by Phil Stern
I’ll give you a perfect example. Saturday mornings were the worst time of the week, when Dad released all the tension that had built up during five stormy days working in New York City. One Saturday morning…oh, I was about seven or so…my father was painting the mail box post by the street. As usual he was pissed off, getting himself worked up. I was trying very hard to please him, warding off the inevitable explosion as long as possible.
“Steve,” he finally said, wiping his brow from the heat. Being overweight, almost any physical activity was unduly taxing for him. “Can you go get me some newspapers so I don’t drip paint on the curb?”
Now, this was exactly the kind of spark to get Dad screaming and yelling. What if I brought the wrong newspapers? Maybe I’d take a minute longer to get them than he thought necessary? With a ball of fear forming in the pit of my stomach, I raced inside the house.
There weren’t any newspapers behind the big armchair upstairs where they were thrown after being read. Nor were there any old papers downstairs next to the laundry machine, where they were put after piling up behind the chair upstairs. I couldn’t find any newspapers in the entire house.
I asked Mom about newspapers. She just told me to go away. At a few points in my childhood my mother sank into a deep depression, and I think this may have been one of those occasions.
Terrified, I finally dragged back out to the top of the driveway, where my sweating father was getting all worked up.
“Where are those papers?” he demanded. “Damn it, Steve. I’m getting paint all over the street!”
Numbly, I mumbled that I couldn’t find any.
Eyes blazing, Dad became very still, staring off into space. This, of course, was the final stage before complete meltdown. “Steve,” he then said with deceptive formality. “Would you please go inside and get your father some newspapers. Do it right now.”
So I stumbled back inside, nearly shaking with fright. It was then that I spied some newspapers duct-taped around the center column of the garage, about three feet up. My father had put them there a few months ago, to prevent the cars from rubbing against the column when pulling in and out.
I ripped down the newspapers and took them out to Dad. For the moment my father was mollified, though I knew what was coming. Racing inside, I squirmed under the covers in my bed.
Sure enough, about forty-five minutes later, Dad banged open my bedroom door, stalking in several steps. And then, covered in flecks of paint, he proceeded to bellow at the top of his lungs, ranting and raving about what an idiot I was.
“IF I’D WANTED THE PAPERS FROM THE COLUMN, I’D HAVE GOTTEN THEM MYSELF!” He was so loud I thought the ceiling would collapse. “What were you thinking!”
“But Dad…” I began, though it was no use trying to defend myself. “I couldn’t find any other…”
“Now I have to put the papers back up in the garage!” Face turning purple, he was utterly out of control. “You’ve made more work for me! You’ve wasted newspapers! WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU!”
Crying in fear and helplessness, this went on for a while. At one point Mom came shuffling down the hallway to intervene.
“All right, Dan, that’s enough,” she ineffectually mumbled. “I’m sure Steve didn’t mean to…”
“He ripped the papers from the garage column!” Dad roared, fists clenched, rocking back and forth. “How stupid can he be!”
At some point, amid my crying and Mom’s pleading, Dad wandered off, hopping in the car and disappearing for the rest of the day. I remember hoping he’d never come back.
I’ve always believed a key part of growing up, a sign that you may have finally reached some hazy form of adulthood, is being able to look back and see your parents for the assholes they really were. They may not have been assholes all the time. Perhaps, overall, they were good parents. Maybe they were only bad parents 10 percent of the time. Maybe 5 percent. I don’t know.
But if you can’t look back at your own upbringing and pick out the good parenting from the bad, you’re lost as an adult. Absolutely lost. You’ll turn into some lunatic at a young age, or perhaps futilely attempt to ward off the coming madness by getting married yourself. But then, trapped within the swirling emotional cacophony of your faulty upbringing, you’ll simply inflict the same pointless insanity on your own wife and kids.
And in case you were wondering, there was no practical harm to my ripping off the newspapers rolled around the garage column. It took Dad all of two minutes (with me helping) to get some more newspapers the next day, roll them around the column, and tape them down. A more harmless, understandable, and indeed amusing “screw up,” if one cared to even call it that, could hardly be imagined.
And as it turned out, Dad himself had cleaned out all the newspapers the night before, tying them up in neat bundles and loading them in the trunk for the recycling center. Trapped within the Saturday morning rage, he’d forgotten by the next day.
So why didn’t Dad just go off by himself on Saturday mornings, shedding the work frustration on his own? Good question.
Unfortunately, Saturdays were “family” days. If Dad didn’t wait around the house, doing odd chores while waiting for his family to get up and join him for some mundane outing, Mom would bitch and complain for the rest of the weekend. So he’d get up and steam, then finally explode. But at least it was “family” time.
You see, my mother had a hopelessly idealized view of family life. It was supposed to be just like those television shows from the fifties, where the man loved working some comfortable middle-class job, the wife adored being a homemaker, and the kids were popular and got good grades. The “family” was always a good thing that made everyone content through some type of suburban osmosis. As long as everyone played their role, everyone would be happy.
But of course this was nonsense. Dad got up at six and didn’t return home again until seven o’clock, dragging himself into New York City and back in the meantime. Mom got up even earlier, commuting fifty minutes to a school district in the next county, then racing back home around three, where she then spent several hours doing chores, carting my sister and myself around, and then cooking dinner. They were both exhausted and unhappy, were utterly disconnected from each other emotionally, and just didn’t know what to do.
Were they content, even mildly so, at some point? I don’t know. But the pressures built, the Formula was failing, and by the time I became aware of such things they both just felt utterly trapped. Too many responsibilities, too little time.
And for some reason, absolutely no support from each other. The one person in the world whom they should have been able to lean on, who could have empathized with their pain, was instead their cruelest critic.
For her part Mom didn’t want to hear that Dad was tired, or needed some space, or perhaps should just rest this weekend instead of cleaning out the gutters. Nope, he was a family man. He had responsibilities. I can remember the cold look that would come over her face at times, icily reminding Dad of some chore or “outing” he’d promised to attend.
And as for my father? Why, Mom was a schoolteacher. What bullshit. All she had to do was babysit some kids, run errands, and cook? He could do that in his sleep. Please, honey. Just shut the fuck up and mop the floor.
Oh, did they give it to one another. Dad wanted to hire someone to mow the lawn on weekends. Mom wouldn’t hear of wasting money that way. Of course, Mom wanted to hire a housekeeper to come in twice a month, just to help out. Absolutely not, said Dad. There was an inalterable misery index to be maintained at all times. Neither one got a break.
Like many women of her generation, Mom had no interests outside of the family. In the evenings she would just watch television, hour after wasted hour. On weekends, when not fighting with Dad or dragging everyone off to some “cultural” activity, she would merely sit around the house drinking coffee. In retrospect she was bored out of her mind, and had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
Perhaps recognizing
this on some level, Mom was vaguely offended by other people’s hobbies. For instance, Dad considered himself a photographer of sorts. He loved to walk around with some goofy camera hanging around his neck, making a great show of find angles and shots and all kinds of nonsense. It was harmless. Hell, at least he wasn’t shouting at anyone.
Well, Mom laid down the law. Every picture he took must have a family member in it. Otherwise, it was wasteful. To his credit, Dad ignored her. So in order to forestall bickering my sister or I would run over and stand in front of some rowboat, or statue, or whatever Dad wanted to photograph, thus satisfying the letter of Mom’s demand.
My father also liked shooting and hunting, which I’m sure was little more than an excuse to get out on his own. Mom never stopped complaining about it, at times assailing Dad for “abandoning” the family on a Sunday. When we got older, Dad took my sister and me along, which was great, because he was away from Mom and thus was in a good mood. Mom sat around the house drinking coffee.
I’ll tell you one thing, though. I probably had the only father in the world who didn’t understand sports.
Bases are loaded with two outs. Hitter strikes out, ending the inning. Victorious pitcher jogs off the mound, batter dejectedly walks back to the dugout.
You know what my Dad’s analysis of this would be? “That batter is an idiot!” Excitedly he would slide forward on the couch, pointing at the television. “If he had hit the ball into the outfield, instead of striking out, they could have scored a few runs!”
Or, if the opposite had actually occurred, and the batter had laced a double down the line?
“What the hell is that pitcher doing!” Dad would scream. “If he had struck the guy out, nobody would have scored!”
I really can’t explain my father’s deep-seated inability to grasp the essence of what was actually transpiring on the field. Countless times I would explain to him, during a commercial, that of course the batter was trying to hit the ball, he just failed to do so in that instance. Or the pitcher was going for a strikeout, and the batter just put a good swing on the ball.
Nope. Dad felt that athletes did whatever they chose to do, almost as if pitcher and batter were mentally connected and would then collectively decide, in that instance, that the pitcher would strike the batter out.
Or, alternatively, if somebody failed to make a play in the field, they were just an “idiot,” as if the players themselves didn’t understand what they were supposed to be doing out there.
Do you have any idea how annoying it is to try and watch a fucking baseball game with your father prattling on like a moron? “My God, Steve, why didn’t the outfielder catch that ball!”
“Dad, he tried. The ball was out of his reach.”
“But if he had caught it, the batter would have been out! What an idiot!”
Next inning. “Can you believe that? Why try to steal a base if you’re just going to be thrown out! That makes no sense!”
“Dad, that guy’s stolen twenty bases in a row. It took a perfect throw to get him.”
“Yes, but he was thrown out!” my father would yell. “Look, Steve. If he wasn’t going to make it, why try to steal the base?”
My father also believed all the coaches had crystal balls. “That guy hit into a double play! What the hell is the manager thinking? If he was going to hit into a double play, why not pinch hit for him instead?”
Perhaps my father felt so intimidated by athletic prowess that he needed to invent some kind of mental paradigm in which he was superior? I don’t know. To this day I like to watch baseball by myself. That way nobody can say anything really stupid.
But this was part of a larger issue for Dad. To a pathological extent, my father needed to be viewed as an “expert” on everything, even subjects he knew absolutely nothing about.
No tour guide was safe from Dad. On vacations my mother loved to visit old homes now set up like museums. My sister used to call them “bed warmer houses” because there was always a prolonged explanation of how rich people used to have servants put hot coals in long metal boxes, called a bed warmer, and then heat up the sheets before sleep. Five minutes into any trip, Dad would interrupt the tour guide (usually some college kid) and take over the tour, babbling away about nothing. Often he would repeat the bed warmer speech from the last tour. On more than one occasion other tourists would stalk away in disgust.
Dad would lecture merchants about their wares, sales people about their cars, and dog owners about their pets. In restaurants and supermarkets he would find the manager and start telling him how to run things. I can remember Mom putting up with this for a while, but at some point she lost patience.
“All right, Dan, that’s enough,” she would quietly say.
“But honey, I’m just telling this young man that if he moved his cash register to the other side of the store…”
“That’s enough! Let’s go!” Without another word she’d stalk away, leaving my father to follow.
He even tried pulling that routine with the surgeon after my sister’s appendix burst. Megan, then 20 and home on a college break, was rushed to the local hospital in grave condition. My mother, father, and I were sitting in the waiting room, fearing the worst.
The doctor came out, still in bloody scrubs, but smiling reassuringly. Barely able to even stand, my mother rushed over to him. “Doctor! How’s my little girl?”
“She’s fine,” the surgeon began. “Megan had a small tumor in her appendix, but we were able to…”
“That’s right, doctor.” Cutting the surgeon off, Dad came striding over. “Actually, from a purely medical standpoint, the appendix isn’t even…”
At this point my mother exploded. I mean, it was like a nuclear warhead had been detonated right there in the waiting room.
“DAN, SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Mom actually turned and took a swing at Dad, though he danced out of the way. “NOT ANOTHER FUCKING WORD!”
“But honey…”
“I AM HERE TO TALK TO THIS MAN ABOUT OUR DAUGHTER!” My mother’s eyes were almost literally twirling, like some possessed woman in a horror movie. “AND IF YOU INTERFERE, I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
For once, Dad had nothing to say. Mom slowly turned back to the surgeon. “Please, doctor, continue. I assure you my husband will not say another word.”
Megan spent another week in the hospital, during which time my parents consulted the surgeon on several occasions. Each time my father was warned not to utter a sound in the doctor’s presence.
“But honey, I have questions…”
“Dan. Listen to me very carefully.” Staring straight out the windshield, Mom turned into the hospital parking lot. “We are here to discuss our daughter’s health and well being. This is no time, and no place, for your self-absorbed bullshit.”
Actually, I’d never even heard my mother curse before Megan’s surgery. This was very late in the game, though. Three years later, soon after my 19th birthday, she filed for divorce.
I’ve often thought about my father’s desperate need to be regarded as a big shot, an authority, a man to be taken seriously. Once he read about an old law school classmate being appointed chairman of some board. “I want to be Chairman of the Board!” he burst out, the anguish palpable. In retrospect, he probably went to law school as a means of moving up in the world, of becoming an esteemed figure of some kind. But that never happened. No one ever asked him to become chairman of any board.
Boy, was he frustrated. How else can you explain a man who spent an entire two-week vacation in Nova Scotia screaming and yelling at his family? Refusing to use a map because he had supposedly memorized the roads beforehand, we drove around lost for almost the entire trip. To this day I feel car sick if anyone mentions Nova Scotia.
Here’s a good one. Dad would constantly let our golden retriever out on her own, under the theory that he had somehow “trained” her not to leave our yard. I can’t tell you how many times we had to search for that dog. I often c
ried, thinking she was gone for good. Neighbors, dog catchers, even the cops were inconvenienced. He only stopped after the town threatened fines and legal action.
By the way, you know what the dog “training” consisted of? Dad would look down into the golden’s eyes by the back door, nod very seriously, and then utter “Misty, don’t…leave…the…yard. I’m serious now. Stay in the yard!” He’d then let Misty charge out the door, turning to me with a Dad-knows-best smile. “She’ll be back in a minute, son, don’t you worry.” Needless to say his technique wasn’t terribly effective, and usually led to more screaming, both at the dog and us.
Look, don’t get me wrong, I have a tremendous amount of respect for my father. About eight years ago, back living on Long Island, I actually commuted into New York City for two weeks. It was exhausting and miserable. I couldn’t hack it.
But he did that, week in and week out, for over 30 years! I mean, think about that. Dad should have controlled himself with his loved ones, no question. He shouldn’t have taken out all his frustrations on some defenseless kid, or used his family like some captive audience. But I do admire his determination to hang in there. I often wonder if I could have done the same.
But still, I think there were dark days, especially during their divorce, when Dad brooded on his life. He’d trimmed the hedges, shoveled the snow, payed the mortgage. Made sure his kids had braces, a new kitchen table every five years, the works. And what had it gotten him? Nothing much, really. The Formula was bullshit. It had all been a big lie.
Now that I’m older, I often reflect on my parents and their dysfunctional relationship. Each complained bitterly, once things completely blew up, that the other had “changed” after marriage, that they weren’t the same person they were when dating. But the simple reality is they just didn’t know one another very well before getting hitched. All that mattered was the magical Formula, with its house in the suburbs, two-point-three kids, three-point-two cats, and a two-week summer vacation.
But that’s not happiness. That’s not what life is all about. At least, not to me.