I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (33 page)

Dad grabbed several of his own cutlets and dropped them into my basket. “Stop that,” I said. “Don’t do that. Snack on your own tray, bro.”

“Eat it. Eat what you can. It makes me happy when you eat.”

Moments like this one call to my mind his “reluctant” adoption of Zuzu. Zuzu was a tuxedo cat, possibly retarded, who sat outside our front door for an entire week, pink tongue jutting
from the side of his mouth, after he had been kicked out of the canopy by his mother. One day, Dad finally went, “C’mon, cat, beat it,” while laying down a bowl of microwaved half-and-half. Then he went, “Get the hell outta here, cat!” as he made a bed of rags for Zuzu in the dining room. Went, “I despise this stupid, stupid beast,” as Zuzu purred on his chest in the recliner, Dad responsible now for the thing he’d tamed.

He ate crumbs of fried errata from the bottom of my basket by licking his fingers, pressing said fingers into the wax paper, and then sucking the bits into his mouth with sharp intakes of breath. Each one sounded like an airlock hissing shut. He wiped at the greasy nimbus around his lips, said: “Text your mother and tell her we’re going down to Pismo, and that we’ll probably have to stop in a motel for the night. Tell her we’ll be back later tomorrow. But make it sound like we’re not having a good time.”

We drove farther inland. The dry hill-and-vale landscape resembled the face of a cheap basketball left too long in the sun. Farming towns here and there.

“The future, you understand, is going to be roving gangs, raping and pillaging this countryside,” Dad opined. “Hell, one of those Asian gangs could take over an entire town right now.”

“
Mad Max,
you’re describing.”

“
Mad Ming.
Everybody’s gonna have to be on the same page. One out of every three people is gonna have to be police, or a friend of police.”

“You know, actively clinging to an outmoded view of reality is, like,
the
basis for mental illness.”

“Fine. Sure. The Chinese
don’t
want your resources. They just want to trade with you!”

“It’s like you’re still navigating by maps that have Siam on them.”

“
Nooo,
don’t anybody listen to what this crazy old cracker has to say. His opinions clearly don’t matter anymore.”

“They
are
becoming less and less significant, statistically speaking.”

“True enough. I didn’t even
vote
in the last election. Not for ol’ numbnuts there. What’s-his-name, the guy with all his money in the Cayman Islands.” When he changed his line of sight, his saggy earlobes swayed like drops held pendant by surface tension. “We all have private ails, okay? I just don’t see why
now
we have to have public cures for them. I would prefer to still be living in an America of a hundred fifty million people.”

“You, the Beav, and George Wallace should build a time machine.”

“It used to be a hell of a lot better.”

“A lot more DUI deaths, for one thing.”

“Absolutely. Who else can lay claim to drinking and driving? Russia?”

“No, their historical soul expects too much absurdity. They mount cameras on their dashboards.”

“Getting kneewalking drunk, and then venturing into the night, with a deadly weapon in your hands?”

“Now we’re talking. Fucking, refusing to surrender your freedom to pick up and go. Relinquishing to
no man
your right to kill your own fool self.”

“And whoever gets in your way.”

“Back when you could whomp your kid a good one in public. When he deserved it. When he was being a shit in a restaurant, let’s say.”

“Cruising for a bruising, in the restaurant’s
smoking section.
”

“Brings a tear to my eye.”

“Goddamn things were made of
steel
back then. Get those tubs of shit up to speed, and the tailfins started shaking off.”

“Weaving past wooden billboards that’re advertising Edsels. Slogans are like, ‘Pulp your body in the crumpled flametrap of tomorrow … today!’ ”

“That’s how a lot of the kids in my high school died. Used to be that fifty thousand people would get killed over Memorial Day weekend.”

“That is almost certainly untrue.”

“Hell yes it’s true. Look it up on your Google machine. It. Was.
Great.
”

Lost in his reverie, Dad laughed until his eyes squinched shut. I reached for the wheel but was batted away.

“When I’m gone, what I want you to remember is:
They
didn’t build this. You did.”

“Also false. I’ve done no civic dirty work.”

“Well, your people did.”

“And what would you like me to mourn first at the wake? When I’m gazing out the window above the sink, scraping casserole from dishes? What’ll it be? Mayonnaise? Set shots? The Rascal-brand motorized scooter?”

Christ alive do I often want to break through the frozen sea of his certainty. See him plunged finally into ambiguity. But in taking an ice ax to his footing, I would cause us both to go for a swim.

Prejudice is an organic truth, false in itself but accumulated and transmitted over generations. What my father intuits but communicates poorly is: we can’t just up and rid ourselves of it and expect to wake up the same. The nation that renounces its foundational prejudices all willy-nilly will then renounce itself until it has nothing left to renounce. Anybody who pines for the good old days pines for a time when this was understood implicitly—that the lifespan of a people coincides exactly with the duration and consistency of that people’s prejudices.

“They ain’t gonna be playing fucking
ice hockey,
I’ll tell you
that much,” he concluded, pulling us into a gas station. He filled her up, but partially, as he carries only so much cash. He got into a funny little back-and-forth with the attendant, who didn’t speak the good English.

Watching him stand there in front of the tank, with his feet, hands, and head positioned urinally, I thought: When you can’t get the world to see you as you see yourself—shame. That is the definition of shame.

God. The first time you see your old man shamed? The beginning of the end right there. He can no longer beat up everything. He stops seeming flush with the blood of the world. After that moment, he becomes to you this chastened, overextended empire of a man. Self-mythology be damned, he has obviously wrapped up his era of misadventure. He will recede. The trouble he stirred up will follow him home.

For me, that happened the day he got dumped overboard on a whitewater rafting trip. A trip that, whoa ho, he did not want to take. For one thing, it had been organized not by him, but by Mom’s brother. For another, he had to endure mateship under a nature-boy captain named Gage.

We were washboarding down a fairly rugged class-three rapid. Dad ordered a zag where Gage said zig; we struck submerged boulders; Dad was tossed. Then he just trundled alongside the raft, getting buffeted between rocks and hard places.

I lunged after him, grabbed him under the shoulders of his life vest, tried heaving him into the vessel. I was a fourth-grader, too weak to do it, and the raft was yawing dangerously. Anyway, he wasn’t cooperating. He’d gone limp. When I got him half out of the water, he looked me in my eyes, shook his head
no,
and slid back into the froth.

It’s a matter of perspective, I guess. You need to get far enough away from your father to see in him the shape of a flawed and fallible man. But you never can get all the way there. It’s
like that math paradox where, to flee the room, you’re allowed one big step toward the door, but each one after that has to be half the size of the last. Eventually, you’re just a small distance nearer the exit.

We paddled ahead and waited at the bottom of the rapid. I can still see him as he was when he washed out: bloodied, recumbent, his head above water. Somehow, a lit cigarette was in the right corner of his mouth. When he drew on it, it canted at the angle of gun salutes.

“What you must remember,” he said upon opening the driver’s-side door. “What you absolutely must remember is this: it’s always the darkest before it’s pitch black.”

Beyond the Pismo Beach pier, the megaton yolk of the setting sun had broken and run into the Pacific. Dad sat next to me on a bench.

“When’s the last time you had a perfect moment?” he asked.

“Like …?”

“Like when I used to patrol this stretch of coast, fifty miles out in the destroyer. At night, I’d come onto the deck, and I wouldn’t be able to tell where the sky stopped and the water began. I was landless. Moments like that, you cherish. I’ve had fewer and fewer of those.”

“You ever read
Moby-Dick
?” I asked, knowing the answer. “ ‘In landlessness alone resides the highest truth’? Or are you on year eighteen of your twenty-year plan to get through that Blackbeard biography on your nightstand?”

“I still miss it,” he said, stubbing out another stick of gum on his tongue. “But now I look around myself and wonder, What the hell is it I’m missing?”

The excitement and the rituals, I thought. Blotting out anxiety while skimming over the surface of a void.

“Well,” I said. “For me, it’s the opposite. For me, it’s the time you took me, Ricky, and Ryan to the Monster Jam truck rally at the old Orange Bowl.”

“You mean the jet engine!”

“The very one.”

“Kee-rist. During ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ ”

“They wheeled it out, put an old car behind it, then dropped the hammer. Engine spewed hot fire until that whole jalopy was puddled on the ground.”

“Rockets’ red glare.”

“All of us, arm in arm.”

“In all my years, I have never heard scooter trash cheer that hard.”

Bloody rare light drained from the few clouds’ windward halves. Under the pier, seals were up and barking like they’d stubbed something. I was feeling pretty good. Though I’d learned well enough to bask in these moments without affixing to them anything as dumb or onerous as, say, the expectation of continuity.

“You got a take on things,” Dad began again. “Like soccer, for instance. You can see the future. I can only see the past. Still, I find it very hard to believe that Americans—American
fathers
—would give up head-busting for that pussy sport.”

We watched the waves hang, break, slide.

Dad snapped his gum, sewing a stitch of muscle in his temple.

They’re an energy disturbance, waves. Energy but no matter is moving through them. It’s crazy to think about. The ocean is just this big puddle of energy roiling back and forth, end to end, forever.

“For instance, you have no idea the national shitting of the pants that went on when they launched Sputnik,” he said. “Thing was the goddamn size of a volleyball. A volleyball with
some car antennas sticking out of it. Had one of those radios that kept squawking like how you say I squawk. We thought it was the end of the world. We started sharpening sticks to get ready for it.”

Just then, a hurtle of mod lovers on fixed-gear bikes sped between our feet and the pier’s railing. “Holy shit,” Dad said, shooting up, tracking them as they went. “Someone get me a fucking two-by-four.”

I took advantage of the opening. “I think I’m going to try to write stuff full-time,” I said. “Support myself that way.”

“This mean you’re going to quit your job at Yeshiva?”

“Think so. Think I’m going to take a real-ass run at this.”

“Just gonna sit at home, make like the constipated mathematician, work shit out with a pencil?”

I stood.

“That worries me,” he said, starting back down the pier. “I worry about your discipline. Discipline is the power to say no.”

When we parked under the terra-cotta awning at a Super 8, he told me, “Stay in the car. I don’t wanna give them reason to suspect some
Lolito
shit here.”

Whenever I come home, or what counts as home now, Dad’s got a new bottle of Maker’s Mark waiting for me. He buys them at Costco; they are comically oversize, 1.75 liters each. I’ll open the door, sling down my bag—and there one sits, still sealed in red wax, looking like a large mallet resting on its head.

“Got you that Marker’s Mark,” he’ll say, purposefully mispronouncing it. He swears that in his day, they only ever drank Jack Daniel’s. “You gotta finish it, because no one here’s gonna.”

So I do. Before we left the apartment, I poured up the last of the bottle into a travel thermos.

I know it’s not the substance that’s addictive. The substance is just another tool. Something to pry open the part of me that was vulnerable, once, back before that part of me curled in on itself like a hand holding something squirmy and potential. Pupal.

Alcohol is a tool, and so is writing. Reporting, too. When getting drunk, or blanking out into a recording consciousness, I’m able to lose myself to time. When getting drunk, or turning reportorial grist into a semicoherent narrative (five hundred words a day, at least, if I’m to have that sundowner!)—I know from fear, anxiety.

When doing either of these things, I am—for the time being, at least—
free.
A worm on sunny open ground, giving zero shits about a bird.

When doing neither of these things, I can hear the rustle of blood in my ears. The kindling crackle of ear hairs trembling. I sort of want to die.

Hence, I do both. Then I wake up—and there it is, the dusty aftertaste of the mortal state—but also this sense of having had my hands on something before it slipped away. I’ve done to myself what saltwater does to thirst. I get up and do it again.

Find me a man without an addiction. I don’t think you can. Whatever it might be that he’s addicted to is incidental. It all comes down to the same thing: a means of fleeing yourself and plunging trance-like after transcendence. It’s the fulfillment, adulterated or not, of a sincere desire. I want to give myself over, utterly.

The problem is that a sponge can’t wring itself dry.

Late morning, we stood in the lacy sunlight of a redwood grove. It smelled sharply of pine needs, tinder. Dad decided that I
should be made to explore the ruins of Jack London’s wilderness manse.

As we walked toward the visitors’ center, he peered upward. His lenses looked alchemized. I held my phone in landscape mode, to take a picture. “Say ‘dick cheese.’ ”