* * *
—
People could not understand why we were in New York and not in Florida. Inquiries kept coming about funeral arrangements, a memorial fund. Because he had been so private, and because I—the only person in the family who might be considered a public figure—had rigorously respected that privacy, most people we knew had had no idea he was even sick, much less how sick he’d gotten. We were not yet ready to break the seal on that privacy, and we were certainly not prepared to discuss the specific circumstances of his death, which at that point we ourselves did not fully understand.
Florida law dictated that because his death was not the result of a crime, his physician and not the medical examiner must be the one to sign the death certificate. But he didn’t have a GP, just a neurologist to prescribe the Levodopa. The doctor he’d been seeing had retired a month earlier. The new one, the one who’d written the new prescription, saw a potential liability issue and would not sign the certificate, which meant my father’s body could not be released to a funeral home. It would end up taking almost three weeks to get him out of the morgue, a Kafkan comedy of bureaucratic horror that was every bit as stupid as it was cruel. But we didn’t know then that we had that nightmare ahead of us.
One thing my sister and I did know for sure was that my father would not have wanted a funeral. The idea would have repulsed him: the religiosity, the expense, the pious platitudes offered by people he’d not spoken to in a decade or more, people he felt (in some cases more reasonably than others) had turned their backs on him. I asked my wife to try to explain all this—some sanitized, digestible version of this—to her parents, who had only met him once, some years earlier, but understood his situation well enough. Now they were ready to do whatever was asked of them, go wherever they were needed. They thought Amanda should be where I was, though they did not understand why I was where I was and not where it seemed obvious that both my sister and I ought to have been. I wanted my wife to be with me also. I would have given anything that weekend to put my head in her lap for ten minutes. But I needed her to stay put for the moment, because I knew we would eventually have to go to Florida to clean out his apartment, and I knew I was going to need her then. There are only so many personal days, so many airfare dollars. Being apart had already been terrible and there was nothing we could do. I have no idea what my wife said to her parents but they are good people and she made them understand. They had food delivered to my sister’s apartment; my sister-in-law sent a bottle of whiskey with which to wash it down.
* * *
—
Replies to the Facebook post came from people I’d grown up with but did not necessarily know well. Some I was never even properly “friends” with. I doubt I ever had their phone number or saw the inside of their house. They remembered Larry Taylor as a Little League coach. As a fundraiser for the debate team, the Hebrew school. As someone who helped them write an important speech—the valedictorian told me this—when her own parents couldn’t. The kids who had been my childhood friends remembered trips to Grand Prix, the enormous video arcade in the cruddy part of Hollywood. To Jaxson’s Ice Cream Parlor in Dania Beach, a kitsch tourist trap to which Dad had been going since he’d moved to Florida in 1969 (a stone’s throw, in those days, from the Pirates World amusement park). He’d been taking my sister and me to Jaxson’s since we were kids.
* * *
—
Amanda’s friend Becky is a social worker, one of a very few friends of ours who knew my father’s full situation because I’d relied on her at times for counsel, and she’d given generously of her expertise. Becky wanted to make a donation to a charity in Dad’s name. Did I have one in mind? I didn’t. My sister and I started looking up Parkinson’s charities but we didn’t know how to vet them. Then I had a better idea. Take the money, I told Becky, and go spend it on your kids. Take them to the movies and out for ice cream. Get the extra toppings. That’s who our father was. When he was healthy, when he was his best self. He volunteered to do the late pickups that the other parents tried to weasel out of: from the movie, the bar mitzvah, whatever. When I was twelve and thirteen years old, just old enough to want to go see grunge shows at scuzzy nightclubs but too young to be left alone in such places, he bought himself a ticket and went with me and my friends. We saw the Foo Fighters and the Presidents of the United States of America at a nightclub in Fort Lauderdale; it was each band’s first tour. We saw Radiohead open for R.E.M. at the Miami Arena. The Vandals, Cake, and No Doubt on a triple bill at Coral Sky Amphitheatre. Dad was a little disappointed, I think, when we got old enough to go on our own, because he liked spending time with us and he genuinely enjoyed going to the shows. They weren’t always the shows he would have chosen (he and I on our own saw Aerosmith; we saw Billy Joel) but he liked to see the new bands from right up close, and to know—for his own peace of mind as much as ours—that he was there if we needed him. He chaperoned, he treated. There was always room to fit one more kid in his car.
* * *
—
Here’s a Jaxson’s story: One time Dad was doing late pickup duty after a bat mitzvah. There was palpable disappointment in the car, a consensus that the party had been subpar. (Why? Who knows. The way young suburban Jews are habituated to the insane standards of the average bar/bat mitzvah party, and the perverse class judgments this engenders, is a subject for another time.) There were four, maybe five of us in the car. We dropped off the first kid, Jeffrey, at home as planned. I floated the suggestion that we go to Jaxson’s as a sort of consolation for the letdown of the party, and Dad said sure. My friend Menal (she still remembers this) said there was no way her parents would let her do that. It was already past ten o’clock and she was expected home. Menal’s parents were much more strict with her than most of the rest of us were used to, and this was the pre–cell phone era, so it wasn’t like she could send them an updated plan. Dad offered to petition them on her behalf. We all went inside and a great negotiation ensued. When all of Menal’s father’s other objections had been answered, he played what I assume he thought was his trump card: that it wouldn’t be fair if Menal got to go and her little brother, Rajiv, did not. My father understood this not as an insurmountable obstacle but rather as the two of them having finally come to agreement. Of course Rajiv could come get ice cream! Tell him to get dressed and let’s go before it gets any later.
Dad loved telling this story, which has two punch lines. The first one is about young Rajiv, who’d have been ten or eleven at the time, dragged out into the night with a carload of his sister’s friends to an ice-cream parlor two towns over from where we all lived. He was overwhelmed by the whole Jaxson’s shtick: the old-fashioned candy-store theme, the heaping bowls of greasy popcorn waiting at the table when you sat down, the seemingly endless menu. While the rest of us compared various complicated sundaes, weighed the wisdom of a quart-size milkshake, Rajiv settled on vanilla ice cream with no toppings, to be served in a dish. Dad, incredulous, begged him to reconsider. “Try something else,” Dad said. “Anything else. I promise I’ll get you the vanilla if you don’t like it.” But Rajiv was determined to get vanilla ice cream in a dish with no toppings; the only concession he made was to a plain waffle cone, provided it was presented as a side to the dish of ice cream. So that’s what Rajiv got, and every time Dad retold this story for the next twenty-plus years he was just as gobsmacked as he had been on the night that it happened. The story never failed to crack him up.
The second punch line isn’t really a punch line, I guess, but it says something crucial about Dad. It’s my kicker to this story when I tell it as a story about him. Dad never got over the fact that we only thought to make the Jaxson’s trip after dropping off Jeffrey at home, and that by the time we brokered the deal with Menal’s parents it was too late at night to go back to Jeffrey’s house and attempt to fetch him. The exclusion of Jeffrey offended his sense of fairness, and he held himself responsibl
e for it. He always ended the Jaxson’s story by mentioning that he still felt bad about Jeffrey not getting to go.
The last time I heard him tell this story would have been in late 2014 or early 2015. He was finally set up at the apartment in Sunrise Lakes, and Amanda and I had come down for a visit. We took him to Jaxson’s, on the pretext that Amanda wanted to see it, or maybe that I wanted to show it to her. And both those reasons were true but neither was the real reason. I wanted to take him there. I wanted to buy him the biggest silliest dish of ice cream I could talk him into ordering, and I wanted to pay for it for once, and I wanted Amanda to hear him tell the story, which, as if on cue, he launched into as soon as we sat down.
* * *
—
Larry Taylor’s defining quality was his intensity. He was intensely intelligent and inquisitive; he was intensely competitive and intensely generous. His anger was unpredictable and, once triggered, impossible to contain. He was never physically violent but he could (I think without meaning to) present as menacing. There were arguments with waiters that ended up ruining birthday dinners; shouting and tears in public places. But he was also a willing, empathetic listener. People trusted him with their deepest, darkest secrets. He was a capacious absorber of information and a great giver of advice.
When he was in one of his rages it was as though the whole world fell away and all he saw was his own anger like a red blind over his eyes. But when you asked him for help it was as though, again, the whole world fell away and all he saw was you, and what you saw, and all he wanted was to solve the problem. It didn’t matter whether the issue was which pair of shoes to buy or the defense strategy at your upcoming trial. It didn’t matter whether the discussion took ten minutes or ten hours: He was there for it.
He was almost totally incapable of advocating for himself or experiencing pleasure and satisfaction on his own behalf. He overinvested in people because his deepest joys were vicarious; he tried to keep his sorrow and rage to himself but did not know how. He thought of himself as a loner, as antisocial, as a curmudgeon, but in fact he desperately needed people. Their validation and especially their need of him. Like anyone, he craved love, but he doubted he deserved it and in some ways I think he thought himself weak for needing it, for not being the rock and island of the old Simon & Garfunkel song, which he loved, and whose lyrics I do not believe he ever read as intended, which is to say as a tragedy, a self-betraying howl of grief. He heard the sadness there, but still thought the song described a plausible way to live your life.
He had a great sense of humor and no sense of irony. When he hurt people, he knew it and felt bad about what he’d done. When he apologized, he meant it. When he hurt himself, on the other hand, he was unforgiving, and therefore unforgiven. It would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, for most people to match the intensity he presented, to give him back what he gave them.
Some people loved him and some hated him. Some thought he was an asshole, or nuts, or their best friend, or their hero, or all of the above. But there was one thing that everyone who knew him said about him. They said that they had never known anyone else like him in their whole lives.
* * *
—
My father’s funeral took place the Sunday of my visit to New York City: April 2, 2017. Only my sister and I were there for it. We didn’t know that was what we were doing at the time, but I understand now that it’s what we did.
We had spent the previous day attempting to navigate some of the miserable death bureaucracy that we did not yet know would swallow much of the following month. We had mourned with cousin Michael, who lives with his wife and daughters in Tribeca. We were feeling restive, cooped-up. It had been a cold, rainy weekend, but on Sunday it was sunny and clear.
Melanie lived in Hell’s Kitchen, so I suggested that we take the 1 train up to Morningside Heights. I’d spent a lot of time there during my New York years. My first apartment in the city had been on 107th and Amsterdam. After my first book came out, I was offered a class at the Columbia MFA program: my first academic assignment outside of the comp department. Telling my parents that I’d be teaching at Columbia was in some ways as great a moment as when I’d told them I sold the book.
When I was a high school senior there had been some disappointment about my “settling” for a state school; I had good enough grades to shoot higher but my parents were basically broke. There was at that time in Florida a lottery-funded scholarship program to any in-state public university, and I automatically qualified for a full ride on account of my GPA. My mom thought I ought to at least apply to Brown, my dream school. (The only thing I knew about it was that they supposedly didn’t have grades; thank God I hadn’t heard of Hampshire.) She also wanted me to apply to Columbia, which for some reason had become the brightest star in the firmament of the family’s educational imaginary: the fanciest, most important school you could get into. (It was where Menal was going.) Dad thought I should live at home for two years, get a job, go to Florida Atlantic or some other local place. I could save up money, see how things went.
University of Florida had been a way of splitting the difference. It was the best school in the state, public or private, and I would surely get in if I applied. I didn’t want to take out massive loans and, as a matter of more immediate concern, didn’t want to be bothered filling out long applications, writing essays. I was ambitious but lazy. The application to UF was a single page, no essay, and I could do it online, which was still a novelty back then. I think it took me ten minutes. I applied for both early decision and early admission, to start the summer before my freshman fall. I was ready to get out of the house. They took me and I went.
To soothe my parents’ residual fears and ease their guilt about the way things had gone, I said something so crazy only a high school senior could ever have thought to say it. I told them not to worry that I wasn’t going to Columbia because in ten years’ time I’d be teaching there.
I said this and immediately forgot about it, but circumstance conspired to make it come true almost to the day. My mother, ecstatic, reminded me of my own brash prophecy, and so Columbia has always been a special place for me.
Say what you will about the adjunct grind, about labor exploitation in the academy, about the psychic trauma (economic violence and class shame) that leads to the outsize veneration of such an institution in the first place, but Columbia was good to me. I liked my students and my colleagues and always felt at home there. When I go back to the city to visit I always find a few hours to go up to campus, walk across the quad, proceed to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on 111th and Amsterdam, and then across the street to the Church of Saint John the Divine. Sometimes I go inside the church but usually I sit by the oxidized copper statue of the Archangel Michael. He’s beheading the devil with his sword while giraffes frolic around him and they’re all riding the broad back of a crab that is itself rising on a column of water from the formless deep.
It is a favorite place of mine, this park and statue, but more than that, a kind of holy place (I mean this separately from its status as the grounds of a church). This was where I went to think, to read, to write. I was in this park when I called my future father-in-law to ask permission to propose to his daughter. I have spent hundreds of hours there, many of them on the phone with my father, his voice huge in my ears to drown out the traffic, me sipping coffee on a shaded bench or circling the statue at a slow clip, as we talk and talk and talk.
I wanted to share this with my sister. I took her on my little circuit: campus, coffee shop, park. We sat with our cookies and coffee by the statue and soaked up the sun and remembered our father. After a while we got restless and so walked to the northwest corner of Central Park and entered it and started south and, without quite deciding to do so, walked its whole length over the course of a perfect New York spring afternoon that eased into evening, walking and talking for hours, the two of us.
I’m not going to get into what we talked about: That’s just ours. But it was without question what my father would have wanted, and the finest memorial I could have imagined for him: a conversation. He was with us in the intensity of our missing him, of our needing him and of his not being there, of our finding each other instead. He would have expected no less of us and at the same time would not have wanted or condoned anything more. As far as he was concerned, there never was anything more than this to hope for: a happy family, kids who love each other and love him and know, too, that they are loved, forever and no matter what. That’s not inference; these are things that he told me, that we talked about many times over the years.
* * *
—
Walking and talking, often about him but also just as often about other things, we began to comprehend the size of our loss—the terrain of it—and at the same time to chart a path through. We continue, together and apart, to make our way.
Hattiesburg Notebook
I’m driving from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, down to New Orleans to visit my friend Jami when it occurs to me to call my father. I’ve got ninety good driving minutes ahead of me, a perfect amount of time to give him. Question is, can I reach the phone where it’s mounted on the dash cradle, pull up his number in my contacts, make it dial, and do all this with one finger and without taking my eyes off the road? Maybe. But it doesn’t matter because I won’t make the attempt because there is no call to make because there is no one to receive it. This is Dad’s car I’m driving, the 2007 Nissan Sentra that I inherited when he died five months ago.
Riding with the Ghost Page 12