My Father Before Me (22 page)

49

A couple of years before this, while still living at home, Kevin had summoned the nerve to make an announcement to our mother: he would no longer attend Mass. He could not, he told her, profess what he did not believe. None of us children had said such a thing before. I, certainly, was too craven to do so. My habit on Sunday mornings was to tell my mother I would be attending a later Mass than she; instead of driving to church, I would drive to the record store and browse the bins for an hour. When I had been forced to make a difficult admission to my mother, it was because two detectives were minutes away from ringing our doorbell. When Kevin was forced to make a difficult admission, it was because his conscience would not have it otherwise.

Our father's kind of courage—and he did have courage—was in charting a plan for his life, a plan of education and professional mastery and advancement, when he had few models for doing so, and then applying himself to that plan, remaining dutiful to it. A consequence, though, of such diligence and single-mindedness might have been that he ignored complicated, troubling, ragged aspects of himself. As he adopted acceptable modes of being, acceptable identities—soldier, husband, father, career man, churchgoer—I suspect that griefs and yearnings he had long harbored were silenced. Maybe this is merely—
merely!—
the human condition. But what if a man defines himself by
his competence in the workplace and then that competence fails him? What if he conceives of himself as surviving on pluck and will and then that will slackens?

What if he gets sick? What self does he have left then? Can he recognize it?

My mother accepted Kevin's proclamation that he would not belong to her church, no matter how his announcement pained her—no matter how it meant the failure of her efforts, from his birth, to instill in him the faith that had given her life such purpose and moral clarity. What alternative did she have?

Kevin had chosen honest perplexity over false piety, and, at the same time, he was choosing poetry. It makes sense: a poem is a place to discover what we know—and a place to map the limits of our knowing. Soon he began sharing his poems with our mother, and, however questioning they might have been of the faith that sustained her, she was proud. At twenty, he wrote a poem called “Grace Before a Meal,” in which the traditional consolations of religion are absent. One evening—irony and paradox I can't untangle—our mother, when we sat down to dinner, asked Kevin to read the poem aloud as we bowed our heads. For a moment, our household's ritual honoring of God for His gifts was replaced by an honoring of the chilling and exhilarating silence that abides beneath all our chatter and guesswork about Him.

An element of hollowness is present in the stew

The upright glasses and laid-out spoons have nothing to say

The seated guests have nothing to say

Between the scraping of chairs and the lifting of spoons,

The candles hold their tongues forever & ever Amen.

50

At sixteen, I was hired for my first real job—in a nursing home, the kind of place where Grandma Carey, my father's grandmother, spent her last years. Her mind mostly gone, she passed away two years after my father did, without ever having been told that her favorite grandson had killed himself—passed away, probably, with no memory that he had existed.

In a white button-down shirt and paper cap, I worked in the kitchen, washing dishes, mopping floors, and setting up the racks of food trays—the silverware and napkins, the salt and pepper packets, the skim milk, the hot water for tea or Sanka—that were delivered to the patients three times a day in their rooms. The door between the kitchen and public hallway was open during the day, and the sounds of a jaunty piano and hesitant, stiff singing reached me from the communal room: “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. . . .” “And we won't come back till it's over over there.” I glimpsed the old people shuffling past the door in slippers or rolling by in wheelchairs, gripping the black rubber railing on the wall for help making turns. Marie, nearly hairless, skeletal, in a thin, tattered robe, minced along with the delicate steps of a geisha, murmuring, “Yes. Yes. Yes.” Mr. Walker sped along in his wheelchair, the stump of his amputated leg pointing forward, as if accusingly, at whoever was in his path. Answering and
re-answering a question that no one else heard, he insisted, through sneering lips, “No. No. No. No.”

Thankfully, in the evening, after the patients had eaten dinner and the racks of trays had been wheeled back into the kitchen, I was allowed to close the door. I felt contentedly alone then, singing to myself, dipping the mop into the bucket of steaming bleached water and slapping it onto the linoleum floor, pouring juices for the next morning's breakfast—thirty-six orange, twelve apple, five cranberry, four prune—in small plastic cups on a wide tray and sliding it into the refrigerator. My first and largest task before turning out the lights was to wash all the pots and plates and cups and silverware. I stood at the stainless-steel sink, snug in my corner, as if in a cockpit, long counter to my left where the dirty dishes were set, immense dishwasher to my right, a handle to slide its door up and then slam it satisfyingly down, like a garage door, before I pressed the red button to begin the wash cycle. One night, humming, in the midst of my familiar, simple, repetitive work, my mind elsewhere, anywhere but there, I grabbed a plate with my left hand, plucked the knife and fork off it with my right, and tossed them into a plastic basket, used a spatula to scrape off the excess food, then grabbed another plate, then another, then another—and then I stopped. I stared at the plate I was holding. No. Could it be? I looked closer. Yes. Gleaming, sticky, nearly black, next to a lump of untouched mashed potatoes and a brownish-pink square of country-fried steak, was a tidy pile of human excrement. A mute, potent protest: the act, perhaps, of someone who felt he'd outlived his usefulness yet was being made to suffer the indignity of remaining alive, someone whose purpose had vanished but who still had a mind, some kind of mind.

Was it a protest against me? Or, more generally, against my kind?: those who delivered from the kitchen, daily, and would deliver until this person's death, congealed oatmeal, cold white toast, bland canned peas, a pear wedge fished from a ten-pound tub. Maybe it was a protest against everything. Or nothing. Whoever sent the message to me, I saw his point.

51

Entering high school, I had left my junior high heart behind me. My ardor for Cherie had cooled, then vanished. This puzzled me; my pure, earnest desire for her had felt so unwaveringly true, so much an axiom of my existence on earth, that I had presumed it would remain a lodestar until my death, a fixed fact by which my happiness would forever be measured. But now I was suddenly, seemingly permanently, ecstatically unhappy about someone else: Sue, a cute, thoughtful, quiet girl in my typing class, an impassioned Catholic who had room in her heart only for Christ, then later for a muscled lunk named Tim, but I was counting on my guileless charm and devotion and tenacity to lure her away from both of them and into my arms. How little it takes to believe the unlikely, to let desire do reason's work. Sue knew I liked her—I told her; everyone told her. She kind of liked me, too, enough to flash me a bashful smile when we passed in the halls; enough to let me walk with her the half mile to her home from school, after which I retraced my steps to begin the walk to my home; enough, even, to go out with me a couple of times: to a baseball game, to a movie. But she didn't like me enough, finally. She could not be my girlfriend, she explained to me. Instead, she would always be my good friend. And isn't that, she mused, more to be valued, really?
No,
I thought.
No, it isn't. It is not to be valued.

Thwarted, with nowhere outside me to go, my desires were channeled back inward, into poetry, into song. In memory, my junior and senior years in high school are a long, dim, drizzly winter afternoon. I sit alone in my room, drafting and redrafting lines of poetry in which my unimpeachable feelings for Sue, cruelly spurned, refuse to die; they make a clamorous sound but a coded one—they are expressed in references only she would recognize. Sue alone would be able to construe my meaning should she ever—
Please, Lord
—ask to read one of those poems I keep reminding her that I write, or should she ever discover a piece of paper lying conspicuously on my desk in typing class, as if, oops, I've accidentally left it there, and should she, curious, pick it up, and study it, and bite her lip, and place her fingers gently against her chest, then read it again, slowly, then again, until she knows it by heart and understands me at last and regrets her foolishness and admits to herself that she wants me for her own. It's my last, best hope. When not writing a poem, I am gazing at Sue's photo tacked to my wall while I sing along with my records. Every song is about her. This is easy to imagine when I'm listening to Electric Light Orchestra's “Can't Get It Out of My Head” or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' “The Wild One, Forever.” It is harder when the song is Blue Öyster Cult's “7 Screaming Diz-Busters.”

I wasn't listening much to the Beatles anymore—certainly not to Paul McCartney's solo work. With “Silly Love Songs” riding high on the charts, he and his new band were coming to town, but I wasn't going. All that cloying gooeyness: I was disdainful of it. McCartney was irrelevant, I thought, a goofy tunesmith, a candy salesman. He was okay. He'd done some things in the 1960s. But he was no Supertramp.

When I told Al that I wouldn't be going to the concert, he looked at me straight: “Don't be a dumb shit. It's Paul McCartney. It's a Beatle. He comes to town, you see him.”

We saw him. Trusting me again even after the beer fiasco, my mother agreed to let me drive the Dodge to the show. In the seat where my father had lain his head for the last time, I rattled down the freeway with Al and a couple of other friends, and soon, in the dark, under the concrete dome of Seattle's new functional gray hunk of a sports stadium, I was standing among sixty-seven thousand people, and there he was: Paul, a football field away but there nonetheless, an actual Beatle, visiting from my past, visiting from another world, from his world, wherever that was—Paul, in glimmering black satin pants and jacket, Paul leaning forward at the black piano, belting out a song of amazement about his love for his wife, whom he couldn't stand to be without, whom he would never dream of leaving, who even now stood just feet away from him, crooning along with his song, which was her song.

A few months later, he released a recording from that concert tour, and I played some of the songs on the school radio station: fifteen hundred watts of solid power, 89.5 on your FM dial. Though the signal reached throughout Seattle, we never sensed that we had many listeners. The station was operated by students—amateur broadcasters who might yearn to be accomplished professionals one day but whose main job now was to avoid sounding too nervous and bumbling and creaky-voiced. I found a home at the station, an identity: I was one of the radio guys. I liked the idea of being on the air; it confirmed me, even if that me wasn't
me
, exactly. Two years earlier, I had hidden in the clothes, and behind the grizzled voice, of Bick Bark. Now I would hide behind my own voice. With the live microphone inches from my lips, I was unavoidably present, appearing in a stranger's home or car—if only by accident, while he was searching on the dial for another station; at the same time, I was alone, safe in the studio, almost anonymous, a name without a face. My obligation was to speak not my heartfelt thoughts but a disc jockey's practiced, impersonal patter.

We played the hits and oldies and album tracks and, on Saturdays, jazz. Sundays were silent. The students had the run of the station, mainly. We chose the music to be played, although the one among us who was program director was required to listen to each track on every new album, keeping an ear out for vulgarities. If he heard a profanity or a reference to genitalia, he marked the track as unplayable. One day we discovered that even irony could be taboo. One of us played, on the air, Randy Newman's new single, in which he sang, “Short people have no reason to live.” We thought the song screamingly funny, an over-the-top, unsubtle comic attack on mindless prejudice. We got it—it was difficult not to—but Mr. Adams, our faculty adviser, was not amused. The song demeaned short people, he said; it would not be played again on his station. Mr. Adams himself was decidedly short. The satirical nature of the song was lost on him. It went right over his head.

Satire, sarcasm, irony: these were the stock-in-trade for my friends and me—safe modes in which to express ourselves without fully expressing ourselves, we who were made of need and nervous glances, who were generally embarrassed, inept, and monosyllabic when it came to sincere, serious talk. It was a mode of discourse familiar to me from my home. When our father had fallen into the habit of inserting into conversations the statement “Well, it's relative,” we had responded each time, in unison, “Relative to
what
?”—ignoring the substance of his thought and instead poking fun at his fussy inexactitude. When I entered the kitchen one afternoon and caught my little sister rapidly stashing an unpermitted bowl of ice cream in a cabinet, I flew into mock fury, raising my fists toward the ceiling and screaming, “How dare you!” I took comfort in pretending that something mattered when it didn't, in mocking those who cared passionately about the irrelevant. All the while I was unmindful of how this habit could be
a means of self-protection: a way of not speaking aloud, and unironically, of the things that do matter.

MAD
magazine and
National Lampoon
and
Monty Python's Flying Circus
: these were the master practitioners of the humor my friends and I prized. The jokes we told felt accurate as expressions of the jokes we felt ourselves to be; they arose from our hunch that existence is absurd and unfathomable—that the mere fact of being was worth making fun of. At its best, such humor was evidence of our humble refusal to presume: evidence of our attentiveness to the existentially unknowable, of our distrust of the falseness of convention, and of our wide-eyed appreciation of people's common humanity. At its worst, it was evidence of our cruelty and stupidity.

Al, his brother Kurt, and Scott had started a punk band—the Cheaters—and devoted much of their time, when not practicing or inventing absurd and comical logos for the group, to haunting radio station lobbies and record stores and downtown clubs and theaters where they might cross paths with musicians. They met Graham Parker and Cheap Trick. Teaming with an amateur photographer acquaintance, they stalked the members of KISS at their downtown hotel and took pictures of them without makeup; the band's manager grabbed the camera and stripped the film from it. When the Ramones came to town, my friends and I lingered outside the theater after the concert, keeping our eyes out for a Ramone, any Ramone. At last, Dee Dee, in his mop of black hair, leather jacket, and torn jeans, strolled out the side door and down the sidewalk. We followed at an indiscreet distance, waiting for whatever might come next, waiting to decide why we were trailing him. Then Scott yelled, “Dee Dee! Get out your knife! I've got mine! Ramone! It's a rumble, just you and me.” Dee Dee turned around, sneered, chuckled, and kept walking. Scott had no knife. He had no interest in fighting a Ramone. His interest
was in pretending to be the sort of person who was interested in fighting a Ramone.

I think of myself in such moments—and they were continual throughout high school—as being almost invisible, a peripheral figure, a voice on the radio but not a real person willing to show his face, a watcher, not a member of the band, just a hanger-on, a junior high friend of the bass player with nothing to do but go where he and his friends went. The world they were becoming citizens of was a real world, an identifiable one, with distinctive rituals and knowledge whose shape and significance remained always just beyond me. The Cheaters cut a single and landed a couple of gigs as an opening act at the Bird, a punk club that hosted shows of local bands and others driving up from Los Angeles or San Francisco. As we entered the club one night, we overheard an exuberant spiky-haired guy who was pointing to a button on his shirt. It said
DEVO
. I had no idea what the word referred to. “Devo is
it
now,” he pronounced rhapsodically, evangelically. “Mark my words: there's no other band. Devo is all that's going to matter from now on.” Inside the club, the audience, meager but crazed, in slashed T-shirts and frayed Army jackets, hunks of metal dangling from their ears and noses, squeezed toward the lip of the stage and pogoed or taunted the musicians, tossing popcorn at them, and the bands retaliated by spitting back. In my JCPenney clothes—flared jeans, plaid button-down shirt, and down jacket—I kept my distance, leaning against a far wall that was squiggly with graffiti. Occasionally, amid the music's sloppy thrash and drone, its frantic motion, I heard something that entered me and stayed put. “Jesus Christ is a monkey on your back!” railed the singer of one band. The song was “Boss on the Cross.” It was audacious and funny and true and, while it lasted, made me forget my suburban shopping-mall clothes.

At home, the music I listened to was often something new that I
had smuggled out of the radio station. In the fall of my senior year, I had begun playing on the air a song by a new artist with a comical name: Elvis Costello. “Alison” was gorgeous and tender and bitter and sad—I decided I should take this guy's album home. On the cover of the record, called
My Aim Is True,
the singer looked nothing like the swaggering, glamorous, shampooed stars in satin pants whom I was used to seeing on album covers. He was skinny, gawky, splay-legged, and pigeon-toed, and he wore nerdy black-rimmed glasses, but he was grinning deviously and throttling the neck of his electric guitar as if he could kill me with it. Elvis Presley had died three months earlier, and on the cover of this new Elvis's record was printed, top to bottom, over and over, brooking no dissent, “Elvis is king.” Who was this guy? I put the needle in the groove, and then I kept it there: day after day, after walking home from school, I put the album on, listened to it all the way through, and listened to the whole thing again, then again. The more I listened, the more I understood who this guy was: he was me.

The songs trembled with desire, vitriol, disillusionment, and guilt. They were witty and enraged and self-implicating, their pithy images boiling over with intelligence and pain. Elvis sang to someone of loving her more than everything in the world but not expecting that to last. He sang of a woman who, as detectives drag the lake for a corpse, coolly files her fingernails. He sang of feeling like a juggler with too few hands. I hadn't realized a person could say these things, or say them in this way; I hadn't known for certain that what I felt, others felt. The album was a stone tablet carved with eternal verities, a gift of permission handed down to me from a cloud. Elvis was all that was going to matter from now on.

Kevin had moved out of the house by then, into a tiny furnished studio apartment over his landlord's garage. One afternoon he was back home visiting, and I brought the record upstairs and told him
that he had to hear it. I pulled the disc from its sleeve, slipped it onto the turntable of the family stereo, and played my two or three favorite songs. “Hmm,” he said. “Pretty good. There's a little reggae beat there.”

A few months later, walking through north Seattle, miles from home, I saw, blocks away and strolling toward me, my brother, of all people, even farther from his own apartment. I hadn't seen him in weeks, but here we were, sharing the same unexpected route. We stopped to greet each other, amused by the coincidence. “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Singing the entire album of
My Aim Is True
to myself.”

“Me, too,” I replied.

When Elvis came to town, I made sure to see him. Even after moving across the state to college the next year, I took a Greyhound back to Seattle in the middle of the week to see Elvis's show with Al. He and his band played for a furious forty minutes, speeding up the tempo of each song, hurtling through it as if they couldn't wait to get offstage. Between numbers, Elvis said hardly a word. Then he stomped off.