I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (16 page)

In the empty apartment parking lot, Dad got out of shotgun to guide Mom.

“ ’MONBACK. ’MONBACK,” he shouted, his head turned, his arm churning. Mom sighed, glanced from him to me in the rearview. “My husband and son,” she said, smiling with her eyes.

Now that she’s semiretired, or maybe freelancing is the better term, she wants to pick up where she left off with the children she barely saw while supporting the family. But when she looks at me, I can tell that she sees a tall drink of
him,
husband concentrate, and barely watered down at that. Her fat, cross-eyed baby—“Fatty from Cincinnati,” she used to call me—no more; returned to her is the Manchurian Son. Occasionally, she’ll ask if I remember how, before Dad’s unemployment, she’d come home early and sit with me on the couch, singing the transposed lyrics, “Button up your overcoat / you belong to me!” I do not.

She compensates by buying gifts. Sometimes soap or razors, but mostly it’s clothes. Idealized clothes, as though I were some large, churlish kewpie. This visit, she presented me with a pink-and-yellow checked oxford shirt, for next Easter mass. “
Très
gay,” Dad pronounced it. I can already see myself sitting in the
pew between them, Mom gently weeping, Dad refusing to kneel before the Host. He never could take that second step, come to believe that a power greater than himself might restore him to sanity.

“Hey,
you
married him,” I said. “At least you had a choice.” She narrowed her eyes in the rearview, bit a nail. I think, in some or another sense, she has washed her hands of me.

Dad got back in and huffed, “We’re ten goddamn minutes late to this ballgame, people!”

Is
he worse now? He’s never
not
been antsy, or wary, not that I can recall. To this day, he refuses even to carry credit cards, because “they got chips for the eyes in the sky.” He jokes about it, but a part of him really does believe that Japanese-made autos have in them a destruction sequence that can be flipped from Tokyo. He carries coupons, notes, receipts—all his corroborating evidence—in a wallet that cannot completely fold. When he stands after sitting, its swollen, misaligned chambers look like an infarcted heart in back of his ass.

He’s an analog curmudgeon. He carries on his person a cloudy plastic newspaper sleeve full of change, which doubles as a blackjack in a pinch. He once threw the GPS out of the car because he thought its scentless British lady-voice was mocking him. When I first showed him how to use Microsoft Office, he denounced Clippy as an agent of Mom. If I point a phone at him, he thinks I’m live-streaming him to the world. If I double over and tap at one, he thinks I’m taking notes to do likewise later.

Funny how perspicacity and paranoia are the two sides of the same one fish flopping around out of water.

He believes everyone’s turned against him. That we’ve achieved unanimity minus one. Which, in a way, he’s right.
He
hasn’t changed. Our attitudes toward him have. But, at the same time: we’ve gotten older and somewhat more mature, and
he
hasn’t changed.
He’s arch-conservative in that sense, that he’d prefer everything to be as it was when he had equilibrium in his work/home life. When he last had a job, and also fun.

For a long time now, he’s been duratively locked on
control.
A white-hot boiler with the relief valve broken off.

“You know who was right?” he asked the second we hit god-awful traffic on the 101. “Me. None of you people listen to me anymore.”

“We have no goddamn choice but to listen to you,” I chirped from the backseat. This, our family life—even at the thinnest, earliest moments of my stretched memory, it felt like being on a ship’s crew. Being a team of persons, each with a defined role and a murky backstory, sailing together through negative space. The one imperative: buoyancy. I.e., do
not
rock the boat. And at the sound of sirens, faint or imagined—our captain jams our ears with wax.

“No. No.” He squinted as though there were rocks in his shoe, scratched his chest with three fingers. “What I do—it’s consideration for the other.”

We lurched with the traffic. Mom skipped from lane to lane, hoping to hit on one that would carry us away from this conversation. Thirty years, she’s endured. When she sees
Dateline
reports on divorce or hookup culture, she says, “I guess virtue is dead in this world.”

“None of you people takes into account the goddamn
weather,
okay?” Dad coughed, hocked, stored the phlegm under his tongue.

“The
traffic.
” He opened the door, leaned out, spit demurely. “The
dangers all around you.
”

I recalled the news story about the highway shooter on the loose and found myself fearing that he was right: there’s someone scoping us out right now. The gunshot wouldn’t be the worst part.

The man contends that there’s a real world out there, and the only one who’s visited is him. The purest distillation of this world was Vietnam, where he got fired upon if he so much as lit a cigarette at night. But getting shot at was something of a relief—he knew VC were out there; now he knew exactly where.

He’d never dream of walking under a ladder, or acting cavalier around a mirror. Every time salt is spilled, three dashes go over his left shoulder.
Left.
Wood gets knocked on, but perfunctorily, as he has completely rid himself of any hope for good outcomes. This attitude is comforting, I think, insofar as it presumes someone or something cares enough about you to make you learn from your mistakes.

He supports the death penalty and doesn’t sweat wrongful convictions because, the way he figures it, even if you didn’t do
that,
you most likely did
some
thing over the course of your life that was reason enough to forfeit your gift.

If no one’s on the line when he picks up the phone, he will for a full minute yell into the dead silence: “Hello?
HELL
o. Heh … HEY? Hell
OH
? Who’s … HELLO?…”

“You think it’s easy? Being me?” he asked. “Think it’s fun?”

“You know what’s not easy and not fun?” I countered. “Being around you when you’re like this.”

“Then don’t behave in a way that makes me like this.”

Frozen on an overpass, Dad put his nose to the window and scanned. “I didn’t say it then, but—you should’ve stuck with baseball,” he said. “Killed me how you quit. You could’ve been a coach.” The sky here was the purple not of the crayon, but of its wrapper. The Oakland Coliseum’s lights blazed just ahead.

We used to take bats and balls to the small park at the end of our street during this magic hour. I’d be the one hitting fungo, because Dad had better range than me at fifty-eight. Every so often I’d overshoot him, and balls would bounce over the seawall into Biscayne Bay. Once their wool windings dried, they
hardened into gastroliths. Connect bad with one of those, and I’d be zapped into mindfulness of the skeleton I wore under my cargo shorts. One such bloop—a little Texas leaguer, a dying quail—Dad ran down so hard that a tooth fell out of his mouth. His teeth back then were always falling out. Now they’re dazzlingly white and fake, but back then they were U’ed in green growth, verdure, like the wall under a window-unit A/C. Verily, the teeth dripped out of that man’s mouth. During afternoon naps, even. If a tooth was gold, he’d say, “Leave it in Coke overnight. It cleans it.”

“Why didn’t you say that then?” I asked.

“Hey,
your
life,” he said. “Which reminds me: When did you get so bookish? And when, exactly, did you start taking baths like a lady?”

I had to laugh at that. Leavened now, but still considering the honking line of cars ahead of us, Dad said, “Screw it. It’s already the top of the fourth. We’ll watch it at home.”

“Thank God,” Mom said. She yanked us onto the shoulder and floored it.

“
Fuuuuuck
you, oh,
Tennnnnn
-essee!
Yoooou
bunch of
rednecks
!” Dad was extemporizing in time with the University of Florida fight song. The Gators had just scored a touchdown, and he’d laddered the volume bar unbearably high.

“Good
bye
!” Mom yelled, slamming the front door on her way to teach catechism to middle-schoolers.

This apartment of theirs isn’t in San Francisco proper, but across the bay on a wooded hill in Marin County. I don’t know what it means that they moved from one place with no seasons to another place with no seasons. But it was salutary, I think, the move. They’ve got a good view here, and the rent’s not too high. There’s a spyglass for watching ships in the bay (“That NKK freighter’s going too slow—here it comes, the dirty bomb, kiss your ass goodbye!”), and a beautiful thrush lands daily on the railing of their balcony. Dad calls it the Bluebird of Unhappiness because it eats other birds and shits on everything. He lines up kettle-cooked potato chips for it in the morning.

It’s really just a large studio with a bathroom, a few load-bearing walls, and a spare futon. They’ve decorated it with the catalog bric-a-brac Dad orders Mom for birthdays and bank holidays—1:4-scale ceramic Jesuses, ceramic Madonnas, crystal
saints. Karen’s books are out and prominent, as is a black-and-white photo of the USS
Twining,
the destroyer on which Dad served briefly as a communications officer while living in San Fran before shipping off to Vietnam. In the picture, the
Twining
is chugging past this very spot, the Tiburon Peninsula. It was a gift; guy doesn’t do photos. On the mantel next to it is another gift, this one from Karen, a carved inscription that reads “How can we miss you if you haven’t left yet?”

“Who was it that said this team’d get in your blood, huh?” he shouted over the fight song. Onscreen, wide receivers hopped into the air and bumped flanks.

In the big old Miami house, Saturdays were easier to abide. Starting at 1:00 p.m., Dad would shoo us from the kitchen so he could watch college football. He had his three institutions—Navy, Vanderbilt, and the University of Florida. He’s never told me how they rank in terms of his affection, but I think they go, in ascending order: Navy, UF, Vandy.

With Navy, he only cares that they beat Army. Which they
did
do when we went to the 2003 Army-Navy game in Philadelphia. Mom rode out that day’s blizzard by huddling in the ladies’ room with all the other moms, penguin-like. It was the first either she or I had seen of snow. I was supposed to be taking the SAT II that day, but, fuck it. Knowing no better, I wore a windbreaker and corduroy pants. I actually froze my ass off.

The Gators, Dad loves for their endearing manner of being always on the brink of falling apart. But they win more than they lose.

It’s doomed Vanderbilt that has claim on his heart. When watching their games, something compelled him to stomp around the kitchen, open and close the oven a certain number of times, flick the porch light on and off. His curses got strange, absentminded. Cigarette smoke would curl alchemically from under the door. I’d look through its diamond-shaped window,
but I saw only his outline. He watched the losses in darkness, backlit by the portable television’s cemetery light.

He’ll often brag that during his time there, the Commodores had no more than two wins in a season. This he will follow with a prideful recounting of how the Sarasota Sailors won none and tied one in the years he was on the high school football team.

And, as parents are models whether they want to be or not, I, too, have come to desperately love and need a sport—ice hockey. It’s something he’s never understood. Doesn’t get where it came from. I’ve skated on ice like three times in my life. But he respects it, my fandom.

He knows that I can’t bring myself to cheer for a team unless they blow irredeemably. They must play ugly, hopeless hockey. They need to lose night in, night out, like it’s their job. Only then will I devote myself to them. Then, I’ll watch and watch and watch, because it seems to me that
someone
has to.
Someone
has to tend to all that defeat.
Someone’s
gotta cram it in there, oozing and deleterious, like spent nuclear fuel in a hollowed-out mountain.

No, I love hockey even though—precisely because—it can never threaten to love me back.
That
he gets.

When he finally ratcheted down the volume, I asked him, “What frat were you in again?”

“That was at Vanderbilt,” he said. “You know, you think, ‘Huh.
Animal House.
That was a funny movie.’ What you
should
think is, ‘Those people really existed, and they were monsters.’ ”

He wondered if he’d ever told me about the time he shit in a small box, hid said box inside his dorm phone booth, then laughed for weeks as the stink made young men weep while collect-calling their mothers?

He wondered if he told me about the times he and some buddies ambushed a bus at the top of an icy Nashville hill—mobbed it, stopped it, pushed against one side until it spun to the bottom?