The second summer of Matt began in May of 2017. It was a transformative time for me. That winter I went out with a woman to a blues show – one of my first small-venue, local, live shows in a while and I began to fall back in love with live music. We only had the one date – she said I wasn’t edgy enough. We stayed friends. Then for a few months I dated a women with a lot of potential. She was cute and successful and lived close by. She liked live music too (we went to a number of shows) and she had a great eye for color and design. In May, I broke up with her. She told me she had fallen fast and thought she could see a long future together. I didn’t realize it in the moment, but I managed to break my own heart in leaving her. While we never said I love you, at times I felt it. I regretted my decision and tried to get back together with her. She wasn’t having any of it… there were no second chances. I felt like I had made a big mistake. I needed to get away I needed to change everything. I needed to do better. I needed distractions and music and sun. I went out and got a tattoo “So it goes.” I went on hikes. I went to more live shows. In late June, three days after Father’s Day, I left on a road trip to Tennessee, Mississippi, and North Carolina. That trip turned out to be a life changing type of trip.
The Sunday before I left, Father’s Day, I drove in to Philadelphia for an all-day concert at Festival Pier. I was excited to see the headliner, The Revivalists, but didn’t know any of the other bands. It was crazy sunny and hot that day. I drank a lot of Corona and sweated almost all of it out. The concert was good. I got out of my comfort zone and danced. I also got out of my comfort zone and got free face painting… They also painted symbols on my arms. If you know me and how uptight I can be – this was me letting go a bit.
At the beginning of the show, I had gotten a sweet Father’s Day text from my step-daughter thanking me for being a great dad and for being her moral compass. I was moved by it – I sent it along to a few friends and said I have the best kiddo in the world. I could swear I copied and pasted it in to the notes on my phone – but I can’t seem to find it anywhere. It was the type of letter that you could always turn to when feeling down. She’s a thoughtful and great kid (though she hasn’t been a kid for many years now).
As the show ended, my thoughts turned to getting out of the city, and traffic, etc. etc. I began my walk back to my car. The sun hadn’t set yet. It was still hot. There was a group of young women walking in front of me – maybe five or six of them all in their late teens. One of them seemed to be arguing with the others. They were distancing themselves from her. She was loud, she was cursing, she threatened to walk out in to traffic. As I passed two of the girls I asked if everything was ok. They said they barely knew this other girl, she lost her keys, and she’s freaking out – they said she was psycho or something like that. I continued walking, we were all heading in the same direction, but it was clear the group was trying to get away from her. At some point, I ended up talking to the distraught girl. She was pissed at her “friends” she didn’t remember where she had parked her truck or where her keys were. As we walked and talked, the group said sorry, we really gotta go and ditched her.
I told her it would be ok and I’d help her figure things out. We walked around trying to figure out where she might have parked or dropped her keys. We checked places that she remembered hanging at earlier in the day. She didn’t really know the other girls, she had just met them through either Craigslist or Tinder and came up to Philly from Baltimore to meet them. She partied with them, drank and did edibles. This is why she had no idea where she parked and why she was so disoriented. It’s also why the other girls were able to leave her behind. They didn’t know her, and to them she was just some crazy chick they met online. She was lost and crying and pissed.
We walked around to parking lots and underpasses for about an hour. I’d ask lot attendants if they had seen a silver pickup truck…. I suggested that she might need a plan B. Was there anyone she could call. Naturally, her phone was dead and she’d have to borrow mine. She couldn’t get in touch with her mom, so she called her dad. The conversation was short and he hung up on her. She said he’s never accepted her ever since she came out as being gay. She eventually got in touch with her mom who agreed to come get her. I said I’d stick around until her mom got there.
We sat on the steps outside of one of the hotels on Columbus Blvd – which was where her mom would pick her up. I gave her a few bucks to get water and a candy bar or chips from the vending machine. I asked her what her plans were – college? something else? She told me that she’s always been the fuck up. She had basically dropped out of school. She said she can’t do anything right. Her father was abusive which is why her parents aren’t together. Her mother doesn’t give a shit about her – I reminded her that her mom is on her way (two hours) from Baltimore. Though she was slight, this girl was tough, jaded, with a chip on her shoulder. She wore her hat backwards and a wife-beater white muscle shirt with her arms low as though she was always ready to throw an uppercut. She said she thinks she wants to be a cop or maybe go in to the military. She’d like to be FBI, or maybe be a chef – she likes to cook. She knew she’d have to go back to school. I told her she’d have to stop drinking and smoking pot to do the FBI thing. She said she knows and was sincere about it. Her girlfriend broke up with her not too long beofre – that’s why she met these girls – it was stupid, and maybe dangerous. I didn’t disagree.
The two hours passed by surprisingly quickly. I don’t remember what else we talked about. Her mom showed up in an SUV. The girl gave me a hug and climbed in to the back. Grandma was in the car too. Mom put the window down. She cursed at her daughter as she got in. I introduced myself to mom and grandma. I said I had a daughter a few years older than her – I can understand that she must have been worried. I said “you have good kid there – she’s had rough day. I hope you have a safe drive back – maybe talk about things in the morning” I got the sense they were going to drive around a little bit to look for the truck – I think the mom had keys that they could use to make it beep.
I don’t remember the walk back to my car or the drive home. It felt late. I hadn’t eaten. I kept thinking about the different lives we give our kids. I couldn’t imagine my daughter running off to another city. I thought about what might have happened to this girl if she had run in to the wrong people in Philly. I thought about that long car ride home and how she’ll be yelled at and lectured as she stares out the window at the passing streetlights and telephone polls, maybe looking up to the bridge spans above or looking out at all the buildings and homes and windows of other lives – wanting to get away from it all. I thought about how she might get home to something worse than a stern talking to. None of it seemed fair. None of it seemed right. She was a fuck up. She didn’t want to be. It all made me unbelievably sad. I was shaken up. I took deep breaths to avoid crying. It wasn’t until I went in to the bathroom and saw myself in the mirror that I remembered the paint all over me. I chuckled at how ridiculous I must have looked to her mom through the rolled down passenger side window.
I’d love to have some sort of nice way to wrap this up, some sort of moralizing statement on the virtues of fatherhood or even some nice follow up to say that everything turned out ok for this young woman. I don’t know how things turned out for her. I hope she’s a little less lost than when I found her. Sometimes, that’s just how the story ends – no cliffhanger, no resolution, just a few hours shared between two strangers – one of them a father and the other a daughter.