by Chris Forhan
Up and down the street, there were yards to frolic in, expanses of grass on which we gathered and had no parents. At dusk in summer, we played a game in which one of us, dubbed the “ghost,” tried to tag the rest of us and imprison us in his dungeon. Stepping hesitantly across the grass, holding our breath, or fleeing full-tilt, we played and played as darkness rose and swallowed us. No parents. On drizzly afternoons, in dim basement rooms, we played Twister and Hands Down and Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots or, with a mouthful of Cheez-Its, stared at afternoon reruns of Gilligan’s Island or The Jetsons. No parents. On sunny days, anyone’s yard might be good for Slip ’n Slide or Simon Says or fireworks—a children’s world, world without end, world of utter fun, except on the day, waving a lit sparkler, I misjudged my reach and slashed Kathy’s chest, leaving a thin pink scar, like an embedded worm. Our street was a gradual, steady incline, ideal for picking up speed on a sled or a bike, ideal for rides of unabated pleasure, except that morning when Jennifer, at the bottom of the hill, steered her hurtling Yankee Clipper into a parked truck, and her spleen exploded, and her dad jogged from the house and picked her up and carried her, limp and moaning, to his station wagon, and except that Saturday when my feet couldn’t find the spinning pedals on my five-speed and I stopped my momentum by slamming my head against a mailbox, then woke on the couch, my mother’s palm warm and soft on my forehead.
One afternoon, in the backyard next door, I met a gangly, sandy-haired high school boy, Bill, who introduced me to a new game: pickleball. It was cartoonish and amusing, a kind of cross between Ping-Pong and badminton involving a paddle, a net, and a Wiffle ball. The neighbors were holding a party for the man who had invented the game: a moderate Republican—there were such things then—running for Congress. The house was full of his well-heeled supporters, and their kids, including Bill, decamped to the backyard. I didn’t stand a chance against Bill on the court: he was four years older and an old hand at pickleball. However, the budding and permanent passion of Bill—who had come to the party with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Gates—was computers.
Kevin liked to fiddle with machines, too. In his downstairs bedroom across the hall from mine, he sat contentedly for hours among wires and switches and capacitors and batteries and bulbs and circuit boards, teaching himself how they functioned and how they connected. He was testing reality with his own hands, his own mind, trying to get to the bottom of it. Kevin was the one who, two decades later, would prepare for every Christmas by inventing and painstakingly constructing an original gift for his girlfriend—some intricate gizmo with little purpose but to charm: a miniature scene of skaters on a pond who would move when it was plugged in; an alarm clock that, when it went off, played one of their favorite Graham Parker songs: I want to wake up next to you. . . .
I had been lucky, when Patty moved out of the house, to inherit her room: the one beneath our parents’ and therefore identical in size and shape—the largest of the kids’ rooms, half buried in the earth, with a window that offered a ground-level view of the backyard: the wooden steps that led down from the deck, the small irregular rectangle of lawn, the raised plot of cherry and apple trees. I kept to myself in that room, listening to Top 40 music on my transistor. It did not occur to me that any other music mattered—or that there was any other music. The songs were playing nonstop on the radio, after all, and playing nonstop in my head, making a pleasing shape, and some sense, of reality: “O-o-h Child,” “No Matter What,” “Cracklin’ Rosie.” After saving my lawn-mowing money and a few months of allowance, I had enough to buy a thirty-dollar portable record player at the drugstore. That gave me a reason to buy records: mostly 45s, starting with “Indian Reservation” by the Raiders. From friends and church bazaars, I bought used records by the Beatles and Three Dog Night and the Turtles. My enthusiasm had a scholarly, or at least archival, component: I set aside a college-ruled notebook in which to transcribe the lyrics of my favorite songs. I wrote about how the world is a ball of confusion. I wrote about how a poor, dying man burdens his son with a reminder that he is the only one left now to ensure that the family survives. With Casey Kasem counting down the top hits each week on the radio, I felt the necessity of ranking the records in my bedroom—of determining my personal cosmology. I still own my single of “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” with a small numeral 1 written in pencil on the picture sleeve.
I had been issued an acoustic guitar—even that late, with the 1960s over and the folk boom having waned, it was almost compulsory that middle-class adolescents own a guitar on which to strum Pete Seeger tunes. With the aid of a beginner’s book, I learned a few chords. And I started writing songs that sounded like what someone would write if he were pretending to write songs. A blue-collar anthem:
I’m a workingman, I get a workingman’s pay,
Even though I work an eleven-hour day.
O Lord, O Lord, there must be another way.
A piercing insight into social injustice, inspired by a poster:
There’s a child, she’s hungry,
Hasn’t had any food for days
And she’s about to die.
But people don’t realize what’s going on.
They don’t want to take the time.
But who’s going to save the children?
A lament in which, if I remember correctly, I was imagining myself as a black person:
Yesterday I came to this town.
People stood and stared, they didn’t make a sound.
They just said, “You’d better leave. We don’t want any fight.”
They just wanted me out of their sight.
But I don’t want any sympathy, I don’t want any tears.
I’ve been unaccepted in many places over the years.
It seems I’ve gone this road before many times in the past,
So I’d best get out of here and hope this time’s the last.
Most of my melodies made prominent use of the E-minor chord, a heartsick sound I could make with only two fingers.
I did not share the songs with anyone. Maybe I feared they weren’t good enough. More probably I kept them private because they were private: I sensed that, in them, I was most nakedly myself, most free to try my feelings on for size without risking censure, even if that meant pretending to be a black man.
I was recognizing, more and more, a distinct difference between what I felt and what I did, between what I imagined and created behind the closed door of my bedroom and what I professed to care about in public. I was discovering what mattered most to me and keeping silent about it.
32
For my eleventh birthday, I had a date with my father. I hadn’t seen him in weeks, maybe months, but we arranged that he would drive to the house after dinner and take me out for the night. My mother had decided I was old enough to dress smartly for the occasion—old enough, she said, to own a decent overcoat, so she bought me one: calf-length, charcoal gray. Before my father arrived, she made sure that I put on my best shirt and pants and that I polished my shoes. On our way out, my father and I paused in the doorway of the house so she could take a photograph. What did my parents say to each other in that moment? Probably something brief, safe, and not impolite. In my new coat, I looked stiff and small and affected; I looked like an idea. Little Dad.
What did my father and I do first? Stop off for an ice cream sundae, maybe, and for harmless, perfunctory talk about how school was going? I remember only that I felt pleased to be with him after so much time apart, and hopeful—he was still my dad; his life still intersected with mine—and I felt a little awkward, conscious of the formality of the occasion, of its being a plan that we were executing. How did my father feel? Pleased, too, maybe, and hopeful and a little awkward. The central event of the evening was a trip to a downtown movie theater to see Beneath the Planet of the Apes, about a world turned upside down, with apes—the self-styled superior species
—ruling humans. We watched the movie’s astronaut hero journey underground in search of his lost colleague, Charlton Heston. We watched the astronaut struggle to communicate with his companion on the quest, Heston’s beautiful, mute female mate from whom he’d been separated. But we witnessed no stirring, permanent reunion of the lovers—only, in the end, a battle between an army of apes and a race of mutant humans who worshipped a doomsday bomb, the one that could eradicate the planet. In the last scene, Heston, shot and dying—Heston, a believer in amity, rationality, and forbearance but seeing no solution to the interminable stupid stalemate between civilizations—with his bloody hand pushed the button on the bomb and blew up the whole damned dirty thing.
We stood up. I tugged my new overcoat back on, and my dad drove me home.
The next month, a second Christmas passed without our father in the house, and then my parents began speaking to each other on the phone, calmly and kindly, not as antagonists but as partners with a plan. My father was saying the right things. He had changed. Partly with a psychiatrist’s help, he could see things more clearly. His health had improved; the psychiatrist had prescribed medication, and he was taking proper care of his diabetes. Still, when my mother asked about the particular source of his troubles, he spoke vaguely, dismissively. What was his condition, exactly? Had there been a diagnosis? How could she help him? “I’m fine now,” he would say. “Let’s leave it at that.” She called his psychiatrist. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Forhan,” he replied. “Everything you’re asking me: it’s confidential. I can’t speak to you about it.” If her husband seemed newly stable, even chipper, she would just have to trust that there were reasons for it. She would need to have faith that he would stay that way.
“Okay,” she told him, “you can come home.”
He had done what my mother had required of him: he had sought professional help, and now he was better. After he moved back in with us, he stopped seeing the psychiatrist and stopped taking medication. He was a grown man, a responsible man: he could do the rest himself.
My happiest memories of my father during the next couple of years involve a single ritual: from time to time, having returned home from work and shared dinner with the family, he would say, “You kids interested in seeing the Sonics tonight?” We always were—we almost invariably being Kevin and Dana and me. Peggy was usually content to stay at home with our mother and help take care of Kim and Erica, who were too young for evenings out.
The Sonics were Seattle’s professional basketball team; they were in just their fourth year and had never come close to having a winning record, but they were the only major pro team in town and were a plucky, endearing bunch of underdogs. On the roster were a thoughtful, soft-spoken point guard doing double duty as coach; a floppy-haired sharpshooter; a backup forward with a good jump shot and a bad stutter; and a twenty-one-year-old phenomenon and renegade, undrafted and underage by league rules, who’d leaped to the team from another league and, to set foot on the Sonics’ court, needed the permission of the Supreme Court. The first thing I remember doing with my father after he came back to the family was driving down the freeway on a February evening in his white Dodge, along with my brother and sister, heading for a game. It was a special game we were going to: the team had designated this Tom Meschery Night. Meschery was a power forward—a fan favorite—who had announced his retirement. He was a bruiser, a brawler, a fearless enforcer under the boards, and there was something exotic about him. He was an immigrant whose Russian parents had escaped their homeland during the Bolshevik Revolution; he sported a thick handlebar mustache; and he was a fledgling poet. The year before, he had published a collection called Over the Rim, on the cover of which he was pictured in game action, crouched tigerlike. Forty years after Tom Meschery Night, I was talking with the poet Mark Strand, who taught in Seattle when I was young, and I mentioned Meschery. “Oh, I knew Tom,” Mark said. The two of them had struck up a friendship when Meschery was with the Sonics, and Mark later advised Meschery that he owed it to himself and his writing to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he did.
On that February night in 1971, as my father and brother and sister and I entered the Coliseum, we were handed two souvenirs: a paper program entitled “A Poet in Motion” and a false handlebar mustache made of thick black construction paper, shaped so that we might slide two hooks into our nostrils and it would stay there.
Later, in his warm-up outfit, Meschery strode onto the court to receive his gifts of thanks: plaques and trophies, a set of crystal, a color television, an electric typewriter, a round-the-world trip for him and his wife. As we watched him walk to mid-court to be honored, I lifted my false mustache to my nostrils and attached it; the paper pinched and tickled. Kevin attached his mustache. Dana, too, and our father. I gazed around the Coliseum, row upon row, section upon section: ten thousand mustachioed people, men and women, boys and girls. It was stupid; it was beautiful. For a moment, all of us were poets. All of us were big-hearted rebounders.
33
In Scouts, I was now a Webelo. “We’ll Be Loyal Scouts,” the name meant. I enjoyed the natty uniform: the golf-style cap and the three woven strands of gold, red, and green on which I pinned my activity badges—the little tree for forestry; the interlocking gears for engineering; the sleek sedan for traveling.
I liked the evenings when my father—with a plan and the tools and skills to complete it—stood at the end of his workbench downstairs, eyeing a small rectangular block of wood in the grip of his vise. He was helping me prepare for the Pinewood Derby; each year, the Scout pack set aside a Saturday for pitting each boy’s miniature custom-made car against the others’, letting gravity pull them down a long, sloped track in the church gym. Each Scout brought a car he had built with the help of his father: they had carved and shaped the block of pine with saw and rasp, measured its length and width, weighed it to the gram, sanded it, spray-painted it, set it aside to dry, then added a second coat, attached axles and plastic wheels, delicately applied decals, drilled holes, and filled them with lead weights so the car was swift but not so heavy as to break the rules, which were rigid and many.
Every year, the car my father helped me bring into being seemed perfect, impossibly so: aerodynamically sleek and gleaming, its wheels spinning freely at a touch. Every year, the car flamed out in the first heat. For the hour that followed, my father and I slouched in metal folding chairs along the wall, watching with polite interest as heat after heat narrowed the field to the eventual winning car, to the smiling dad and son who must have known something essential that we did not. Maybe they had cheated. But winning wasn’t everything: the true satisfaction was in the preparation, in the construction of a car you could be proud of regardless of how it fared in competition, my father might have said, and didn’t.
Most of the time, in Webelos, I was on my own. And the whole thing—the uninterrupted succession of pleasant rituals—started to give me the creeps: buttoning up my uniform shirt and tugging on my cap; sitting in den meetings with a dozen other boys, pledging and praying with them, proclaiming in unison, in song, what we should do if we were happy and we knew it; hunching with them over a long table, cutting and gluing colored construction paper into Christmas ornaments and spraying fake snow on them from an aerosol can. I was part of an organization, of a scheme for growing up and becoming an honorable citizen, that didn’t feel right because—well, I was starting to sense, because it was organized, and because it was a scheme.
My father was a joiner. He had signed up for the society of altar boys, for the marines, for the Air Force Reserve; he had graduated from college; he had joined the National Association of Accountants—he had become his chapter’s president. The first ten years of his life had been ragged and structureless, his gone father, drowned brother, and dead mother instructing him in the fragility of families and of plans. But the path he traveled after that was through institutions of certainty and stability. It might be said that he
worked hard at playing it safe, employing his considerable intelligence and industry to succeed at tasks that were clearly defined and unquestioningly valued by whatever social group he made himself a part of. One of those groups was us—the big Irish Catholic family he created with my mother, a family he must have hoped would be different from the one he knew as a boy: dependable, permanent. One reason to believe so was the woman—the girl—he had chosen, by luck or some mix of conscious and unconscious design, to be his wife. My mother, unlike his parents, would stick it out with him; she was strong and steadfast—permanently loyal to the ideal of marriage and to the actual marriage she was living in, however profoundly it might test her. As my father pursued, indefatigably, his safe, conventional path, it defined him as an accountant, a successful professional, a faithful parishioner, a husband, and a father. I wonder, within those selves, where the fatherless, motherless, brotherless little boy was. What had become of little Eddie, of Bud?