My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  On the excursion to buy the beer, I was not a coward. I believed in this mission. It did not seem to me reprehensible for a teenage boy to desire to try alcohol, but I also did not doubt that if my mother knew what I was doing, she would make me pay. To take this drive, to make this purchase, to pop the cap from a bottle and take a swig, I would have to become—I would have to liberate—a boy I never was at home, in her presence: a boy who followed his whims, even if that meant ignoring the rules. I imagined if my mother were to discover what I was up to, her conception of me would be altered forever: she would understand at last my depravity and weakness, my general unseemliness. I was a teenager, biologically programmed to feel constrained by the values of my parents. Still, this sense of my mother as a strict moral arbiter—had my father felt it, too? Maybe he’d kept part of himself secret because of it. I was beginning to live a life outside of my home, a life that I wouldn’t give up. If I could live that life only by hiding it, I would.

  The store was there, just where we’d been told it was: a small, nondescript place on the corner of a busy street. We strolled in. It was empty except for the cashier. He eyed us impassively when we entered, then looked away. We must have looked like what we were: four furtive white boys from the suburbs. He must have known why we were there.

  We had decided we would try to buy a six-pack or two. But which of us would do it? We huddled briefly in the aisle next to the chips and peanuts and whispered haltingly. “Sorry,” Al said. He had no money. “I have a dollar, that’s all,” Scott apologized. John had two dollars, enough for a six-pack. So did I. We would do the buying. If John succeeded, I would try, too.

  John sauntered over to the refrigerator case, then eased the door open and snatched a six-pack of bottles. Rainier: we’d heard that was good. The rest of us watched silently as he carried the beer to the register. Looking unsurprised and a little tired, the cashier took John’s money, handed him some coins back, and slipped the beer into a paper sack. John headed out the door. Al, Scott, and I glanced at each other. This was easy.

  It was my turn. I repeated what John did. By the time I was taking the heavy sack from the cashier, Al and Scott were out the door and headed to the car, which was parked at the curb. I left the store, the glass door swinging shut behind me, and hopped into the backseat, setting the bag on the floor next to John’s purchase. Then we were off, laughing. As we drove up the hill, a car pulled alongside us to the right, an arm extended out of its open window. In the hand was a badge, glittering silver in the late-afternoon light. There were two men in the front seat, waving us back over to the curb.

  “Fuckfuckfuck,” Scott said.

  John parked, and we stepped out. The two men approached us. “You boys have something in the car you want to show us?” one of them said.

  “No,” John said. “What?”

  “Did you buy some beer just now?”

  “Son,” the second man said, “would you mind opening the doors of your car?”

  John did as he was asked, opening the front and back doors on the curb side of the car.

  “May I have those bags, please?” The man pointed to the floor near the backseat.

  John leaned down, grabbed them, and handed them over.

  “Any of you boys twenty-one?”

  None of us spoke. The man opened the back door of his car and set the six-packs on the seat.

  “Don’t tell my mother,” I said. I looked one man in the eyes, then the other. “Don’t tell my mother.” My secret life—the one that had brought me to this moment—and my life at home were at risk of colliding. I was pacing on the sidewalk, back and forth, pleading. “Don’t tell my mother. Are you going to tell my mother? I don’t care that you caught us. Just don’t tell my mother. She’ll kill me. My mother can’t know about this. Please. Don’t tell her.”

  “There’s no need to worry,” one of them said, “as long as it wasn’t you who bought the beer. Did you buy the beer?”

  I hated myself for having had two dollars in my wallet.

  About my mother, they made no promises. I would just have to wait and see, they told me. It depended on how the case panned out. It was the cashier they were after, not us. They’d been sitting in their car for hours, surveilling the place. Whoever they caught would be a prime witness against the cashier.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Just don’t tell my mother.”

  When I returned home, I spilled the whole story to Dana. I had to tell someone. “Are you going to tell Mom?” she asked.

  No, I wouldn’t tell her.

  “I think you should tell Mom.”

  I couldn’t. I’d sweat it out. I’d bury the problem and, if I got lucky, never be required to speak of it.

  I waited: I waited all the next day, then the next one, for a phone call. I prayed not to get one, prayed that the episode would fade away, be forgotten.

  And then, one late afternoon, the call came. Two detectives, I was told, needed to speak with me in person, and they were on their way over.

  With only minutes left before the doorbell would ring, I trudged upstairs and announced to my mother that I had something to tell her, something important. She looked at me quizzically. “Okay,” she said. I walked into the living room and sat in a chair. She followed and sat on the couch a few feet away.

  My mother knew me as a good boy. I had mainly stayed out of trouble, and it hadn’t been difficult. But now I had broken the law, then covered up the transgression.

  My throat dry, heart pounding, I explained to my mother what I had done. She did not move from her seat. She stared at me. “I’ll never trust you again,” she said.

  It wasn’t the buying of the beer that bothered her, she explained, although she didn’t approve of it. My crime had been my silence: my assumption that part of my life should be kept a secret. My crime—as I think of it only now—had been my father’s crime.

  The detectives didn’t stay long. They asked me to narrate the series of events surrounding the purchase of the beer. Had the cashier asked my age? Had he asked for identification? Then they told me that I would be expected to testify in court. The cashier had a long history of selling alcohol to minors, and it had finally caught up with him. Throughout the interview, neither of them cracked a grin. After our door closed behind them, as they were descending our porch steps, maybe one of them muttered, “Poor dumb sucker of a kid.”

  In court, I answered the lawyers’ questions as accurately as I could. Yes, I had willingly purchased the beer; it was my idea. No, the cashier did not ask me to produce identification. No, he did not remind me that there was a minimum age for purchasing alcoholic beverages. No, I could not say for sure that the man sitting in the courtroom was the one in the store that day. His face had faded away as soon as I had turned toward the door.

  My punishment was not finished. If I hoped to have the citation for buying alcohol expunged from my record, I was required to attend alcohol school; one afternoon a week for two months, I would join a dozen other teenagers for group counseling. Mainly out of a sense of duty as a friend, but maybe also out of a sense of guilt—he hadn’t had to tell his parents or testify or enroll in alcohol school—Al accompanied me, every week, on the four-mile walk to the counseling center. He waited outside while I joined my troubled peers, a tough bunch—leather-clad, straggle-haired, callous, and sad. None, it appeared, had recently completed a year as junior high school president. Week after week, I listened to lectures about drinking and depression, about drinking and skipping school, about drinking and dying behind the wheel. I filled in the bubbles and blanks on surveys designed to elicit in me recognition of my reckless relationship with alcohol and the ways in which it was deadening me to my family, my friends, and myself. Meeting after meeting, I was polite and silent; I did my time; I spoke briefly and only when spoken to.

  One afternoon, though, I was required to stand before the entire group
and make a speech—we all were. We sat in a circle and, one by one, rose and testified about what it felt like to be drunk and why we liked it so much. The others spoke in rich detail, with fondness, of wild sensations of joy and fearlessness, of drunken urges to fight, to weep, to scream at their tormentors—the bullying vice principal, the disloyal sister, the feckless father who had abandoned them—or to declaim freely, without shame, their tender love for their true friends, the few who understood and accepted them. Then it was my turn. I stood, hesitated, then made an embarrassed admission: I had never been drunk. I had never tasted alcohol. I had only wanted to try a beer. Was that such a big deal? I was almost sixteen, after all; I was curious—but, before I could so much as pop the top off, I had been caught, and now here I was, and, believe me, I wished I could explain what it felt like to be drunk, I wished I knew what it was like, and if I was lucky, I would find out one day, and that day would come soon.

  After my eight weeks of meetings, during my exit interview, the counselor sat behind her desk and looked at me sympathetically. “Sorry about that,” she said. “I know you didn’t belong here.”

  My record was expunged. For my trouble attending the trial as a witness, the state mailed me a seven-dollar check. I was too ashamed to cash it. To do so might be to confess my crime all over again. My aunt was a teller at my bank: there was a chance that I would end up standing before her and she would say, “A check from the state? What have you been up to, Chris?” I slipped the check inside a book in my bedroom and forgot it, or tried to imagine that I had. Months later, the state sent me a letter asking what had happened. It needed to balance its books for the fiscal year. Had the check not reached me? Did I need another one? No, what I needed was to have the whole torturous, embarrassing episode expunged from the record of my life.

  I plucked up the courage and cashed the check. I was lucky—it was my aunt’s day off.

  Not long afterward, I got my wish: I got drunk. The parents of a friend of a friend of my friend were out of town, so their house was available for a party. I had no idea how to drink; I was unaware that between the moment one sips alcohol and the moment its effects kick in, there is a delay. I was handed something simple, maybe a rum and Coke. It tasted sweet—not bad at all. But there wasn’t much alcohol in it: I wasn’t feeling anything. I drank another. Meanwhile, one of our group, Randy, was being more careful. He had not drunk much, that evening or ever, but, wanting to look as though he knew what he was doing—wanting to align his behavior with the deepening general stupidity being displayed by the partiers—he hesitated in the stairwell, tilted his head, gazed at a potted plant, and delicately lifted one of its leaves to his parted lips, pretending to eat it. Is that the kind of thing one does under the influence of alcohol? I didn’t think so. I was sitting on the stairs, considering Randy, then considering a row of knickknacks lined on a narrow shelf on the wall: small porcelain puppies and a figurine of the Virgin Mary, arms extended toward me. She seemed to be moving, seemed to be about to speak. Why was I sitting on the stairs? Hadn’t I just a moment before been walking down the stairs, intending to go somewhere? Mary was looking at me. My dad’s dead, I thought. My dad’s dead. He hadn’t been on my mind, but suddenly he was. Then I said it aloud: “My dad’s dead, my dad’s dead.” I said it louder, and then I wailed it. “My dad’s dead!” Tears welled in my eyes. I pounded my knees with my fists. “My dad’s dead! He’s dead!”

  Al was suddenly sitting next to me, putting his arm around my shoulders. “I know, Chris,” he said. “I know. We all know now.”

  I ended the night outside, on my back, faceup in the flower garden, no desire to rise.

  49

  A couple of years before this, while still living at home, Kevin had summoned the nerve to make an announcement to our mother: he would no longer attend Mass. He could not, he told her, profess what he did not believe. None of us children had said such a thing before. I, certainly, was too craven to do so. My habit on Sunday mornings was to tell my mother I would be attending a later Mass than she; instead of driving to church, I would drive to the record store and browse the bins for an hour. When I had been forced to make a difficult admission to my mother, it was because two detectives were minutes away from ringing our doorbell. When Kevin was forced to make a difficult admission, it was because his conscience would not have it otherwise.

  Our father’s kind of courage—and he did have courage—was in charting a plan for his life, a plan of education and professional mastery and advancement, when he had few models for doing so, and then applying himself to that plan, remaining dutiful to it. A consequence, though, of such diligence and single-mindedness might have been that he ignored complicated, troubling, ragged aspects of himself. As he adopted acceptable modes of being, acceptable identities—soldier, husband, father, career man, churchgoer—I suspect that griefs and yearnings he had long harbored were silenced. Maybe this is merely—merely!—the human condition. But what if a man defines himself by his competence in the workplace and then that competence fails him? What if he conceives of himself as surviving on pluck and will and then that will slackens?

  What if he gets sick? What self does he have left then? Can he recognize it?

  My mother accepted Kevin’s proclamation that he would not belong to her church, no matter how his announcement pained her—no matter how it meant the failure of her efforts, from his birth, to instill in him the faith that had given her life such purpose and moral clarity. What alternative did she have?

  Kevin had chosen honest perplexity over false piety, and, at the same time, he was choosing poetry. It makes sense: a poem is a place to discover what we know—and a place to map the limits of our knowing. Soon he began sharing his poems with our mother, and, however questioning they might have been of the faith that sustained her, she was proud. At twenty, he wrote a poem called “Grace Before a Meal,” in which the traditional consolations of religion are absent. One evening—irony and paradox I can’t untangle—our mother, when we sat down to dinner, asked Kevin to read the poem aloud as we bowed our heads. For a moment, our household’s ritual honoring of God for His gifts was replaced by an honoring of the chilling and exhilarating silence that abides beneath all our chatter and guesswork about Him.

  An element of hollowness is present in the stew

  The upright glasses and laid-out spoons have nothing to say

  The seated guests have nothing to say

  Between the scraping of chairs and the lifting of spoons,

  The candles hold their tongues forever & ever Amen.

  50

  At sixteen, I was hired for my first real job—in a nursing home, the kind of place where Grandma Carey, my father’s grandmother, spent her last years. Her mind mostly gone, she passed away two years after my father did, without ever having been told that her favorite grandson had killed himself—passed away, probably, with no memory that he had existed.

  In a white button-down shirt and paper cap, I worked in the kitchen, washing dishes, mopping floors, and setting up the racks of food trays—the silverware and napkins, the salt and pepper packets, the skim milk, the hot water for tea or Sanka—that were delivered to the patients three times a day in their rooms. The door between the kitchen and public hallway was open during the day, and the sounds of a jaunty piano and hesitant, stiff singing reached me from the communal room: “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. . . .” “And we won’t come back till it’s over over there.” I glimpsed the old people shuffling past the door in slippers or rolling by in wheelchairs, gripping the black rubber railing on the wall for help making turns. Marie, nearly hairless, skeletal, in a thin, tattered robe, minced along with the delicate steps of a geisha, murmuring, “Yes. Yes. Yes.” Mr. Walker sped along in his wheelchair, the stump of his amputated leg pointing forward, as if accusingly, at whoever was in his path. Answering and re-answering a question that no one else heard, he insisted, through sneering lip
s, “No. No. No. No.”

  Thankfully, in the evening, after the patients had eaten dinner and the racks of trays had been wheeled back into the kitchen, I was allowed to close the door. I felt contentedly alone then, singing to myself, dipping the mop into the bucket of steaming bleached water and slapping it onto the linoleum floor, pouring juices for the next morning’s breakfast—thirty-six orange, twelve apple, five cranberry, four prune—in small plastic cups on a wide tray and sliding it into the refrigerator. My first and largest task before turning out the lights was to wash all the pots and plates and cups and silverware. I stood at the stainless-steel sink, snug in my corner, as if in a cockpit, long counter to my left where the dirty dishes were set, immense dishwasher to my right, a handle to slide its door up and then slam it satisfyingly down, like a garage door, before I pressed the red button to begin the wash cycle. One night, humming, in the midst of my familiar, simple, repetitive work, my mind elsewhere, anywhere but there, I grabbed a plate with my left hand, plucked the knife and fork off it with my right, and tossed them into a plastic basket, used a spatula to scrape off the excess food, then grabbed another plate, then another, then another—and then I stopped. I stared at the plate I was holding. No. Could it be? I looked closer. Yes. Gleaming, sticky, nearly black, next to a lump of untouched mashed potatoes and a brownish-pink square of country-fried steak, was a tidy pile of human excrement. A mute, potent protest: the act, perhaps, of someone who felt he’d outlived his usefulness yet was being made to suffer the indignity of remaining alive, someone whose purpose had vanished but who still had a mind, some kind of mind.

  Was it a protest against me? Or, more generally, against my kind?: those who delivered from the kitchen, daily, and would deliver until this person’s death, congealed oatmeal, cold white toast, bland canned peas, a pear wedge fished from a ten-pound tub. Maybe it was a protest against everything. Or nothing. Whoever sent the message to me, I saw his point.