I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (34 page)

“You put this on YouTube, and I swear to God.”

“I’m live-streaming you right now. Feng in Taiwan says you look like a goblin.”

We ascended the center’s few stairs. “I’ll go down swinging,” he said. “Believe that.”

The one other person there, an elderly docent, opened the door and asked, “Gentlemen, please.”

I said, “We know each other, lady.”

Dad said, “We’re related. It’s okay.”

The interloper said, “Mr. London is buried here. We ask for a little respect.”

Our fists opened and closed, gawping like fish out of water. Then we went inside.

Dad browsed, his hands behind his back. “I look at these other writers—your Jack Londons, your Zane Greys,” he said, “and my guess is that these guys weren’t family men. Couldn’t possibly have been family men, not in a woman’s way of understanding the term.” He picked up and lightly jostled a ship in a bottle. “I have no idea what you’re doing with your life. But … it’s fucking over when you get married. Writing being no exception.”

“Well, that’s when I’ll sell my soul,” I said. “When I’ve got kids, and they need braces and shit. I’ll do celebrity profiles. Buy me a brownstone with a home office.”

“What nobody talks about, okay, is the asteroid. Or the dirty nuclear bomb. Both of which are coming.”

“Your argument against home ownership in this real-estate climate is
asteroids
?”

“Anyway, it’s good you’re thinking of that now. It would
make me feel good if you wanted to do that. Then, I’d know there will be more Russells in the world. The long line of Russells”—he gestured unenthusiastically—“prolonged. Otherwise, you’re the last one.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be another stay-at-home dad, bringing in little to
nada
financially.”

“No rush. Just don’t get all pussified. No Baby Bjorns.”

“Until he can tell me he prefers otherwise, my kid’s getting clothed in burlap. The amount of research I will do re: area schools—zero.”

“Fulfilling the prophecy. From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.”

“A reprisal. The sine wave rolls on.”

“Maybe he’ll make it big with a memoir about what a shitty father you were.”

“Oh, I’d murder him first.”

We tread lightly through London’s ruined manor. It had been made out of the same stuff as its surroundings: redwood trunks, blue slate, volcanic rock. Place had its own hot water, electricity, refrigeration. London dropped about two million dollars on it, adjusted. His life’s dream.

He was fixing to move in when it burned down mysteriously one night in 1913. What remains is a maze of fallen beams and roofless, mossy walls.

Dad, strolling apart: “I’m sure that when you
do
write about it, you’re gonna conveniently forget to mention all the times I did shit like get my ass kicked by Cuban mothers while snagging you the last blue Power Ranger. Or take you to Toronto, to see the Stanley Cup. Which we never should have touched, by the way.”

“Most definitely. It’s gotta be life, minus the dull parts. Nobody wants to hear about the week you did nothing but toast
up bagels after we all caught norovirus and blew out both ends. Virtue’s got no charm, or biographer.”

“Right,” he derided. “I’m sorry you had such an insufferable upbringing.”

Moments later, almost apologetically, he said, “My life now is
only
the dull parts. But, as I’ve mentioned, I was a piece of shit when I was your age. Make no mistake. The only thing I was up for promoting was myself, and whatever bad thing people wanted to start. They knew where to find me. No drugs involved, of course. But alcohol.”

I meandered through the shadows. They were damp as though fresh-peeled. I raised my voice: “It was the style at the time. Three martinis with lunch. A grasshopper after dinner.” “Heavy in my family,” Dad sang out. “Yours. You come from a long line of world-class addicts. My mother left me to fend for myself because of it.”

The man had
never
mentioned his mother to me.

“And Jimmy. I feel so goddamned responsible for Jimmy’s death. James. My older brother. He was such a total fuckup. Fun as hell. But I was getting ready to ask your mother to marry me, and I didn’t want her to meet him. I was afraid she might think that he was who I would become.”

A faint alarm sounded, a tinkling distant but audible that snapped me to attention. I thought of the cemetery bells they used to twine to the toes of the newly interred.

“I should’ve been back home, with him,” Dad said. “I should’ve been there. Instead, he passed out alone with a lit cigarette between his lips.”

Do we always have to succumb to the malign intelligence of male hurt? Do I always have to destroy the things I love through the very acts that reveal my love for them?

“Kent!” Dad exclaimed. “Look!”

Above us were a dozen birds banking against a faultless sky.
They were flying clockwise and at speed, as if spun centripetally. “What are those,” I asked, “turkey vultures?”

“Shitbirds, would be my guess.”

Implausibly, on our return, Dad pulled into a Jack in the Box and told me,
Drive.
I hadn’t driven him anywhere since the ride back from my license test twelve years prior.

Freed from the wheel, his attention fractaled as such: “That Madonna Inn might’ve been the first motor hotel in America” → “What’s that boat doing there?” → “Which reminds me: the Battle of Jutland …” → “… and that’s how the Battle of Jutland affects us today. Whoa, see that big-ass construction site down there?” → “But
that
machine looks like it could
really
put a hurting on you.” → “Remember that Dave Barry column? What’d he say? ‘
A tool is something that enables you to use the laws of physics to seriously injure yourself’?”
→ “Dave Barry is who you should emulate.”

For hours, the Hanna-Barbera-ish repetition of commercial roadside landscape ran by our windows. We came to drive in silence but for the soporific purr of tires. Soon, Dad was down for the count. He snored ragged snores. Every now and then something caught and throbbled in his throat.

Rumors of his demise have been greatly exaggerated, by him. He isn’t going anywhere. Not yet, at least. Anyway, it’s not his call to make.

Cruise-controlled, my mind wandered back to those nights he’d come home late from work either dead tired or wasted, I’m not sure which. He’d throw off his shirt and tie but give up on his shoelaces. He’d announce which game we were to play and then fall face-forward onto his made bed.

If the game was “Aircraft Carrier,” I launched toy planes on risky missions from the USS
Dad’s Back.
Occasionally, a lock of
hair would get caught in an axle and torn out by the roots. I’d shrink into a cringe, wait for it. When I cracked an eye, Dad was still spread-eagled, sawing logs.

If it was “Barbershop,” I smeared Barbasol on his shoulders and shaved them. The cream thinned pinkly when I nicked warts and dermal barnacles.

If he decided on “Kent, MD,” I was to pour hydrogen peroxide into the bottle’s cap and use Q-tips to daub the oozing sun sores on his head.

Afterward, I would untie his shoes and crawl next to him on the crinkly pink cover. He was warm, soft, pale, and reeking. Beached, like. I swear I could close my eyes, open them—and it’d be morning.

I have spent a lot of my life trying to regain this power.

At some point during my woolgathering, the gas needle dipped well below empty. The moment I noticed this felt, face-wise, not unlike the moment the Ark of the Covenant gets opened in Indiana Jones.

I turned off the A/C, feigned like I farted, and rolled down the windows. Dad stirred.

“I was just thinking,” he said a few beats later. “You have chosen, by my estimation, a pretty shitty life for yourself.”

According to the signage, we were about three miles from his apartment. I leaned over the wheel, goosing the pedal.

“I wouldn’t have chosen it. But, as you know, I respect individual decisions.”

Big wheels keep on turning,
I prayed.
Dear Taurus please.
I would never hear the end of it.

“Everything you are and everything you’ve done has had nothing to do whatsoever with parental intervention or incursion. I hope you realize that.”

The car emptied itself of fumes to burn. We began to glide. Dad said, “I’m proud of you, is what I’m saying. And I guess I don’t have a history of telling you that.” We began to decelerate.

“I owe it all to you, you know,” I said. “The better and the worse.”

“You saved my life,” he replied. “I’d be dead or in prison still if it wasn’t for you. You saved
me.
Thank you.”

We petered. Your Priuses, your hybrid SUVs—they zoomed past. I wrung the wheel and threw my weight against the seat belt, trying to inch us that much farther forward.

“On second thought,” Dad said. “I take that sui generis shit back. You are, if nothing else, my son.”

I was about to age out of Mom’s insurance plan, so we all went to the dentist, to see my wisdom teeth off.

They thought Dad was Grandpa. They gave me the gas, which tasted of satin and helped me not freak out when the dentist put his foot on the chair for more torque. My mouth cracked sharply, neaping with blood. My lips went red like wine-mouth, like I’d drunk from my own left ventricle.

After that, we went to Costco, to get us some new glasses prescriptions. As always, I couldn’t deal with the glaucoma machine. Started weeping involuntarily while waiting wide-eyed for the air blasts. Tracking the MacGuffin of the optometrist’s pen light had me doing likewise. My vision is getting significantly worse, they told me. It’s the connective tissue. My eyes are regressing to their cross-eyed natal state.

I was unfazed. I was wearing blu-blockers. I was feeling fucking
phenomenal,
wandering around this, the crown jewel of empire.

Full-size trampolines and St. Louis–style ribs and dry-wicking sportswear, XXL. The bright, continual ringing of registers. Kids hanging off the sides of overloaded carts like Southeast Asian dudes on trains. One liter of Kirkland Vodka was nine dollars, and the bottle’s
glass
!

O, give me your poor, your tired, your teriyaki samples yearning to get eaten! Anything you need that is not love: right here.

I had to wipe my eyes.

I was with a sales associate, running down the specs of the Kentucky Rose—Kirkland’s finest square-cornered, eighteen-gauge steel casket—when Dad approached with poultry breasts akimbo.

“Feel these,” he said. “Which one do you want?”

Is this love? Or is this indirect self-interest?

“They gave you the good stuff, eh?” he asked.

If love means to move outside the black hole of egoism, to will the good of the other
as other
—does he do it? Do
I
do it?

“Look, just pick which fucking bird here.”

I’m not sure. Whatever it is—love or its agnate—we each beam ours and run from the other’s like two boys playing flashlight tag.

“Why do you keep looking up at me like that?” he asked, breasts sagging.

“That one,” I said, pointing with neither hands nor eyes. “Looks delish.”

“Which one?”

“The hormonally tumid one.”

“The many side effects of nitrous oxide may include trying to flout your fancy vocabulary, eh, Mr. New York Asshole?”

“Flaunt,”
I corrected. “You
flaunt
something you have. Like how we
flaunt
this image of ourselves as exceptional and self-sufficient.

“
Flout
is what you do when you think a thing blows and want the world to know it. Like how we all gotta start
flouting
that shit, even if it means we’ll be dissolving the substance that holds us together.”

“Decently put,” he said, scaling both turkeys one last time before placing the right one in the cart. “… for a flesh-flautist.”

I was dilated. Everything in my field of vision—blurring from the outside in. When I tried to focus, the red, red crabs and cudgels of olive oil and stacks of Pynchon’s latest started wavering. I was dizzy. The ferrous tang in my mouth made me want to retch. By the time you think you need to make a decision, that decision has already been made. We added Stove Top stuffing and a cask of mayo to the cart. We got ourselves in line.

Opening the Taurus’s trunk in the bright, denuded parking lot, Dad offered: “I’ll make you a deal. If I’m alive and well in the New Year, I’ll take you home.”

“You sure you want to do that?” Despite the blu-blockers, I closed an eye and saluted the sun.

“Not in the fucking least.”

“That’s fine.”

“No grand adventure?”

“This is fine. Here’s fine. Here, but not here yet.”

“Here? How you figure you’re gonna put
here
into words?”