by Grant Koo for the Autumn 2025 issue
He’d been listening to “Watermelon Man”, the version off Herbie Hancock’s groundbreaking Head Hunters album, on repeat for most of the week. Instantly absorbed by the apartment’s stillness and completely motionless himself, he’d sit for long stretches of time parsing each individual instrument pirouetting into and out of the song—first the whistling beer bottle, followed by the bassline, drums, synthesizers, and so on. He imagined that he was hearing a singularly complex rhythm, just differently voiced as it emerged from the composer’s profoundly personal silence like a prism viewed in reverse weaving rainbows into transparency. He’d come to associate entering into this peculiarly ritualistic frame of mind with that particular song’s funky syncopations, supposing it was either a kind of Pavlovian response or something akin to tribal superstition. The point being, on those languid mornings with “Watermelon Man” playing in the background, he’d suddenly find himself immersed in thinking about what to impart to his daughter before she left for college the following year.
The recurring motif in the time and key signatures of those days was that he wanted her to know the real him before she moved out, probably for good. He revised several of the mental representations of him she might be carrying off with her to college. Surely, he thought, she would hear my voice echoing through her self-judgments, so wasn’t it better for her picture of me to be as complete as possible? Not only must that picture be categorically misinformed, limited as it was by childhood memories confabulated in childish perspectives and thinking, but it’d be distorted in dozens of other ways too, some more deliberately than others. It would be prudent to consider noise and other communication errors as well. Then there were her withdrawn years of closed doors and laying down boundaries and the emergence of privacy as something she valued. Anyway he looked at it, whatever image of him she had formed so far must be wholly inadequate, and if it wasn’t updated now, while they were still living under the same roof, what chance was there realistically of ever correcting it over text messages and thirty-minute calls once a week? On balance, what she didn’t know about him made him more angry with himself than sad.
He couldn’t be accused of living an especially secretive life, one redolent of the hard-boiled espionage and early black and white film noir they’d enjoyed on Saturday nights, not exactly, no; he just couldn’t ever seem to find the right time and place or work himself into the proper mood for those potentially more revealing, if uncomfortable conversations. Now the window seemed to be closing on her adolescence and with it any possibility for honest talk about his own fading memories of early adulthood, for laying out whatever lessons could be gleaned from exploring those shifting emotional landscapes, often driven through in the dead of night and sometimes even half asleep in the passenger’s seat himself, and confessing all the wrong turns he’d taken along the way so that she might be better prepared to embark on a life of her own and get to where she was going stronger, faster, safer, and with any luck, less disappointment.
…
“So aren’t you at all curious about our lives before you were born?”
The daughter shrugged. Classic. Her Dad couldn’t help but laugh a little because otherwise he’d be crying. They pulled out of the garage into a thick, gentle flurry of snow. Her Dad flipped on the windshield wipers and waited for another car to pass before easing into traffic. At a red light, he turned the radio on and took it as a sign when he heard the whistling yelps ushering in the “Watermelon Man”.
“So what were you like when you were my age?” she asked, smoothing over her winter skirt and sitting up in the attitude of an attentive interviewer.
“Well, let’s see,” he started, unexpectedly touched by the question he himself had solicited. “I liked writing poems, which I think you knew already. I only had the vaguest idea what poetry was about, not that I’m super clear on it now, but it’d felt like access to something deeper at the time, a kind of separate reality. You could say I was a bit of a dreamer back then, precociously disdainful of conventional attitudes.” Her Dad paused to let a pedestrian pass and fell silent. That all sounded about right to him, as confirmed by the prick of embarrassment he’d felt in saying it, and he resumed sketching out his self-portrait as a sixteen-year-old self-consciously, working out what details his sixteen-year-old daughter might find most relatable. “I was near the top of my class in almost every subject, but ran track near the bottom of the team each season for three straight years. I finally quit my senior year and took up smoking instead. Which I admit was dumb.”
It was his turn to shrug.
“Don’t worry, Dad, I’m not trying to start smoking. I never liked the smell,” she assured him in a preemptive move. Her phone lit up with another text message alert, which she again ignored to ask what kind of music he used to listen to.
“No, I didn’t listen to much classical music back then, and hardly any jazz. I was mostly into classic and alt rock, some grunge and hip-hop, too. I wanted to be Jim Morrison, this rock singer who died before I was even born.”
She finally picked up her phone, all self-restraint seemingly pulverized by the sheer velocity of her thumbs typing. Then she tilted the screen to surprise him.
“This him?”
He glanced over at the black-and-white headshot pulled off Wikipedia. Long hair, clean-shaven, deep penetrating stare crouched in shadows. That was him alright. She put the phone back down without further comment, face down on the dashboard. If he were honest with himself, he’d say the expression on her face looked an awful lot like disappointment. She cleared her throat and posed another series of questions, which he responded to thoughtfully and, at times it seemed to him, even artfully. All the random drilling had struck oil and a veritable geyser of memories gushed forth, freed from the ground of his being.
“I worked part-time at the mall most weekends with a couple of evening shifts after school, first selling cheap sunglasses, then stepping up to overpriced t-shirts. Weeknights were quiet, with employees outnumbering shoppers, so I could get some reading and homework done…. I’ve always been frugal, but back then it was more out of necessity. I saved half my earnings for college and mostly spent the other half on used books and clothes at the Salvation Army, splurging on a CD or concert ticket every now and then…. I might go to the park and join in games of basketball or football, but most of my closest friends were female. They tended to have better conversations. I suppose it wouldn’t be a total mischaracterization to describe ourselves as indifferent participants in the 90’s neo-hippy subculture…. I remember consuming a lot of vegetarian pizzas while listening to jam bands and watching old movies at somebody’s house. Or if everyone’s parents happened to be in for the night, we’d hang out in empty playgrounds or nearly empty 24-hour diners, keeping our running commentary going by moonlight on how fucked up we’d thought the world was generally.”
Her Dad paused to gauge her reaction to his casual cursing, but she hadn’t flinched. He seemed to be looking through her at another teenage face that hovered into view with its own story to tell.
“I actually met my first girlfriend at one of those small house parties my senior year,” he continued as if to himself, not quite able to bring her elusive face into focus. Her smile full of crooked teeth was the first of her jigsaw features to fill in the nothingness that immediately preceded it. Slowly, one by one, other pieces fell into place—short, auburn hair cut like a boy’s, pale skin, copper cat’s eyes, teacup ears, and so on. When at last her narrow nose with its pierced left nostril completed the picture, it seemed to shimmer a moment under the halo of memory before sinking back into a forgetful darkness. “She’d transferred in as a junior from LaGuardia…that’s an art school in Manhattan.”
“I know LaGuardia, Dad. It’s renowned.”
“Right, of course you do,” her Dad acknowledged, amused by the displeasure she’d displayed at his offering of knowledge she’d already acquired on her own. He was happy to let the matter drop entirely had she not pressed for further details. “Well, she was a young artist,” he continued hesitatingly, “so she took me to go see a lot of student art exhibitions and gallery openings, and I was grateful for that introduction to a world I knew very little about at the time. I remember she came up to visit me once after I went off to college, but we sort of lost touch after that and started seeing other people,” he hastily concluded.
“That’s it?” Over the years, she had sharpened her sense of detecting when he was withholding information.
“No, I’m sure there’s plenty more I’ve forgotten after nearly thirty years,” but drumming his fingers on the steering wheel seemed to help. “She trained formally as a painter, but also took photographs and would sometimes even paint over the photographs. She was good at crafts too and would make me these beautiful journals to fill with poetry and bookmarks of dried flowers pressed between six-inch segments of filmstrip stitched together with fishing line. She never really discussed her parents, but I surmised they’d gotten divorced prior to her transfer and that she was living with her Mom and new stepdad. Or it might’ve been the other way around, and she was living with her Dad and new stepmom.”
“Your Dad died from leukemia, right?” She knew of course, even if she didn’t know how she knew, having never asked him about it so directly before.
“That’s right,” her Dad confirmed, switching tones to avoid sounding flippant. “He passed away in the summer after eighth grade. Both my brothers were in college at the time, so it was just me and my Mom for a few years after that until she got stomach cancer and passed away herself my senior year. I’d just turned eighteen.”
“That must’ve been tough,” she said almost to herself, thinking as he imagined, what her life would be like if he’d died when she was fourteen and it were her mother fighting cancer.
They hadn’t discussed sex, a topic her Dad seemed more than happy to leave for her mother to have, and his experimentations with drugs and alcohol were barely mentioned in passing. He couldn’t imagine her and her friends, many of whom he’d known since kindergarten, smoking cannabis and cigarettes or drinking cheap beer at parties like he and his neo-hippie friends had at her age. In many ways, she’d lived a pretty sheltered life so far; no great Shakespearean tragedies in their family.
As they continued their drive across the city, her Dad pointed out all the ways it had changed since he was a kid and marveled at all the things that’d stayed the same: the 24-hour diner he’d hung out with friends in till sunup was still in business and the buildings he used to live in still standing. The neighborhoods he grew up in looked shabbier to her than the one they lived in now—the shuttered storefronts, trash in the streets, the loiterers and their paper bags ostensibly hiding cans of warm beer. His parents’ store has gotten robbed several times and muggings weren’t all that unusual back in the day. He silently recalled Liberato, his best friend in fourth grade, whose father was shot and killed in a burglary, and glanced at his daughter, considering certain memories better left unspoken as the snow continued blanketing the city.
…
They emerged from their building burdened with water bottles and tennis gear into one of the first really nice days that spring. The sun was out with hardly the suggestion of clouds for miles around, tanning every exposed inch of pale skin throughout the city. The cherry blossom trees in the neighborhood were just starting to bloom, though the one on their corner had jumped the gun again this year, mottling the fenced-in square of earth around it with lavender pink, paint-drop petals.
“Hey, let me ask you something about the boys at your school,” he brought up as casually as he could. “Feel free not to answer.”
She groaned, “Dad, we don’t have to do this.”
“I know. I know we don’t, sweetheart. But humor me here. I just wanted to ask if they’re behaving themselves around you, you know, to your standards.”
“Yes, dad. They can get a little goofy at times, but otherwise, they’re perfect gentlemen. The guys I talk to are mostly from mock trial, you’ve met them already, and a few are from boys’ tennis.”
He searched his memory for the names of the two volunteers helping to manage the girls’ tennis team she played varsity doubles for. He slowed his steps, trying to remember, and she fell in line in front of him as they passed a mother pushing her baby stroller along the narrow strip of sidewalk in the opposite direction. As they waited on the corner for the light to change, he suddenly recalled the last time they’d held hands crossing the street. It must’ve been when she was in fourth grade that she one day released his hand to push the crosswalk button and just never picked it back up ever again. She’d happened to be thinking the exact same thing. It’d been an entirely natural, nearly unconscious gesture. A simple switching of her drippy ice cream cone from one hand, which she proceeded to wipe clean on the back of her shorts, to the other one he’d been holding, and with that, another arbitrary shift had turned permanent.
“Are there any boys you like in particular?” The question seemed to hang in the air a moment before floating like a deflated helium balloon out into oncoming traffic. He tried a less direct approach. “Have any of the boys asked you to hang out alone together after school? You know, like to watch a movie or get something to eat?”
She maintained a forced, but defiant smile, giving away nothing.
“Alright, alright, I got it. No more prying into your love life.”
“I don’t have a love life, Dad, and neither do any of my close friends. We’re all just locked in on summer program apps right now, so you don’t have to worry.”
“Worry? Who’s worried?” he laughed nervously, unable to help himself. “I heard you talked to Mom about contraception the other day?”
“Okay, can we please not? Yes, we had the talk, and it was uncomfortable, but good, surprisingly.”
He raised his palms in a pose of surrender then pantomimed zipping his lip and throwing away the key, which he realized only afterwards didn’t make any sense. They walked the rest of the way without saying much.
The couple in the north tennis court were just picking up balls when they arrived, so they didn’t have to wait long to play. They rallied from the top of the service box for the first ten minutes to warm up. He’d won two of the first three games, but then got clobbered the next five in a row, ending the match two sets to six. His daughter was the only person it actually felt good losing to; still, facing the fact that he wouldn’t even make the cut for her high school’s girls’ JV squad must’ve smarted and made him feel his age.
…
That summer, she’d gotten an internship with The New York Historical conducting research into the Reconstruction era. It was the third Sunday after her first day, and the two of them were down by the pool, holding onto its edges to keep their heads above water while talking about how things were going with her work. She’d just turned seventeen.
“So there’s this boy at work,” she confided. “We’ve gotten closer working on the same research project.”
“Oh, that’s great. When can we meet him?”
“Meet him?”
“Sorry, I meant beat him.”
“Ahaha.”
“So? Tell me about him. What’s this boy like?”
Joshua was from Brooklyn and harbored plans coinciding with her own to apply to the Ivies as a history major. He was co-captain of his school’s debate team and a contributing editor to its newspaper. He had an older sister, a sophomore enrolled at Columbia, and two labrador retrievers. She didn’t know what his father did, but his mother, a first responder, had died a few years back during the pandemic.
She reached for the phone she’d left on her sandals in the shade by the side of the pool and showed her father a selfie taken of the two of them in Central Park with Belvedere Castle featured prominently in the background. He looked like a good kid, handsome, smiling, happy to be memorializing that moment with his daughter. She studied her father for his reaction, who had nothing to say about Joshua being black, but felt a twinge of regret having joked about wanting to beat him. She smiled broadly when he told her they made a cute couple and briefly dipped her head underwater before resurfacing, still smiling as she used her free hand to brush back her dripping wet hair.
The next night, she returned home later than usual and made a beeline for her bathroom, locking the door behind her. Her parents exchanged glances.
“Why’d she take her bag in there?” his wife whispered.
Her husband retorted with a shrug, “Pregnancy test?”
The concerned look on her face told him she’d jumped to the same conclusion. They huddled outside their daughter’s bathroom door, listening intently for any sound that might help fill in the anxiously blank picture of what she might be doing in there, then quickly dispersed, his wife to the sofa and him to the kitchen, when they heard the toilet flush.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked, emerging from the bathroom with practiced nonchalance.
He forced his thoughts towards dinner. “Shrimp scampi over orzo?”
“Ooh, sounds good.”
He proceeded to thaw the frozen shrimp and assembled the ingredients on the counter, thinking back to his first girlfriend. He’d never mentioned to them how he’d gotten her pregnant, despite using a condom, or the trip to the clinic after the second pregnancy test had confirmed the results of the first. He remembered picking her up the morning of the abortion in his mother’s beige Oldsmobile, waving to her Dad or stepdad from a distance, and hoping he wouldn’t ask any questions that might expose a contradiction with whatever lie she’d made up about where they were headed that day. He’d written a poem about the ordeal afterwards that started Reality is an inferior product, and ended with The difference between now here and nowhere was a space. Remembering the middle required an effort he wasn’t at the time willing to make. She’d cried so much that day, and all his feeble attempts to comfort her had been criminally inadequate. A dark wave of helplessness knocked him off his feet all over again, and he sat down for a moment on the wooden stepping stool, waiting for the light-headedness to pass. It occurred to him that his secret was approaching thirty years old.
He reached for his phone as a distraction and put on some music. Tonight, the “Watermelon Man” seemed to be mocking him as he measured out the ingredients to mix into a marinade. It was as if the song had suddenly revealed itself to be a kind of jungle funky fertility invocation for the gods to grant abundance, as if it were possible that listening to this song so many times over so many months could actually be blamed for their daughter’s pregnancy, if not through immaculate conception, then through some other mysterious pathway, some jazzy agitation of adolescent desire, and he found himself wondering for the first time, what the hell even was a “Watermelon Man”?
He’d never in his entire life ever seen a man selling watermelons on the street, but he pictured one now, standing on a Jersey City park corner in the summer fist-pounding familiar passersby. Checking under the lid, he pictured a man rising from the steam, wearing an unlikely combination of long, Irish green overcoat, tophat, and shoes; deep red suit and shirt with black buttons; and a thin, shiny black tie with matching leather belt and pocket handkerchief for additional seeds.
He turned off the stovetop with a sigh and yelled out that dinner was ready.
“So how are things going with Joshua?” her Dad asked, scooping another half serving of cauliflower onto his plate. Her mother listened without looking up.
“Things are good,” she answered, swallowing a mouthful of orzo. “We had lunch together in the park again, and he invited me to a barbeque this weekend for his sister’s birthday.”
“That should be fun, right?”
“To be honest, I’m kind of nervous meeting his family and friends.”
“I’m sure they’re going to like you as much as Joshua must if he wants you to meet them.”
She smiled inwardly.
“When do we get to meet him?” her mother asked lightly.
“Maybe we can do something next weekend?”
“Sure, how about dinner in K-town?”
“Dinner in K-town sounds good, I’ll ask him tomorrow.” She forked another shrimp and used it to scoop up some orzo. “This dinner’s great, Dad, we should add it to the rotation. What’s in the cauliflower?”
“Just garlic, olive oil, and grated parmesan. Salted and peppered to taste, all mixed in a bag then oven-roasted for about fifteen minutes at 350 degrees. It’s simple.”
“You’ll have to teach me the recipe.”
He frowned thinking he just had. Picturing her cooking for herself made him unexpectedly sad.
“I have a confession to make,” he declared delicately, leading into a triangulation of looks that located their sudden silence. “I got a girl pregnant when I was in high school, and she got an abortion. We used a condom, but I guess it wasn’t enough.”
Mother and daughter exchanged uneasy glances. In uncharted waters, they each felt the need to proceed cautiously.
“And you’re confessing this now why?” his wife, recovering first, wondered aloud.
“I just thought you both should know. It’s been weighing on me these past few days. And I was just thinking before in the kitchen how she must’ve been about your age now, then I thought, well, if you’re sexually active, we might want to consider getting a prescription for birth control pills. In addition to always using a condom, you know, a belts & suspenders kind of approach.”
“That’s not a terrible idea,” her mother conceded.
“Joshua and I aren’t having sex, you guys.”
“First, thank god. Second, that’s all the more reason to consider birth control now. Just in case, because you never know. These things happen.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yes, okay. I’m hardly ready to become a mother myself.”
Her parents looked relieved and so did their daughter, but her relief was mostly derived from having dodged a long, drawn out discussion and successfully bringing it to such a swift and sensible conclusion.
…
Her senior year sped past in a blur and the long-awaited day had finally arrived. Things had been on-again, off-again with Joshua for most of the year until they’d finally admitted to each other that neither was interested in maintaining a long-distance relationship. Her Dad’s reaction was a silent Sayonara, Joshua, stay gold. The three of them had been packing the car all morning with everything she needed for life in the dormitories. It was no longer possible to see out the rear window, so he drove under the speed limit the entire way. They listened to a playlist that started off with Billy Joel and the Beatles and ended in tears. He rattled off some fatherly advice along the way, as it occurred to him and in no particular order: Keep good company and surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth. Speak truthfully yourself. Invest your time and attention wisely. Remember birthdays and show appreciation. Give and take and make as much love as you can in this world; can’t fight the hate, but you can try drowning it out. Make sure to get enough exercise and sleep. Never run from difficult questions; knowing a thing can’t hurt you the way not knowing it can. Sacrifice for a better future, but live how you want and don’t take shit from anyone; the only power people have over you is the power you give them. Read and write, consume and create, don’t be afraid to care and share. Stay curious and cheerful; act on opportunities to spread laughter and light. Don’t spend too much time alone and eat your vegetables….
“Eat my vegetables?”
“Yep, never underestimate the importance of a well balanced diet. Keep your drug and alcohol consumption in check. A bad hangover might just ruin the weekend, but addiction can ruin your entire life. Don’t let the past get in the way of your future. And when you don’t know what the right thing to do is, choose the harder thing because at least that builds character. Your struggles have a way of defining you whether you want them to or not.”
“Got it,” she chuckled. “Hey, mind if I offer you a bit of advice in return?”
“Please.”
“Don’t worry so much about me. I’ll be absolutely fine. I have you guys,” she said, placing a reassuring hand on each of her parents’ shoulders.
“That’s pretty good,” her Dad laughed, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. “Alright, last thing. The good thing about being born? You don’t have a lot to lose. At most your life, and what’s that really worth if you’re still in diapers, right? But the thing is, you have everything to gain. We love you, sweetheart, and are always here for you. Come back anytime for as long as you want. And remember,” her Dad concluded, locking eyes in the rearview mirror and lowering his voice to a whisper, “I would bury a dead body for you, no questions asked.” It hadn’t come off as funny as it sounded in his head.
Though the “Watermelon Man” would fall out of regular rotation, he credited the song with opening up his wider interest in jazz history, which he found bursting at the seams with colorful insider stories surrounding its major practitioners as they pushed the artform to ever new heights and commingled across cultures to produce new and distinct subgenres. If nothing else, tracing the palimpsest of influence and inspiration from one jazz great to the next helped keep his mind off missing his daughter, whom he still saw regularly enough though increasingly more on video calls than in person. They never tired of discussing the same basic questions he’d been asking ever since he was her age. Who are we, where did we come from, and where are we going? Questions you just have to keep asking since the answers are never the same. 🏁
Noisy Joy Z Opinions
Got good vibes to bounce back to the author? Gift them your gut reactions!
The Joy Z Journal 
Leave a comment