I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (32 page)

“
I
get to choose how to make a life. I choose this.”

“How is what you’re doing mature?”

“How’re
you
mature? The time has long since come and fucking gone, okay, when you should’ve been like, ‘Shit, my seed’s grown. He is no longer one of the eggs in my basket. He has in fact hatched into a bird? A bird that will occasionally return to the basket, but to curl up, feign egginess, all for the sake of the basketholder?’ ”

“Just wait till you have your own.”

“Be free, man. War’s over.”

“This shit ends only when I’m plotted in the ground.”

There was a campaigner’s red in his face when he marched out the door.

9/29/13

He did not tell me where he went or what he did for all those hours. But he
did
come back with an offer: no Ohio, but a one-day road trip. He agreed to my agreement only after I promised I wouldn’t write about it.

The chariot awaiting us was a 1997 Ford Taurus, dull silver. Low-slung she is, and wide, with the oblong headlights and slack little grill-slot mouth that all domestic buckets came outfitted with at the millennium. She looks sluggish, like the sort of thing that would live in the mud in a tropical river and make for your anus the second you dove in. Except plastic, of course, and a car.

Do you know her? You do. She is what you will see if you mishear your GPS and turn off the interstate midtrip, having then to drive through an eerie methtown shambles before finding a spot to U-ey. There, on a blasted side street, acreep at idling speed and driverless, somehow, is a 1997 Ford Taurus, dull silver.

“I did the research, and I told your mother not to buy this rusted-out shitbox,” Dad called through the open front door. “Es
pecially
not used. Thing’s got the worst gas mileage I’ve ever seen.”

He spritzed off-brand cleaning fluid onto the windshield, ragged it in with the heel of his hand. Next, he tested the tensile strength of the zip ties tied to what used to be door handles. He never trusted the Taurus’s one amenity, automatic locks, so, after many years of strenuous handle checking in parking lots, all but one have come off in his hands. “No good deed goes unpunished, I guess,” he said.

We saddled up. Farther along the wooded hill’s incline, a fawn watched us from a stand of cedars. Its face and snout were crusted with red spider mites. After three tries, Dad got the engine to turn over. “I can’t take you anywhere because of
her,
you know,” he said. When we pulled away, I could see that the mites were teeming, a living death mask. “I don’t want to hear her bitch for months or years because we went to Ohio without her.”

“Totally why,” I sneered, checking the center console. The mouthwash was in there, as always.

“I really wanted to do it, but I also didn’t want to get my ass chewed out.”

In high school, when the Taurus was passed on to me my senior year, the center console came stocked with holy water from Mom and a small, unopened bottle of Listerine from Dad. For emergencies, both.

“I just don’t want anybody bitching at me anymore,” he said. “Like the trip to the fucking ballpark the other night. She didn’t want to go, but if we’d left her out of it—hell to pay.”

We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge going southbound. Dad hunched in his seat and Indian-burned the wheel while weaving between lanes, straddling them occasionally. He projects his anger and fear into the minds of those who make him angry and fearful. Below us, the dark shapes of container ships glided across the water like cloud shadow.

“That’s what people fear most, you know,” he said. “The total loss of control.”

He took his eyes off of the road to mad-dog me. He glanced down at my hands, which were instinctively tapping at my phone. “People fear that more than death,” he said. “Being trapped, in a kind of a prison, like. Nowhere to run, and people are poking at you, judging you.” The most unpardonable offense in his world is to lay oneself dumbly on the outcome of forces. To trust in anything but yourself. “I swear to … If you so much as fucking—” he started and then stopped.

His antipathy smoldered. It seemed almost to give off an acrid vapor that I wished to lean into and inhale.

“I’m e-mailing Yeshiva,” I lied.

“Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around,” he said. “If you think you’ve suffered anything—you ain’t.”

We rode on, missile-crisis tense. When we were speeding past the headstone-knurled fields of Golden Gate National Cemetery, Dad offered, “Chester Nimitz is in there. Just one of the outlying graves. There should be a shrine to him, for Christ’s sake. Guy won us the war in the Pacific.”

I nodded. He continued: “Lauren should’ve joined the navy. I’m still pissed about not pressing her on that front. She would’ve been well on her way to a fourth star by now. A real ass-kicker.”

“Not so conflicted about my not joining the navy?”

“You have … a poet’s soul.”

“Saying I’m gay?”

“A little.”

We’ve allowed ourselves to come to blows only once, in line for the
Jaws
ride at Universal Studios. I was tired then, and a little sun-mad, and had had enough of his chirping—so I suckered him. And though I have grown to where I can look down upon the crown of his skull, he had the height, weight, and reach advantages that day. He dropped me with a single jab to the solar plexus. He felt bad, I think, because the moment after I
received my college diploma, we drove from Gainesville to that same theme park and had a blast.

Meanwhile, Lauren—she can and does talk shit for days, and all the guy’ll do is pillow his hands and bat his lashes. She is loved most because, as a child, she was so pale and blond and demure that his eyes could barely hold her. But she never was childish, Lord no; she moved through the world like a Victorian death portrait brought back to life. Dad pretends to fear her, but what it is he’s scared of is his own oceanic devotion. He calls her “the Clone,” after Mom.

“Big Sur Point!” he was saying sometime later. “Point Sur Naval Facility used to be right over there.” With his crippled right pinkie he pointed out every object of interest as we switch-backed along coastal SR 1. “And McWay Falls is back in there a little.

“Kent? Not looking? Don’t give a shit?” he asked, waggling his pinkie in front of my face.

“Thataway’s the Esalen Institute,” he went on. “They do a bunch of New Agey stuff. Peer into crystals, wax their scrotes. I don’t know.”

“It’s funny that you moved out to this part of the country,” I said. “Since, you know, historically, everything you detest has come from this coast.”

A thin railing was all that separated us from a long drop into combed sea. On the driver’s side, it was sheer cliffs, redwood groves, headlands pinned with blue flowers. Country that only an asteroid could plow.

“I bet those hippies would pay buku bucks to visit my old survival school, spend a week in triple-canopy jungle with the Negritos. I got your ecotourism right here,” he said, joggling his crotch.

“No, but I’ve always been fascinated with the hippies,” he continued. “They were arriving in full force just as I was getting
ready to ship out of San Francisco.
What might have been,
you know?”

“A great many bouquets of flowers shoved up asses, is my guess.”

“A solid prognostication.”

Dad wanted me to see William Randolph Hearst’s castle. Something about the faded glory of print, I guess. In theory, the newspaper magnate’s estate was modeled after a Spanish Renaissance village. In actuality, it’s a bastioned pastiche of architectures on top of a tall, narrow hill in San Simeon.

The crowd was retirees. The last generation of Americans who’ll go in for this kind of thing. Women with hard, dry updos, like carefully arranged beach wrack. Husbands in hats that aphorized:
I’m not aging
—
I’m fermenting!

“If there is a God,” Dad said as our tour bus careened up the steep hillside, “He will not let you die amongst these people.”

The estate was constructed piece by piece, seemingly on a whim. Hearst mail-ordered lots of mustily priceless bric-a-brac from Europe—portraiture, statuary, tapestries. An entire ceiling from an Italian church. None of it cohered, but as an example of that American dream of creating pedigree ex nihilo—it was neat. Fifty-eight bedrooms, and Hearst was still adding to it when he died.

“You will not, in all likelihood, be living out your days in a house like this,” Dad said. We were trailing behind the crowd, cracking wise in the slipstream of their normalcy.

Hearst’s estate was the place to be in the ’20s, ’30s. Hollywood and political elites flew into the private airfield to spend long weekends engaging in whichever depravities were clever then. Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, FDR, Winston Churchill. Cary Grant came like fifty times.

“I think Cary was sweet on ol’ Willie here,” I said.

“You mean to tell me he preferred the company of men?” Dad teased. “Who
doesn’t
?!”

A couple of honeymooning Euros began to take selfies with iPads, holding the tablets at arms’ length with two hands. “There should be a number from one to ten on back of them,” Dad suggested, unquietly. “A scorecard, for how big a dildo you are.”

Normally, we parley via jokey semaphore and signal lamp, communicating as candidly as warships across a gulf. But now seemed a time for directness.

“How come, do you think, we have in our hearts such contempt for others?” I asked, falling in line behind him as we climbed a back staircase.

“I’m a bit of an expert on anger, as you know,” he said over his shoulder. “Suffered from it all through my youth.”

“… youth?”

“It’s a pretty miserable state to be in, but it’s also really gratifying. Rage is gratifying. And it’s a good substitute. Indulging in your desire, okay, to fuck up everything new or beautiful? It’s a hell of a lot more fun than trying to make shit more tolerable for yourself.”

Atop the landing, Dad rewound his loose limb of hair. He turned to me. “We all know when to deploy our quills. All of us but your mother. Meeting her, thirty minutes in, I knew I’d found the perfect one. I just had to plan out how not to blow it. There’s no woman like your mother. But don’t tell her I said that. I don’t want her to get a big head.”

“Remember my temper tantrums?” I asked, wresting the conversation back on course.

“Christ, you were a terror. Punched out teeth. Pulled out hair.”

“Slammed heads into the blacktop by their stupid jug ears. I know. Remember how you used to march me to my room and lock me in there? Till I was ready to act civilized?”

“Bucking. Snarling.”

“Crying and screaming till I lost my voice. I know. And when’s the last time I had one? Eighteen years ago?”

We were led back outside. The sky here was cloudless, illimitably blue, like it had no atmosphere. I looked up at it and thought, If I tried to jump, I’d keep rising.

“You know how I spend most of my waking moments now?” I asked. “Daydreaming about killing myself. Well, blowing myself up. Metaphorically. I’m sitting there at dinner with a woman—a nice dinner, bread in a basket—and I’m trying very hard to listen, and to respond to her comments about what she looks for in an endocrinologist—but really what my mind’s coming back to, again and again, unless I’ve doused it with booze, is the moment when, at last, I can detonate my stockpiled separateness.”

“Terrorist.”

“
Dad.
I don’t want to
be
like this anymore.”

“Well, you
should.
Feel that way. People are stupid assholes. People are stupid assholes precisely because they believe they are anything
but
stupid assholes. I used to think it was just me—that
I
was the bad guy. And I was. When I was a young man, I was a bad guy who had convinced himself he was good. The United States Navy needed my ass real bad.

“So, okay, fine. We’re stupid assholes. Bad guys. But, look. You shouldn’t blame yourself. Your natural inclination is to condemn yourself first. I know you. And what’s your second? To condemn everyone else, too. Without exception. To thin that self-hate out a little. Water it down.”

“I feel like I’ve got a ton of empathy in reserve, though,” I countered. “Stores of it. A motherfucking
cache.
In fact, I would argue that I am the most empathetic man a woman I have yet to meet has ever met.”

Dad snorted several times in quick succession, bullishly. It sounded as though he was trying to hold in laughter, which would not have surprised me. The man laughs easily, but never really
at
a joke. He laughs when something strikes a personal
chord, when it rhymes with his salad days. He did a quick spot check, and then he gobbed an oyster against a tree trunk.

“Shit, son. I’m not gonna be around forever, okay. And you’re gonna have to learn how to watch out for yourself. If you don’t watch out, you’ll let the wrong ones in, and they’ll siphon everything they want out of you. Take and take and take, until you’re left high and dry.

“You can’t let anyone buffalo you.
They
want what
you
got. And as soon as they got it, they have no more use for you. Believe me.”

We wandered back inside. “Right. Okay,” I appeased. We walked through dry swimming pools. We walked through nefarious-seeming sculleries. “But what I’m saying is: It’s not that I’m afraid of letting the wrong one in when I lower that drawbridge. It’s worse than that. I can’t even bring myself to send out the negotiating party. I don’t want to sue for peace.”

“What do you want me to tell you?” he said, stopping. “That it’s easy? It’s not. It’s
hard.
Every day, it’s hard.” He was not looking at me. He was standing close, uncomfortably close, and pointing his ear at my chest as though calling through a door. “Every day, even still, I want to say,
Fuck it!
and hail ruination like a cab after last call.”

I made the mistake of mentioning that in Australia I had some fish and chips and enjoyed them, so, back on the road, we stopped for fish and chips.