I always felt that there must be a way to use my son’s savantism to further enhance his day-to-day life. Because he could read maps so well and knew every street in downtown Philadelphia, the law firm thought he would make the perfect messenger. He did it once and never wanted to do it again. He was scared of making a mistake, but the job, however well suited he was for it, was simply too far removed from the routines that had guided his life. I thought at one point that he could be a tour guide for schoolchildren to the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News because of his encyclopedic knowledge of the building’s every nook and cranny and all the people who worked there. But he wasn’t interested; again, he felt nervous about making a mistake in a job with too much flexibility and margin for error.
His memory is a wondrous parlor trick. That is worth something. A great something because he clearly draws pride from it. But that is all. His brain truly did give him something wondrous at birth, communicating to the operators in the boiler room that the right hemisphere was interested in any unused parts the left hemisphere was planning to dump. But his brain also took away interpretation and abstract thought and comprehension. If you don’t have those skills in life, what do you have? Super Mario Brothers?
IV
We are in the deep meat of the Chicago highway system now, a hodgepodge heap of numbers—57, 80, 294, 55, 94, 90. Any false turn can mean the diaspora of Calumet City or South Holland. I have brought along a GPS whose direction dispensary speaks with a calm English accent. She is unflappable. My wife Lisa is convinced I love her most of all. I do love her. She never yells. She has never abandoned me. But now she has become insistent and stubborn. I detect bitchiness beneath her cool British exterior. Personally I think she wishes we would all go back to the days of maps instead of such pathetic reliance.
Drive .1 miles. Then turn right. Turn right, then turn left.
What kind of sense does that make in .1 miles?
I punch in commands to get us back on track.
Turn left. Then take ramp left. Take ramp left. In .2 miles, keep right. Keep right. In .2 miles, turn left. Then turn left.
—Where the FUCK IS THIS TAKING ME?
Zach is quiet. He is taking joy in another meltdown. He knows I should have used him. He is punishing me with silence.
Turn left. Then turn left. Recalculating. Drive three hundred feet. Then turn right. Then turn right. Then turn right. Recalculating. Drive three hundred feet then turn right. Then turn right. Recalculating. Drive .2 miles. Then turn left.
—She’s a fucking dope.
Turn left. Then turn left.
—She’s a complete dope, DOPE!
Zach abandons his silence.
—What’s her name?
—Sheila.
—How do you know?
—She told me.
—When did she tell you?
—She whispered it in my ear. Sheila!
—She likes me?
She sure as fuck doesn’t like me.
In .2 miles, take ramp left, then keep left. Take ramp left. In .4 miles, keep left. Keep left. Drive 1.9 miles. Then keep left.
She takes us off the interstate, sends us through a roundabout of city streets, only to put us right back on the interstate. Lisa believes I am scared of her; it’s true that I lack the courage to defy her and use my own sense of direction, which I don’t have anymore anyway once I started using a GPS.
We finally reach Michigan Avenue in the heart of the city. I am grinding down now. I have driven over four hundred miles and I am lost in a maze of one-way streets. I have no idea where I am even though I worked in Chicago for two years and have been back numerous times. Zach knows exactly where we are. He points out the marker of the Northwestern University School of Law. He spots Northwestern Hospital. He remembers a cousin named Pat Kauffmann who went there before she died.
—We should go by her old place she was on East Chestnut remember the address?
It was twenty years ago. Why would I? Why would anybody?
I finally see the Westin Hotel where we’re staying, but I can’t find the entrance.
—Why did I fuck it up, goddamn it!
Zach ignores my question. He barrages me with his non sequiturs.
—When did you go over to the Tribune from Pat’s where you stayed sometimes would you walk over why did you sometimes take a cab to the train to Milwaukee you once spent a whole day with me at the Tribune I remember I saw Brooks Brothers out here once.
I cannot look at Zach right now. I cannot deal right now with these memory eruptions that are his stand-in for conversation. They only make me feel more tired, more trapped in our unbreakable bubble.
We finally find the hotel and check into our adjoining rooms. Zach wants to walk to the Tribune building several blocks up Michigan. I need to be alone. I don’t want to hear him padding about in his room opening every drawer and cabinet and closet. I don’t want to hear the squeaks and squeals he makes when he is alone. So I let him go. I tell him he has to be back in forty-five minutes. I just want to sleep.
He is back exactly forty-five minutes later. He lays a little stack of pack rat paraphernalia on the bed, free maps from tour bus booths and business cards from restaurants and clothing shops. He has also gotten something else.
—Look what I got Dad!
He points to his stomach.
—You bought a belt?
—Well remember I thought I had packed one but I didn’t pack one so I thought Dad I thought it would be a good idea to buy one since I don’t have one.
—That’s great, Zach! Where did you get it?
—The shop right downstairs they have a gift shop.
—Zach, nobody buys a belt at a hotel gift shop. How much did it cost?
—I’m not sure I charged it to the room.
V
A bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé resides within me. We have eaten dinner, and I am drunk. I needed to get drunk. The trip has not been easy. The driving is often exhausting. Zach is often exhausting. There have been moments of surprising awareness and self-awareness, like the sun peeking out between the clouds, only to be hidden by them again. I love his savantism. I hate his savantism. I feel exalted with him. I feel stuck with him. I love his memory jags. I hate his memory jags. I also know were it not for Zach, I would probably still be in that parking lot at the Holiday Inn Express in Pennsylvania, going in circles.
Thinking of the belt he bought, I’m reminded of the time in Philadelphia we went to get his passport. Normally the application requires a signature. It could be waived in Zach’s case since his mother and I have guardianship; I could sign the form myself. But I suddenly felt uncomfortable; doing so would diminish him. It was his name that belonged there, written in his own hand. I showed him where he had to sign. He gripped a pen right by the nib. He started writing out his name as if chiseling in stone, most in block letters. I could tell that he had worked on this for many hours; the lines were clean and straight and strong. I was struck by the simplicity but also the sturdiness; this was not a signature but a statement.
Zachory Bissinger
The belt is the same as that signature: a statement of his individuality and independence. He never would have bought it had I been with him.
I must try harder to keep his individuality in mind. I promised myself before the trip that I would focus on what he can do, not on what he can’t. As my head begins to sink into the eighty-five goose-down pillows that hotels now offer to quietly suffocate guests so they can free up the room at a higher rate, I wonder if I am capable of appreciating the positive. I always look for the negative, a guardrail against withering disappointment and emotional free fall. Since I am drunk and sweetly drowning in pillows, I won’t have to wonder for long, a welcome mercy because the wondering is so painful.
6. Embassy Suites!
I
THE SHOPPING ALONG Michigan Avenue rivals that on Fifth Avenue, except that here people smile. In New York people smile only when a kamikaze bicycle messe
nger is hit by a taxi being driven by someone who doesn’t speak English, drives sixty miles an hour across three lanes of traffic, and asks the passenger if he knows how to get to Park Avenue. On Michigan Avenue, the tidy displays of Cartier and Johnston & Murphy and Coach beckon with glittering diamonds and glossy wallets and fine leather shoes so shiny you could shave and get a tan in their reflective glare.
Zach carries in his hand a map of Ohio and a Chicago bus schedule. He has no interest in window shopping. His only focus is on going to the Tribune building. The belt was an uncharacteristic splurge, plus charging it to the room is his version of a magic lantern in which money just disappears. He buys nothing with what he makes from work, except for candy bars and a gray T-shirt with the logo of SEPTA, the Philadelphia regional transit system, because that is his favored mode of transportation. He did once go into a high-toned clothing store in Philadelphia to look for a tie, a rare burst of whimsy. Zach’s concept of money, while rapidly improving, is still hazy. Prices are an abstract idea, and it’s hard for him to associate the value of something with its cost. But even he had sticker shock.
—You could maybe buy four or five ties maybe at Old Navy where I sometimes shop with my mom so you know you know Dad it was silly to buy just one it’s just a tie you know what I mean and I already have a lot of ties.
Zach and I often go to malls together in order to break the isolating silence of being at home in our separate orbs. He likes the food court and always orders General Tso’s chicken in its 30-grade sauce. I always ask him if he wants something, and he always says no unless there is a map section, and I have yet to find a clothing store that has one. When he lived with me during the week, I once went into his red set of drawers from Ikea and found dozens of Christmas gifts never used—hundreds of dollars in cash, as well as watches and shirts. As Debra points out, Zach’s modus operandi is always on to the next thing. So every Christmas, once he tears open the wrappings of gifts, he completely loses interest in the contents and wants to know what’s for dinner. The journey of choice is never a journey.
We enter the Gap on Michigan Avenue. The interior is tricked out in the de minimis style, mostly sanitarium white. Loud pulsating music plays. The intent is to evoke the hip atmosphere of a converted-warehouse club, but this is a clothing store, not a place to score Ecstasy and do water-cooler deeds in the bathroom. The sales clerks are in alignment with the non-atmosphere atmosphere; you ask them a question and they reluctantly nod in roughly the right direction, underscoring that they have nothing to do and that’s the point of their presence. We are there to help them fetch a nonfat double-shot latte with a twist.
I ask Zach if he needs anything; as usual, he says no. I suggest a shirt and he agrees, maybe one to look suitable for work since all the lawyers look so suitable. His requirements are specific—long sleeves and a buttoned collar because Zach has carefully observed what the suitable lawyers wear. I ask him if he sees any shirts he likes. He picks up the first one on the rack, garish and multicolored, just to have it done with so we can get to the Tribune. I choose a more modulated one of thin red stripes that fits him well. He is pleased.
—It’s nice to look good sometimes Dad isn’t it that’s why I need to wear a fancy shirt and shave every day.
—Sometimes you forget to shave every day.
—Those are just the days I don’t.
We arrive at the intricate and eclectic magnificence of the Tribune building. It is the ultimate example of the edifice complex, built over three years from 1922 to 1925 by the famed owner of the Tribune, Colonel McCormick; it remains a towering reminder of the days when publishers were America’s most powerful titans, the exclusive dispensaries of information however slanted to their own tastes, imperious, arrogant, luxuriating in their grip of public opinion. Some 120 stones were embedded into an exterior wall of the Tribune Tower; they came from such places as the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal, the suggestion that the building, like these eternal monuments, was equally eternal.
We go to fourth-floor reception and wait for Ann Marie Lipinski, my former boss at the Chicago Tribune and now the Tribune’s executive editor. There is a line of framed citations on the far wall commemorating the Pulitzers the paper has won. For the first time ever, Zach asks about my newspaper career.
—Didn’t you ever win a Pulitzer or win something an award I guess?
—I did. I won a Pulitzer at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Zach moves on to information of more relevance to him.
—Wasn’t your health club around here that you joined I guess?
—It was further up.
—It had two pools an indoor and outdoor.
—You’re right.
—How many times did you go like maybe once or twice?
I think he’s punked me three times now.
—That’s about right.
—Why didn’t you go more?
—I always planned on going. But on the way I ate M&M’s so I felt sick.
I go to the men’s room and return to find Zach interrogating the receptionist. He is a close talker. He likes to point when he speaks, as if he is conducting his own words. He bears in closer. He quizzes her on the location of all the different departments. Zach acts like she is holding out on him. More questions. Ann Marie shows up, at last. The receptionist is relieved.
The configuration of the newsroom has radically changed since I was there from 1989 to 1992. I am confused, but Zach has no problem finding my old desk. He sees an old colleague of mine, David Jackson.
—Hi David I remember you sat next to my dad.
I ask Zach when was the last time he saw David Jackson.
David is a superb investigative reporter. His distrust of all answers is inbred.
—Nineteen ninety-one right up here at the Tribune I spent the whole day here.
Swish. Zach adds that David almost came to visit us in Philadelphia in September of 1994. Swish. Zach tells him that he liked to run. Swish. Zach announces that reporter Bob Blau, who used to work at the Tribune, is now at the Baltimore Sun, that Dean Baquet, who also used to work at the Tribune, is now at the Los Angeles Times, and that John Carroll, the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times where Dean Baquet now works, used to work at the Baltimore Sun where Bob Blau works. Hat trick. Zach pops in on the sports editor, Dan McGrath, and informs him that he lived in the Philadelphia suburb of Ambler when he used to work at the Inquirer. He says he knows this because Inquirer reporter Raad Cawthon told him, noting to Dan McGrath that Cawthon himself has moved from the Inquirer to Pensacola in Florida. Three-pointer from thirty feet. At lunch, Zach tells Marie the date of the Tribune awards dinner we all attended in 1992. Buzzer-beater. Knowing Zach’s interest in the physical plant of the Tribune, Ann Marie tells him as we finish lunch that a new gym has been built for employees. Zach perks up.
—My dad joined a gym once.
Punked number four. The impish look again. Forget it.
—Well, Zach, we need to get going to Milwaukee.
We head toward Interstate 94 on Congress Street. I am overcome with melancholia, no surprise since my eighth-grade yearbook predicted my future occupation as undertaker. I hate going back to places where I have spent significant time before. It is not an ironclad rule, but when I do return I feel I am going backward instead of forward. Memories are bittersweet at best, and the connections you made are always tinged by the awkwardness of time passed, conversations filled with nervous pauses, praying for some words to come into your brain, the default to superficiality. What at the time came so naturally no longer comes naturally at all. It may be why the trip sometimes puts me at odds with Zach, who loves nothing better than visiting places he has been to before. He never goes through such machinations. He connects. I disconnect.
I can’t wait to get to Las Vegas. I have never lived there, so there are no relationships to fret over. It is hell, a good kind of hell, a crazy and beautiful hell with neon rainbowed lights like a wave of falling stars, hell as it
should be with secrets left behind, and I will need some definite hell at that point in the trip. But with Milwaukee ahead of us and then the trek to Odessa, Vegas seems unreachable. I cannot shake my gloom. I need to talk to somebody. Zach is it.
—It’s funny being back in places where you haven’t been for a long time. You think about a lot of things. You think about when you were younger. Life seemed so much simpler, more unburdened. I feel old today.
—Yeah.
—Do you ever worry that you’re going to die?
—You lived in Milwaukee like I remember when you were thirty-three to thirty-seven you were young.
—My life is behind me.
Zach pauses. He looks through the car window. I wait for something profound like the Peggy Lee song.
—HEY DAD THERE’S THE EMBASSY SUITES!!
Not what I was quite looking for.
II
We grow quiet once we get onto Interstate 94. It is raining and the sound of the drops against the car is comforting in its rhythmic rat-a-tat. It feels like the timing is right.
—Do you ever want to live on your own?
—Maybe.
Father's Day Page 9