Jovan Musk

Every morning my father would shower, shave, and splash liberal amounts of Jovan Musk on his neck. The smell was sharpest in the morning, but I could still catch it when he came home at night and wrapped me in a hug. When I was little, he would dress every day in slacks, a button-down shirt and loafers, and tuck a handkerchief in his back pocket. My father had started two businesses in a couple of years- a Burger King franchise, and an independent home video rental store. His video store was one of the first in the area, a real entrepreneurial accomplishment. As a businessman, he dressed and smelled the part.

As the years went on, competition heated up for his video rental store, primarily a newcomer called Blockbuster Video. They opened shop a couple of miles up the road, and their store was larger, brighter, and had a wider selection of videos to rent. My father still dressed and smelled like a businessman every day, though fewer and fewer customers were coming to his store.

Eventually, he had to close his video store. He couldn’t compete with Blockbuster. And his Burger King, once a wildly successful franchise, was weathering the storms of a fickle economy. Where he’d once been able to hire professionals to help with the maintenance of a high-volume fast-food restaurant, he started to take on some of that work himself. He started coming home smelling of French fries.

My father bought a set of navy blue Dickies workwear and a pair of steel toed boots. Some mornings after he showered and shaved and put on his Jovan Musk, he’d pull on his Dickies and boots to go down to the Burger King. He had to do the administration and accounting of the restaurant, but he also had to sling fry baskets and build Whoppers sometimes. He had to kneel down on the red tiled floor to scrub the grout, and bend over in the parking lot to pick up cigarette butts. My father had planned to get rich by opening multiple franchises in the area and run them as a high level manager.  Now he was a part-time maintenance man, working alongside teenagers who had no respect for him. I don’t know if it was more humiliating for him or for us.

By the time he sold the Burger King, his Dickies had become everyday wear. And when I hugged him at night, the smell of the deep fryer obscured his Jovan Musk.

Portrait of my father

Mom’s Mink

He took us to see the houses he grew up in- a small but proper house in Morristown, the huge pink house on Loantaka Way in Madison. They moved to the big house after the war, when GIs were buying cars in droves and the dealership was making profit hand over fist. They were able to buy whatever they wanted: a beach house on Barnegat Bay, a boat named “Mom’s Mink”, a 4 carat diamond ring, a full length fur coat. Every single photograph of my grandfather from that time shows him with a drink in his hand. Even while driving the boat.

The Squirrel

When he was young, his friend took him shooting with a .22 rifle. He killed a squirrel with that gun and felt so terrible about it that he decided he would never shoot a gun again. After college he joined the Marines.

His bartender

He was the valedictorian of the Madison High School class of 1958, he would tell us proudly, even though he didn’t often go to class. He didn’t even need to study, he’d say. His mother was salutatorian, so he came from intelligent stock. He went on to study Eastern religions at Princeton but dropped out after two years, joking that the only person who would miss him was his bartender.

The Flag

In 1964 the World’s Fair came to Queens, NY, and he and his friend Charlie worked the Tropicana orange juice booth. They stole a massive World’s Fair flag. It is folded neatly in my mother’s basement like a military souvenir.

Deep fryer

Sometimes I woke to the smell of coffee and cigarettes in the kitchen, and that heavenly combination equaled joy. It meant he was home with us. Not gone for days on end, working or otherwise unaccounted for. I would race down the stairs and jump into his lap. Later, after he quit smoking, he would come home smelling of French fries, after spending all day in his Burger King.

Starfish

We’d rent a beach house on Long Beach Island that we affectionately called the Little Red House. One night after a big storm, hundreds of starfish washed up on shore. He collected them and pressed them under heavy books on the picnic table in the backyard. We were disappointed that the starfish wouldn’t lay flat. Their little arms kept curling upwards to the sky. We threw them all away. Our one souvenir was a horseshoe crab, which he told me to give to our science teacher.

Heroes

His heroes were Hemingway, Johnny Cash, and Van Gogh. He took us to see Les Miserables twice on Broadway. He cried both times.

Autumn

Every autumn, he would look out the bay window and sigh. “I hate fall, because it means everything is about to die.” He died on the winter solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year.