Here's my other candidate for my father's best story. The more I think about it, the more I give it the nod. I have no idea when he wrote it because the Lodi stories are undated, but I put it last because it has the oldest protagonist of the bunch––forty-seven, older than my father ever got to be. 

I look at it as a depressing vision of who he might be if he let himself go, let himself fall away from the things that were keeping his life together. Unlike many of his protagonists, Willie has no children; he also doesn't seem to have ever been in prison, like most of my father's characters have been. Willie is also a racist pig––sort of a worst-case-scenario of who Thomas J. Wingate might have become had the circumstances of his life (and his attitude toward it) been different. 

This is a hugely important story to me in terms of my father's influence on my writing. There's a scene in "Beaching It" from Wifeshopping––which might be my best short story––in which a man goes into a bar looking for a woman he used to sleep with, only to find himself rebuffed by a bartender armed with a pipe. It's almost exactly the same scene as one in "The Peephole"; that's how much this image from my father's fiction seared itself onto my imagination. And I didn't even know it was lurking around there, didn't even make the connection, until I read this story of his aloud. 

The character of Willie Towers is also a would-be rapist, and if you look at Souls Fall Through you'll see that I have a whole novel dedicated to just such a character. An outsider who has fallen into sexual depravity and reduced himself to preying on teenagers. Is this coincidence? A mere theft of characters and themes? Or did my father's worst-case-scenario vision of himself affect my worst-case-scenario vision of myself so profoundly that I couldn't escape it, neither in my life nor in my fiction?