Blue Sky Dream (37 page)

This story of a foiled, last-ditch escape attempt is new and surprising to me and it prompts me later, as we drive along the World’s Most Beautiful Freeway in my father’s brand-new, silver and streamlined Camry, to ask him for one more revelation. I have never, in the twenty years after my father beat my face black and blue on a summer evening, summoned that memory from him. I have long since forgiven him for it, have long since returned the crush of his hugs with love to match, but I am wanting to know the answer to this remaining mystery in my father. So cataclysmic an episode must hold a key, certainly, to the puzzle my father was then. The car is quiet and warm, and my father and I have had a good day in the sky, and so I ask him, “Do you remember it?”

“Yes,” he says, “I hit you, didn’t I?” He wears the expression of one asked to recall the plot of an obscure movie. By the look on his face, I presume he would prefer to forget. I feel bad for bringing it up and I do not expect any more revelations today. Then my father says, “I have been abusive to every one of you in the family. There are
so many
bad times I’ve lived to regret.

“Back then, I found myself in a very disturbed state of mind for days on end. And then I’d snap out of it. I was in my late thirties and my life was crystallizing. I could clearly see that things weren’t going to turn out the way I had hoped, the way I had expected when I felt I had plenty of options. I began to feel hemmed in, penned in.

“None of the benefits, none of the very powerful pluses that were coming my way on a daily basis for having married Terry and for having you and your brother and sisters in the house, none of that seemed to make a bit of difference. When that was all, really, that I should have ever cared about. I was pissed off all
the time and life looked to me a very dreary landscape. And what that leads to is, if you’re disappointed in yourself you find yourself doing bizarre things that hurt the people you love. You pick on the people you love and the reason you do it is you know they’ll forgive you. And that’s what I would do. Even today I fly into little rages with the people I love. I hope they are fewer and less severe and not as long lasting. It’s just a phenomenon I learned about myself, and I see it for what it is.”

My father tells me then about how he came to see this phenomenon for what it is. He would rage at his wife or child and the next morning he would arrive at Lockheed sick with remorse that ached like an alcoholic’s hangover. He would sit, then, at his desk writing what coworkers assumed was documentation related to a secret project of technology. In truth, my father spent hour upon hour writing long essays to himself, recording feelings observed within, working his way painstakingly toward some diagnosis of the irrational at his core. Whatever came to mind he wrote down, blame heaped not only on himself for becoming a “paper pusher,” but also on his wife and children for blocking his way out. What he wrote was often raw and ugly and he never meant it for other eyes, my father tells me. But he kept every page in a folder by his desk, a folder that grew thick over the course of fifteen years, and at times when the hangover of contrition had lifted, he would pull old essays from his file to see where he had been and whether he might now know enough to troubleshoot the problem.

What my father concluded is this. “Puzzling over why I was such a bizarre personality, I resolved it was the difference between myself as reality displayed itself to me, and the inflated self-image I carried around.” My father’s task, the task that Lockheed Missiles and Space Company had in a sense assigned him, was to sit at his desk and write memos to himself until the expectations of a hot young fighter pilot had been reduced to fit the space that had in fact been reserved for him. When my father wrote his last letter to himself, sometime in the early 1980s, he
passed the entire file through the shredding machine Lockheed provides for classified documents of no further use.

I love my father all the more for telling me this story, for adding to his familiar theme of regret the honest admission that we, his wife and children, had not only given him much, but had exacted a cost as well. I thank him for the doubt and pain he has revealed to me, layer by layer, not just through his stories but even when I knew it as inchoate anger. I am grateful because all of it showed me why the culture of the corporate bureaucracy was a way of work not only to be avoided, but unlikely to thrive forever. Those organization men and women who shared his misgivings but repressed and ignored them, choosing instead to force a happy face at the dinner table every night, did their children a disservice. If my father had not exposed for me the flaws in its foundation, would I have managed to be so far clear of the blue sky monolith when the toppling began?

On the freeway crowded with commuters finishing their day of work, my father finds a slot in the formation between a rusted Dodge pickup carrying Mexicans and gardening equipment, and a Mercedes sedan with a license plate boasting ABUV PAR. I turn the conversation away from disappointments, toward the sky. I ask my father why the former jet pilot had learned to fly powerless sailplanes years ago, just before he quit flying altogether.

“Soaring is a battle of wits,” he says. “You are an intellect dealing with the airmass. It’s invisible but you are trying to exploit its properties in a way that favors you. And if you don’t do it well, the negative aspects of that airmass are going to force you to land sooner than you wanted to.

“So there’s a case where, sure, you’re encased in a machine, but really what’s going on is intellectual.”

G
ary Kolegraff cheerfully tells me that his Navigation Technologies job did not last past three months, that he has landed and
lost many other jobs after that, and that he is, for the moment, without employment.

“These companies are generations ahead of Lockheed and I find it a really hard fit. They actually make you work! Believe it or not, I may go back to Lockheed for a temp job.”

But not if his latest dream were to come true. He has taken the savings in his Lockheed 401K and rolled it into high-risk, high-growth investments, some of which, like a software maker for the Net, are yielding extremely well. His goal is to clear a $100,000 gain in one day and, if all goes well, to be a millionaire in a few years. Then he will never need a job at all.

“The other thing I’ve been doing is hanging out in coffee bars. That’s what I enjoy most. Just having a cup of coffee and taking a hike all day.”

The cruise ship girlfriend from Greenwood, Indiana, had not been his type, which is fine because he has decided he lacks interest in marriage, anyway. He is living, still, in the rented tract home with the same two single men. Near as I can see, Gary Kolegraff has reinvented himself into a component very attractive to the new economy: the white male unburdened by family, accustomed to the notion of no job (much less a lifetime career), the coffee shop dweller ready to bet his retirement fund on the rises and falls of virtual corporations making their runs at the global market.

“I got my father interested in investing, too. He’s making a fortune in tobacco.”

I
hang up the phone and move toward the sound of my baby daughter crying. We are alone in the condominium, Nora and I, for this is one of those days her mother spends at the university where she is a professor of education. I meet Nora’s reaching arms with my own, lifting her from her crib and pulling her tightly to me as we go to the diaper-changing table. At the advanced
age of thirty-eight, I am enclosing a child of my own, finally, in a father’s hug.

My wife and I are every bit the cliché of our time as my parents are of theirs. Like any truly modern couple, we do not cede separate realms to each other as did my engineer father and mystic mother. We have been soulmates since our meeting in college, Deirdre and I, drawn together by all we have in common. We are Irish Catholic children of sunny suburbs who share ironic agnosticism, leftward politics, a taste for impolitic humor. We make our livings with words on computer screens and are always interested to read whatever latest product the other has manufactured from those words.

The conceit of the son of the suburbs who moves to the city is that his choice is bolder than the example of the parents. But I don’t think that about myself anymore. Mine has been the more timidly conservative life, in many ways. I did not gamble my happiness on four children before I was thirty-five, nor was I audacious enough to believe I could invent meaning in the vacuum of a freshly sterile subdivision. Deirdre and I have chosen to live in a city of beauty and every amenity, a very easy place to be with no child or even with one. So flush with Asian investment is Vancouver, so perfectly manicured are its parkways and neighborhoods and tourist-friendly attractions, that this city has become the highly desirable suburb to the Pacific Rim. When Diefenback Elkins, a U.S. design firm, advised Air Canada to market all of Canada as “a kind of innocent America, as yet untainted by ethnic tensions and urban blight,” the target customer was me. A blue sky child is raised to recognize the fragrance of optimism in the air, and, for now, Vancouver is heady with it.

From Vancouver we ship to Nora’s grandparents packages stuffed with pictures and videotapes of baby firsts. In return we receive clothes, toys, safety-approved car seats, and Jolly Jumpers, all the equipment necessary for raising a modern child. Clearly my mother and father, like Deirdre’s parents, can hardly contain their relief that Nora exists, that we have made this demonstration
of faith in the future. It does not seem to matter to them that Nora will not have what they gave me. She will be raised in the vertical, lawnless downtown, without a cul-de-sac full of playmates or a walnut tree to climb. She will not have a restless, fix-anything force of nature for a father, nor will she be shown the workings of my mother’s heaven. Her father will not be one who planned his flight and now flies his plan, for I have no plan. I have, merely, a nervous sense of the shifting movements of air that we, and now Nora, too, float upon.

EPILOGUE
 VIRTUAL BLUE SKY
 

O
nce you’re cleared for take-off, we’ll initiate your catapult down the launch tube. Now remember, you’ll be at full throttle by now. Once you’re movin’, give the stick a little backward pull and get your nose up. And you’ll get your lift from the end of the deck
.…

The man telling me this, telling me how I will soon fly a jet off the deck of an aircraft carrier, is jut jawed and tan faced, wearing the familiar brown cotton and silver bars of a Naval flight commanding officer. He is explaining to me the procedures for operating the X-21 Hornet, “a top secret, high performance strike fighter that just rolled out of Strategic Command R&D labs.” The genius of this machine, the evolved result of a half century of American aerospace, is that a person like me, a jet pilot’s son who never learned to fly, can pilot the X-21 Hornet with less than an hour of training. That is why I am here in this windowless briefing room on Spacepark Way, preparing myself to take the controls.

 … You’re gonna learn real fast why they call it a joystick. It’s
a state-of-the-art pressure sensitive mechanism that requires the slightest force in any direction to get a big, and I mean big response.… The Hornet is the Defense Department’s answer to the security of our nation in the 21st century, with the most sophisticated aerodynamics, the most advanced avionics, and the most accurate weapons in the world …

In this script (and it is a script, for my “Commanding Officer” is “Max Power,” an actor speaking to me through a television screen), the precise reserve of my father’s aviator language devolves into corny macho-isms I recognize from elsewhere, Clint Eastwood movies and Tom Clancy novels and Desert Storm headlines in
Newsweek
. These are glitches that break the spell, collapse the whole effect, but still, I tell myself, this is experimental stuff and I am not interested in waiting until the product has been perfectly engineered.

I have paid my twelve dollars and seventy-five cents to Magic Edge, Inc., was issued a flight suit at the cash register, and had my new code name, Astro, recorded in the computer. I have been introduced to my squadron leader, a live person, clean cut and all business as squadron leaders must be. He has collected me and three other customers, men who have strolled over from one of the tilt-up office buildings across the street in search of an airborne coffee break. We instant wing mates have been pounded with the tape-recorded thunder of fighter jets passing overhead as we have followed our squadron leader down diamond-plate steel stairs, beneath gray-girdered bulkheads, into the briefing room where Max Power lives on laser disk.

 … All right, people, I’ve heard you’re a bunch of hot shots, and I’m anxious to see if the rumors are true. I’ll be keepin’ an eye on you and I hope you like this dream machine as much as I do. Good luck and good flying.…

My wing mates and I are strapped into the cockpits of our respective X-21 Hornets, the black Plexiglas shells closing over us, the control panels glowing before us, the joysticks in our hands. I hear the voice of my squadron leader in my ear, telling
me to throttle up. I feel the jolt of the catapult launch, the surge of acceleration into the simulated blue sky ahead.