Portable Deadbolt

This personal essay appeared in Issue 46 of 100subtexts Literary Magazine (June 3, 2026).

Dad was a road rage pioneer. Speeding along in his truck or Trans Am and owning the road like Mad Max, my father was furious when others cut him off or drove too slowly. The latest newspaper article to land on my desk at work claimed he’d been arrested for assaulting another motorist, an off-duty sheriff. It also noted that Dad was already on probation for having consensual intercourse with a minor. The article said that “a year after receiving a lenient sentence in an unlawful sex case, a suspended criminal defense attorney is facing new felony charges that could send him to prison and destroy his bid for State Bar reinstatement.” After my father and the other man were involved in a minor traffic incident, the article said that the two pulled into a parking lot, and Dad struck the officer, breaking his nose. He fled the scene.

I filled out a form and took a seat. Everyone in the waiting area seemed rundown and depressed, not that I expected a parade. Thanks to my copy of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, the tenor of my surroundings was easy to tune out. I was getting into the story when a man with a little girl at his side began speaking to me like we were old friends. It was Dyno Dave, the singer of Free Beer, a cover band I’d reluctantly played in several years ago. The little girl was his daughter.

Dyno Dave was at the jail to visit his son, who was locked up on a failure-to-appear warrant. Dave was excited to tell me about his newest invention: the portable deadbolt. He expected to be a millionaire within the first month it came out. I glanced over Dave’s shoulder at the clock and replaced my bookmark. After an hour, a guard called us in to visit our loved ones.

Dad was in a pretty good mood for someone who’d spent the last three days behind bars, but it saddened me to see him in a uniform with the name of the jail spray-painted on the back. He wore disposable plastic shoes and shared a cell with eight other men. I wondered what they were like. “Oh,” he said, “the usual. You’ve got a couple of guys with PhDs and an accountant or two.” He pretended to laugh and dug his thumb into the telephone cord.

When a voice beckoned Dad back to his cell, I stood in a hallway with the other visitors. My father formed a procession with the other inmates opposite a heavy door. On my side of the heavy door, a deputy began calling names from our group—the guests—and Dave said they were arresting certain visitors because of outstanding warrants. When the deputy got to Dave, Dave handed me the key to the locker, which held his portable deadbolt, and stepped forward. His daughter was frozen.