To All the Keychains I’ve Loved Before
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Relationships, Travel, Life Lessons, Life, Family

Whenever I traveled, which was often, my pop asked for a simple souvenir. “Bring me a keychain,” my pop would say. A summary of a place I’ve seen. Keychains were the only souvenir he wanted, and he’d stack them in a jar and marvel at the places he’s never been.

I’m 17, taking the Greyhound alone across the country to visit a girl I’d known only from her letters. It’s 1993, and the guidebooks describe a state so expansive that it registers just beyond my reach. My friend and I drive through Los Angeles, Encino, Long Beach, and Anaheim. I tell my pop about our car breaking down in Compton and the boys on the block giving it a jump and how everyone cheered when we got it moving.

“What’s Compton like?” my pop asks, to which I respond, “It’s like the Bronx with sunshine.” There’s no keychain from Compton, but my pop settles for one of Mickey Mouse from Disneyland until I tell him that Mickey tried to feel me up. He says, “I always knew that mouse was a bastard.”

Keychains were the only souvenir he wanted, and he’d stack them in a jar and marvel at the places he’s never been.

“Get me a keychain with a palm tree,” my pop says. I’m 18, boarding a bus to the beach in Sarasota, and I apply sunscreen like my body is some kind of Jackson Pollock painting. I’m torched. Sick and lying on the floor. My friends ply me with wine coolers, and we eat chicken and shrimp in a shack that advertises an “early bird special.” I’m the kind of woman who will make bird sounds sotto voce until my friends tell me to settle down. Quit it, Fee. Enough. Later, we are drunk and naked on the beach. Rolling in the sand. When we leave, we are sleepy, blistering brown, and red. I grab a bunch of keychains at the airport and tell my dad that Florida reminds me of Red Lobster.

I’m 20 when I board my first overseas flight. For $250 round-trip, we fly to London to visit our roommate who’s studying abroad. We stay in a hotel that’s not a hotel in Kensington, where heat costs a pound per hour. We shiver under the covers and sleep until evening and go out to the bars and wonder why they close so early. But there’s Guinness and Italian men and fresh bread in paper bags. We visit the Tate, British Museum, and Big Ben. I think of my pop walking the same streets as I did when he was my age, wondering if we saw and felt the same things.

I bring home a metal keychain of Big Ben, and my pop nods his approval. “This is a good one.” I ask him to tell me about his English mom, who died when he was young, and his face pales down to bone, and he shakes his head, changes the conversation, and asks if we want to go to TGI Fridays.

The first, second, and third time I go to Paris, I tell my pop I got sick on the chocolate, street crepes, and cheese. “So much cheese. You wouldn’t believe it!” I walk through the Louvre, the Picasso Museum, the Musée d’Orsay, Notre Dame, Sacré-Cœur, up the Eiffel Tower, and uphill in Montmartre, where a man asks if I’m Peruvian and could he paint my picture? By myself in a bar, where I speak Spanish to a man who speaks French; another man asks if we could fuck because he lives nearby. I politely decline and fall asleep, alone, with an almond croissant.

I tell my pop all the hotels in Paris are mouse-small and the men are forward. When I give him a pile of glittery keychains from all the places I’ve been, his eyes are like Christmas. I ask him if he’s ever been to Paris, because everyone I know who lives in Europe takes the train between countries, and he says no, Dublin is the only city he knows.

In Prague, I cross the Charles Bridge and pay $5 to hear concertos during the day while I drink good beer and reel from bad wine, rude Germans, and suspicious pasta. I don’t tell my pop that I slipped into a dance club alone and danced with boys wearing makeup until I fell out of the club and into a taxi to find my hotel room door open and German porn blasting. I wondered if people in a five-door radius think I like anal sex.

I give my pop a keychain and a book by Kafka and say that someone snuck into my hotel room and bought porn. “Fuckers,” he says.

I fly to Russia for a writing program, and my ears and head never adjust to the altitude and white nights. Everything is in Cyrillic, George Bush is president, and everyone hates Americans. I never know what day it is, and the only food I eat is pizza. We cruise the Nevsky Prospekt, get lost in the Hermitage, snap selfies with our heavy cameras in front of the Church of Spilled Blood, dodge gypsies, roam the Summer Gardens, buy bootleg CDs, run in the rain to the opera, cry through a ballet, visit the Museum of Oddities. We sat in silence with the boys on a riverboat and get drunk at two in the afternoon and resolve never to talk about the dead baby museum again.

By myself in a bar where I speak Spanish to a man who speaks French, another man asks if we could fuck because he lives nearby. I politely decline and fall asleep, alone, with an almond croissant.

Before I left, I told my pop about my trip, and he looked at me like I was going to Mars. To him, Russia is far beyond what he can conceive or see.

I write bad fiction and try to learn Russian and instead read Dostoyevsky while everyone tells me that the star, really, is Pushkin. Still, I visit the museums of dead men and fall in love with Nabokov all over again. I read four of his books in four days. We drink vodka in apartments, workshop shitty drafts with Aimee Bender, wander the streets and ask for the time, unsure whether it’s 4 p.m. or 4 a.m.

At the airport, they confiscate a plastic keychain of Catherine’s Palace that I picked up at a tourist shop on the way to the airport. I’m out of rubles and patience, and can I please get on the plane already and go back to a place where night divides the day?

My pop asks what Russia is like, and I say, “Too grand for type.”