On Wednesday I found out via email that my father died. A woman calling herself Essential dropped me a line.

“Oh, wow,” I said, pulling back from the screen. I hugged my girl and began packing my gym clothes. The work would have to wait. I had no tears, but needed a place to think. In the bathroom mirror, it hit me that now there’s less pure expression of the Alexander look. Our resemblance had grown by the year.

                    ***

In more ways than the biological I’d not have my life without my father. Five years ago I published a book about our time together and apart and its contents were regarded as incendiary enough that I couldn’t get work for years after. Whatever though; the memoir was real. My father agreed, or so I heard. After the book came out, he and I failed to speak again.

My father was the seminal figure in my life because I inherited his penchant for trouble. He was a prison boxer who got heavy into heroin and, even after he straightened up, flirted off and on with homelessness. I was a failed track star who fancied himself an outlaw journalist. In the mode of Hunter Thompson, I’d tell friends and reporters. Actually, in the spirit of Delbert Alexander Bilal’s realness, it was my father’s mode. Even before he showed me the prison writings that in part inspired Ghetto Celebrity, I’d known about his scribe impulse. He and I would smoke marijuana and talk about my early writing endeavors, back when I was making my way across America. Dope in a small shed on Sandusky, Ohio’s black side of town. Dogs barking all around with me in this landing strip between Fresno and a summer internship at the Boston Globe.

I could not wait to do some cardio and sort out these thoughts while the hi-def show about nothing that is ESPN relieved the pressure to understand what one’s life is about. But I simply couldn’t get there. Skipping the car, I chose to walk. And, like my junkie father, I needed a pick-me-up. So there I was a-wander in the aisles of Rite Aid, looking for guarana, caffeine and Vitamin B. I called up those visions of meritocracy that danced in my head when I hiked to a southside branch of the Sacramento public library, in the summer of 2004. In clusters of 100-degree days, I’d walk there from my sister’s crib in the projects. The idea was to revive interest in that book about my father and me by manipulating the internet. Rapped “Don’t Say Nothin’”, the first single from that year’s release from the Roots, over and over everyday with sweat pouring down my face. Trying to fix that book and waiting for my mother to die.

In a sense those days were endurable because my father was a runner. That I ran far and fast was the prime thing of myself that I remember making Delbert proud. That’s what the memories say. The first time I remember seeing him though, at age 8, we beefed because I preferred George Foreman to Muhammad Ali. This little boy didn’t know he had converted to Islam. He didn’t know what it meant to convert to islam.

Over the years sports were the point of connection in our elliptical and fraught relationship. There was the estrangement that resulted when, as a teen I failed to support the entirety of his dogfighting enterprise. And there was the rare sustained and unqualified show of pride that came from my gig at ESPN’s magazine. He couldn’t believe that’s I’d hustled such a perfect paycheck. It took a long time to tell him that I hated the work so much that I hated waking up in the morning.

<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>                    ***</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>But I lost track of my father after I wrote that book about our lives together and apart. My sister informed me her father/neighbor pronounced the memoir “genius”. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to let me know. And I avoided him in 2004 while I waited for my mother and his ex-wife to pass away from this world. When Brenda Graham died and Delbert failed to attend her funeral, I told every one he was dead to me. Or, to be more precise in my reportage, I said, “Fuck that nigga,” time and again. As if it would bring my mother back. Or something.

And then came yesterday’s email.

It’s funny that I learned of Delbert’s death on Wednesday, as I’d come to think about him infrequently and had thought of him a lot the previous afternoon. My fiancée and I had been out in Apple Valley interviewing Dock Ellis for a public radio assignment. I thought of my father throughout the session, in part because the former Pittsburgh Pirate reminded me of my ’70s Ohio youth, but mostly because he and Delbert were of that generation of live-wire American African who said “fuck the rules,” a posture that just wasn’t possible previously. They burned out fast, but had the kind of runs their parents couldn't have imagined. They hurt a lot and the years flew by, but their difficult lives were better than dying on one’s knees. “I did it my way,” Ellis, 63, told me.

The exercise machine never did provide me catharsis and answers. In my rush to leave that email, I forgot my lock and could not secure my belongings. I sat on a bench, dressed in gym clothes, and watched around the locker room, listening to the other men’s banter and wishing I had a joint, But there would be none of that distraction either. I just had to sit there and suffer that creeping sense of loneliness. Nobody left who looks like us. His sister, my sister. My kids and her kids. But we’re all diluted.

No joint,  so I settled for the solace of my notepad, sitting in a Starbuck’s across from Sony. So far from my Ohio home. Here was the story of my father — to borrow from the youngsters — one mo’ ‘gin. My pops’ tale has always been a long run, a distant journey. Now his run is done. And I don’t know how to feel.