my dad’s orchestra and band teachers respectively, and when they took roll they’d shout “Watters!” and glare around the room. “I know your father, and I have my eye on you” they’d say and point at me. I believed it, and I wanted to live up to the musical part of his legacy. I played my best those days, and stayed in my seat – first chair woodwinds. Otherwise, I’d have headed up to the drum section and pounded away on the tom-toms.

It was always the drums.

My dad played the drums. He was in a rock and roll band. He insisted my brother and I take piano lessons before we picked up another instrument. He dutifully went to our recitals and concerts. He was pretty understanding when I quit band my sophomore because it meant marching band in the cold Wyoming football season. It’s when he reminded me, “you should have done orchestra,” and I had to revisit that moment – as I often still do – when I chose to the flute over the cello. My dad played in both band and orchestra. He kept the beat.

Until he lost it.

My dad taught me everything I knew – for a while at least – about music. He taught me to appreciate harmony and, even as a Republican, he taught me to appreciate folk music and hootenannies and protest songs of the Sixties and Peter, Paul, and Mary and Pete Seeger. He taught me how to identify terrible drummers – in form and style and the inability to count to four. We listened to Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. And I had to admit that he was probably right. They were better than any other drummer, alive, dead, or Grammy winner. Nonetheless, he could be remarkably open-minded about the music I liked as a teen. He could also be brutally harsh when he’d identify a band as just a newer version of The Monkees – they didn’t play their own instruments, he’d remind me. Nor did KISS, he’d point out. It was a lingering suspicion when he’d watch early MTV with me. “They’re not really singing.”

He took me to see my first rock concert – Rick Springfield. He thought he bought us decent seats, but I made him come with me down on the floor where he stood behind me, hands in his pockets, looking cool, while I was in awkward teenage bliss. “I don’t think he really knows how to play the guitar,” he told me in the truck on the way home. “Rick Springfield is terrible. And now I think I”m deaf."


My dad helped run the grocery store – the family business. His older brother, my uncle Jimmy left for New York City when he graduated high school. My dad stayed.

He was obligated, he said.

He kept the beat, and yet he was always sort of broken.

He broke his leg – quite severely – when he was in PE in community college. He had some shoddy surgery with pins and plates that left him, in his early twenties onward, limping and perpetually in pain.

He was declared medically unfit for the military.

So many of his best friends, he would repeat, were drafted, served, and died in Vietnam.

But he stayed.

He stayed in Casper, and he minded the store. It’s a metaphor, I suppose, but a flawed one.

(He's left my brother and me with such a mess.)

I would like to think he had, at some point, aspirations that could have taken him elsewhere. He married a girl from England, after all.

But he stayed.


I left. We all did.


He taught me how to play Monopoly – or rather, I learned how to lose. The secret, he'd say with a grin: always be the banker. My secret: throw the damn Monopoly board up in the air and stomp off into my bedroom and refuse to play the game.

He taught me to cuss – inadvertently, of course - while he watched the Broncos. Every Sunday during football season, particularly when Craig Morton was quarterback, a child could learn all the bad words.

He would read poetry aloud sometimes. He had "The Charge of the Light Brigade" memorized. He would use this booming Vincent Price-like voice to read “The Raven” that would make me shriek and beg him to stop. All he had to say were the opening few words, “Once upon a midnight dreary,” and I would come unraveled.

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!“

Quoth the Raven, ”Nevermore."

My dad called me crying the night Barack Obama was elected. He said he’d never thought he’d see a Black president in his life. He said he thought his father would be rolling in his grave; I reminded him that Grandpa Fred was, at the end of the day, a man of great integrity. We learn and we grow – even those of us from, even those of us who stay in Wyoming. We recognize that the world changes. It has to. The past and the future are inventions; they are stories we need to tell with more care. My dad lost the thread of the story for a long, long time, but from what I understand, he'd started to grow and blossom again in the last few months of his life.


My dad and I are alike in so many ways. As I grow old, I look in the mirror and I see the King chin, the curly hair. I can be, like him, quite selfish and stubborn. I worry now about my heart.

My dad and loved to talk politics; we rarely discussed feelings. I couldn’t tell him when I was hurt; he would never tell me. I think it’s all why things fell apart between us.

He could be terrible, and I can be terrible. And I loved him, and I am very much his daughter.

There’s a lesson here somewhere about forgiveness – forgiving him and forgiving others and forgiving myself. It's something that, with his passing, I think everyone in his family will be forced to consider. There's something here too to learn about resignation - when and why you must stay, when and why you must fight, when and why you must walk away.

Audrey Watters


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Audrey Watters

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