Plow the Bones (18 page)

My father was an intellectual.

He bought me a cell phone when I was sixteen so that he could call me from the basement and say, “Hey Lieutenant.” (This is how he began every conversation I ever had with him; it’s how he began his toasts at the wedding ceremonies marking both of my failed marriages, and it is how he told me my mother had died when he called from his new place in California, to my new place in Boston). “Hey Lieutenant. I just finished another chapter. Care to give it a listen?”

So I would. I would pass by the stairs to the attic (this is where my mother stayed in those days, with her Kurzweil keyboard and her fantasy novels about opera singers) and I would hear Mom shout down, “Dean, whatcha doing?”

And I would ignore her and go downstairs, past the set and backstage, to visit my father’s greenroom, where he would read to me, in the sonorous baritone he reserved for pronouncements of the gravest profundity, selections from the autobiography of the life he wished he had led. Here’s the first chapter:

The War I Fought

I was drafted into a secret war when I was six years old. I was given a machete, and I went out at dusk to find the threat and destroy it. The threat, in this case, lifted itself up out of the drainage culvert that ran behind my house in Tarzana, California, an army of human hands with foot–long fingers and twenty–eight knuckles and mouths superimposed over their wrist–stumps. The hands would collect on the concrete banks of the culvert in the summers of my childhood, each night when the sun started to go down, and they would click their fingernails against the concrete. The men who drafted me into this war told me that, if the hands were ever to make it past the culvert and into the world, their mouths would open and they would sing a song of such profound joy that humanity would be plunged into universal, suicidal depression through the inevitable comparison of the sum of their own life’s joy to that depicted in the song. This was not allowed to happen, obviously, so… I was in charge of stopping it. I would hack the hands to bits with my machete and throw them back into the shallow water. One day, the men who drafted me came to my school and called me to the principal’s office, where they told me that the job was done, and the world was safe.

The house of my teenagehood always seemed to breathe. It was a labored breath, rattling and uneven, but I could feel it, sitting in my bedroom across the hall from my older sister’s room, or sitting on the couch watching television, or sitting on the toilet, or sitting anywhere. The whole place seemed to take in air and spend it, the walls seemed to move so slowly that you couldn’t be sure they were moving at all, and the whole operation seemed to take so much effort and energy that, falling asleep at night, staring at the television in my room, I was routinely afraid that the works would collapse around me.

I tried speaking to my sister about it on those few occasions when I was allowed into her room. My sister’s room changed every time I went in. She was fickle with her fandom, her interests shifting from moment to moment. I remember when she painted the walls black and put candles on all the flat surfaces, and teased her hair and wore bold make–up that made her look like something excised from a silent movie and dropped into the real world. She was lying on her bed when I came in, staring at the ceiling fan with her headphones on. I opened the door, and then I knocked on it, which I immediately recognized as the wrong order of doing things, and I almost closed the door and ran back to my room out of shame and fear. She didn’t seem to notice. I said, “Hey Marcy?”

She glanced at me, sighed deeply, and shifted her attention back to the ceiling fan.

“Can I come in?” I said.

“I don’t care what you do, Dean.”

So I came. I sat on her black bedspread and stared at her black walls and tried to think of something to say. I said, “Hey, can I ask you something?” Even then, I didn’t know what I wanted to ask.

She sat up without using her arms to support her and fiddled with her portable CD player. Then she sighed dramatically (again) and pulled the headphones down around her neck. She said, “Fine. Free country.”

“Is Norton… you know, is he Mom’s, like… boyfriend, or something?”

Norton. That name, which more than any other I associate with a particular person, a specific face. That name, which to me feels like something slick and sticky and rotten on my tongue and in whatever portion of my brain it occupies. Norton. Who, when I learned the word “obsequious” several years later, sprang to mind as its paragon (and who, despite his omnipresence in those days, was not around when my mom lost her footing and became my dead mom). Norton. My mother’s boyfriend. Or something.

Marcy said, “Mom says he’s her student. He’s taking piano lessons.”

“I know what Mom says. What’s true, though?”

“Dean, what do you think?”

“I think they’re fucking each other,” I said, and I started to cry. I’m not sure why anymore. Maybe I was sure then. Maybe there was some vital imperative that compelled me to cry, and maybe it made sense at the time. But I can’t remember it now.

Marcy put her headphones back on and said, “Yeah, well…” and fell backward onto the bed. The next time I saw her room, it was painted burnt–orange and she had joined the volleyball team at school. There was more than a little of my father in her, the set–builder, the changer of backdrops.

Here is what my father’s autobiography says about when he was sixteen:

The Great Spanish Orgy

I went to Spain when I was sixteen to escape my father, who had no idea that I had spent the majority of my childhood among magic and war but seemed to sense that there was something strange about me in any case and desired nothing less than my humiliation and the destruction of my spirit. He was a dentist. I was a poet. I have always been a poet. My son is also a poet, because I have made him into one. My daughter is a poet of a different sort. My wife is fucking a poem written for her by our house, so at least there is some tenuous theme to attach our family to one another. I had saved some money from the summer previous, when I sold psychic tongues on the black–market, and I used it to buy a plane ticket and a counterfeit passport. These were the days in which you could still smoke cigarettes on airplanes, and I did. Then I got to Barcelona, and I watched the bullfights, which the locals call La Corrida. They shouted “Viva La Muerta!” from the bleachers. In the streets that night, a group of men with long wooden poles maneuvered a gigantic wooden marionette through the avenues and boulevards, and I met a girl named Giselle from France, and she took me to an orgy. She had an extra arm that grew from her side, which she kept wrapped around her belly beneath her shirt. She couldn’t allow it near pen or paper for fear that it would tell her secrets. She claimed to have many secrets, but she would not share them with me. That night, lying on a mattress made of other people sprawled across the floor, with the light from the windows turning everyone bluer than Krishna, and with the shadow of the leering marionette peeking through at us from outside, I gave her extra arm a pen and I let it write some secrets on my back. When I returned home, I had a tattoo artist attach these secrets to me permanently. I have never asked anyone to read them for me, and so I still do not know what they are.

My only real friend in those days was Fir, the Iranian girl with the nose ring. Fir had enormous eyes. She was quiet, and she smiled a lot, and she was thrifty with her attention, and so when she said something nice, she meant it with such sincerity that it wrecked you inside, made you feel somehow simultaneously that you really met her criteria for goodness and worth, and also that you couldn’t possibly deserve it. Around her, you were reminded of all the awful things about yourself that she didn’t know. Or maybe you wouldn’t have been. But I was.

Behind my father’s childhood home (or whatever he imagined to be his childhood home in the wild nonsense of his autobiography) may have been the legendary culvert, but all that was behind mine was an empty lot, overgrown with weeds and freckled with trash and rimmed at the far end by a row of unhealthy looking trees, and beyond that, the freeway. This is where Fir and I spent our afternoons, once we had escaped from high school and the various tortures therein. There was an old wooden observation tower at the edge of the lot, although what you were supposed to observe from on top, neither of us could ever figure out. Its planks were old and dark and soft, and the stairs to the top deck were rotten, and some of them were missing. We spent our afternoons erecting fresh planks stolen from behind the hardware store. We added a room to the bottom by walling off the empty space beneath the top deck, and we decorated the walls with posters of my favorite movies and her favorite bands. We repaired the stairs. We mounted a flag to the guard rail on the top deck, a piece of red fabric that had once been a Halloween Dracula cape, and we wrote in sharpie on the face of it: THIS TOWN BELONGS TO US. Which, thinking back, we had backward.

Fir and I, with the sun beating down on us, sitting together on the observation deck and staring out beyond the sick–looking tree line at the freeway, her smoking Iranian cigarettes pilfered from her father’s cabinet (she was smoking those same cigarettes at my first wedding, and at my second, and she smoked them in the parking lot of the church where my mother’s funeral was held, and I have never learned how she came by them, this endless supply of Iranian smokes; I think, when she finally did return to Iran two weeks ago, she must have been motivated only secondarily by her compulsion toward activism, and primarily by the need to buy more slim, fragrant Iranian cigarettes), and me wracking my brain for something impressive to say. She would talk about how her father was an intellectual, an atheist in exile with slender hands and a well–trimmed beard and half–moon glasses, and how he was always sad, and I would think that we were almost siblings, our fathers like twins from different nations.

Fir said, “After college, I’m going back to Iran. I’m going to be a women’s activist. Tear down the fucking paradigm. That’s what my dad is always saying. You’ve got to tear down the paradigm.”

One afternoon, we sat in the bottom room, sweating because we hadn’t added any windows. What happened was sort of an accident. It just happened. With her huge, happy eyes on me, with her subtle smile, with her arms around my neck, she said, “I don’t ever want to talk about this again, okay? After this? I don’t ever want sex to mean something. Ever. Please? Can we?” I told her we could, because I would have said yes to everything she asked of me, and she laughed a little, and she asked me to tell her what hurt me. And I did. And we laughed, and I cried a little too, and she held onto the back of my head and moved with me. We were very quiet. It was, to date, the only time in my life that I have felt that sex meant anything larger than itself. Afterward, I was very angry, and very alone, and I felt like I had become my mother.

When it was over, we got dressed, and she said, “Wanna go up and smoke?”

So we did.

And sitting in the sparse shade of the trees, among the yellowed weeds and dead grass down below us, I saw Norton. Norton, reading the newspaper. Norton, thirty years old and always dressed in a black suit, even sitting in the grass, even in the summer, with his horseshoe–shaped mustache, licking his lips after every sentence, like his tongue couldn’t stand to stay in his mouth for too long. Norton, so close to our tower, invading the space into which I imagined he was not allowed. He looked up at me and said, “Hey, tiger.” This is what he called me.

Tiger.

I said, “What do you want?”

Fir glared at him. She tapped ash off her cigarette. Something in the way she did this made me love her, because it felt (perhaps only to me) like she was willing the ash to float down toward him, to stain the black pinstripes of his pleated pants. Fir hated Norton, because I hated Norton, and she needed no other justification. She whispered, “Jende,” which is Farsi, and not complimentary.

Norton stood up, brushed grass and dirt from his ass, and was suddenly as immaculate as if he had never sat down in our filthy lot at all. He shrugged and sheltered his eyes from the sun with one big, hairy hand. He said, “Your mom’s looking for you. Better not let her see you with that cigarette.”

I wanted to say something impudent, but I wasn’t brave enough.

Here is what my father wrote about being in love with my mom in his autobiography:

The Magician’s Duel on my Wedding Day

I was in love with my wife’s ability to love me. We met after university, united by a theatrical director I knew in Los Angeles who produced a play I wrote. The play is lost. I can’t recall the name of it. This director friend of mine was producing my play, and the woman who would become my wife was hired as an accompanist, which is to say that she sat at her piano and played happy songs during the happy scenes, and sad songs during the sad scenes. I do not remember thinking that she was pretty, although she is. I only remember thinking that she was lovable. That I could love her, and that she was perhaps capable of loving me. Which was silly of me, ultimately. My director friend told her that I was brilliant, and that I was going places, and that I was destined to be a famous playwright and poet, and she believed him. And that’s why we were married. On the day of our wedding, a Magician who had heard my reputation appeared in my dressing room and challenged me to a duel. The dressing room transformed, mutating into a stage, the walls falling away to make room for a bottomless orchestra pit from which the song of the twenty–eight–knuckled hands was playing so softly that I could barely hear it, and a long panorama of banked arena seating beyond the proscenium, and an audience of faceless men who applauded politely for every trick we performed. He poured a thousand rabbits from his top hat. I removed the top of my cranium and poured rabbits from my skull. He turned to smoke. I turned to glass and shattered. He sawed his assistant in half and danced with her living torso while her legs kicked in time on the table, then reassembled her and took his bow. I reduced myself to my component parts, each atom sawed from its partners and floating as a mist before him in the haze of the stage lights, and I reassembled myself as two smaller men and danced with my reflection before becoming myself again and taking my bow. I was the clear winner. In a rage, the young Magician commanded the hands in the orchestra pit to sing louder, and they did. It was a petty act of revenge, and it destroyed both of us. I returned to my wedding forty–five minutes late, ragged and unkempt, and as I marched down the aisle I saw my wife’s eyes fill with a resigned disappointment and a bewildering absence of anger and a realization that this would be her life with me, forever and ever, an accessory secondary to the awful adventure that haunts me everywhere I go.