My First Family Vacation to the Ocean
Growing up, my family didn’t take orthodox vacations. My mom and grandmother would load up my brother, sister, and I to drive eight hours to Houston, Texas for bi-monthly chiropractor visits on weekends after school. These weren’t so much escapes from our lives as they were weekend hostage situations. I’d rather have been doing anything other than riding in the back seat of a Nissan Maxima for half of my time off between school.
The entirety of the only day we weren’t traveling for eight hours was spent sitting in a doctor’s office, as anything that could’ve been confused with future college tuition money was handed over in check form to some guy who’d taught my mom and Grams to make all of their decisions using a crystal on a necklace. I’m sure Grams’ check memos were made out for “health.” Mom’s could’ve easily been made out for “hot dickings” since I’m almost certain the chiropractor was boning my mom. As a skinny young boy, I had no concerns with back problems. If any had developed, they almost assuredly resulted from riding in a car for sixteen hours a weekend, 26 weeks out of the year.
The nuclear family’s abbreviated trips usually consisted of a KFC family bucket, a 30 pack of Busch Beer, and an inflatable raft that would never make it back from a local swimming hole, The Blue River. I’d never truly known vacation in my life. My great life lessons came via patience and playing games of I Spy along the I-45 corridor, of which I’d learned nearly every mile. Much to my elation, I was told on my seventh birthday that we would be taking a family vacation in our conversion van, sans a Grams, plus a dad! Not only would I have some room to move around along the way, this time we would be arriving at Galveston Beach!
It was August 1992, which meant Baywatch had been molding my mind about how sexy beaches were for several years. My universal geographic knowledge consisted of Ada, OK, aforementioned chiropractor’s office, and the areas of the malls I’d managed to escape to when I’d run off from my family (like I said, hostage situation). What followed would be a harsh lesson about setting expectations.
Day 1 -
I hardly slept a wink the night before we left. My mind raced with a plethora of possibilities the beach might provide. Perhaps there’d be a talent scout who’d instantly realize Hollywood had made a mistake in casting Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone? I decided my biggest concern was being able to descend the Palm Tree I’d monkeyed up in time to tell a passing Pamela Anderson how much I admired her acting. It probably took me an hour to realize we were on the identical route through Dallas, and back on I-45 to Houston. No matter. An actual ocean awaited the end of this long car ride!
Driving down is as unmemorable to me as all of the previous trips. That is, until we got to the massive bridge arching over the water to get onto Galveston Island, at which point I proceeded to cry hysterical tears of fear the entire way over. Then, within the time it took to calm down from a meltdown, we had arrived at our motel, no more than 60 feet across a 4-lane highway from the beach! The edge of the freaking world! My forever-curious mind was alive with wonderment!
I hope you, the reader, didn’t cease reading this article to book your next vacation to Galveston in anticipation of paradise and are now returning to finish this story. The thing about Galveston Beach is, it’s a beach for a man with an aged bourbon taste, on a rubbing alcohol budget. This certainly applied to my dad. It might as well have been heaven to him. My enthusiasm waned almost instantly, as the Gulf was feisty that day, and we’d arrived at high tide. This was problematic, considering they’d built a 13-foot seawall that held the highway up (appropriately named Seawall Boulevard), leaving only about 15–40 feet of usable beach, depending upon the wave size. The water was icky and disgusting diarrhea sludge brown. This was nothing like the Caribbean blue waters that had been projecting on repeat to the forefront of my imagination. What the hell was this ugly ocean roaring so raucously that I wasn’t even allowed to get into it? A tall offshore oil well jutted from the ocean in the distance, like an exclamation point on the water’s hazy horizon, when read left to right, completing the sentence, “FUCK YOU!”
If there were anywhere to seek solace that trip, it would not be found sulking back in the disgusting motel we’d holed up in. I don’t remember what it was called (very possibly The Harbor Handjob Motel). I hated it. Not a single detail of the room could I regurgitate to you today. I retreated to our van with dad and my brother Gade, to watch the wind whip across the wave tops with violent ferocity. As luck would have it, our once-in-a-lifetime family trip’s arrival from 500 miles north coincided with Hurricane Andrew’s descent upon the Gulf Coast from the south! ’Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony, this life.
Dad cracked open beer after beer as we sat there cursing the thing we’d come to see. Mother Nature was being such a rotten bitch, right to our faces. Worn ragged from the day of pinned up excitement, sleep deprivation, and underwhelmed with the beach’s lack of gusto, the approaching hurricane’s wind bursts on our van slowly rocked me to sleep. Might as well be asleep, nothing but disappointment being awake anyways (which coincidentally has been my mantra since).
It’s just as well that I drifted off, as sometime after, three African-American guys pulled up beside us, and I had a habit of loudly blurting out “chocolate people!” in the cutest, most naïvely racist way imaginable. Dad had a knack for being able to talk to damn near anyone. My pops had grown up in Pasadena, California and would oft use an old Wolfman Jack introduction learned from the radio. This consisted of a brief, yet well-announced howl prior to speaking in jive; “OWWW…yowhatsgoodbrothaman?”
The men began bullshitting back. Dad offered them beers. The next thing you know, they hopped into our van, next to my passed out seven-year old self. Minutes into the newfound camaraderie, our newly acquired van guests asked if we’d run them by a friend’s house. Gade, six months into his teen years, was understandably flabbergasted when dad didn’t hesitate to oblige. In dad’s defense, he was probably pretty primed to make bad decisions, as he was surely drunker than Cooter Brown by this point.
Arriving at our new friends even newer friends’ house, as the new friends departed the van, they told dad, “hang tight and don’t leave. We’ll be back in a few minutes.” A minute or two passed, and, in a rare moment of clarity for my father, he turned to my brother with an ephipany, “You know what, Gade? I think we might be involved in a drug deal. We should probably go.” Gade gleefully agreed.
By the time we arrived back at the motel, my dad was pretty plowed. As it began to rain, he carried my marionet of a body inside (unaware it had just been an accessory to its first drug deal), cracked another beer, and began a fight with my mother that lasted into the wee hours of the morning. Ohh, what a first day of beach vacay!
Day 2
The hour at which I awoke is completely lost upon me, but it was early morning. Not that the sun could be seen outside. Hurricane Andrew had really made some leeway throughout the night. A concerned glance out the window alerted me that the seawall was now doing very poorly at its job of keeping the ocean in the ocean. Waves leapt up and over the wall, like overzealous fans attempting to catch a glimpse of Corey Feldman. Water molecules began multiplying around the motel, which was built only 6 inches above the structure supporting it.
The flooding shock set in almost immediately. We, the nuclear Pardue family, commenced the fleeing of Hurricane Andrew. We scrambled to vacate the vacation (along with thousands of others not wishing to endure the tropical storm barreling down upon us). Our full-sized conversion van was chugging along, mere miles from the mainland’s safe bosom. Suddenly, dad stopped in the middle of the four-lane road, screaming to no occupant in particular, “did you fucking see that?”
The rest of his family sat petrified and oblivious. Whatever it was, none of us had observed. Our stunned silence was shortly interrupted, “That was a wallet!” — dad proclaimed. To hell with the thousands of other vehicles behind us frenziedly seeking refuge far the hell away from the island that had witnessed the deadliest hurricane in history at the turn of the century (8,000–12,000 casualties). Dad hopped out, ran back behind the van, and quickly beyond our line of sight.
He returned to the vehicle prouder than he would’ve been if he’d gotten a full-time job and worked for two weeks. Indeed, a wallet. Its contents were ~ $500 cash and condoms. Dad had a knack for finding money, or somehow being the recipient of gifts from the universe. Perhaps it was existence’s way of attempting to repay him for two traumatic tours of Vietnam? Then again, if you look long enough, you’re bound to find something good in life.
Good news was that dad was in great spirits. Bad news was we were still in Andrew’s path, with a monstrous bridge still in our way. If I cried a lot on the way over the bridge in ideal conditions; imagine the amplified horror of a natural disaster’s gale-force winds chasing you to the tall bridge of doom. Further consider the utter familial delight as 110 dB shrieks of terror squawked from my tiny body. Our suddenly sail-like van swayed across lanes in midst of the then-most destructive hurricane ever recorded. The rain finally let up an hour later, on the outskirts of Houston.
Despite the good fortune of fortune and not dying, dad began drinking again (or perhaps due dad’s real-life Monopoly Chance card — you come into some money, collect $500…and some wallet condoms…) we decided, storm be damned, it was our destiny to continue our vacation in Houston. By that time, we were justified in questioning Hurricane Andrew’s manhood, as we heard that little bitch had lost its potency. That “tropical storm” couldn’t hurt anyone, it was a measly wil’ category 1 now.
Thus, we stayed at a mildly-nicer Houston motel on a sunny, humid, and sweltering August summer day. And guess what? It had a pool/12,000-gallon toilet! This trip may be salvageable after all. We swam all damn day. Dad threw us around in the pool, taking victory gulps of Busch Light after he’d flung an offspring far enough to get to the edge before being swarmed again.
Mom sat inside, likely due to dad’s overindulgence. As he got drunker, he became less playful, and more of an older brother bully. Games of getting tossed into the deep end turned into “don’t let dad drown you.”
Democratically we decided dad’s an asshole and we’d been outside long enough. We left to the laundromat to wash the abundance of wet clothes accumulated from the rain and the pee pool. Dad dropped us off at the laundromat & said he had to go do something (as if he had official business he’d forgotten about on this impromptu Houston stop). To my delight, this place had The Simpsons 4-player arcade game! It might’ve been a single quarter turn for all I recall, but I felt as if I played that game for some of the happiest hours of my life.
Dad finally retrieved us from the laundromat, visibly & aromatically inebriated. The squabble that ensued lasted into the night, dad picking fights with each individual family member in the now-seemingly small van, then on into the motel room we were coinhabiting. I stayed up late, being relegated to a crudely-fashioned polyester pallet on the floor. I watched what Good Parenting Magazine recommended any developing mind should absorb, the very child-friendly late-night programming of HBO. Tales from the Crypt had an after-midnight Saturday slot. The show’s skeleton host, teamed with his eerie laugh and haunting stories, made Tales from the Crypt the quintessential nightmare creator of the early 1990s (honorable mention — Unsolved Mysteries). The only thing missing from this particular episode’s frightening formula was a family fleeing a downgraded, yet still terrifying tropical storm.
Day 3
Before I was awake dad had a beer open again. We had to make the 8-hour drive back to Ada, since we had school the next day. Dad, unsurprisingly, returned to an antagonist throughout the morning. By the time we were leaving town, he’d drank enough that he “had to piss.” Not like Godfearing people urinate though. He instructed my mom to pull over on the side of an I-45 on-ramp, where he could pee nineteen-feet from Sunday church crowd traffic, on one of the busiest sections of one of the busiest interstates in the 3rd largest city in America.
Dad usually used me as his bargaining pawn, so I’d fully anticipated his demand “come with me, Dave.” He led the way out the dual rear-passenger van doors. As I neared the door, my mom, brother, and sister beckoned me to stay in the vehicle. I was pretty indifferent on the whole feeling-inferior-standing-eye-level-next-to-some-gargantuan-dad-dick, and he hadn’t been overly charismatic in his attempt at persuasion. I deduced that was three against one in the popular vote, in this scenario I acted as the electoral college, and dad lost the election.
There’s a memory forever-etched in my mind of feeling badly, yet accomplished, as I stared out the van’s rear windows. He became rapidly distant with full usage of the van’s powerful V8. In his right hand he held the thing that was half-responsible for two of the van’s occupants presence on the planet (and what kept the driver coming back). His left hand extended as heartfelt a middle finger I’ve ever received, as we sped off, until he was a disappeared dad.
Let me tell you, you’ve never truly experienced a vacation until you’ve left your father on the side of a busy thoroughfare with his dick in one hand, as he emphatically flips you off with the other! There was no waiting in line at Disney for that thrill of a lifetime! Just sheer heart-pumping adrenaline that only comes from betraying your captor who was a scrotal sack one too many times.
Mom finally filed for divorce for good about a year later, which was either their 4th or 9th attempt at splitting, depending upon which brother I ask. We never took another family vacation together. Always check the weather and plan accordingly.
