Attempting Normal (15 page)

I was driving home one afternoon during this period when I rolled past a woman putting household objects and furniture out in her front yard. I figured it was a garage sale or she was termite bombing. As I moved past her house an object I saw stopped me. Dragged me into the present. A chair. The chair? The orange Danish modern chair that I broke and that subsequently broke up my marriage appeared to be sitting on her front lawn. “Impossible,” I thought. That was destroyed, thrown out, gone. I stopped my car abruptly in the street, opened my car door, and ran up into her yard. She was pulling more stuff out of her house. I said, “Hi. Hey, are you selling this stuff?”

“Just take whatever you want. I’m leaving,” she said, going angrily about her business.

“Where did you get this chair? I used to have one exactly like it. I’ve never seen another one.”

“I found it,” she said. “Take it.”

I inspected the chair. It had been carefully rebuilt, put back together. It was the chair.

“Did you find this on the street up on the hill around the corner?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Why?”

“This chair destroyed my marriage.”

She looked at me with a dark, stressed gaze for a second like she was looking through me at something burning in the distance and said, “Mine, too.”

I didn’t ask any questions. Synchronicity was upon us. The causality was there, it was explainable, but the meaning of the object before us was at once unique and shared. It was some kind of black magic that sent my thoughts back to the garage wizard who kept Jung’s curtains locked up. What had he unleashed on this world, my world, her world, with this chair?

“We have to take it out of circulation.”

“Yes,” she said, catatonically, like how I felt.

Then this stranger and I proceeded to destroy the chair with our hands and our feet until it was unfixable. We took a breath and looked down at the scattered chair shards.

“Thanks,” she said.

A horn honked. I turned to see my car, door open, sitting in the middle of the street, running. Someone needed to get by.

“Good luck with everything,” I said, then walked back to my car and drove away, strangely relieved. I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw her making a pile of culprit pieces.

  12  

I’ve had two wives but no children. When my first wife started reading baby books, that was a red flag to me and I freaked out. I knew I had to get out. I wasn’t ready. I felt like if I had kids I would have no life. That everything I wanted to accomplish would have to go on hold or get ditched to service the kid. That my ridiculous show business dream would have to be reined in and I would just have to do whatever was necessary to support a family. That I would be resigned to a life of bitter surrender, trying not to infect the kid with my sadness and disappointment, hoping that the kid didn’t notice my deep resentment of his or her part in my failure.

So, clearly, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind.

When I was with the second wife I thought maybe we could do it. Maybe we should do it. In my mind, I was ready. She wasn’t. She put it very succinctly: “You think I’m going to bring children into
this?” My response was something along the lines of, “What does that even fucking mean? You don’t think I’d be a good father? Fuck you. Fuck this.” The fact is, she was right. I was an abusive, selfish, needy, angry asshole.

Now I’m just kind of selfish, a little less angry, occasionally needy, with flights of asshole. I’ve grown.

After the second divorce I accepted that I wouldn’t have kids. I didn’t have a woman in my life. I was getting old. I would probably be happier without them. I could put an end to the genetic bundle of selfishness, depression, and anger that has tumbled down through time along my father’s line of descent. I would be doing the world a favor.

I’m not sure my parents even wanted to have kids. I think they did it because that was what they were supposed to do; it was what their generation
did
. The truth is, they were kids themselves when they had me. My mother was twenty-two and my father was twenty-six. I don’t really think of them as parents. They’re just these people I grew up with who were a little older than me. My parents were always too worried and panicky, too consumed with themselves to ever make me feel like things would be okay. So now I’m a panicky, worried, self-consumed adult who is fundamentally unable to feel like things will be okay. There is some part of me that will always be looking, futilely, for a parent to just make things okay.

My mother has stepped up her parenting game over the last few years, and she applies these new skills to my brother Craig’s three kids. Grandkids have given her a second shot at being a parent, but in a more hands-off situation. She seems to be excelling.

But when I watch my father around Craig’s kids, it makes me sad to think of little me being raised by this man. He engages with them for a few minutes, until he realizes they aren’t really all that interested in him. Then he detaches. I was in Phoenix for the bat mitzvah of one of Craig’s kids and I had to go pick my father up at his hotel and bring him over to the house. I got to the hotel and I said to my father, “You ready to go?”

“Where we going?” he asked. He was getting dressed.

“We’re going over to Craig’s so you can hang out with the grandkids, right?”

Without irony or a second thought my father said, “Yeah, you know, some people get something out of that. I don’t get anything out of that.” Completely deadpan.

So I said, “Well, what do want to do?”

“You remember those mustard slacks I had? You can’t find those anymore. I’ve looked all over.”

“Okay,” I said, a little afraid of the non sequitur.

“Let’s go across the street to the mall and see if they’ve got them.”

My father and I then went to the mall across the street, where he walked into the most expensive store he could find and dropped three hundred dollars on a pair of almost-mustard slacks. Then we went to my niece’s bat mitzvah brunch so my father could show off his pants.

I am at a crossroads. I am in a relationship with a women who is twenty years younger than I am. I’m not bragging. The age difference presents its own set of problems but I love her. When we met we had no idea that we would end up together. We thought we were just going to hang out, have fun, and move on. Now, after three years of very intense trials and tribulations, fits and starts,
we are living together and she wants a baby. I know this because she says things like, “When are you going to put a baby in me?” I’m thinking, “I don’t know. When you frame it differently?”

I knew this was something she always wanted and now I find myself thinking, “Well, if I’m going to do it, it’s going to have to be with someone her age, and I love her. This is it. This is when it will happen.”

Now it is pressing. Everything within her is screaming
baby now
. When she’s not worrying about her own years of fertility, she’s concerned that if we wait much longer I will be too old to make it for the long haul as a father. She’s worried that by the time it all shakes out, she will have wasted years on me.

I’m afraid that I’m already too old. When I tell people that, they say, “You’re a guy. You can have kids until you’re a hundred if you still have cum in your balls and a way to get it out.” Sorry, didn’t mean to get clinical.

In response to that I say, “I don’t want to do that to a kid.”

I remember the first kid I met with an old dad. It might have been in nursery school. I can’t remember the kid’s name but I recall waiting around after school for our parents to show up. Eventually some old guy pulled up in a car and got out. I said to the kid, “Who’s that?”

“That’s my dad.”

“How old is he?”

“I don’t even know.”

“Does he do anything?”

“Yeah, sometimes. I gotta go. I have to help him.”

I don’t want a kid to go through that. It has been pointed out to me by people with old dads that your dad is your dad and that’s it. You love him regardless. That sounds good in theory. I’m not quite sold.

I know it’s trendy for a man in his late forties or fifties to have his first kid after a life of self-indulgence and fun craps out on
him and doesn’t deliver the deep win with the lasting answers. I don’t want to be that guy.

On the other hand, I see men in their fifties and sixties who have never had kids and I feel that they are missing something, some wisdom, some fundamental humility that comes with being forced to reckon with the kind of responsibility and selflessness that can only come from taking care of a child.

Except for George Clooney. He seems okay.

Maybe I’m projecting. I’m sure I am. That is how I glean meaning. I make up lives and vibes for people I meet and see.

The woman I’m with would be a great mother. She works with severely emotionally disturbed and autistic children. She teaches kids in very difficult situations how to relax and communicate. The patience necessary for that task is daunting and impressive. That on top of the patience necessary to deal with my bullshit should earn this woman some kind of humanitarian award. Or a child.

Why can’t I just do it? Just make a baby? I’m terrified. When she brings it up I hear it as an attack or an ultimatum. I hear it as a manipulation, a trap, a way of staying connected to me, keeping me tethered to her for the rest of my life. My brain spins fear scenarios. Here’s the list.