Does my father hate the announcers for being bland, flatminded dispensers of vanilla good cheer? Yes, certainly. Does he also envy them their positions, their right to hold forth to the world on all and sundry topics, their self-importance, their well-chosen ties? Yes, yes. And which is ascendant in his railings, the envy or the apt critique? To this day I could not tell you.
Generally, my father’s relation to the TV is an active one—he’s almost always got a dialogue going with the box. But one thing shuts him up completely, turns him mordantly silent. And that is any mention of the Kennedys. He dislikes the Kennedys and always has. When JFK ran for president in 1959, my father referred to him exclusively as Black Jack. When the man’s handsome face appeared on the box, my father would turn away in disgust. This was odd behavior in Massachusetts, where Kennedy worship was a minor religion, an adjunct to Catholicism, and to certain Jewish and Protestant strains, too. It wasn’t at all uncommon to go into someone’s house and find there a Kennedy shrine—a few photos of JFK, one of Bobby, a snap of sainted mother Rose, with devotional lighting on the peripheries. But about this distaste, which encompasses the whole Kennedy family, down to the newly born—and a new Kennedy seemed to pop into the world every three months or so—my father, who is not oppressively restrained about most of his views, is silent.
He changes the channel when a Kennedy homage comes on; he snorts and sneers when one of the royal clan is depicted on the news. But there is no accompanying tirade, no corresponding denunciation. He voted for Nixon in the 1960 election. Following his lead, I too was a Nixon man, size small—the only one, as I remember, in my third grade class. I wore a campaign button to school every day. Some of the Belmont School teachers—future Kennedy shrine-builders maybe—were shocked at my apostasy and took me aside in the halls to try to talk sense to me. In the fall of ’69, though, my father was anything but enchanted with Nixon. He referred to him familiarly, disparagingly, but with a pinch of affection, as Tricky Dick. Generally, Nixon was subject to the blanket skepticism that Wright threw over all pretenders to truth and virtue. This would change.
MY OWN relation to TV is almost as long-standing as my father’s, surely as enveloping, though much more complacent. From the time I was five years old, I have been a stone addict. I remember hopping out of bed early on Saturday mornings when I was very small, passing the closet where, I believed, my father hid his National Guard rifle, turning a swift pirouette at my parents’ half-open bedroom door, the way the Lone Ranger, crossing the entrance to a bank, broke the aim of desperadoes holed up inside. From the pantry I snagged a handful of Fig Newtons, then took a slow-motion Ted Williams slide over the living room rug, pulled into Sioux powwow posture, and popped the on button. There I would sit, my breath softly held at the back of my throat, waiting for the cool, thoughtful hum, the pinhole of light, then the great eye dilating into wakefulness.
TV to me was everything: As various shut-ins are said to do, I cultivated personal relationships with the figures on the screen. I believed that I could talk to Roy Rogers and Clarabell the clown, the Hardy Boys and the Lone Ranger, and that they would hear me and understand. Walking to school, or on the border of sleep, I elaborated on the shows I watched, merging the characters with my friends and family, creating my own scenarios.
But by the time I was ten or so, I strained to see the underside of things, and in this my father was my guide. He let the air out of my favorite shows, one after another. It was like putting aside the things of childhood, to have them debunked this way. It was this century’s equivalent of cutting the boy’s curls and getting him out of short pants. He showed me how the Lone Ranger and Tonto were chasing the bandits around the same shrubbery prop time and time again, show after show. He pointed out how some elaborate combat footage from a film we’d seen together weeks before had been spliced into a Saturday-afternoon Hercules epic. He spotted a rip in Pinky Lee’s pants.
But my father is not only a critic; he is also an authority in his own right. His field of expertise encompasses all things and everything. Whence does his authority come? Not from any formal education. My father dropped out of high school, then slipped back in and copped a degree by the skin of his teeth. Until I was about ten, he worked two jobs to support us (and a lot of wayward habits). He was a short-order cook on two contiguous eight-hour shifts, one at a restaurant called Perry’s and another called the Chuck Wagon. (It was at Perry’s that, family legend has it, I met two of the more prominent individuals ever to pass through Malden. One was the formidable future governor of Massachusetts, who then owned a construction company—this was the [soon-to-be] Honorable John A. Volpe. The other was Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, responsible for the horrible deaths of at least a dozen women.) Perry’s was days; the Chuck Wagon, nights. He arrived home at three in the morning, smelling of booze and blistered, charred beef, turned on the TV medium loud, and hoisted The Boston Globe in front of him like an enormous white sail. He was off into the broad seas of knowledge.
Then and always, he read the newspaper with a flaming eye: the front page, the ads, the editorials, the stock quotes (though he had no stock), the obits, the sports, the columnists he could barely abide and the columnists he abhorred. No one ever got such value from a dime’s worth of paper and ink. When he found something especially good—usually a story off the AP or UPI wire, a story, that is, that he did not have to credit to any other human being—or one particularly repugnant, he read it aloud to us, as though he were its creator or its appointed assassin. I believe he read aloud to us when we were asleep. After he read through an issue of the paper, you expected to see it cleansed, pure white, with no print remaining, as though it had been dunked in an acid bath.
My father needed no Bible; the paper was enough. Once, when I was ten or so, he went downstairs to repaint a chair. To begin, he spread the floor with old newspapers. Two hours later, I peered down the darkened stairs to see him under thin light, poised in what the yogis call child’s position, down on his knees, buttocks resting on his ankles, head forward, eyes wide, chugging down the print. The paint can was unopened.
While he read the paper and snorted and groaned through his great damaged nose, my father would be glancing up at the tube, denouncing this figure or that, and sometimes praising one, too. For despite the general mob of morons and geeks who bayed at him from every quadrant of the dial, there were also a few human paragons, whom it paid to observe closely and, when possible, to emulate.
Johnny Carson, who appears every weekday night at eleven-thirty to host The Tonight Show, he classes as one of the first among men. There is nothing that Carson cannot do. He can talk to anyone adroitly on any subject and do so modestly (that is, he—or his script writers—knows just about everything that, say, a truly dedicated reader of a solid metropolitan newspaper might know), and he has admirable physical proficiency. When the winner of the Alaskan Olympic Games decathlon (sled dog–related events predominate) comes on the show, Johnny beats him two times out of three at the sport of stick grappling, in which you try to wrest a four-foot-long engraved staff from the other contestant’s hands. And then—pièce de résistance—when the world’s female arm wrestling champ comes through the curtains and sits down in the guest chair and challenges Johnny, Johnny grits his inhumanly perfect teeth and whips her handily. Or so my father tells it.
These events took place before my Carson-watching period, which, in my senior year, has just begun. Sometimes, after my mother has gone to bed, my father will let me stay up late, past the monologue and into the show itself. And here we have some of our best times together. He is tired, ready to go to bed himself, and the fatigue, functioning like a soft drug, along with the TV’s oddly lulling light, calms him down a little. He loses his edge, grows almost benevolent. He truly likes Johnny; he likes the way that without ever being rude or high-handed, Johnny stands up for the regular guy and calmly tames all the big-shot authors and movie stars who appear on the show, makes them lose their airs, relax—o
r face his low-key, softly flaying ridicule.
For my father, who is never relaxed, wants everyone else to be. He can’t bear the agitation that any nervous, pulsating being adds to his considerable store of anxiety. He is always telling us, sometimes at impossibly high volume, that we must, individually and collectively, relax. “Relax!” At meals, where he is especially tight, he sometimes decrees complete silence. When we chatter too much, he slams the table and hits us with an old National Guard command, “Chuck it in!” Until I was about twenty, I half believed that talking at the dinner table was not a sign of cultivation but of pig-rudeness.
Johnny was relaxed. He was calm, sure, and also very much himself—a midwestern skeptic, Montaigne from Nebraska, without the classical quotations. He accepted nonsense from no one. So when Carson gets set to go into one of his standard routines—say, Carnak the Magnificent, his mock fortune-teller—my father will exhale hospitably through his great beak and say, “Listen, listen, listen, Mark. I think you’re really going to like this.” And this concern for what I might like, this willingness to put himself in my seventeen-year-old weird, blemished place and imagine a pleasure for me, warms me nearly to the point of tears.
To my father, Carson was the apogee of sophistication, and for my father to think that I might be capable of sharing this taste with him was no small tribute. My brother, Philip, seven years younger, was much too junior to enter the Carson circle. It was my father and I who together attended his television academy.
My father, up late at night, talking to Johnny, and through Johnny to me, told me what he thought the world was like and showed me what he most aspired to, which was a kind of balance, the balance that Carson had on camera, supported by his handlers and dressers and makeup men. It was a balance that my father wished for and perhaps thought he possessed. Such balance was achieved by being affable, witty, receptive, but only up to a point, for there a sharp if adroitly phrased skepticism had to come into play (Carson was no gull—ever). One was courteous without being stuffy; mildly curious, but never particularly surprised by anything; one was, above all, supremely relaxed, though one never needed to holler at other people to relax in their turn. Carson, at least the on-screen Carson, followed Jocasta’s advice from Oedipus Rex: He lived lightly, not worrying himself about the big questions, taking in the passing show with detached ease, doing no philosophy, consulting his account books when need be, diverted by the world as it unfolded before him, but unimpressed by it, too.
It was not just my father and me in the living room (dining room, den) awake late at night. For with us there is a constant unseen presence that never sleeps. It is my sister, Barbara Anne, who died at the age of six, three years ago. She is rarely spoken about, rarely alluded to, though a small photograph of her sits on one of the end tables and the room is decorated with reproductions of famous paintings depicting innocent young girls. Renoir’s Girl with a Watering Can has pride of place over our television set, presiding in melancholy grace over Carson as he runs through his shtick. Barbara’s death, from a series of strokes, had been brutal, horribly painful to watch, as she slowly, slowly degenerated over time. First she lost what speech she had; then she could not walk without dragging her foot behind her. All the expressions of pleasure that come to pass in our living room are partial, muted: Every birthday party or Christmas celebration goes on beside a small unseen grave, barely covered over by the dense yellow carpet, the ornate couch, and the large patriarch’s chair on which my father sits, pitched and ready for battle with the TV. In our house, we attend what seems to be a never-ending wake.
When I told my father about what I gathered to be Frank Lears’ views on TV, did he take them as a slap at the medium only, a snob’s dismissal of what the unwashed loved to drown their rages and pains in, a kind of ocular booze, or did he see it as a stroke against our tiny confraternity of Carson, which—who knows, for he would never have told me—might have meant as much to him as it did to me? When, two years later, I spent a summer working at Raytheon, one of my father’s colleagues after another commended me for some past achievement that my father had described to them in pinprick detail, though he had not offered me a direct word of praise about it.
Carson is a credible figure, a plausible Nebraskan man of the world. When my father wants something more high-flying, he goes to Humphrey Bogart. The Maltese Falcon is by far the greatest movie ever made; and my father will wake us up at any time of the night to come in and watch the best scenes with him. He knows the film so well that he can run two or three lines ahead of the track, so the movie is less in stereo, as sometimes happens when an inveterate repeat watcher of this or that classic is on hand to recite the dialogue simultaneously, than it is simply out of sync. More than a “cocker,” one of my father’s highest terms of praise, Falcon qualifies as a “peachy cocker.” But Bogart is a joy ride, a night of debauchery, liquored up in a black sedan. Carson—Carson is the unacknowledged anti–philosopher king of America. Though in my father’s mind, Richard Nixon will eventually replace him.
For now, Wright, whose name bespeaks accuracy, truth, rigor, is comfortably in the saddle and he can afford to play a little with my puzzlement and his own about this Frank Lears character. So what is to be made of an unprepossessing guy who apparently has no use for the Globe but who reads the Times, which my father has heard of and knows something about, since the Globe refers to it occasionally and nothing that was or is or ever shall be in that paper seems exempt from being stored in my father’s memory? But consider, if you read, truly read, a sound enough American newspaper (and the Globe was that, even if it had a predilection for stories about missing and found dogs and the like) and read it like a ferret, then took it and digested it and metabolized the whole business, and if you watched TV with hyperactive intelligence, you would know a good deal—all Johnny did and maybe more, though no little might escape you, too. Frank Lears may or may not have been a part of that no little. My father, oddly enough, was eager to know.
One night while we were discussing Lears my father became so interested that he threatened to turn up in class and break a lance or two with the guy, argue a few points about Plato, whom I was describing, raggedly enough, during a commercial. It would be the Globe against the Times, the Chuck Wagon versus Harvard. For, about Lears, I had already told my father other puzzling and tantalizing things.
I told him that Frank Lears liked rock and roll, despite his being a great reader of books. In fact, on a couple of occasions, Lears had indicated that there were things to be learned from listening to rock—that some kind of sloppy, fantastical vision was unfolding in the music. To me, rock was nothing but the kind of amped-up raucous noise exemplified by the Stones, a good prelude to a street brawl or a football game; or it was the agreeable surfer noodling that the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean provided. I didn’t much care for the Beatles. That rock had any consequence beyond being a kind of additive that raced or quelled the engine a little—this was a peculiar idea to me. I turned it over in my head, then pushed it aside to think about the Somerville game and Abigail Glynn, who looked like the human equivalent of Ivory Snow but, rumor had it, did it all with her boyfriend, Johnny Contini.
My father detested rock and adored Beethoven. Each year he asked us to present him with a bust of the composer for Christmas or for his birthday. For twenty years, we never delivered the gift, never really looked into it, in fact. Then, when it was finally found, bought, wrapped, and opened, my father, who then was getting old, though only in his fifties, simply looked at it ruefully and put it aside.
As to books: My father, in my sight, read two of them in his life. One was Yeats’ complete poems, a gift to me for Christmas when I was twenty-five or so; he stayed up all the night before Christmas reading it, and my mother had to wrap it the next morning. He pronounced it a cocker. The other was Humboldt’s Gift, by Saul Bellow: also a cocker but absurd, because the characters were unbelievable, too flagrant and power-packed—this from someone who could have auditio
ned for a role as a minor Bellow figure. Based on his affection for Yeats, I suggested that he try a few more modern poets—Stevens, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop maybe. He looked at me like I was nuts.
I told him that Frank Lears wore suits of fifty years’ vintage. “We got a guy at Raytheon who does that,” my father replied. “Wears hand-me-downs. He’s got a tiny goat beard, a goatee, and he says that it makes him look like an intellectual, so he’s worth one or two K extra at raise time.”
I told him that Lears, as far as the class could figure, drank only tea. Tea! A man who only drinks tea? My father was nonplussed. I could almost read his thoughts. What about coffee? What about Budweiser? Or Miller High Life, the champagne of bottled beers? What about Jingle Bells, J&B scotch—a true challenge to the belly and liver of the American male?
One habit of Lears’ that my father seemed to approve of unequivocally was his way of conferring praise. There wasn’t much praise to be conferred, not at this point in the course, but it came in an odd way. If Lears liked what someone said—that is, liked what Sandra or, occasionally, very occasionally, one of the rest of us, said—he would observe, grinning subtly, that the remark was “not too bad.” Or sometimes he would observe that the comment at hand was “really not unintelligent at all” or “far from stupid.” Over time—a long time, given the difficulty of the lesson for us—we learned that the more dire the word Lears negated, the more he liked the comment. So “Not in the least dumb” was better than “Not too bad.” My father—whose favorite adjective was probably atrocious—found Lears’ mode to be a reasonably dignified way of dispensing praise when there was no way of evading the job, and he probably began making use of it at Raytheon.
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