My Father Before Me (14 page)

33

In Scouts, I was now a Webelo. “We'll Be Loyal Scouts,” the name meant. I enjoyed the natty uniform: the golf-style cap and the three woven strands of gold, red, and green on which I pinned my activity badges—the little tree for forestry; the interlocking gears for engineering; the sleek sedan for traveling.

I liked the evenings when my father—with a plan and the tools and skills to complete it—stood at the end of his workbench downstairs, eyeing a small rectangular block of wood in the grip of his vise. He was helping me prepare for the Pinewood Derby; each year, the Scout pack set aside a Saturday for pitting each boy's miniature custom-made car against the others', letting gravity pull them down a long, sloped track in the church gym. Each Scout brought a car he had built with the help of his father: they had carved and shaped the block of pine with saw and rasp, measured its length and width, weighed it to the gram, sanded it, spray-painted it, set it aside to dry, then added a second coat, attached axles and plastic wheels, delicately applied decals, drilled holes, and filled them with lead weights so the car was swift but not so heavy as to break the rules, which were rigid and many.

Every year, the car my father helped me bring into being seemed perfect, impossibly so: aerodynamically sleek and gleaming, its wheels spinning freely at a touch. Every year, the car flamed out in the first
heat. For the hour that followed, my father and I slouched in metal folding chairs along the wall, watching with polite interest as heat after heat narrowed the field to the eventual winning car, to the smiling dad and son who must have known something essential that we did not. Maybe they had cheated. But winning wasn't everything: the true satisfaction was in the preparation, in the construction of a car you could be proud of regardless of how it fared in competition, my father might have said, and didn't.

Most of the time, in Webelos, I was on my own. And the whole thing—the uninterrupted succession of pleasant rituals—started to give me the creeps: buttoning up my uniform shirt and tugging on my cap; sitting in den meetings with a dozen other boys, pledging and praying with them, proclaiming in unison, in song, what we should do if we were happy and we knew it; hunching with them over a long table, cutting and gluing colored construction paper into Christmas ornaments and spraying fake snow on them from an aerosol can. I was part of an organization, of a scheme for growing up and becoming an honorable citizen, that didn't feel right because—well, I was starting to sense, because it was organized, and because it was a scheme.

My father was a joiner. He had signed up for the society of altar boys, for the marines, for the Air Force Reserve; he had graduated from college; he had joined the National Association of Accountants—he had become his chapter's president. The first ten years of his life had been ragged and structureless, his gone father, drowned brother, and dead mother instructing him in the fragility of families and of plans. But the path he traveled after that was through institutions of certainty and stability. It might be said that he worked hard at playing it safe, employing his considerable intelligence and industry to succeed at tasks that were clearly defined and unquestioningly valued by whatever social group he made himself a part of. One of those groups was us—the big Irish Catholic family he created with my mother, a family
he must have hoped would be different from the one he knew as a boy: dependable, permanent. One reason to believe so was the woman—the girl—he had chosen, by luck or some mix of conscious and unconscious design, to be his wife. My mother, unlike his parents, would stick it out with him; she was strong and steadfast—­permanently loyal to the ideal of marriage and to the actual marriage she was living in, however profoundly it might test her. As my father pursued, indefatigably, his safe, conventional path, it defined him as an accountant, a successful professional, a faithful parishioner, a husband, and a father. I wonder, within those selves, where the fatherless, motherless, brotherless little boy was. What had become of little Eddie, of Bud?

In organized groups—a baseball team, a Cub Scout pack, a congregation at Mass—I was beginning to feel vaguely false, peripheral, simultaneously in the group and outside it, observing it, observing myself, or only a part of myself, within it. Maybe my father felt that way, too. In fourth grade, because my friends were doing it, I chose a musical instrument to learn and joined the school band. By sixth grade, though, I had wearied of the clarinet. I was tired of lugging the thing around, the black case bumping against my leg; tired of the saliva, all that licking of the reed; tired of the beginner's repertoire—“Arapahoe Warriors,” “Go Tell Aunt Rhody”; tired of the gruffness of Mr. Holbrook, the band director, tall and angular, with shaggy blond hair and a confident willingness to wear black-and-white large-checked pants. He had the habit of seizing my instrument from my hands and, with his wide mouth and big jaw, blowing into it so I could hear how a real clarinetist plays, then returning it to me with his spittle still on it. I realized that I had only been pretending to be a clarinetist—it had seemed an appealing and acceptable identity, so I had tried it on. I quit and asked my mother to return my rented instrument.

Kevin felt restless in groups, too: he had made it to Webelos but not beyond. I followed his lead. When I told the Scoutmaster I was
quitting, he was bewildered. “But you're a good Scout, a model Scout,” he said. “You're a Tenderfoot now. You could be Eagle Scout material.”

No, I couldn't. I was a boy who liked to shoot free throws in his backyard by himself and to sit on his bed with a guitar and to curl up under the covers at night, transistor pressed to his ear, listening for the next thing he might decide he loved, alone.

34

Bins of glittering nails; sacks of grass seed; hammers, wrenches, and handsaws hanging on hooks; a row of bright bicycles, pink, blue, and yellow, the scent of their new rubber tires an intoxicant; jars and jars of hard, striped candy in cellophane—strawberry, root beer, coconut, sarsaparilla: this was McVicar's hardware store. This was my father, who was the reason I went there. When I try to bring him back to life in memory, he is squatting in an aisle at McVicar's, gazing at a jar of putty in his hand. He is standing between two sawhorses on our patio, letting a metal tape measure snap back into its case as he picks up a pencil to mark a spot on a two-by-four. He is hauling a bucket of dark gray paint up a ladder that leans against the house. He is recruiting Kevin and me to help him with a summer project. In the backyard, he has built a long wooden vat in which to dip dozens of narrow boards and stain them before he fashions them into a slatted roof for our deck. We slide a little wire hoop over the end of each board, lower it into the vat, then lift it, lay it on a drop cloth and let it dry, then do it again, giving it a second coat. “Good job today, boys. Let's clean up and head on in.”

Near the carport, in the storage shed, my father kept the supplies he needed to maintain the family cars: motor oil, spark plugs, Turtle Wax and chamois rags, brushes and sponges, an air pressure gauge, a
tin of grease, replacement bulbs and air filters, a low rolling wooden creeper to slide beneath a lifted car. On the top shelf in this shed is where, one summer day, I found a battered, well-thumbed paperback novel. It was called
The Seven Minutes,
and on its cover was the gauzy image of a naked woman on her back, knees raised and spread slightly, her right arm lifted to her head. What was this book doing in the shed? Was my father hiding it there? Or was this merely the kind of thing he liked to read, and he kept it outside while working so he could make a few pages of progress during cigarette breaks?

“That's how long it takes to have sex,” my brother told me. “Seven minutes. That's why it's called
The Seven Minutes
.”

It was Kevin who had revealed to me, a year or so before, why men have penises and women vaginas. I had scoffed; the notion was preposterous. But then I began to think about it—and I have rarely stopped thinking about it since.

Of course my parents had sex. One remark that I overheard confirmed that they were still at it, whatever
it
was, exactly. Not long after they reunited, they slipped back into a familiar pattern, engaging in tense, silent standoffs interrupted by fragile, tentative truces and occasional eruptions of enraged denunciation. One evening they were arguing in their bedroom, loud enough that snatches of angry language carried through their door and down the hall. “Even during intercourse . . .” I heard my mother complain.

Even during intercourse
what
? If I heard the rest of the sentence, I don't remember it. It was enough to have heard my mother say
intercourse
—enough to make me stop what I was doing, or stop whatever I was pretending to do as I tried to ignore that my parents were fighting. She did not say
fucking
. She did not say
making love
. She said, “Even during intercourse.” The word she uttered after that phrase must have been an accusing
you
or a lamenting
I,
but in the passion of her fury she employed the clinical terminology of a junior high health text
book. Maybe it was because of her Scandinavian reserve. Maybe it was because of her Catholicism. Maybe it was because she knew her children might be listening, so she was wary in her choice of words, even in her rage. Maybe it was because she'd never had sex other than with her unreliable and secretive husband, and she could not recognize what they did as fucking or making love. Intercourse, though: she could testify to that.

It was as if there was something essential in my father's mind—something essential in his life—that he would not share with his wife, let alone with his children. Sometimes, sitting with him in his car as he held the wheel, we felt him being both there and not there, both with and without us. One summer he hired Peggy to work in his downtown office, cleaning and organizing the storeroom where his firm's records were kept. Every afternoon he would drive her home, and Peggy would sit nervously as he steered and accelerated erratically and as, manically and strangely, he narrated the drive, as if he had to confirm for himself what he was doing or as if he could think of nothing else to say to his teenage daughter: “There's Third Avenue. There's Fourth. And here's the road we take—here we go, turning left.” When they reached the freeway, he would sometimes drive too slowly, forty miles an hour, traffic whizzing past on both sides.
It's better than going too fast,
Peggy would tell herself.
It's okay. We'll get through this.
Had he been drinking? Was his blood sugar low? Or was his mind simply off by itself somewhere?

One steamy summer morning, he drove several of us kids miles out of town to a berry farm. We spent an hour or two in the fields, fanning out, choosing a row and kneeling in the moist soil, picking strawberries, plunking them into wooden baskets, the sun warm on the backs of our necks. Then we loaded the baskets into the car trunk and headed home, along a two-lane highway, up a mild incline. Sitting in the front passenger seat, I felt that something was wrong: the car
was gaining speed too quickly, then continuing to accelerate, my father silent, sitting stiffly. I peered down; his foot was pressed to the floor. Should I say something? Probably not: my father, not I, was the one who knew how to drive, and he was not a person whose behavior you questioned out loud. And then we were careening off the road, the car lurching, bouncing, slamming into a ditch.

For a moment, there was silence. Then, from behind, Kevin spoke. “Dad, are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Chris, are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Dana?”

“I'm okay.”

“Everyone's okay?”

“Yes.”

I don't remember how the police were informed of the accident, but an officer arrived, and my father explained to him what had happened: he'd had a diabetic reaction. The officer radioed for a tow truck. “Oh,” he added, “and bring a Hershey Bar”—my father needed a quick intake of sugar. We waited and waited, leaning against the car or sitting in the roadside grass, my father drumming his fingers against his knee, waiting for chocolate.

Later, it occurred to us that, the entire time, the trunk of our car had been full of sweet strawberries.

Especially when he was away from home, away from a regulated schedule and quick access to the right foods, my father risked such plummeting: becoming stubborn and irritable and reckless, hands shaking, vision blurring, mouth shutting tight or chattering away.

Kevin remembers one evening, when he was fourteen, accompanying our father to the neighborhood movie theater two miles from home. After the movie, as they were walking to the car, Kevin noticed
our father acting strangely: speaking quickly and as if to himself, gesturing with exaggerated, erratic movements. They got into the car and started driving through the dark streets.

“Dad?” Kevin said. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, yes. I'm all right. I'm all right.” But he was swerving in and out of his lane. Then he was driving down the middle of the street, in the turn lane.

“Are you sure, Dad? Are you okay?”

“I'm okay. Just read me the street signs. Help me out. Tell me where we are.”

“One-hundred-seventeenth Street . . . One-hundred-fifteenth . . . One-hundred-thirteenth . . .” Kevin was panicking. “Dad—”

“Just read me the street signs!”

Street by street, with our father frenzied, angry, near-blind in the dark, and with Kevin terrified and desperate to stay calm—or to appear calm—they managed to find their way safely home. Our father pulled the car up the driveway, shifted into park, and said to Kevin, “Threw a scare into you, didn't I?”

My brother fled into the house.

Our father must have felt sorry about what had happened, maybe a touch ashamed, but he didn't say so to Kevin. He wouldn't have; he probably wouldn't have known how. What he did do was ask, a week later, whether Kevin wanted to see a movie again. Maybe it was his way of apologizing. Or maybe it was his way of pretending that nothing had happened: of erasing that frightening ride home and replacing it with a second one in which he was a different Dad, calm and responsible.

“A movie?” Kevin said. “I'll see.” Then he sought out Peggy to ask if she'd like to come along.

Another father might have recognized the fear he had put into his son, might have recognized that he owed him an apology and an
explanation. Another father might have talked with him calmly, reasonably, about the challenges he faced as a diabetic and the difficulty of maintaining the proper level of blood sugar. He might have said what he could to reassure his boy.

Our father punished Kevin for his fear. “If you need your sister to come with us,” he said, “then we won't go. If you're afraid to go with me alone, forget it. I don't want to take you to the movies.”

On our many after-dinner excursions to Sonics games, I recall no frightening driving. I remember the rousing feeling of freedom as Kevin, Dana, and I rushed to finish our dinners, grabbed our coats, then stepped out together into the twilight. I remember how, after backing the Dart down the driveway and into the street, our father pulled the lighter out of the dash and touched it to the tip of the Tareyton between his lips; I remember the smoke filled the car—the pine-scented air freshener, a flat green cardboard tree dangling from the dash, unable to compete with my father's exhalations. I remember we watched the Sonics lose to the Bulls and beat the Bucks and lose to the Lakers, for whom it was the thirtieth win in a row; afterward, I lingered among a throng of fans outside the locker room on the chance that I would glimpse a star, and I spotted Wilt Chamberlain, in street clothes, striding swiftly toward me, looming large, a giant, then his plate of a hand steered me out of his way. I remember that this made me feel rapturously irrelevant. I remember we cheered the Sonics' beloved player-coach, Lenny Wilkens, on a special night when the team honored him; I remember, eight months later, we cheered him again, cheered him after the Sonics had stripped him of his coaching duties and traded him, outraging the fans—we stood and applauded when he came back to town with his new team, we cheered him to victory over the home team that had betrayed him, we did not want ever to stop cheering. I remember the comfort, while our cheering lasted, of knowing that I was feeling and thinking what my father
surely felt and thought. We were believing in something, experiencing something, together, at the same time. Yet I remember, through all of this, all of these evenings out, not a single topic of conversation with my father, although we must have talked, we certainly said something. I remember, at the end of these evenings, with the post-game show on the car radio, he drove us back up the freeway, then nosed his Dart into its place in the carport, crushed his cigarette out in the ashtray, turned off the ignition, and announced, “That's all she wrote,” the engine ticking.

I wanted to be Lenny Wilkens. I wanted to be Spencer Haywood, Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Walt Frazier. I was skinny and butterfingered, with no natural athletic gifts, but I had a dream. I would one day be a Sonic: that was an identity I would happily be defined by; that was a group I would join without question. In our backyard, where my father had sunk a four-by-four wooden pole into cement, with a backboard and basket bolted to the top, I dribbled and drove and shot for hours at a time and, because of the wacky configuration of the court, inadvertently developed a grotesque and largely useless one-dimensional game. The court was our patio: an asymmetrical strip of concrete with a large patch of gravel on one side and, on the other, an overhanging deck. I could not drive to the basket from the left: that was the side of the gravel and a rocky incline up to the lawn and a set of concrete steps. I could rarely complete a layup from the right: that's where the deck was. I practiced against Kevin, but, unless he was in a rare, giving mood, he always beat me. He was two years older and almost a head taller; when he had the ball, all he had to do—so long as he wasn't made weary by the tedium—was dribble and dribble and dribble, backing patiently and deliberately into me until he reached the basket, then turn and lay in the ball over my head. When I had the ball, the complicated series of obstacles—the deck, the post holding up the deck, the gravel, the patio concrete's cracks and divots, my lanky brother with his long arms
raised—allowed me only two options: a sudden underhanded reverse layup from the right or a wild, blind flick of the ball over my head from the left. Out of necessity, I perfected those shots. When I played in the backyard against someone shorter and slower—ideally, my six-year-old or four-year-old sister—I was a phenom: I was Connie Hawkins; I was Earl Monroe. When I played on a regulation court, on a real team, I ran around without design, my arms outstretched, my palms open, wondering why no one was passing me the ball.

I was in Maple Leaf Elementary now, a public school. What with my parents' separation and my mother's uncertainty about the family's future, she had decided to save the tuition money. At Maple Leaf, I met a new best friend: Paul Ringo. Two Beatles! What were the odds? All I had to do now was meet someone named John George. Paul's father was the pastor of the Lutheran church across the street from school, but nothing about Paul indicated that he had Jesus on his mind. Instead, he thought about the Beatles (natch) and Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grass Roots and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. For his eleventh-birthday party, Paul sent me an invitation that read, “There's just a few things coming my way this time around now”—James Taylor lyrics appropriated for the purpose of reminding his friends to bring presents.