The Old Fart

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
05/05/02
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/History/oldfart.htm

The Old Fart is dead. The news didn't come as any great shock. He was 77, and along with end-stage emphysema (a condition not helped by his four pack a day unfiltered Camel habit), he had congestive heart failure and finally, colon cancer (or, in his words, "terminal rot of my asshole").

He had a name, of course, and being a descendent of one of the great Scottish clans, he was quite proud of it. But he was private to the point of being secretive, and if he learned that I used his name in one of my essays, he would probably come back to haunt me.

But he had a talent for creative dissembling, and would find it easy to understand what I meant when I say that sometimes withholding accurate information results in a greater truth.

Besides, I don't think he would make for a real appealing "Casper" style ghost. So we'll just skip the name. For the seven years I knew him, he was "The Old Fart."

Yes, to his face. About six months after I met him I was over at his Old Man's house, trying to figure out what the hell he had done to his computer this time, and it went longer than it usually should, partly because he was convinced that if he didn't know what a file did, it was ok to delete it. About half his computer problems could be fixed by a quick peek in his recycle bin. Most of the rest usually involved carbon particulate matter and nicotine oil. I was running late, and called my wife to let her know I was late. She asked where I was, and I replied, "I'm at the Old Fart's." She didn't have to ask who I meant; she had met him. I glanced up, and the Old Fart was looking at me with a look of mock horror on his face. Then he growled, "At least you're honest." I grinned and said, "You're just saying that because I haven't given you my bill yet."

After that, he was just "The Old Fart." He lived in a small Siskiyou County cabin about 200 feet from the town graveyard (I once accused him of wanting to save money on the Hearse), by himself and his pets. He had an immense black lab named Chad, a noble, strong animal who, the first time I walked in his house, whimpered and urinated on the floor. "Chad, you son of a bitch!" the Old Fart screamed, and went on to explain that Chad usually reacted that way to strangers. That made him of dubious value in his professed role of watchdog, and left me wondering if the Old Fart was abusing the animal. In time, I realized that aside from screaming at Chad a lot (and dogs, especially large dogs, are utterly impervious to being screamed at), there was no abuse going on, and they doted on one another.

Chad got used to me, and I got used to the Old Fart. I would come over every couple of months to settle the inevitable disputes that would occur between the Old Fart and the Windows operating system, and Chad would rest his ten pound head on my knee while I hid the existence of essential files whose names annoyed him and took a cotton swab daubed in rubbing alcohol to moving parts of his printer.

He liked to talk about his past. Married three times, including once to a high priestess in the New Age movement. None of his marriages worked out, but he did produce three boys, who he referred to as "My son," "My other son," and "My son, the asshole lawyer in Dallas." The Old Fart had a thing about names; he would never refer to anyone by name. I was "The computer guy." I thought it was odd that he would refuse to use people's names and yet he had a dog named Chad, and had recently lost a cat named Cat, until I found out that he always owned one dog and one cat, never more and rarely less, and every single dog was named Chad, and every single cat was named Cat.

When I learned this, I looked around and said, "So where's Cat?"

"Got squashed" was the semi-informative answer.

"Planning on getting another cat?"

"Fuck, no."

The next week, I saw an ad in the paper for Maine Coon kittens. Now, if you aren't familiar with the breed, Maine Coons are big, friendly, intelligent long haired cats who come with placid dispositions and a kind of feline loyalty. They make great pets, especially for guys like the Old Fart, who want pets that are independent, but friendly and loyal. They are also disgustingly cute kittens.

So I showed up at his place the next day with a big pair of bright blue eyes framed in grey and black fur and a high pitched mew. The Old Fart stood on his porch, hands on his hip, and glared in silence at the kitten in my hands for a full minute. Finally he snarled at me, "You son of a bitch!" and reached out to take Cat.

I got to learn some of his life story. He was in the Merchant Marine during World War II, which was one of the most dangerous duties anyone faced in that war. And if I didn't know that, he was quick to remind me, because I was a fucking limey and needed to be told about that. I was a fucking limey because I lived in England for three years a decade after the war ended, and because it delighted him to abuse someone who shared his Scots descent by calling him an Englishman.

It didn't matter; saying you were in the Merchant Marine during World War II will get my instant respect, no matter what else. He claimed to have studied photography under Ansel Adams, and he had a darkroom/photography lab in a "shed" that was nearly as big as his house about 50 yards up the trail. He had some damn fine pictures on the wall, along with who-knows how much in equipment. The cameras alone had to be worth $25,000.

He had an amazing collection of books, including a first edition Edmund Burke, and a marvelous atlas from 1710. He had a pretty impressive collection of law books, and I wasn't entirely surprised to learn that he did a turn as a lawyer, specializing in constitutional law.

We both liked to discuss politics, and most of the time, we agreed on most things. Where we differed most sharply was on guns. I'm for gun control, he considered gun control to mean hitting a vital organ on the first shot. He would gleefully point out that my Clan name was Gunn, and illogically accuse me of treachery against my own kin. He was fascinated by my essays, although ones on guns would usually elicit a growl in email from him.

He had a ton of guns around the house, everything from muskets to shotguns, although his preferred toys were the twenty or so handguns he owned. He didn't go for the high-powered sniper scope jobs and high volume "street sweeper" type weapons, and I doubt any of his guns were less than a quarter century old. They, and his knives, were the things in his house that weren't dusty and smoky and covered in cigarette smoke.

His knives were amazing pieces of work, incredible steel with edges that could drift through a sheet of paper without the faintest tug. He made them himself, from scratch. He literally wrote the book on knife making and sharpening, and even though he had retired 15 years earlier, other knifesmiths were still in awe of him. I learned this, not from him, but other knifesmiths. And I got to see the manual he wrote about it.

When I first met him, before his health started to really decline, he was an independent lobbyist for the American Veterans, and excelled in making life difficult for elected officials.

He bought and sold railroad watches on Ebay for a while, and it came as no surprise to me to learn that he was a pretty fair watch repairman, too. He did pretty good at it, and got me to do the html layout for the pieces he put up for sale. He was happy enough that he gave me the watch that I'm wearing today, a fine Swiss Army Watch that keeps perfect time. He tried dabbling in computer sales for a while, and got taken to the cleaners. For all the other things he could do, he never got a grasp on computers, and couldn't understand that a CPU had the shelf life of a bunch of bananas.

His health worsened and worsened. I began to appreciate how close he was to riding the black camel when I playfully tossed a 30-gallon plastic bag full of packing peanuts at him. The whole thing weighed perhaps eight ounces. But he threw up his alarmingly thin arms and gave an old man's caw, a weak and tremulous sound, one I never wanted to hear. Just months earlier, he would have just batted it back at me.

The last time I was at his house, he was living a chained existence, trailing plastic tubing along behind him in his constant struggle to breathe. A year earlier, he had tried smoking with the oxygen in place, and set fire to his nose. Superficial flash burns, and it finally convinced him to cut down on the cigarettes. He was often going up to two weeks at a time without a cigarette, and while he acted proud of it, I suspected he really had no choice in the matter. It was usually physically impossible for him to smoke without blacking out. When he first met me, I smoked two packs a day, and it used to mystify and annoy him that I just gave them up one day, and never looked back.

I didn't know it at the time, but it would be the last time I would visit his house. I only saw him once more after that, when he stopped by to tell me the latest diagnosis. It was over. After that, he retreated to his house, and refused all visitors except nurses and the one son he seemed to genuinely like. Two months later, he was dead.

On that last visit, his place was less cluttered than it used to be, between aid workers setting him up with a gleaming new kitchen and air conditioning (in a place where nobody has air conditioning), and his kids coming to divvy up some of the belongings. But there were still a lot of boxes and bags full of all kinds of weird stuff. Getting to his computer, as always, involved moving a bunch of crap out of the way.

The Old Fart pushed at a box, and it spilled, sending photos skidding across the floor. While he stood and steadily cussed, a stream of rich, if unoriginal invective, I gathered them up.

I picked up one photo and paused. There were two men in the picture. One was an impossibly young looking Old Fart, not as young as the brave kid on the merchant marine card, but tough and mean-looking and tousled, with big arms. I recognized him by the evil glint in his eye and the big, fuck-you grin. The other guy, also grinning and with an arm draped carelessly over the Old Fart's shoulders, in a quintessential mentor's pose, was Ansel Adams. I glanced up at the Old Fart.

He grinned down at me. "You thought I was full of shit when I told you about me studying under Adams, didn't you?"

An honest answer would have been that I wasn't quite sure what to believe. But he would have sneered at such an answer as weak dissembling, namby-pamby bullshit from a limey gun-grabber. Besides, I had an answer that would, for a moment, make the old ruin of a man in front of me feel like the brash, brave kid in the picture.

"Yeah. I guess you could say I thought you were full of shit. I'll be damned." Hearing the caw of triumph was worth it.

Sometimes withholding accurate information results in a greater truth.

Goodbye, Old Fart. I'm glad I knew you.