The thing I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, especially my mother, was that my father lived in a portable freight unit, with the velvet Jim Morrison. He called it his “river house,” as if it were a place to spend a long weekend. I never spent a whole weekend there, but Dad and I had our Friday nights together, so I got to see it then. On Friday afternoons he’d pick me up and we’d drive around in the Dodge Diplomat for a while before making our way down through the abandoned factory district and into the shipping depot where he lived. I was fourteen years old and under permanent orders to tell my mother that we only ever went to SlugFest to hit the batting cages. It seemed a strange way to deceive her, but I decided to get over it when my father said I wasn’t going to be a man until I got comfortable lying to the women in my life. But besides Mom, there were no women. “That,” he said, “is exactly what I’m trying to tell you.”

After she kicked him out of the house, my father lived for a while at the Big Shoulders Motel. But he got sick of paying for rip-off Coke machines and a hot tub that wouldn’t bubble, so he moved into a portable freight container in a massive shipping depot. The container was one of those oblong steel boxes covered in foreign graffiti, with a garage door at one end. They came and went on train cars and flatbed trucks, and sometimes by the dozen on barges that trudged in from across the lake and parked on the river bisecting the shipping yard.

My father’s container was right along the river. The metal was painted Chicago Bears colors, which he said he’d picked out so I’d be comfortable visiting him there. The words Lu Kang Inc stamped the side and one end was spray-painted with a picture of a single bare breast that had a dagger through it. When he took me to see the place for the first time, he explained that my mother wasn’t to know he was in storage.

I told him it was getting hard for me to remember all the right things to say.

“You’ll do fine,” he said. “Besides, it won’t be for long.”

I watched one of the cranes loading other containers onto flatbed semitrucks. Dad scrambled my hair like he always did and said, “Oh, I get it.” He picked up a chalky piece of gravel and wrote “Do Not Ship” on the door of his unit, and then below that, for the overseer’s sake, he wrote“Nein Shippen zis Craten!”

To stay at the shipping yard, my father paid off the overseer, a German self-mutilator whose kraut guts we hated. Just talking about how much we hated him took up a good deal of our time together. Every day of his life the German wore a soccer jersey with the name of some Nazi town across the chest—Linz, Salzburg, Innsbruck—and a first aid fanny pack around his waist for easy upkeep of his self-inflicted injuries. He was always covered in gauze pads and Ace bandages, as if each day for him was a break from the front of some nearby war no one else was fighting. The girls at school like that were called “cutters.” Mr. Bisoulis, the health teacher, had described it as a tragic and unpopular thing, but really it lent an air of mystery to the actress who starred in the movie You’re Cutting Yourself to Pieces. The German was no “cutter.” He was, according to my father, just pathetic and weird and probably dying for some attention.