Father's Day

by Buzz Bissinger

—Do you know what roulette is?

  —What?

  —You spin the wheel and you pick a number.

  —Yeah.

  —You know what blackjack is?

  —I don’t know what it is.

  —You try to get to twenty-one.

  It is an intentionally empty response. If I tried to explain the game to him for the entire night, he still would not understand. And he seems so far away now, in the Space.

  —Are you okay, Zach?

  —I’m good.

  —Are you sad?

  —No.

  —You seem a little sad. Are you tired of me?

  —No I’m good.

  I should have tried to explain to him the basic concept of twenty-one. So I try. He knows what a face card is but cannot grasp that it equals ten. Or that an ace can equal one or eleven.

  The entrées come. Zach plays with the straw in his drink. A woman with a baby in a stroller passes by. The din of the casino is beginning to sound like a collective murmur in which no words can be made out. Zach and I just can’t stare at each other all night, so I start a new conversation.

  —Have you ever fallen in love with anybody?

  —No.

  —Have you ever had a girlfriend really?

  —I think I like Shanna.

  —Do you know what sex is?

  —I’ve heard about it before.

  —What is it?

  —When you sleep together.

  —Have you ever slept with anybody?

  —No.

  —Do you want to?

  —No.

  —Have you ever kissed anybody?

  —No.

  Somebody yells “Happy Birthday.” The television screens show a catastrophic bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Nobody stops to watch.

  —Do you hate it when I ask questions like that?

  —A little.

  —Why?

  —’Cause I just do.

  —Questions about what?

  —The reason I don’t like when you ask the questions is that sometimes I don’t know how to really answer them.

  —I’m sorry.

  —Yeah.

  —It’s hard.

  —Yeah it is hard it’s very hard to answer them.

  —I am sorry.

  —It’s okay.

  —I’m your father. I thought I should ask those questions.

  —I know you’re my father.

  I continue to look around the casino floor because there is nothing else to do. Zach is emotionally gone. I don’t try to reach him and I don’t feel like it anyway because of my own disappointment that the dream date is crumbling. There is a white neon sign for three-card poker. Men in blue shirts and black shirts walk past, some aimlessly as if lost and some with purpose as if escaping. A man in a red shirt drinks a beer and actually laughs at his losses. A knot of Hasidic Jews crowds a slot machine with their urgent whispers and disagreements. A man in a white cowboy hat and brown boots smokes a cigarette.

  Zach gulps his food down in his typically large bites. My voice rises with the same reproach I made the night before. When will teaching him to eat ever stop? When will my scolding stop?

  —PUT THE FORK DOWN. TAKE A REST. NOBODY IS GOING TO TAKE IT FROM YOU.

  We finish dinner without a word. Why should he say anything? I raised my voice at him not because of the way he eats, but because he doesn’t understand blackjack or anything else in the casino. I am more than upset. I am pissed. It is unfair to Zach—he can only do what he can do—but fuck unfair. Don’t I ever have the right to be unfair with a child like Zach? My hopes are in the zone of the irrational, but fuck irrational. I want this night to work; I want the dream date to come true.

  III

  —I feel like gambling, Zach, and losing a lot of money. You think that’s a great idea?

  —Yeah I think it’s a great idea.

  —Want to lose a lot of fucking money?

  —Yeah.

  —It’s bad, losing money.

  —Yeah.

  —I’m feeling very self-abusive. I want to lose a lot of fucking money.

  —Yeah I think it’s a great idea Dad.

  —What should I lose money on?

  —How about craps what Brian Chavez plays.

  —Yeah, I’m gonna lose a lot of money on craps. I’m gonna lose. Everything. Fucking everything! That’s what I feel like tonight. Come on, let’s go. Let’s lose some money.

  We find a craps table. I watch the shooters in a semicircle peering into the green felt. Cigarettes are Super-Glued to their lips so you can see a tiny indentation. Half-full drinks sit next to them with condensation dripping down the glasses in slow streaks. The fatal dice roll of seven bounces onto the green felt time after time. The stick man sweeps up piles of chips like a stadium worker sweeping up peanut shells. The table is cold. I am cold. I lose five hundred dollars in five minutes before I quit.

  We get lost in the ridiculous maze of the Wynn trying to find our way out. We end up at the golf and pro shop.

  —How the fuck do you get out of this place?

  —I think you can go down this way.

  Zach is right, of course. We finally make it outside. The neon lights bounce and dance to their private disco beat. I point out the Frontier. Then the Venetian, where Lisa and I stayed when we got married here in 2004, just the two of us. Zach’s interest finally perks up at the mention of the Venetian because it enables the concrete to solidify for him. He wants to know what room we stayed in and which floor. He wants to know if we ate at a restaurant there. I tell him I don’t remember.

  —Oh.

  We get to Treasure Island early for the show and play slots poker. I remember Zach as a child playing Go Fish with my second wife, so I think the basic concept of poker is something he can grasp. But Zach doesn’t understand the game, what buttons to press to hold certain cards in your hand, such as a pair. I end up pushing the buttons for him.

  We go to the main auditorium and take our seats in row DD, numbers one and two on the end. We are seeing Mystère, the Cirque du Soleil extravaganza. Much of the show’s voice-over is spiritual non sequiturs flowing one into the other in indecipherable nonsense.

  Only when the questions become more important than the answers will the solutions emerge.

  The Ancient Bird hops down the Songlines that furrow the brow of the desert. She taps her beak along the path that only she can see clearly. Every click of the crooked bone raises a puff of dust, a few notes, a few memories. A shiver ruffles her sun-worn feathers. The joy of remembrance fills her with surprise, as always. The mystery of memory.

  Mystère de la Mémoire.

  Oh, my God . . .

  The narrative line is only an excuse anyway for exquisite feats of acrobatics in costumes that look as if they were designed by Liberace in particularly manic inspiration—aerial high bars, one-hand balancing on wooden squares no bigger than the size of a palm, trampolines, Korean planks in which performers jump on a seesaw device to form a four-person tower, Chinese poles on which performers maintain balance only with their feet. A puffed-out clown in a baby costume with a bottle around his neck bounces a huge orange rubber ball and throws popcorn at the audience between acts.

  Zach’s arms and legs twitch back and forth and he closes his eyes and quietly talks to himself. I put my hand on his thigh and ask him if he wants to leave, but he says no, he’s okay. He only says this because he knows it is important to me.

  There is a moment in the show when one male performer grasps the hand of another performer with a single hand and stretches his body out in a perpendicular line four feet off the ground. The strength and grace required to achieve this feat are unimaginable. I turn to Zach who is expending every ounce of his willpower not to fidget. It is torture for him. The whole show is a blur. Tears fill my eyes, as I face the fact that, all night long, I have done nothing but push my son beyond all limits of what is reasonable and right. The tears trickle down my cheeks, and I turn my head
so Zach will not see them. I want to hold his hand. I want to entwine my fingers with his. But he is in his twenties and no longer wants to hold hands with his father in public.

  The show ends, and we head back to our suite at the Wynn. We should have gone back there hours ago. The neon lights of the hotels and casinos are played-out, pitiless.

  We arrive at the suite. Zach changes into the T-shirt and underwear that he uses as his pajamas and slips into bed. We play the don’t-say-the-word game.

  —When I leave here I don’t want you to say Mystère.

  —Okay good night.

  —Good night.

  —Good night.

  —Good night.

  —Good night.

  —Just don’t say Mystère, that’s all. Good night.

  —Good night.

  —Good night.

  I leave the bedroom and walk about fifteen feet.

  —MYSTÈRE!!

  I march back into his room.

  —What did I tell you not to say?

  —Mystère?

  —So why did you say it?

  —Mystère.

  —This is your fault.

  —Dad Dad Dad Dad.

  It is what he wanted all along, a vigorous round of cuddies. He runs around the bed. I chase after him. He squeals with delight. I throw a pillow at him to catch him off-guard, then leap across the bed and grab his legs. He’s toast now. I pin him down and tickle him furiously. He giggles furiously. He squirms loose. I grab him again, tickle him again until we are both out of breath.

  I kiss him good night.

  I go to bed but I cannot sleep. Why did I do what I did tonight? I should have known our dream date wouldn’t work. Everything I have learned from and about him on the trip cannot eradicate that so much will always be overwhelming and incomprehensible to him. I just felt there was a chance because of his flowering. He has blossomed. We have blossomed. It gave me false hope, even though I instinctively knew when I saw him lying on the white lounge chair by one of the outdoor pools that this is where he wanted to be, ordering tall nonalcoholic drinks and charging them to the room, happy into the night before a blanket of blue.

  16. Coming into Los Angeles

  I

  LAS VEGAS IS TIRED in the morning, a sequined hooker waking with mascara streaks of black tears and dagger slits in the stretched holes of her fishnets. Like vampires, gamblers see the rising sun and scurry inside the closest coffee shop to avoid daylight. They sip black coffee and stare ahead, steeping in the sourness of a spurious last-chance run. In the shock of sun, the Eiffel Tower at the Paris looks like a keepsake key chain. The vertical Bally’s sign looks as worn as The Last Picture Show. The Mirage and Treasure Island and the Venetian and Caesar’s Palace crowd together like subway riders elbowing for space.

  We need to leave to wash away the disaster of last night. Surprisingly, I don’t whip myself anymore for what happened. I placed Zach in a role he could not play, like all parents sometimes do with children. Yet as bad a dream date as it turned out to be, Zach did take another step forward: for the first time ever, he defended himself. He told me to stop asking the probing questions. He said he didn’t understand them, but my intuition tells me there were some he did. Instead he was building a wall around feelings that he considered to be personal and proprietary to him.

  When you have a child like Zach, you do feel as if you own his life, that he is obligated to reveal whatever he thinks and feels on demand. This belief is understandable because you do literally own him as a result of the court-ordered process of guardianship, in which your child answers questions from the judge with a quiet “yes” and doesn’t fully grasp that he’s giving up every right he has, usually to his parents. Some of those rights must be given up, financial decisions and health decisions and decisions of where to live to make sure he is in the best environment. But it should not equate to the entire loss of his individuality. It was only a moment at a restaurant last night overstocked with banal noise, but Zach cordoned off a part of himself with yellow police tape. The issue of sex was something he did understand, at least on the surface. But the issue also bewildered him and made him nervous and perhaps most of all embarrassed him. By asking me to stop bringing it up, he was telling me not to embarrass him anymore. In his quiet and nonconfrontational way he was asserting himself as a young man, not a man-child to be picked at and forever probed, not to be deprived of trying to make himself whole.

  We make our escape on Las Vegas Boulevard and almost immediately get stuck behind a rental camper with a tableau of a mountain range on the back. It becomes our view, a fake string of snowcapped mountains painted on a camper stuck in traffic in an imaginary land that has lost all illusion in the glare of day.

  —What did you think of the gambling?

  —It went well I thought.

  —Went well? You lost twenty bucks.

  —Yeah I lost.

  —Didn’t that bother you?

  —I liked it.

  We escape the city and get onto Interstate 15 South toward Los Angeles. It’s a five-hour trip, and we should be there in the afternoon. We have now traveled 3,206 miles. The journey from coast to coast will officially end today. Gerry is coming to meet us. If Zach has been my heart, Gerry has always been my soul. I look forward to having my heart and soul both with me, but right now there is instantaneous nostalgia.

  —This is the last day that we have to drive anywhere. Doesn’t that upset you?

  —A little.

  —It does?

  —Yeah.

  —I thought you hated the car.

  —Well I didn’t like it that much.

  —It makes me sad.

  —Yeah ’cause the driving’s gonna end after today.

  —I like driving with you. I like having you next to me. I just like having you next to me. I even like it when you’re asleep.

  —Yeah.

  —’Cause I love you so much. I just enjoy your company.

  —Yeah.

  —You’re a good traveler.

  —Yeah.

  —I think you did a lot of things just because I wanted you to do them. And I appreciate that.

  —Yeah.

  The closer we get to Los Angeles, the more excited he gets. Zach spent summers and school vacations there with his mother and stepfather as a little boy. So he of course remembers the sprawling sprawl the way he remembers everything, in perfect bite-size pieces. The closer I get, the less excited I get. I will never quite shake my Hollywood blues. Zach is buoyant. I am brooding.

  II

  We are about fifty miles away from Los Angeles. Zach clutches the Rand McNally atlas and per prior arrangement guides me through the freeways. We get on Interstate 210 West then Interstate 605 South then the Santa Monica Freeway.

  The nearer our destination of the Beverly Hills Hilton, the more Zach recalls. He remembers that I was in Los Angeles from October 25 to November 6 of 1996—about eleven years ago—to interview infamous detective Mark Fuhrman for a piece I wrote for Vanity Fair.

  —Do you know who he is?

  —No.

  —He was a detective on the O. J. Simpson murder case.

  —Was he nice?

  I couldn’t possibly answer a question like that.

  We exit the freeway at La Cienega and onto Wilshire in easy striking distance of where we are staying. It is perilously near to the Fox lot where NYPD Blue was located.

  —I think this is how I used to get to work.

  —Yeah.

  —Just being near here, my stomach is really tight.

  —What does it mean it’s tight?

  —It’s nervous.

  Zach’s breathing is like an overwound metronome because of his excitement. Suddenly it slows and he becomes reverential.

  —The La Cienega Hand Wash . . .

  Suddenly he is yelling.

  —RODEO DRIVE I REMEMBER I REMEMBER THIS RESTAURANT CRUSTACEAN!

  I am seething.

  —Everything
takes fucking forever in Los Angeles. The traffic’s been shitty for the last two hours.

  —THERE’S THE BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL!

  —About goddamn time.

  —I LIKE BEING IN LA!

  —I wish we were back in Odessa or even weird Tulsa.

  III

  We check into the hotel. Zach and Gerry will be in one room; I’ll be next door. We drop off our bags and go to the home of my cousin Pete Berg, the film director who made Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights, and The Kingdom and is currently shooting Hancock in Los Angeles, starring Will Smith. He is also the creator of the widely acclaimed television show Friday Night Lights. In his prior life, he was an actor with a recurring role in Chicago Hope and a slew of movies, including The Last Seduction with Linda Fiorentino.

  When he was growing up, he was often in the psychic doghouse whether he deserved it or not. Our extended family all figured him for an early death or at the very least the nomadic life of one failed job after another. Since I had spent my life trying to impress my extended family and be the Good One, his impending doom did bring me a certain amount of satisfaction. I still wore the crown of King of Accomplishment. But he double-crossed me.

  He had great talent if he could find the right home for it. Hollywood became that home, probably the only home that would take him given his mix of visual genius and attention deficit disorder and fine appreciation of mayhem. Like getting into fights with drunken Marines. Like taking Caleb aside as a teenager and showing smartphone pictures that beautiful naked women had sent with the hope of convincing him in person they were perfect for a role in one of his films. Or buying Zach for his sixteenth birthday a Playboy key chain in the shape of a woman’s bent-over butt. Like visiting Zach and me in Philly and telling the limo driver at twelve thirty in the morning to suddenly stop so we could run up the famous Rocky steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum and then turn to face the city with our fists held high. “If he wasn’t working in Hollywood, he’d probably be in jail,” Kyle Chandler, who plays Coach Taylor in the Friday Night Lights TV series, told me. But behind the naughty-boy reputation is a pure heart. Honest. Kind. Warm. Thoughtful when he remembers. Or at least when his assistant Lindsay reminds him to remember.