“If you do the job in a principled way, with diligence, energy and patience…and in superhuman truthfulness (every word, every utterance)—then your life will be happy.”

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

∞

My dad is a master storyteller in the grand African American tradition. Like me, he’s descended from folk who birthed a spoken-word culture from the most adverse conditions imaginable. Today, the culture is arguably the most artistically vibrant the world has ever known.

As a lowercase j, I couldn’t wait for Dad story time, which was always way better than TV. We didn’t have cable or the internet back then, but still.

My dad would paint word pictures that transported me to fantastical places all around this world and beyond. One time, he took me to a seedy pool hall in Harlem where he hustled Marvin Gaye, who stole the lyrics to Sexual Healing from my dad, who wrote them on a napkin in between racks of 9-ball. Another time, it was to a bar in Baghdad where he snake charmed a snake charmer and hitched a ride home on a hijacked magic carpet. My favorite was the one where he was stranded in a Mexican desert without food or water on a horse with no name, yet somehow, he dug deep into his well of intestinal fortitude to slay the dragon guarding the magic stone in the hidden cave. On a nightly basis, my dad took me to places I didn’t know existed, and I wasn’t sure I was even allowed to go.

My dad likes to run stories back, and he’ll often combine old stories into brand-new ones. If he’s on a roll and the vino is flowing, before you know it, he’ll be jousting against Little Richard on a Mexican dragon in Baghdad while singing the lost verse to What’s Going On? Everyone loves his mashups, of course.

My dad’s stories are immersive, multi-dimensional experiences, and part of the fun is adjusting to his ever-shifting reality. In this regard, my dad, whom I love dearly, and President-elect Trump, who didn’t get my vote, share a nature. In moments when I get carried away, which happen all the time, I see some of myself in both of these wacky word wizards.

The settings and characters of my dad’s tales change, often on retellings, but the basic structure is always the same: some fool dragged him into a shaky situation against his will or better judgment, the fool did something stupid to make bad worse, and my dad, through superior intellect, cunning, strength, skill, savvy, sheer force of will or whatever else the moment required, stepped up to save the day. 

My dad took me to many places with his words, but he rarely took me back to Jim Crow South Memphis, where he grew up, and never to South Vietnam, the one overseas trip he says he took that’s verifiable with photo evidence. He calls Nam his study abroad experience, and his country sent him there when he was barely out of childhood to fight a war he didn’t believe in, where many of the soldiers on the other side were still children themselves.

As I moved out of childhood, I became a regular character in my dad’s stories, especially the ones he’d tell my friends and the girls and women I’d bring around. I noticed that I often remembered the caper going down way differently than how my dad told it, as things were way livelier in his versions compared to mine, and I was usually way dopier.

Some of my dad’s yarns involving me were so over-the-top that I started questioning the veracity of his other stories. To be clear, my dad is all poker faces and devilish grins when he’s storytelling, and it’s up to you, the listener, to take the tale as you like. I took most of my dad’s stories as the literal truth deep into adulthood, even though I knew I shouldn’t.

One time, my dad was telling me and my meathead best friend a whopper where he wrangled a gator in the Panama Canal. After only a couple of minutes in, it hit me that he was riffing on one of my adventures I told him about when I visited a homey who lives in Costa Rica. While I didn’t wrassle a gator in that one, I did deal with some adversity in the jungle and saw a flying monkey.

Pops’ version was admittedly way better than mine, but my man straight-up gaffled my story, finally forcing me to accept that his ones might be jive.

I did a mental inventory of my dad’s favorite stories. Since my mom died over a decade ago, his go-to is the one where they were cruising on the interstate and eating a bucket of fried chicken in a T-top Corvette outside of Butte, Montana, on the way to Yellowstone. The story can go in many different directions from here, depending on my dad’s mood and the moment. I like the version where my mom threw a chicken wing out the T-top, pops punched the gas up to 88 mph, and the cluck capacitor that makes time travel possible sent them back to the Jurassic. Fortunately, my dad had boots on ground in Pangea, who knew a triceratops wizard that wormhole teleported them back to the future and straight to The Lodge at Yellowstone. The triceratops wizard, Tre’Ron, even threw in an upgraded deluxe suite with a hot tub on the house for their troubles.

Like an MSNBC intern during a Trump debate, I furiously fact-checked what I could, and things didn’t quite add up. I could let the time travel part slide, but the road to Yellowstone doesn’t pass through Butte, Montana. I fact-checked a couple more of my dad’s greatest hits, and stuff didn’t totally line up on those ones, either. A feeling soon set in that I had no idea who my dad really was. For an extended period, I felt some kind of animosity toward him for tellin me lies my whole life when he knew I idolized him. 

I love my dad and wanted to keep our healthy relationship going, especially with my mom and his wife of over 40 years dying of cancer. I had enough data to accept that fact-checking his stories wasn’t the way. But getting lied to and not piping up about it didn’t seem right, either. I just wanted my dad to tell me the truth.

Recently, my egghead best friend said that college, where they be lying all the time and don’t even know it, is the place to go to get the facts. In that moment, it hit me that most people who think they’re telling the truth are actually telling lies. It might could be the case that my dad was telling some kind of truth with all his lies.

I believe that’s his take on it. My dad is an astral traveling man with a vivid imagination, and the way he sees it, if he can imagine himself doing the thing, it must’ve happened somewhere in the cosmos. He tunes into the version of himself that did the thing so clearly that it’s as though this version did it. He just doesn’t feel called to point out that he may not have done the thing in this three-dimensional experience that we’re sharing.

From my dad’s perspective, “the facts” are often so cosmically and comically subjective that they don’t really matter. What happened in the past is way less important to my dad than the connections he makes in the present moment with his outrageous tales that are so tall they make Paul Bunyan look like a hobbit. 

Recently, my dad visited the African American History Museum in Washington, D.C., and told me all about it. This wasn’t one of his tall tales, but his vivid breakdown of the breakdown still hit so hard that I felt like I was there.

My dad explained how they set the museum up chronologically, starting from slave times, and how you move through time as you move through higher levels of the building. I thought about what it must’ve been like to be a slave in America, like my relatively recent ancestors. 

If I was a chattel slave in the African American tradition and enslaved on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta like my grandad’s grandad, and all I had to look forward to was rape, torture, cotton picking, and getting sold like a beast, I’d be making up some wyld ass stories to pass the time, too.  

Or if I grew up in the Jim Crow South like my dad did, and my crazy-as-hell but true reality was that I couldn’t legally drink water out of a public fountain as a child cuz I was Black, then perhaps I’d have developed the habit of taking liberal liberties with the facts to soften the pain of brazen bigotry.

I know I’d experience distortion in my facts field if I made it to college on academic merit as my dad did at a time when most brothers on campus were there to shoot jump shots and run track meets, and then a racist draft board sent me halfway around the world to a jungle to fight the Viet Cong, who never called me the N-word. All this before I could legally drink firewater at a bar, Jim Crow or otherwise.

But that’s not how it is with me, praise the Universe. I’ve experienced some brutal pain, but nothing as spirit-injurious as race-based chattel slavery, Jim Crow, or armed warfare. I do my best to keep it 100, as in this reality, I get to tell my truth straightforwardly and enjoy a degree of confidence that I won’t get lynched by bigots or shot at by children.

My dad and his parents before him broke the cycle of generational poverty in our family. Their sacrifices have allowed me to live Seneca’s hallowed life of leisure. Because of them, I have the time and space to train my mind and body to tune in to and explore planes of reality that I previously thought only existed in fairytales. On some level, I feel like I’m living out the adventures that my dad says he got into back in the day.

I enjoy the luxury of going wherever I desire and speaking my truth to the fullest like a modern-day pharaoh. And I sing it from the mountaintops. Only you pronounce it “sang it,” like James Brown, my dad’s favorite singer.

These days, as my dad gets older and gives less fux, his stories are getting even more outrageous.

European capitals? My dad’s seen ‘em all.

Mega yachts in the Caribbean? My dad steered Jeff Bezos’s in to port on a hot night in Havana when the captain got sick with food poisoning.

Magical monasteries perched on hidden Himalayan peaks in Tibet? My dad’s been there, done that. In fact, the head monk still owes him $20 he lost in a game of mah jong, which my dad had never picked up until that moment. Yet Pops still smoked that Buddhist brother, a mah jong master, on his first go.

The most maddening part about my dad’s wyld ass stories is that every so often, I’ll get soul-level evidence that validates even the most outlandish of them.

Like, we’ll be strolling through a random airport in a city we’ve never visited before, and someone appears out of nowhere who recognizes my dad from the time the crazy thing popped off where my dad was in the middle of everything and saved the day. The details don’t always align completely with my dad’s version of events, but they’re close enough that it wouldn’t trigger your jive detector.

The first time it happened, I thought my dad must’ve hired an actor to back up his BS, but this sort of thing has gone down several times since then. And the vibe between my dad and the other guy is always so genuine and heartfelt that you can tell they shared a magical moment. If not in this life, then surely in another.

These cosmic connections happen frequently enough that they almost lend credibility to my dad’s story where he blasted off into space and met the man on the moon who told him the secret of life.

The secret? Pops ain’t spilling. 

He says we can’t handle the truth.