My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  My mother knew that he gambled in the last year or two of his life—the check from the stranger after my father’s death confirmed that. But she had had no idea of what Kirk told me: that he had gambled for at least a decade before that, and all the time. How much did he lose? Only he could know: he controlled the books. Beyond the monthly allowance he issued my mother for household expenses, the money, however much it was, was his. He always paid the bills on time—the mortgage, the utilities, the insurance—but he must have been setting aside money for gambling. Kirk said the stakes were low in those poker games, but one of my sisters remembers a day when Dad reassured Mom, “Well, I didn’t lose the house.” Had he really gambled the mortgage, or was he being teasingly, or cruelly, hyperbolic? And wouldn’t that conversation mean our mother knew about his poker playing? But she says she didn’t realize what he’d been doing until after his death. Still, one of us children remembers our parents arguing about his gambling. One of us remembers, fuzzily, a story being told long ago—by whom?—about Dad getting lucky and winning a color television and then, maybe, a car. Wasn’t there a time when we had one too many cars? Who knows? Where do such stories come from, and how can we know if they’re true? Each of us recalls only fragments, and what we knew was too little to begin with.

  Before I ended my conversation with Kirk, I had one last question for him. I wondered what my father felt about us: his wife and children. Through all of those business trips the two of them took, during their long plane flights, their full days working together, and those daily dinners, what did my father say about his family? Nothing, Kirk said. He never said a word about such things.

  46

  Days after my father died, I rejoined my church basketball team. After practice one afternoon, the twilight descending, I lingered outside the gym to wait for my ride home. One of my teammates, Perry, a lumbering, quiet, kind boy, walked past me, then turned around. “Chris, I should tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “That last night, the night before your dad died, my dad was with him. They had a drink together at the Wedgwood Tavern.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I thought you’d appreciate knowing.”

  I did appreciate it. It was information. But what could I do with it? What might it explain? Did my father spend the evening in the tavern because he needed to eat up time while waiting for us all to go to sleep? Was he steeling his nerves with drink? What did he talk about with Perry’s father? What does a person talk about over a drink when he intends, the next morning, to be dead?

  I had told my best friend, Al, about my father. Otherwise, as I returned to school after the Christmas break, I intended to tell no one. The city had two daily newspapers, and the Times had not reported the suicide. The Post-Intelligencer, though, had published a small paragraph about it. I could take comfort, at least, in the thought that most junior high students didn’t read the paper, let alone the tiny items in the back pages.

  On my first day back in school, at the end of science class, I was gathering my books. Nanette, who I had heard might have a crush on me, slipped me a folded note and, without a word, walked out of the room. I opened it: “Chris, is it true that your father committed suide?”

  Suide. No, my father did not commit that.

  I did not respond to Nanette. But word had gotten out. It was junior high: the manner of my father’s death was a weapon that could be used against me. For days, in civics class, Tony, sitting in the back of the room, whispered, “Forhan. Hey, Forhan.” When I turned, he began miming, patiently, the act of getting into a car and turning the ignition key. Grinning, he pretended to inhale deeply the fumes coming through the open car window. Then he slumped in his seat, eyes closed, tongue hanging slack from his mouth. Other students giggled or covered their eyes with their hands. I did nothing. Preferring not to be there, I acted as though I weren’t.

  I might as well not have been there—in that school, in my own life: I felt blurry and indeterminate, or I was sensing more intensely the blur that I had always been. For a couple of months, I had exulted in being a basketball player on the JV team: our coach, a parish dad, was relaxed and rumpled and funny, and I was a star. Even with my limited shooting repertoire—I depended almost wholly on a quick burst to the hoop from the right and a layup—I was the leading scorer, at fourteen points a game. I was flashy enough to draw the attention of the varsity coach, a square-jawed marine with a blond buzz cut. He needed me on his squad, he told me. His boys were creating something special in the top league—with my help, they might have that perfect season they were dreaming of. I made the switch. At the first team meeting I attended, the coach introduced me by saying, “Is everyone getting a good look at Forhan’s hair? Kind of long, don’t you think? I guess the new guy doesn’t care about rules.” It was then that I learned about a team rule the coach had established before the season started: no hair so long that it went past the top of the ear or reached the collar. “Well,” the coach announced, “he’s a late addition to the family. I suppose we have to let it slide.” Whether it was my aversion to barbers or my one-dimensional game or my inability to meld with a group that had forged its own identity months earlier, I found myself transformed from a high-scoring court wizard into a grumpy longhair riding the pine. In practices and games, the coach rarely looked at me. Only late in a blowout win would he wave me in. I finished my truncated varsity season with a scoring average of one fifth of a point per game. Maybe I wasn’t who I thought I was.

  And my dad was dead. My dad was dead. And the geography unit I had begun to study when he was alive I was still being tested on, and the sun still rose, and people stood in winter jackets on sidewalks waiting for buses, their breath a cloud in the air before them, and Karen Carpenter sang gleefully about being on top of the world, and I tied my shoes every morning and ate and drank, and my skin sometimes itched, my body still existed, and it was important to trim my nails and comb my hair and get to sleep on time so I would have enough energy for the next day, and it was important to wear my retainer faithfully so my teeth would stay straight, and it was important to be confirmed, it was the next thing to do—it was important to be initiated as a full-fledged, willing member of the Catholic Church. I was fourteen: old enough, I was told, to make my own choice about whether to accept Christ as my Lord, as my father had done thirty years before, and as his parents had done and their parents before them. I had, indeed, made my choice: I had rejected Christ—at least the story I had been told about him, the one in which he was the one and only god who had died for my sins and been resurrected, the one who promised he would return for me one day, who promised there was, without question, a world for us beyond this one. My father was in the ground in the Catholic cemetery, and he was floating in the murk of my memory, in fragments, but he was, most important, elsewhere, basking in the glow of God’s love—at least if he had been forgiven his final crime. Everyone around me seemed to take such ideas seriously, but they struck me as being, at best, unsubstantiated. Still, I did the safe thing: I prepared to confirm my faith publicly. This involved joining dozens of other eighth-graders in the school gym for a series of meetings during which we nibbled on cookies and listened to songs from the cast album of Jesus Christ Superstar and then discussed them in small groups.

  To celebrate the end of our formal preparation for confirmation, we organized a big potluck spaghetti dinner. Each boy or girl would bring from home a contribution to the meal, something we could share as we partook in the elation of claiming a personal stake in the Catholic faith. I had not chosen this faith; it had been sprinkled upon my forehead when I was an infant, and I had been asked week by week, year by year, before I had developed my reasoning abilities, to recite the prayers and participate in the rituals taught to me. I was old enough to feel whether I was a true believer, but I was not old enough to have the nerve to profess what I really thought. I held my tongue. I was beginning to sense that exi
stence is terrifyingly and beautifully bewildering, but, instead of being encouraged to experience that bewilderment on my own and pursue my hunches about it, I was expected to accept someone else’s metaphysical construct. About that which is the most essential thing in life—the ultimate mysterious ground of existence, the inexplicableness of our simply being here, of our being alive on this particular planet in the first place—I was being asked to adopt the beliefs of others. Could I, for a lifetime, perceive every moment through the filter of that fixed idea, merely because it was the local custom? And would this not, I was already beginning to feel, be the worst kind of lie because it was a lie I would have to tell myself?

  To the celebratory dinner, I brought garlic bread and paper napkins.

  47

  In school, when given a choice, I sat in the back row of any classroom, where I could lower my head and whisper to my neighbor or pretend I wasn’t there. Until now, I had cared about school—or, in school, I had performed with care. I knew that I was supposed to. I still knew it, but I had trouble summoning the effort. I had usually earned A’s, occasionally a B. Now my grades were plummeting: I earned a C in English and a D in algebra.

  As my performance in the classroom wavered; as I felt my attention detach, splinter, and flit off toward a thick mist at the edge of my thoughts; as I felt a yearning for sense—for an explanation of the world that would account for my being here in this strange, changing body and for my father having achieved his wish to be only a buried, decaying one; and as I hadn’t yet the mind that could have defined my discomfort so clearly, I engaged in a manic, blind descent into school activities.

  The student variety show was approaching; anyone who had an idea for a performance could sign up. Al and I had one: we would join with two other friends and be a hillbilly band playing old-time music. We’d dress in overalls and straw hats and stand on the stage barefoot, playing a washtub bass, guitar, jug, and washboard. If we were serious about this, we knew, we would need to practice, even if our instruments were primitive, and we would need the guidance of a professional­—that meant the band director, Mr. Holbrook, the same Mr. Holbrook who, two years before, leading my elementary school band, had tried to persuade me to take the clarinet seriously.

  One day after school, we four friends gathered in the music room with our instruments. I was on washboard. Mr. Holbrook stood before us. Baton in hand, he announced, “Okay, I’ll count you off. Let’s start on the downbeat. One—No! The downbeat. Start on the downbeat. Try again. One—No! The DOWNbeat!”

  I didn’t know what the downbeat was, and I didn’t feel like asking. None of us did. Aw, we decided, let’s just lip-synch to records.

  The hillbillies were out. Inspired by American Graffiti and the 1950s nostalgia that was heavy in the air, we came up with a new plan: a rock-and-roll revue. I would be the front man, the master of ceremonies. I didn’t care; I wasn’t shy—or, rather, this would be a way to circumvent my shyness: I would ignore myself, act as though I didn’t exist. I would be Bick Bark, with a name based on Dick Clark’s and a gravelly voice based on Wolfman Jack’s. I hid behind round mirrored sunglasses and wore white jeans and a sky-blue sweatshirt on which, with a thick black felt-tip pen, I had drawn stars and squiggled wavy lines and written, in large block letters, BICK BARK. With every student in the school in the auditorium—with Cherie there, and Debbie, and Nanette, and Tony—I stood at the lip of the stage behind a microphone stand and spoke in the voice of a stranger, introducing the songs that my friends—in jeans with rolled-up cuffs and grubby white T-shirts, their hair greased into DAs—pretended to sing: “Teenager in Love,” “Rock Around the Clock,” “At the Hop.”

  We were a smash. The audience clapped and even sang along, and we earned a raucous ovation. After the show, I remained Bick Bark. I kept his clothes on. This came in handy at the after-school dance when a pretty girl who had previously kept an oblivious distance from me sidled over and whispered, “Are you really Bick Bark? Will you dance this slow dance with me?” Would I ever. I settled my hands on her waist, she wrapped her arms around my shoulders, and we rocked gently back and forth, her head on my chest, the apple scent of her shampoo in my nose. She was the age my mother had been when she first danced with my father, when they did the slide together, when they sensed that they already somehow knew each other and should stay together. At the end of the song, the girl smiled, slipped her hands from my shoulders, then stared—aghast, repulsed—at her palms. They were black with ink; I had come off on her hands.

  Even if I was in hiding, distracted, and playing the role of the mediocre student, one of my teachers took notice of me: one day, as the rest of the class headed out the door toward lunch, she waved me over to her desk. She had a proposal. I had leadership ability. I should run for school president. I should at least think about it.

  Later that day, at home, I decided, yes, of course: I should be president. It was a thing to be, another role to play, a predefined identity to slip into, a safe place to put myself. Whichever eighth-grader won the election in the spring would spend the next year as leader of the student government. I wasn’t thinking much, though, about next year. I was thinking about the campaign, about how it was something in which I could lose myself, in which I could invest my time and art supplies. For the next week, my bedroom became campaign headquarters. I sat on the floor, cutting badge-size circles out of orange and blue construction paper, writing meticulously on them and on large posters my slogans: “Bick’s the Best,” “I’m for Bick,” “Bick Clicks.” Bick had been working for me: he would be the candidate.

  My two competitors were Laurie, a quiet, thoughtful flutist, and Joe, a serious, bookish, true school citizen who ran on a platform of more openness and fruitful interaction between administration and students. My platform was that I was Bick Bark and I had cool buttons and posters. Secretly, too, I coveted the honorary dark polished wood presidential gavel that I would receive if I won, and I hoped that walking past my posters on the school walls for two weeks would make Cherie realize that she was blind and misguided and had actually loved me from the start.

  Bick won by a landslide. The year’s final edition of the school newspaper recounted the election, the front-page article saying, “Chris, not being sure of his status as Chris Forhan, put on the gimmick of being Bick Bark.” Side by side with that article was another, reporting the victory of the student who had run for Girls’ Club president: “Angie is planning new activities for the school and will try to make seventh graders feel welcome. The interesting fact is that, when she won the election, she didn’t have any posters up in the halls.” A campaign of ideas. I hadn’t thought of that.

  On the next page of the paper was this article, written by my friend Al:

  Rumor Spreads Quickly

  If some students heard a rumor going around about three weeks ago regarding Chris Forhan, next year’s president, getting suspended, it’s not true. This rumor was started by a person who thought it was funny. He told a couple of people that Chris sneaked into the balcony and turned the spotlight on Mr. Richardson at the choir concert May 22. Before a person starts spreading stories, he should know the facts.

  The inventor of the rumor was probably Al himself; his article had the tone of an act of forced penance. It was someone else, though, who spread the rumor that I had been spied naked, streaking across the football field.

  I was Bick Bark. I had stepped into an invented character’s clothes and, in full view of the school, stepped onto the stage. Bick was popular. Bick was president. Bick was the subject of wild rumor and conjecture. The boy I’d been, the kid whose dad had done himself in, had disappeared, happily so.

  48

  We wanted beer, my friends and I, and we’d heard where we could get some. Word had spread around my high school that a convenience store in central Seattle, the black district, sold alcohol to teenagers, no questions asked. Could it be true? Four of us were wil
ling to find out.

  I’d never had a beer. It was time I tried one.

  I was a month away from turning sixteen—still too young to drive. John, a year older, would take his family’s old sedan, and Al and Scott and I would come along. Scott lived across the street from Al and was a central member of the group I had begun to hang around with. One of Scott’s favorite rituals, as we were cruising nowhere in particular, was to roll down his window and, as we passed a man tugging at his ear, yell authoritatively, “No ear tugging after four o’clock!” To a pair of girls in the crosswalk wearing knit caps, “No knit caps after six!” To a dog: “No barking on Fridays!” Scott had come into possession of a fire extinguisher and begun filling it with water and bringing it along on our travels. He would pull up beside someone walking along the street and call out, “Excuse me—can you tell us how to get to the Space Needle?” When the kind stranger put his fingers to his chin and said, “Let’s see—” Scott would lift the extinguisher, blast him in the face, then hit the accelerator. Through all of this, I hunkered down in the backseat, cringing, mortified—too much a good boy to enjoy Scott’s shenanigans, too much a coward to demand that he stop.