My Father Before Me (21 page)

47

In school, when given a choice, I sat in the back row of any classroom, where I could lower my head and whisper to my neighbor or pretend I wasn't there. Until now, I had cared about school—or, in school, I had performed with care. I knew that I was supposed to. I still knew it, but I had trouble summoning the effort. I had usually earned A's, occasionally a B. Now my grades were plummeting: I earned a C in English and a D in algebra.

As my performance in the classroom wavered; as I felt my attention detach, splinter, and flit off toward a thick mist at the edge of my thoughts; as I felt a yearning for sense—for an explanation of the world that would account for my being here in this strange, changing body and for my father having achieved his wish to be only a buried, decaying one; and as I hadn't yet the mind that could have defined my discomfort so clearly, I engaged in a manic, blind descent into school activities.

The student variety show was approaching; anyone who had an idea for a performance could sign up. Al and I had one: we would join with two other friends and be a hillbilly band playing old-time music. We'd dress in overalls and straw hats and stand on the stage barefoot, playing a washtub bass, guitar, jug, and washboard. If we were serious about this, we knew, we would need to practice, even if our instruments were primitive, and we would need the guidance of a professional­—
that meant the band director, Mr. Holbrook, the same Mr. Holbrook who, two years before, leading my elementary school band, had tried to persuade me to take the clarinet seriously.

One day after school, we four friends gathered in the music room with our instruments. I was on washboard. Mr. Holbrook stood before us. Baton in hand, he announced, “Okay, I'll count you off. Let's start on the downbeat. One—
No!
The downbeat. Start on the downbeat. Try again. One—
No!
The DOWNbeat!”

I didn't know what the downbeat was, and I didn't feel like asking. None of us did. Aw, we decided, let's just lip-synch to records.

The hillbillies were out. Inspired by
American Graffiti
and the 1950s nostalgia that was heavy in the air, we came up with a new plan: a rock-and-roll revue. I would be the front man, the master of ceremonies. I didn't care; I wasn't shy—or, rather, this would be a way to circumvent my shyness: I would ignore myself, act as though I didn't exist. I would be Bick Bark, with a name based on Dick Clark's and a gravelly voice based on Wolfman Jack's. I hid behind round mirrored sunglasses and wore white jeans and a sky-blue sweatshirt on which, with a thick black felt-tip pen, I had drawn stars and squiggled wavy lines and written, in large block letters,
BICK BARK
. With every student in the school in the auditorium—with Cherie there, and Debbie, and Nanette, and Tony—I stood at the lip of the stage behind a microphone stand and spoke in the voice of a stranger, introducing the songs that my friends—in jeans with rolled-up cuffs and grubby white T-shirts, their hair greased into DAs—pretended to sing: “Teenager in Love,” “Rock Around the Clock,” “At the Hop.”

We were a smash. The audience clapped and even sang along, and we earned a raucous ovation. After the show, I remained Bick Bark. I kept his clothes on. This came in handy at the after-school dance when a pretty girl who had previously kept an oblivious distance from me sidled over and whispered, “Are you really Bick Bark? Will you
dance this slow dance with me?” Would I ever. I settled my hands on her waist, she wrapped her arms around my shoulders, and we rocked gently back and forth, her head on my chest, the apple scent of her shampoo in my nose. She was the age my mother had been when she first danced with my father, when they did the slide together, when they sensed that they already somehow knew each other and should stay together. At the end of the song, the girl smiled, slipped her hands from my shoulders, then stared—aghast, repulsed—at her palms. They were black with ink; I had come off on her hands.

Even if I was in hiding, distracted, and playing the role of the mediocre student, one of my teachers took notice of me: one day, as the rest of the class headed out the door toward lunch, she waved me over to her desk. She had a proposal. I had leadership ability. I should run for school president. I should at least think about it.

Later that day, at home, I decided, yes, of course: I should be president. It was a thing to be, another role to play, a predefined identity to slip into, a safe place to put myself. Whichever eighth-grader won the election in the spring would spend the next year as leader of the student government. I wasn't thinking much, though, about next year. I was thinking about the campaign, about how it was something in which I could lose myself, in which I could invest my time and art supplies. For the next week, my bedroom became campaign headquarters. I sat on the floor, cutting badge-size circles out of orange and blue construction paper, writing meticulously on them and on large posters my slogans: “Bick's the Best,” “I'm for Bick,” “Bick Clicks.” Bick had been working for me: he would be the candidate.

My two competitors were Laurie, a quiet, thoughtful flutist, and Joe, a serious, bookish, true school citizen who ran on a platform of more openness and fruitful interaction between administration and students. My platform was that I was Bick Bark and I had cool buttons and posters. Secretly, too, I coveted the honorary dark polished wood presidential
gavel that I would receive if I won, and I hoped that walking past my posters on the school walls for two weeks would make Cherie realize that she was blind and misguided and had actually loved me from the start.

Bick won by a landslide. The year's final edition of the school newspaper recounted the election, the front-page article saying, “Chris, not being sure of his status as Chris Forhan, put on the gimmick of being Bick Bark.” Side by side with that article was another, reporting the victory of the student who had run for Girls' Club president: “Angie is planning new activities for the school and will try to make seventh graders feel welcome. The interesting fact is that, when she won the election, she didn't have any posters up in the halls.” A campaign of ideas. I hadn't thought of that.

On the next page of the paper was this article, written by my friend Al:

Rumor Spreads Quickly

If some students heard a rumor going around about three weeks ago regarding Chris Forhan, next year's president, getting suspended, it's not true. This rumor was started by a person who thought it was funny. He told a couple of people that Chris sneaked into the balcony and turned the spotlight on Mr. Richardson at the choir concert May 22. Before a person starts spreading stories, he should know the facts.

The inventor of the rumor was probably Al himself; his article had the tone of an act of forced penance. It was someone else, though, who spread the rumor that I had been spied naked, streaking across the football field.

I was Bick Bark. I had stepped into an invented character's clothes and, in full view of the school, stepped onto the stage. Bick was popular. Bick was president. Bick was the subject of wild rumor and conjecture. The boy I'd been, the kid whose dad had done himself in, had disappeared, happily so.

48

We wanted beer, my friends and I, and we'd heard where we could get some. Word had spread around my high school that a convenience store in central Seattle, the black district, sold alcohol to teenagers, no questions asked. Could it be true? Four of us were willing to find out.

I'd never had a beer. It was time I tried one.

I was a month away from turning sixteen—still too young to drive. John, a year older, would take his family's old sedan, and Al and Scott and I would come along. Scott lived across the street from Al and was a central member of the group I had begun to hang around with. One of Scott's favorite rituals, as we were cruising nowhere in particular, was to roll down his window and, as we passed a man tugging at his ear, yell authoritatively, “No ear tugging after four o'clock!” To a pair of girls in the crosswalk wearing knit caps, “No knit caps after six!” To a dog: “No barking on Fridays!” Scott had come into possession of a fire extinguisher and begun filling it with water and bringing it along on our travels. He would pull up beside someone walking along the street and call out, “Excuse me—can you tell us how to get to the Space Needle?” When the kind stranger put his fingers to his chin and said, “Let's see—” Scott would lift the extinguisher, blast him in the face, then hit the accelerator. Through all of this, I hunkered down in the backseat, cringing, mortified—too
much a good boy to enjoy Scott's shenanigans, too much a coward to demand that he stop.

On the excursion to buy the beer, I was not a coward. I believed in this mission. It did not seem to me reprehensible for a teenage boy to desire to try alcohol, but I also did not doubt that if my mother knew what I was doing, she would make me pay. To take this drive, to make this purchase, to pop the cap from a bottle and take a swig, I would have to become—I would have to liberate—a boy I never was at home, in her presence: a boy who followed his whims, even if that meant ignoring the rules. I imagined if my mother were to discover what I was up to, her conception of me would be altered forever: she would understand at last my depravity and weakness, my general unseemliness. I was a teenager, biologically programmed to feel constrained by the values of my parents. Still, this sense of my mother as a strict moral arbiter—had my father felt it, too? Maybe he'd kept part of himself secret because of it. I was beginning to live a life outside of my home, a life that I wouldn't give up. If I could live that life only by hiding it, I would.

The store was there, just where we'd been told it was: a small, nondescript place on the corner of a busy street. We strolled in. It was empty except for the cashier. He eyed us impassively when we entered, then looked away. We must have looked like what we were: four furtive white boys from the suburbs. He must have known why we were there.

We had decided we would try to buy a six-pack or two. But which of us would do it? We huddled briefly in the aisle next to the chips and peanuts and whispered haltingly. “Sorry,” Al said. He had no money. “I have a dollar, that's all,” Scott apologized. John had two dollars, enough for a six-pack. So did I. We would do the buying. If John succeeded, I would try, too.

John sauntered over to the refrigerator case, then eased the door open and snatched a six-pack of bottles. Rainier: we'd heard that was
good. The rest of us watched silently as he carried the beer to the register. Looking unsurprised and a little tired, the cashier took John's money, handed him some coins back, and slipped the beer into a paper sack. John headed out the door. Al, Scott, and I glanced at each other. This was easy.

It was my turn. I repeated what John did. By the time I was taking the heavy sack from the cashier, Al and Scott were out the door and headed to the car, which was parked at the curb. I left the store, the glass door swinging shut behind me, and hopped into the backseat, setting the bag on the floor next to John's purchase. Then we were off, laughing. As we drove up the hill, a car pulled alongside us to the right, an arm extended out of its open window. In the hand was a badge, glittering silver in the late-afternoon light. There were two men in the front seat, waving us back over to the curb.

“Fuckfuckfuck,” Scott said.

John parked, and we stepped out. The two men approached us. “You boys have something in the car you want to show us?” one of them said.

“No,” John said. “What?”

“Did you buy some beer just now?”

“Son,” the second man said, “would you mind opening the doors of your car?”

John did as he was asked, opening the front and back doors on the curb side of the car.

“May I have those bags, please?” The man pointed to the floor near the backseat.

John leaned down, grabbed them, and handed them over.

“Any of you boys twenty-one?”

None of us spoke. The man opened the back door of his car and set the six-packs on the seat.

“Don't tell my mother,” I said. I looked one man in the eyes, then the other. “Don't tell my mother.” My secret life—the one that had
brought me to this moment—and my life at home were at risk of colliding. I was pacing on the sidewalk, back and forth, pleading. “Don't tell my mother. Are you going to tell my mother? I don't care that you caught us. Just don't tell my mother. She'll kill me. My mother can't know about this. Please. Don't tell her.”

“There's no need to worry,” one of them said, “as long as it wasn't you who bought the beer. Did you buy the beer?”

I hated myself for having had two dollars in my wallet.

About my mother, they made no promises. I would just have to wait and see, they told me. It depended on how the case panned out. It was the cashier they were after, not us. They'd been sitting in their car for hours, surveilling the place. Whoever they caught would be a prime witness against the cashier.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Just don't tell my mother.”

When I returned home, I spilled the whole story to Dana. I had to tell someone. “Are you going to tell Mom?” she asked.

No, I wouldn't tell her.

“I think you should tell Mom.”

I couldn't. I'd sweat it out. I'd bury the problem and, if I got lucky, never be required to speak of it.

I waited: I waited all the next day, then the next one, for a phone call. I prayed not to get one, prayed that the episode would fade away, be forgotten.

And then, one late afternoon, the call came. Two detectives, I was told, needed to speak with me in person, and they were on their way over.

With only minutes left before the doorbell would ring, I trudged upstairs and announced to my mother that I had something to tell her, something important. She looked at me quizzically. “Okay,” she said. I walked into the living room and sat in a chair. She followed and sat on the couch a few feet away.

My mother knew me as a good boy. I had mainly stayed out of trouble, and it hadn't been difficult. But now I had broken the law, then covered up the transgression.

My throat dry, heart pounding, I explained to my mother what I had done. She did not move from her seat. She stared at me. “I'll never trust you again,” she said.

It wasn't the buying of the beer that bothered her, she explained, although she didn't approve of it. My crime had been my silence: my assumption that part of my life should be kept a secret. My crime—as I think of it only now—had been my father's crime.

The detectives didn't stay long. They asked me to narrate the series of events surrounding the purchase of the beer. Had the cashier asked my age? Had he asked for identification? Then they told me that I would be expected to testify in court. The cashier had a long history of selling alcohol to minors, and it had finally caught up with him. Throughout the interview, neither of them cracked a grin. After our door closed behind them, as they were descending our porch steps, maybe one of them muttered, “Poor dumb sucker of a kid.”

In court, I answered the lawyers' questions as accurately as I could. Yes, I had willingly purchased the beer; it was my idea. No, the cashier did not ask me to produce identification. No, he did not remind me that there was a minimum age for purchasing alcoholic beverages. No, I could not say for sure that the man sitting in the courtroom was the one in the store that day. His face had faded away as soon as I had turned toward the door.

My punishment was not finished. If I hoped to have the citation for buying alcohol expunged from my record, I was required to attend alcohol school; one afternoon a week for two months, I would join a dozen other teenagers for group counseling. Mainly out of a sense of duty as a friend, but maybe also out of a sense of guilt—he hadn't had to tell his parents or testify or enroll in alcohol school—Al accompa
nied me, every week, on the four-mile walk to the counseling center. He waited outside while I joined my troubled peers, a tough bunch—leather-clad, straggle-haired, callous, and sad. None, it appeared, had recently completed a year as junior high school president. Week after week, I listened to lectures about drinking and depression, about drinking and skipping school, about drinking and dying behind the wheel. I filled in the bubbles and blanks on surveys designed to elicit in me recognition of my reckless relationship with alcohol and the ways in which it was deadening me to my family, my friends, and myself. Meeting after meeting, I was polite and silent; I did my time; I spoke briefly and only when spoken to.

One afternoon, though, I was required to stand before the entire group and make a speech—we all were. We sat in a circle and, one by one, rose and testified about what it felt like to be drunk and why we liked it so much. The others spoke in rich detail, with fondness, of wild sensations of joy and fearlessness, of drunken urges to fight, to weep, to scream at their tormentors—the bullying vice principal, the disloyal sister, the feckless father who had abandoned them—or to declaim freely, without shame, their tender love for their true friends, the few who understood and accepted them. Then it was my turn. I stood, hesitated, then made an embarrassed admission: I had never been drunk. I had never tasted alcohol. I had only wanted to try a beer. Was that such a big deal? I was almost sixteen, after all; I was curious—but, before I could so much as pop the top off, I had been caught, and now here I was, and, believe me, I wished I could explain what it felt like to be drunk, I wished I knew what it was like, and if I was lucky, I would find out one day, and that day would come soon.

After my eight weeks of meetings, during my exit interview, the counselor sat behind her desk and looked at me sympathetically. “Sorry about that,” she said. “I know you didn't belong here.”

My record was expunged. For my trouble attending the trial as a
witness, the state mailed me a seven-dollar check. I was too ashamed to cash it. To do so might be to confess my crime all over again. My aunt was a teller at my bank: there was a chance that I would end up standing before her and she would say, “A check from the state? What have you been up to, Chris?” I slipped the check inside a book in my bedroom and forgot it, or tried to imagine that I had. Months later, the state sent me a letter asking what had happened. It needed to balance its books for the fiscal year. Had the check not reached me? Did I need another one? No, what I needed was to have the whole torturous, embarrassing episode expunged from the record of my life.

I plucked up the courage and cashed the check. I was lucky—it was my aunt's day off.

Not long afterward, I got my wish: I got drunk. The parents of a friend of a friend of my friend were out of town, so their house was available for a party. I had no idea how to drink; I was unaware that between the moment one sips alcohol and the moment its effects kick in, there is a delay. I was handed something simple, maybe a rum and Coke. It tasted sweet—not bad at all. But there wasn't much alcohol in it: I wasn't feeling anything. I drank another. Meanwhile, one of our group, Randy, was being more careful. He had not drunk much, that evening or ever, but, wanting to look as though he knew what he was doing—wanting to align his behavior with the deepening general stupidity being displayed by the partiers—he hesitated in the stairwell, tilted his head, gazed at a potted plant, and delicately lifted one of its leaves to his parted lips, pretending to eat it. Is that the kind of thing one does under the influence of alcohol? I didn't think so. I was sitting on the stairs, considering Randy, then considering a row of knickknacks lined on a narrow shelf on the wall: small porcelain puppies and a figurine of the Virgin Mary, arms extended toward me. She seemed to be moving, seemed to be about to speak. Why was I sitting on the stairs? Hadn't I just a moment before been walking down the
stairs, intending to go somewhere? Mary was looking at me.
My dad's dead,
I thought.
My dad's dead.
He hadn't been on my mind, but suddenly he was. Then I said it aloud: “My
dad's dead,
my
dad's dead
.” I said it louder, and then I wailed it. “My dad's
dea
d
!” Tears welled in my eyes. I pounded my knees with my fists. “My dad's
dea
d
! He's
dea
d
!”

Al was suddenly sitting next to me, putting his arm around my shoulders. “I know, Chris,” he said. “I know. We all know now.”

I ended the night outside, on my back, faceup in the flower garden, no desire to rise.