Teacher (10 page)

Anyway, Miss Finkelman aside, my father generally took about as much interest in my education as he did in avant-garde painting and Husserlian phenomenology. But then Frank Lears came along and about his tendencies, tastes, and quirks my father, who was usually curious about nothing—for to be curious indicated that one was not omniscient, and every adult male of my father’s generation seems at least to have toyed with the omniscience possibility—couldn’t hear enough. The business about television started things off.

One day in class, Lears suggested to us, smoothly, in an indirect kind of way, a conversational wrist shot, that he had no television. We had become, without quite knowing it, students of Lears’ personality, if only (we imagined) to use the information we collected the better to mock him. And, strategically or not, he was chary of giving out much by way of personal data. You had to keep your ears open, because a good deal was to be found in the intonation. This intonation business was very non-Medford. Medford spoke in one tone of voice—loud, assertive, fragrant, obscene. The intonation thing, the irony thing, suggested a combination of worldliness and modesty, and would eventually make the Medford yawp sound almost frightened, a way of worrying about what might be said in reply and an effort to shut off all replies, or rebuttals, including your own.

This time, Lears’ intonation gave us to understand that he suspected that anyone who enjoyed watching the tube probably had suffered a touch of early brain damage, a quick drop and pickup from off the gray kitchen linoleum.

“Don’t you even watch it for the news?” Nora Balakian had asked.

“You can read the newspaper,” Lears said. “You can read the
Times.
” We were encountering someone, maybe for the first time, who was not immersed in the world of TV.

To all of us, TV was something like a third parent. We had grown up with it. At my house, the first person up on any given morning flipped on the set, which stood dead-center in our upstairs-apartment living room, and the magic box hummed, hollered, sang, wept, flattered, and cajoled all day and well into the night, often with one or two or three or four of us there gazing, but often not. Often the TV sounded and flashed away to an audience of no one in particular. Did the cave dwellers extinguish their communal fire when they weren’t actually warming their hands in front of it? Then why should we flip off the box when we weren’t actually watching?

“Mr. Lears hasn’t got a TV,” I announced one night to my father, pretty much out of the blue.

“Why not?” Then, adding a kick, because my father usually adds a kick when he can, even if it isn’t well aimed or adroitly delivered: “Can’t he afford one?”

Was this a probe on my part? Was it an unguided missile of resentment sent off toward my father to see what would happen? For my father loved TV. He also hated it, dearly.

I can see him still, standing in front of the television set, fresh from his shower, with a threadbare red bath towel cinched around his waist, his belly distended, statesman-style. Though his waist is thick, the rest of his body is very thin—sticklike, birdy legs; small, delicately boned arms. I have been able to beat him at arm wrestling since the sixth grade, but from the night when I defeated him at the kitchen table—slamming his fist against the wood, with a noise like a gun blast—he has never been willing to give it another go. The veins in his feet are a striking, almost frightening blue. He has a giant hawk nose—he calls it noble, aristocratic, Roman. His glasses are only half a generation removed in style from the heavy, black-rimmed GI specs that were standard issue in the army and maybe too in the National Guard unit where my father did his bit.

Wright Aukenhead Edmundson: forty years old, overweight, on the way to being worn to death from incessant work and from yet more devoted—and to him restorative—carousing (also known as galavantin’ and calupin’). He’s got his cigarette, the Camel straight, with which he is committing a pinch of suicide—self-destruction on the installment plan, for those who, for various reasons, can’t manage to do it all at once—stuck in his mouth and he’s puffing away, letting the ash extend itself to French-café length, then ordering me to procure an ashtray (children are servants in their parents’ houses during this period; he has once clouted me so hard that I saw the galaxies born, expand, explode, and die for not hustling off to Charlie DeLuca’s to get him a pack of his smokes) so he can tap the butt before the carpet is scattered with ash.

The TV is on, it’s the news, and Wright—Wrightie, as he’s called at Raytheon, at work—is denouncing virtually everyone bold enough to push his face into our living room. The sportscasters—in particular Curt Gowdy, the genial voice of the Red Sox, whom everyone else dotes on—the news anchors, the weatherman, the pundits, the guests: all are rounded up in a human clump, belted together, knotted tight, and cast away into the infernal pit as a plague of
morons,
and
geeks.
(Later, after
All in the Family
becomes popular, he’ll insert
meatheads
into the repertoire.) And should a woman, any woman, hold forth knowingly on a subject unrelated to cooking, gardening, or the higher arts of gabbing the day away on the telephone, the roof is likely to lift from the eaves of 58 Clewley Road, Medford, Massachusetts. The DeMarias, who live downstairs and who own the house, loopy as they seem, while we, fraught with intelligence (maybe), pay ignominious rent, punch our floor, their ceiling, with a broomstick when my father launches stratospheric, powered by the highly combustible fuel of a pontificating TV presence. My father ignores the pop-pop-pops, the civil artillery barrage. For here, in his living room-den-dining room (his meals are often taken in front of the tube so that the morons will not be able to pull off anything egregious on the sly), my father is a lion of displeasure.

Does my father hate the announcers for being bland, flatminded dispensers of vanilla good cheer? Yes, certainly. Does he also envy them their positions, their right to hold forth to the world on all and sundry topics, their self-importance, their well-chosen ties? Yes, yes. And which is ascendant in his railings, the envy or the apt critique? To this day I could not tell you.

Generally, my father’s relation to the TV is an active one—he’s almost always got a dialogue going with the box. But one thing shuts him up completely, turns him mordantly silent. And that is any mention of the Kennedys. He dislikes the Kennedys and always has. When JFK ran for president in 1959, my father referred to him exclusively as Black Jack. When the man’s handsome face appeared on the box, my father would turn away in disgust. This was odd behavior in Massachusetts, where Kennedy worship was a minor religion, an adjunct to Catholicism, and to certain Jewish and Protestant strains, too. It wasn’t at all uncommon to go into someone’s house and find there a Kennedy shrine—a few photos of JFK, one of Bobby, a snap of sainted mother Rose, with devotional lighting on the peripheries. But about this distaste, which encompasses the whole Kennedy family, down to the newly born—and a new Kennedy seemed to pop into the world every three months or so—my father, who is not oppressively restrained about most of his views, is silent.

He changes the channel when a Kennedy homage comes on; he snorts and sneers when one of the royal clan is depicted on the news. But there is no accompanying tirade, no corresponding denunciation. He voted for Nixon in the 1960 election. Following his lead, I too was a Nixon man, size small—the only one, as I remember, in my third grade class. I wore a campaign button to school every day. Some of the Belmont School teachers—future Kennedy shrine-builders maybe—were shocked at my apostasy and took me aside in the halls to try to talk sense to me. In the fall of ’69, though, my father was anything but enchanted with Nixon. He referred to him familiarly, disparagingly, but with a pinch of affection, as Tricky Dick. Generally, Nixon was subject to the blanket skepticism that Wright threw over all pretenders to truth and virtue. This would change.

MY OWN relation to TV is almost as long-standing as my father’s, surely as enveloping, though much more complacent. From the time I was five years old, I have been a stone addict. I remember hopping out of bed early on Saturday mornings when I was very small, passing the closet where, I believed, my father hid his National Guard rifle, turning a swift pirouette at my parents’ half-open bedroom door, the way the Lone Ranger, crossing the entrance to a bank, broke the aim of desperadoes holed up inside. From the pantry I snagged a handful of Fig Newtons, then took a slow-motion Ted Williams slide over the living room rug, pulled into Sioux powwow posture, and popped the on button. There I would sit, my breath softly held at the back of my throat, waiting for the cool, thoughtful hum, the pinhole of light, then the great eye dilating into wakefulness.

TV to me was everything: As various shut-ins are said to do, I cultivated personal relationships with the figures on the screen. I believed that I could talk to Roy Rogers and Clarabell the clown, the Hardy Boys and the Lone Ranger, and that they would hear me and understand. Walking to school, or on the border of sleep, I elaborated on the shows I watched, merging the characters with my friends and family, creating my own scenarios.

But by the time I was ten or so, I strained to see the underside of things, and in this my father was my guide. He let the air out of my favorite shows, one after another. It was like putting aside the things of childhood, to have them debunked this way. It was this century’s equivalent of cutting the boy’s curls and getting him out of short pants. He showed me how the Lone Ranger and Tonto were chasing the bandits around the same shrubbery prop time and time again, show after show. He pointed out how some elaborate combat footage from a film we’d seen together weeks before had been spliced into a Saturday-afternoon Hercules epic. He spotted a rip in Pinky Lee’s pants.

But my father is not only a critic; he is also an authority in his own right. His field of expertise encompasses all things and everything. Whence does his authority come? Not from any formal education. My father dropped out of high school, then slipped back in and copped a degree by the skin of his teeth. Until I was about ten, he worked two jobs to support us (and a lot of wayward habits). He was a short-order cook on two contiguous eight-hour shifts, one at a restaurant called Perry’s and another called the Chuck Wagon. (It was at Perry’s that, family legend has it, I met two of the more prominent individuals ever to pass through Malden. One was the formidable future governor of Massachusetts, who then owned a construction company—this was the [soon-to-be] Honorable John A. Volpe. The other was Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, responsible for the horrible deaths of at least a dozen women.) Perry’s was days; the Chuck Wagon, nights. He arrived home at three in the morning, smelling of booze and blistered, charred beef, turned on the TV medium loud, and hoisted
The Boston
Globe
in front of him like an enormous white sail. He was off into the broad seas of knowledge.

Then and always, he read the newspaper with a flaming eye: the front page, the ads, the editorials, the stock quotes (though he had no stock), the obits, the sports, the columnists he could barely abide and the columnists he abhorred. No one ever got such value from a dime’s worth of paper and ink. When he found something especially good—usually a story off the AP or UPI wire, a story, that is, that he did not have to credit to any other human being—or one particularly repugnant, he read it aloud to us, as though he were its creator or its appointed assassin. I believe he read aloud to us when we were asleep. After he read through an issue of the paper, you expected to see it cleansed, pure white, with no print remaining, as though it had been dunked in an acid bath.

My father needed no Bible; the paper was enough. Once, when I was ten or so, he went downstairs to repaint a chair. To begin, he spread the floor with old newspapers. Two hours later, I peered down the darkened stairs to see him under thin light, poised in what the yogis call child’s position, down on his knees, buttocks resting on his ankles, head forward, eyes wide, chugging down the print. The paint can was unopened.

While he read the paper and snorted and groaned through his great damaged nose, my father would be glancing up at the tube, denouncing this figure or that, and sometimes praising one, too. For despite the general mob of morons and geeks who bayed at him from every quadrant of the dial, there were also a few human paragons, whom it paid to observe closely and, when possible, to emulate.

Johnny Carson, who appears every weekday night at eleven-thirty to host
The Tonight Show,
he classes as one of the first among men. There is nothing that Carson cannot do. He can talk to anyone adroitly on any subject and do so modestly (that is, he—or his script writers—knows just about everything that, say, a truly dedicated reader of a solid metropolitan newspaper might know), and he has admirable physical proficiency. When the winner of the Alaskan Olympic Games decathlon (sled dog–related events predominate) comes on the show, Johnny beats him two times out of three at the sport of stick grappling, in which you try to wrest a four-foot-long engraved staff from the other contestant’s hands. And then—pièce de résistance—when the world’s female arm wrestling champ comes through the curtains and sits down in the guest chair and challenges Johnny, Johnny grits his inhumanly perfect teeth and whips her handily. Or so my father tells it.

These events took place before my Carson-watching period, which, in my senior year, has just begun. Sometimes, after my mother has gone to bed, my father will let me stay up late, past the monologue and into the show itself. And here we have some of our best times together. He is tired, ready to go to bed himself, and the fatigue, functioning like a soft drug, along with the TV’s oddly lulling light, calms him down a little. He loses his edge, grows almost benevolent. He truly likes Johnny; he likes the way that without ever being rude or high-handed, Johnny stands up for the regular guy and calmly tames all the big-shot authors and movie stars who appear on the show, makes them lose their airs, relax—or face his low-key, softly flaying ridicule.