Ballake Sissoko & Vincent Segal — Oscarine (from Chamber Music)

I have very good reason to believe that in the months before my birth my Uncle Phil plotted in earnest to kill my father — probably by rigging his car so that it would explode upon its ignition. At the time of this suspected death plot, Uncle Phil was a special operations marine, which would have given him not only the necessary skill set to successfully pull off such a scheme, but also the necessary warped and bloated confidence to believe he might go unpunished for blowing up an American civilian —or maybe just plain get away with murder. That long ago year, my biological father, having admitted to a string of infidelities, had left my mother — and therein left soon-to-be-born me— in her early pregnancy. So, my mother’s older brother, my Uncle Phil, would not have been acting without motive. Little unborn me would never have known the man with whose DNA he was half-wound. Nor would teenage me have known —and in later years long for— the nights this never-never-father allowed high school girlfriends and he to drink wine coolers in a lakeside jacuzzi, as those wonderful reputation-making nights would have never been. Nor would present tense me be in position to inherit a black-and-green, tricked-out Harley-Davidson Fatboy upon the real-life death of my biological father, as the delayed midlife crisis and broken marriage, a comeuppance for his long-ago infidelities (?), that led him deep, deep into motorcycle culture would never have unfolded. This impotent death plot may be as close as I’ve ever come to real world intrigue. And while, yes, ultimately impotent, I’m quite sure Phil considered — and continues to consider— the non-act infinitely noble. The would-be death plot was subtly alluded to by Phil himself while visiting my grandparents from Yuma one summer following my college graduation.

That spring, Phil had come a knuckle-hair away from caving in Aunt Melinda’s face whilst sleep-fighting the Iraqi soldier he once killed in hand-to-hand combat during Operation Desert Storm. Now, he was seeing a therapist weekly and Melinda was sleeping in a spare room to leave my uncle Phil with his dream attackers and barked orders. The therapist encouraged Phil to detail the gruesome complexities of war through storytelling and writing. And since spring, Phil had only been able to produce a half-page of a now-crumpled yellow legal paper, his twenty-plus years of specialized military service — which supposedly included acting with Oliver North at the top of the Iran Contra Affair and the surrounding daring, but ultimately FUBAR’ed, hostage rescue mission, a helicopter crash that left two men dead and the survivors, Phil included, embedded across enemy lines in the Iranian desert for two days — whittled down to ten crude but hyper-technical sentences. Solely based on the fact that my first job out of the university was writing the education beat for a southern Indiana newspaper, Phil saw in me the much-needed ghost writer for his war memoirs. I was called north to my grandparents’ house that summer weekend to listen to Phil, his once taut and lean face now bullfrogged and steakhoused, relay in great detail the many highlights of his special-ops exploits, many of which had been, up until that very year, “government classified.” Phil envisioned I would transform this one-time-through, clunky telling in my grandparents sitting room into something Clancy-esque in its sure-shot combination of cinematic thrills and technical prowess only a military lifer would be privy to. Of course, I would never write a word that mooed from Phil’s mouth that day for the purposes he intended. Not only did I care little for war stories, albeit fairly convincing near-death accounts of an officer on the inside of the inside of American war games in the Middle East from the late 70s through the early 90s, I cared less for Phil as a member of the family. His visits visibly distressed both my mother and grandfather, and he aggressively sought to emasculate my step-father at every turn. And to be honest, his presence always furthered my suspicions that I had actually been adopted into this brood of simple folk to begin with, regardless of the deathplot for my biological father.

“And there was another thing that almost happened in Summer 1981. But I can’t tell you because it involves you, and it involves your mother,” Phil said at the end of his diatribe. “Luckily, your aunt here talked me out of it.”

Melinda, in the rocker across the room, gave a weird smile. Phil left it at that, and I’m glad.