Waterfalls

In 1995, the movies Kids, La Haine, The Doom Generation, and Georgia came out. Friday, written by and starring Ice Cube, came out. Noah Baumbach’s writing and directing debut Kicking and Screaming was released. Radiohead’s The Bends dropped March 13, 1995 followed by 2Pac’s Me Against the World the next day. Four months later, Bjӧrk’s album Post was released June 7, 1995. Then, Mirror Ball by Neil Young with Pearl Jam. What an album. The king of proto-grunge hammering a final nail into grunge’s coffin, a quarter after Collective Soul’s self-titled album, a post-grunge anthem, signed the genre’s death certificate.

Pianist Wild Bill Davis died at the age of 76. Actor David Warrilow died at the age of 60. Playwright Howard Koch died at the age of 93. All on the same day. Novelist Don Carpenter and philosopher Gilles Deleuze committed suicide months apart. Rapper Eazy-E, former member of N.W.A., died from HIV-related complications days before singer Selena was murdered by family friend Yolanda Saldivar, president of Selena’s fan club.

I have a blue notebook where I write these things. I have tabs open on my computer. Murders in 1995. Suicides in 1995. Independent Films in 1995. I care about these things because Justin Jerome Keever died on August 17, 1995 and I care about Justin Jerome Keever because he was my father.

A lot of what I’ve learned from this research are things I could’ve reasonably guessed. There’s a good chance Justin never saw Kids or The Doom Generation or La Haine, based on theatrical distribution and the assumption that an HVAC repairman in rural North Carolina had little to no interest in movies about disaffected New Yorkers, Angelenos, or Parisians 10 years his junior. Justin might’ve seen Bad Boys. He might’ve seen Friday. He probably saw Batman Forever and Die Hard with a Vengeance, two of the highest grossing movies of 1995.

I care that Justin Jerome Keever was a good father. I know that he loved me and I’ve heard, too many times, that I look like him and smile like him and laugh like him. I’m quiet like him and I get loud when I’m drunk. Just like him. But that’s not something I would talk to anyone about. Conversationally. There’s no one I could talk to where those similarities would come up naturally. They don’t help me get to know someone. If I could go back and spend more time with my father, I wouldn’t talk about laughing or smiling or being quiet. If I could go back in time, to 1995, as like, an HVAC technician trainee who just moved to Kannapolis, North Carolina. Say I got a job at G&S in July 1995 and my first day was in the middle of the month and I had a month to potentially change both of our lives. I would need to talk to him like anyone else. At least at first. To gain his trust. I’d have to shoot the shit. I’d have to ask if he heard the new Neil Young album. The one with Pearl Jam. Or whether he thought this Jim Carrey guy was actually funny or just making stupid faces.

I’m 30 years removed from Justin’s death. I’m the age he was when he died. I can’t know him as a father and, even in a fantasy, I don’t want to. But I can get to know what the world was like around him. Even the world he didn’t know. The media and material around a person’s life are not more important, but they are more stable than memory. When family members tell stories of the father a child never knew, they don’t include box office numbers, billboard charts, newspaper headlines. But, those things are less nuanced, able to be criticized and, therefore, easier for me to deal with. The media and material around a person’s life are observable in a way that the person’s life is not. Especially when that person is no longer living.

*

Some more movies Justin couldn’t, and more than likely, wouldn’t have seen are Mortal Kombat and Baby-Sitters Club. The Last Supper, Glory Daze, Empire Records, New Jersey Drive. Flirt, Fallen Angels, Denise Calls Up. Desolation Angels and Heavy. Jeffrey and BloodSisters.

I think there is zero chance Justin Keever saw any of these movies in 1995. Besides distribution and access to theaters and home video release, I can’t even be sure he enjoyed watching movies as a pastime. I’m assigning tastes based on a fallacy I was trying to avoid – that we are alike because we are related. I’m assuming the options of my leisure were even imaginable at the time. Just because I can find the information online in no way guarantees it was available to anyone outside of major coastal cities. Apollo 13 opened in 2,197 North America theaters on June 30, 1995. By August 17, 1995, the movie had made almost $150,000,000. Was my 35-year-old dad at one of those theaters?

The closest parallel I can find is A Quiet Place: Day One, which opened June 27, 2024 in 3,707 North American theaters. I did not see that movie. I had no interest in seeing that movie and cannot imagine I would’ve entertained a conversation about the third installment of A Quiet Place during the month it was released.

Why would I assume Justin would be any different just because I set out these parameters? I’m assuming Justin cared about the things I care about now, that I only care about to relate to a version of him I’ve created.

I’m literally asking my dad who did you follow on Twitter when you were my age.

What’s your favorite small-plates, locally-sourced restaurant?

Did your college town have a DIY scene?

Did Dunkin have cold brew when you were growing up or did you have to drink iced americanos?

The 35-year-old man I would’ve been in 1995 was metropolitan and worldly to a fault. Unrelatable to anyone outside of major coastal cities and not see a need to change that. He couldn’t have been from rural North Carolina. He couldn’t have access to movie and music and art trivia if he was even from Raleigh or Charlotte. The 35-year-old man I would’ve been in 1995 would have to be from some exotic untouchable place the average working class Southern man could barely comprehend.

He’s an artist researching a project, they might say. He’s writing a screenplay. He’s joining the G&S team for the month.

I think he’s a good kid. He just wants to do some honest work. Lord knows they don’t got any of that up in Hollyweird or Jew York City (I don’t know if people were anti-Semitic in my hometown. I don’t think anyone had enough first-hand experiences with Jewish people to be critical of them (though it’s not a mischaracterization that, if aware of epithetic language, it would be used to garner team rapport)).

He’s different but we shouldn’t hold that against him. Maybe he’ll put one of us in his book. Or movie. Or whatever the hell he’s doing.

*

I know Justin had seen the movie Wolf (1994) starring Jack Nicholson because I have a cloudy, vague memory of him explaining the moment a man became a wolf. He had just gotten off work, Justin, and was washing his hands. Or, he had just come inside after working on some motorcycle in the small building out behind the house he lived in with Sherry Efird, my mother. Probably a Kawasaki GPz750 Turbo. Manufactured from 1983 to 1985. But, whatever the reason, he was washing his hands while telling the story. Describing the scene. And I thought, for a long time, the werewolf in Wolf violently transformed while his greyish-white wet hands were clasped about 18 inches from his face with elbows bent at a 90 degree angle.

I watched the movie at some point because of that memory. I don’t think Jack Nicholson washed his hands once while on screen. Not to say that Will Randall, Nicholson’s character, never washed his hands in fictional rural Vermont, that maybe the illness transforming him into a wolf wouldn’t have taken hold, or, at least, would’ve been a milder case, or that physiological torture re: animal contagion was a punishment for the contemporary man who didn’t clean properly. No, I’m just saying I didn’t notice it. It wasn’t a big part of the story.

Besides Wolf, I don’t know what movies Justin did or didn’t see. I don’t know what songs he did or didn’t hear prior to August 17, 1995. After that day, though, I can be certain. I know that at half-past five on a Thursday afternoon, a young couple returned home from work, not at the same time. One got there first. And whoever that was, husband or wife, found Justin Jerome Keever, unmoving, unconscious, and fairly obviously dead behind their home. He was there to repair an air conditioner. He was sweating because it was the middle of August. He was in the process of reattaching a metal door. His left hand completed a live current through his body, out his right foot, into the ground. The next day, The Usual Suspects opened in 42 North American theaters. It was the newest movie he would never see.

*

It’s a foolish way to look for an answer, but maybe if I know what was happening that year, that month, what movies people watched, what music people listened to, what world events people experienced, I could get there. And.

Then what? Solve a murder that wasn’t a murder? Interfere in a suicide that wasn’t a suicide? I guess just say, like, Dude, this job sucks right? Don’t you want to do something else like, starting immediately?

It’s not impossible. For instance, I could refer to a common quote from the time, made famous by TLC, the titular phrase from their song “Waterfalls.” I can say, now that I know that it was the #1 song on the US charts, Justin for sure had heard it. Maybe he listened to it on the way to the last house call he ever made.

Though, I don’t think the thesis of that song lines up well with Justin’s career choice at the time. He still occasionally raced his Kawasaki GPz750 Turbo, but much less often, and he spent most of his recent free time attending classes to become HVAC certified, then seeking employment as a technician at G&S. Justin had turned his back on the waterfalls. He was running in the other direction.

So, I wouldn’t tell him, were it that fully knowing the cultural moment of the final month of his life allowed me to live contemporaneously alongside him during that final month of his life, to listen, really listen, to the song “Waterfalls” by TLC.

I’d probably say this song rocks, huh? It’s like, really good. What if, say, instead of doing this house call, we just take the company van and drive. Let’s just get out of here. We can listen to this song some more. I bet it comes on one of these stations again. It’s all you ever hear anymore. Bet we can learn the rap. Unless? You already know the rap? Do you know it already? Dude. You got to do it. It’s so good.

And when the song came on again, we would rap along with Lisa Left Eye Lopes. And we would, you know, probably lean into the voice a little too hard. But it would be okay. Because it’s 1995. And we’d keep the windows rolled up.