One of the lingering issues I have with losing my Dad, aside from the whole “he’s dead” thing, are the questions I will never have answered. I’m not just talking the intrusive questions like “were you scared when it happened” or “did you think of me before you left” (I hope not, I hope so).
I’m talking the stupid, everyday questions like:
How do I change a car battery?
What’s this rash on my face?
Is this really how you use a tape measure?!
Can you overdose on ‘shrooms?
If so, what are the signs it’s currently happening?
Google and YouTube can help me unclog a sink, but what about the deeper, more personal questions? The ones with answers only my dad would know, about his time on this earth. The questions that emerged while excavating the artifacts of my dad’s life, or ones that pop up as unremembered details from stories he told me, during our 37 years together.
My dad knew a lot of stuff, he’d lived a lot of life. You can’t grow up in the sixties, in southern California, without sex (ew), drugs (duh) and rock n’roll (hell yeah).
Speaking of which, my dad played bass in a band called “Fat Bag” (not to be confused with the more famous band, Fat Bag). Knowing my dad, the name was a reference to drugs. Maybe money? But definitely drugs. And, if I remember correctly (and let’s assume I do, since there’s no way to know), Fat Bag was legit enough that they got signed to a record label. Unfortunately, this was after my dad quit the band, but also before the lead singer died of a heroin overdose.
Fat Bag played parties around Pasadena, which was a totally normal thing to do for burgeoning rock gods. According to my dad, they booked regular gigs, and had a nice little following, due in large part to the drummer from The Seeds gigging with them. Of course, The Seed was a big deal, so he was the only paid band member, his drumming services exchanged for cases of beer and/or drugs.
So here’s a question: which drummer from The Seeds? They’ve had TWENTY NINE MEMBERS. And not in a Parliament way, with brass and percussion sections. The Seeds are a band with 4-5 people at a time! I suppose I could look at a timeline of drummers for The Seeds, but most of the members of the band do not have their own Wikipedia pages, and they’re also mostly dead, too. As in, some of them are fully dead, some are still alive. But also the living ones are probably also mostly dead.
Questions I would love to have answered re: Fat Bag and my dad’s time in the band include:
Are there newspaper articles about Fat Bag?
What record label signed them?
What was the lead singer’s name (Jim comes to mind, but I think I’m thinking of Jim Morrison)?
Is there anyone alive who remembers my dad in this band and are there any photos?!
That last question is bringing me, in real time, to a weird discovery: there are almost NO pictures of my dad in his 20s. At least, I don’t have any. I do have a good amount of pictures of him as a kid, but there’s at least a whole decade missing! Until he met my mom and they had me, I think he was photographed a total of 3 times as an adult: once for his Coast Guard yearbook, once overseas with a fellow Coast Guard-er (and their two, ahem, “dates”), and once in the bushes of a dusty hill, wearing jorts (jean shorts), as seen previously, in this post.
Who was this young man, aside from a guard of the coast and a bass player in maybe an almost famous band!?
Even if there were more pictures, the images, taken in a time before my existence, would still feel separate from who I knew my dad to be. But they also feel weirdly familiar because of his stories, his forever moustache, and how I can see him in mine and my brother’s faces. I think that’s probably how most of us feel about our parents, dead or alive. “They had a life before me?! Go figure.”
I’ll never know everything about my dad. But I wouldn’t have anyway, had he still been alive. He lived almost 35 years on this planet before I was born, and there’s not enough time (or enough reasons) to share that much about yourself with your children. I know we need to see our parents as humans with lives and purpose separate from ours, but I’m good with leaving the carousing in the past.
And despite him being gone, there are a few things I’ve learned that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Things like:
How much his trip to the ER cost the night of his motorcycle accident, in his 20s (he kept the receipt)
How much of a pirate he was (he hid treasure on his boat)
How nostalgic he was (he had every greeting card I ever gave him)
His birthday is this Friday, October 20th, and to mark the occasion, Pete and I will be spending the day at Disneyland, a place he loved. We’ll celebrate my dad, Philip Mackie, the patriarch of the Mackie family (of which I am 1/4), and the man to which I owe my sense of humor, moles and belly button. I will eat churros, sing along with the birds in the Tiki Room, and, if my trip on his first posthumous birthday in 2021 is any indication, I will sob my way through Space Mountain. A ride my brother and mom refused to go on, and which was always time spent, just me and my dad.
Until we meet again (and happy birthday, dad)!
xo Nicole