Father's Day

by Buzz Bissinger

  II

  Zach is already inside Brooks Brothers on Walnut Street in Philadelphia when I get there. He is tired from work. The stacks of shirts and the cold-cut platters of striped and solid ties on circular tables and the racks of khakis and flannels pleated and unpleated and cuffed and uncuffed overwhelm him. He bends down to touch a tie. He has always fixated on ties. When he was a little boy he insisted on picking ones out for his grandfather and uncle, deliberating between one covered with little whales and a classic striped. Later on he asked for ties every Christmas. He has gotten so many, he still has some he has never touched a decade after receiving them. Now, among questions he uses every time to communicate with someone new, he asks whether he wears a tie to work. The other four basic questions he asks in his rote way are: “Where do you live?” “Where do you work?” “Do you drive to work?” “What is your birthday?” He never forgets the answers to these questions. Throughout the year he calls dozens of people, some of whom he hasn’t seen in twenty years, to wish them a happy birthday. He is the Birthday King, and many now call him to make sure they haven’t missed one that could lead to unwanted trouble. He is always right. They don’t even try to remember anymore.

  Zach acts like he’s happy to see me. Since Zach does not know the meaning of acting, he really does welcome my presence. I am not like him. I have always been terrified of making an ass of myself, hyper-self-conscious, sometimes social but often beset by anxiety and depression and the downside of mild bipolarity: a morning cocktail of Klonopin, Effexor, Wellbutrin, and Lamictal that my wife Lisa makes sure I have taken, terrified of medicated-less consequences.

  —Oh hi Dad!

  —Hey, Zach. How was work?

  —Pretty good.

  —Did you bag a lot of groceries?

  —I did.

  —Did you talk to any customers?

  —I didn’t know anyone there anyway it was a Friday people I know don’t come until Saturday like around two because that’s when my shift starts maybe Sunday after church sometimes.

  —Remember you are there to work. You can’t talk to them very long.

  —I know.

  —Did you pay attention?

  —Yup.

  —Did you bug anyone?

  —Nope.

  —Did you break any eggs?

  —Oh Dad . . .

  —Are you ready to spend your gift certificates? You have five hundred dollars’ worth.

  —I’m ready.

  —Do you know what you want?

  —A tie maybe.

  —You have a hundred ties, most of which you have never worn.

  —Oh.

  —I think you need to get some other things.

  —Like what?

  —Maybe a sports coat.

  —Maybe a sports coat.

  —Maybe new pants.

  —Maybe new pants.

  The smell of the new clothing in Brooks Brothers is aromatherapy. It takes me back to the once-a-year pilgrimage with my father in the 1960s to the flagship store on Madison Avenue and 44th Street in New York to get clothes for school. I can still see the button-down shirts and flannels and khakis we’d chosen piled high on a table. I can remember my father looking at my haul and saying, “Maybe we should throw in a blue blazer.” After we threw in a blue blazer another suggestion followed: “Let’s just take a little peek at the men’s section.” So we went to the men’s section. “Can I help you with anything?” the salesman always said. “Just looking,” my father always said. “Let me know if I can be of help,” the salesman always said. “You got it,” my father always said. He went through the racks of clothing twice. He made a move to the elevators. “You should get something, Dad!” I always told him. He always returned to a certain jacket on one of the racks. “Let’s just see how it fits,” he always said. “Of course,” the salesman always said. He always bought two. Then he always bought a couple of shirts and a couple of ties and a couple of pairs of socks and a couple of pairs of underwear.

  “Well, Buzzer, we had a pretty good day,” he always said after we’d left the store and crammed ourselves inside a taxi with all our shopping bags. The one thing he never said was that we were the only two people in the entire world at the moment. But I knew anyway.

  I am all too aware of what I am doing with Zach so many years later at Brooks Brothers on Walnut Street. I am trying to dress him into myself when I was a boy with my father. I am trying to make him into something he isn’t. Zach tries on a pair of classic gray flannels. I am anxious that they fit him well. He goes to the dressing room.

  —Everything okay in there?

  —I’m fine.

  —How do they look?

  —Pretty good.

  He comes out of the dressing room. The pants cannot make it over his protruding stomach. The legs billow like the jib of a sailboat in a dead wind. I silently rail against the cruelty of his metabolism that in a few years has made his midsection mushroom after being stick thin throughout his youth. The salesman knows I am trying to dress this man-child in Brooks Brothers from head to toe. He intuits my need to keep alive some fantasy that my son must have gray flannels because he works as a lawyer or hedge fund trader.

  The salesman steps in and tries to deflect the tension of my frustration. He calls Zach “Hey, buddy” with familial intimacy. We move to the rack of blazers, five-hundred-dollar coats selling for forty percent off. I pick one out for Zach. The blazer fits Zach in the shoulders but there is no way he’ll ever be able to button it. It is the best we are going to do. My frustration becomes agitation. My agitation becomes bitchy admonishment.

  —You eat too much, Zach.

  —Okay.

  —How many times do you stop for a Kit Kat?

  —Sometimes during grocery breaks.

  —No more Kit Kats. No more cheese. No more fried foods. Your stomach is getting enormous. It is hard to find you clothes that fit.

  —I’m sorry Dad.

  —How many times have we told you you need to eat less?

  —A lot.

  —What has Doctor Runfola told you?

  —I need to lose weight.

  —Do you know why you need to lose weight?

  —Because maybe it’s bad for you?

  —Do you know why it’s bad for you?

  —Because you kind of look big?

  —Eating too much can affect your heart. Also because you have high blood pressure. So no more Kit Kats. You understand? This is serious.

  —I’m sorry Dad.

  I don’t think he truly understands the medical implications of obesity and high blood pressure. He will try to lose weight because I have told him to and his mother has told him to and his doctor has told him to. But he cannot grasp basic principles of good health. This worries me, but it has nothing to do with why I’m so agitated now. The promise of a new Brooks Brothers wardrobe is just an illusion. What I experienced as a son with my father I will not experience as a father with my son. He is not a hedge fund trader. I should have known that by now. I will never know that by now. I can’t.

  We purchase the blazer, which Zach is still wearing. He asks the salesman if they have a pocket square he could put into the breast pocket because that’s what my uncle wears and maybe it would be nice maybe to look like my uncle yeah yeah Dad don’t you think it would be nice to maybe look like him?

  The salesman finds a pocket square. He slides it into the breast pocket with the peak sticking out. Zach looks regal. He looks transformed. I never knew he noticed such touches. He is not an abstract thinker; he does not pick up on aesthetic details. It is a common blind spot for people like Zach who harbor aspects of autism, although his diagnosis is not nearly as tidy as that. Yet it was an abstract and aesthetic notion for Zach to see the pocket square in his uncle’s breast pocket and want it for his own as a sartorial touch. It surprises me. It gives me the necessary elixir of hope.

  Which is when I first get the idea.

  III

  We celebra
te shopping success by visiting the Barnes & Noble several blocks up Walnut Street. Zach goes directly to the map section. He always goes there. I have never seen him go anyplace else in a bookstore.

  He picks up a map of Philadelphia, but since he has about a dozen maps of Philadelphia and has memorized virtually every street in the city without trying to memorize them, he moves on. He considers a map of one of the surrounding counties, maybe Montgomery, maybe Delaware, maybe Bucks, but he has plenty of maps from these areas as well, and he feels like traveling. He settles on a map of Kansas City since he has recently met someone from Kansas City. He takes the Kansas City map and unfolds it. He holds it high with one hand as if he’s looking for just the right angle of wind so he can fly. He buries his head in the interstices of streets and avenues and parkways and boulevards. He pinpoints the street he is looking for, the address of the person he has met from Kansas City. He looks at it once more, touches it with a finger from his free hand. He will remember it forever after.

  I watch at a distance as if I’m observing some otherworldly phenomenon, the pelicanlike presence of him with that one hand held high as if he’s barely balancing, his face so deeply buried inside the map that his nose almost touches it. I like that he is unaffected by the thought of how he looks, the idiosyncrasy of it. And since I’m a parent, and all parents live through their children whether they admit to it or not, I probably love most of all that my son, my son, can do something that so few can do. Nobody can read a map like Zach does.

  I poke about in the adjacent guidebook section. I thumb through Frommer’s guides to Turkey and India and Spain. I move to a different section and pick up a book called 1000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die. I have been to many of them. I have visited forty-nine of the fifty states. I have driven across the country four times. I love the lonely roads where your thoughts come to you with such clarity, as if you are living in them, touching them. I crave the truck stop junk food, even the whiplike lengths of “beef” jerky that settle in your stomach only after stubborn reluctance. I make peace with the burned coffee and the whitener that becomes more and more popular the deeper you go into the heartland. I find pleasant mystery in the funky off-the-exit-ramp motels whose polyester bedspreads smell of sex and Juicy Fruit and hairspray.

  My father taps me on the shoulder again. It’s inevitable that thoughts of your own childhood crowd around you as you raise your own children. Still, given the forever horror that happened at the end with my dad, I am surprised he keeps appearing. But he does, prompting me to remember the road trips we once took together.

  When I was ten we drove from New York to Hanover and Dartmouth College, where my father had gone to college. In the recollection I carry with me, probably not quite true and yet as true as it should be, there wasn’t another car on the road once we hit New Hampshire. Just me and my dad kicking it through the night.

  Dartmouth football was in its heyday in the 1960s. He had become a fanatic, and I followed in his wake to show solidarity. If you’re bleeding Big Green, Dad, so am I. I always cried when Dartmouth lost to Yale. He put his arm around my shoulder in the pothole of the Yale Bowl and did not say a word, his acknowledgment that any pain is legitimate if you love something. He certified me, even though he knew he had on his hands a clinically oversensitive child who feared too much of the world. It was like the fireworks show every July Fourth on the Jetties Beach in Nantucket where we owned a house. I loved the spectacle but I was terrified by the sound. My father anguished for me and plotted a solution. He brought along two huge pillows that he held over my ears so I wouldn’t freak out. I looked ridiculous, but he didn’t care. So I didn’t either.

  It was after midnight as we neared Hanover. “Look, Buzzer,” he said, as he pointed to the speedometer. The needle had hit a hundred. It had to be the coolest thing any father anywhere had ever done. Even if he did risk losing control of the car and killing both of us instantly. “Don’t tell your mom,” he said. My father trusted me with a secret! We were confidantes.

  We drove to Saratoga Springs one summer to see the horseraces. The trip had been planned hastily. He had found a motel on the outskirts. There was a reason it was on the outskirts, slowly giving in to dereliction. But the bed in his room had Magic Fingers. It supplied instant amusement as you plunked the quarters into the metal box next to the bed, then felt rolls of pain grinding into your back and wondered who had been clever enough to invent something so worthless that someone still used.

  We went to the historic racetrack but the only tickets we could get were in the grandstand. The beautiful people of Saratoga in their silk and ascots and wide-brimmed hats flitted about with languid arrogance in a separate section. I caught occasional glimpses of them. I envied them. I wanted to wear an ascot. I wanted to flit with arrogance. My father sensed it. “They’re all a bunch of stuck-up fucking assholes,” he said. Even more thrilling than going a hundred miles an hour: his first profanity to me.

  Many more millions would follow.

  At the Barnes & Noble, I continue to thumb through the guidebook. I thought I knew the country, had picked it clean, but there is still so much to see. Zach puts the map of Kansas City back and plucks another one. Enough. I am impatient. It is his bookstore routine, but we have repeated it dozens of times now, and the over and over and over is gnawing at me.

  —Zach, you ready to go?

  —I’m ready.

  —Did you find a map you wanted?

  —Yeah.

  —What is it?

  —A new map of Philadelphia.

  —You have a dozen maps of Philadelphia. Why do you need another one?

  —I don’t know I just do.

  We go to leave. We stop. We are like the film Groundhog Day except nothing ever changes. Until now.

  —Hey, Zach. You and I are going to drive cross-country this summer!

  Zach scans his memory.

  —Uncle Bobo drove to Texas once he got hit by a deer.

  —I’ll be more careful than Uncle Bobo.

  —It wrecked his car I think.

  —Zach, what about the trip?

  —Will Gerry go?

  —Nope. Just the two of us.

  —Oh.

  —You don’t seem very excited.

  —No no no I’m very excited how will we get there?

  —We’ll rent a car and we’ll drive.

  —To where?

  —To California.

  —Hey Dad I have an idea I think you’ll really like yeah yeah yeah I think you’ll really like it.

  —What is it?

  —Maybe we can fly.

  IV

  I ask Debra what she thinks. Her optimism was always in direct proportion to my pessimism, so our marriage lasted the predictable length of about four years. Or maybe three. She is reticent about the trip. She rightly worries about Zach sitting still in a car for long stretches no matter how hard he tries to rein in his body. She also points out that Zach is interested in neither hiking nor walking nor nature nor sightseeing. She and her husband, Paul, and their two children and Zach and Gerry had gone to Yellowstone National Park a few summers earlier. Zach was not only resistant to this journey but angry about it. When a dizzying flurry of bats flew over the trees during a nighttime walk to appreciative “oohs” and “aahs,” he complained, “It’s not even Halloween yet.” In Zach’s mind there is a precise slot for everything, and he balks at any departure from his precision. Bats are for Halloween. Gloves are for winter. Why is it so difficult for everybody to understand that?

  Gerry’s response to my idea is typically terse and direct.

  —Two weeks in a car with Zach is a very long time.

  Zach’s mother frets that Zach will be unbearably uncomfortable. Zach’s brother wonders what Zach and I will talk about. I worry that I’ll be subjecting Zach to something he is doing solely for my sake. Zach wants to fly.

  The notion of the trip becomes even more precarious when such typical attractions a
s the Badlands and Mount Rushmore and Wall Drug and Bryce Canyon and Yosemite and the Pacific Coast Highway must be avoided since I have seen them and Zach has never heard of them and has no interest in ever seeing them even if he did.

  If we go at all, I have to figure out a route that has resonance for Zach. That is not so easy. The idea is beginning to seem impulsive and implausible, spawned in a giddy flash on a cold and brittle day. It is maybe a well-meaning notion. More likely it is a selfish one, a father forcing his imprint on his son and creating an experience that becomes memorable only because both parties spend a lifetime unsuccessfully trying to forget it.

  I am not going to expose Zach to something he silently hates. But I still think about the trip. I wonder if there is a way to structure it, not to treasure the country’s epic attractions but to give rebirth to his past, go back to the present because of the way his mind works. I still think about the moment on the ground floor of Brooks Brothers in the after-Christmas emptiness when he asked the salesman for a pocket square so he could look like his unfortunately named Uncle Winkie. I always will see it neatly folded into the breast pocket like a church spire.

  There was a spark inside Zach at that moment. Maybe it is a spark that rises like a busted firework, only to drain thinly back down to earth with a diminishing whistle. Or maybe I waved the surrender flag too long ago on my son, gave in because it was easier to give in.

  Zach and I are driving across country.

  2. Bon Voyage

  I

  WHEN ZACH WAS YOUNG and still living with Gerry and me during the week so he could attend the specialized private school in the area, I sometimes stood in his room in the dark and watched him sleep. His body teetered to the side, and his mouth curled open. I wished that I could crawl inside him without him ever waking and reach into the marbled matter of the brain to reattach a wire here and a wire there, a couple of broken strands that just needed splicing, red to red, yellow to yellow, blue to blue.