I hung up the phone, my head pounding and with Morris’ voice ringing in my ear, I went for a walk along the beach. There’s something soothing about Venice Beach in the late afternoon: the slanting light, the cool air, the seagulls wheeling in the sky, the surf pushing against the sand, Harry Perry rolling along on his skates with his puffy turban and his electric guitar, while the sun drops undiligently into the sea.
Walking along the shore that day, there was so much I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand my uncle’s troubled life. As it turned out, Ike would spend more than twenty years sleeping on Adelle’s pull-out sofa, living as an unwanted stowaway in her condominium while working as a deliveryman for a medical lab. As the years went by, the two of them became like an unmarried married couple, spending every evening together, traveling to Lubbock together, Ike squiring his elder sister the way he’d squired their mother. They were like characters in a long-running sitcom, aging in their unchanging parts, performing their no longer quite so humorous shtick with a rigid sense of determination, Ike referring ironically to Adelle as “my landlady,” Adelle referring to Ike with a certain exasperation as “the tenant.”
Unbeknownst at least to the children in our family, Ike had struggled with addiction nearly his entire life. Though he was more or less sober for the twenty years following their mother’s death, after Adelle died, he fell—once again and spectacularly—off the wagon, blazing through a quarter of a million dollars of crack before the family realized what was going on.
Suddenly, the ghostly nonstory of his 1976 disappearance began to take on form and substance: a man’s mother dies, he disappears, no one knows where he is for six weeks, until he washes up in New Orleans with no money and no car. I mean, how hard is it to find the drug addict in this picture?
At the time, though, all I remember being told was: “He took his mother’s death very hard.”
It was Morris’ bad luck that he called and attempted to entice Ike out to the Drake with all that Hollywood cocaine when Ike was only a few years away from his long Lost Weekend in New Orleans. The drugs were the least of it, I imagine. Worse would have been comparing himself, a forty-four-year-old man clinging to the life raft of his sister’s pull-out sofa, to Morris, an actor in a major Hollywood film, surrounded by his famous friends in a regal hotel suite with a mountain of the world’s best cocaine laid out, like an offering to the bitch-goddess Success, on the glass coffee table.
Recently, I watched Morris’ films, most of them for the first time, and I realized that, perhaps based on my father’s disdain, I’d misjudged him. He wasn’t the stiff amateur I always imagined him to be, helped into films by influential friends so that he might keep his SAG card and his insurance. No, he was a wonderful character actor who, it’s clear from his oddly musical performances, thought deeply about his work. His films were almost all major films, and over the course of his long career, he acted in scenes with some of his generation’s most notable performers: Nicholson and Eastwood but also Meryl Streep, Harvey Keitel, Mary Steenburgen, Danny DeVito, Tom Waits, and even Elvis Presley.
As I watched his films, one after another, late into the night, on the TV and VCR Barbara and I had bought nearly twenty-five years before in LA, I began to understand Morris’ bitterness towards Ike. Morris had done the impossible. He’d made it! He’d broken into the movies, and when he called Ike, I’m sure all he wanted was for Ike to share this vision of his success with him. Who but Ike could glory with him in his arrival at the top of the Big Rock Candy Mountain? Not the workaday grinds in Lubbock, like my father, who shook their heads at the mention of his name, wondering why he couldn’t be more like his brother, Bob.
An unfortunate stalemate: the conditions under which Morris was asking for Ike’s admiration were precisely the conditions that prevented Ike from giving it to him. My father and I regarded each other across a similar chasm of incomprehension. As a kid, there was so much I didn’t understand about my father’s life. I didn’t understand the unhappiness that seemed to dog him or his dissatisfaction with the world or the disdain he felt for those relatives of ours who weren’t quite making it, and he didn’t understand that his concern for me, his terrible fears about my future, felt by me as disapproval, only drove me more resolutely on.
Still, we rarely get the kind of love we want, and though it’s easy to grow bitter over the imperfect love we’re given, there’s nothing to do but accept it.
THE HANK WILLIAMS SONGBOOK
I worked for a few weeks at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Lubbock when I was fifteen years old. This was the place where, if you ate a seventy-two-ounce steak with all the trimmings—baked potato, buttered bread, salad, ice tea, I forget what else— you got your meal free.
“And you know who can actually do it?” the manager told me after I’d been hired. “This goin’ta surprise you, but cheerleaders. Yeah,” he said, “high school cheerleaders. Itty-bitty little girls that jump around all day.”
I wasn’t old enough to drive, so my mother had to drop me off and pick me up. I’d lug my guitar case into the back room, tune up, put on a cowboy hat. The place was huge. It was supposed to look like a ranch with bales of hay stacked in the corners and wrought-iron wagon wheels and branding irons and pairs of spurs hung up all over the walls.
James, the other guitarist, and I strolled from room to room and table to table as a country duo. I didn’t actually know that many country songs, but I could follow James on whatever he played. Occasionally, we got a request from a teenager dining with her parents for a song by Cat Stevens or Bread, and then James followed me, although we weren’t really supposed to play anything but country music. Once—somebody had probably requested a Beatles song—I even played George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass,” that dour dirge to vanishing love and existential impermanence.
The silence that followed my solo performance—James didn’t recognize the Esus4 and the Asus2 chords and let me play it alone—was broken only when the mother at the table, her hair piled high in a honey-colored beehive, said, “Thay’s real sad.”
I loved playing for the patrons. I loved strolling from table to table, singing at the top of my lungs. I loved all those crazy country tunes about love gone wrong and lonesome train whistles and blue eyes crying in the rain, songs I’d never learned but somehow always knew, songs like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “Why Don’t You Love Me?”—which together, when you think about it, have exactly the same themes as “All Things Must Pass.”
I was thrilled to be out there, but not James. James was more than twice my age, and he’d sit in the back during our breaks, pulling on a cigarette and staring into space, his black Stetson pushed to the back of his head, his funk belied by the jaunty lavender kerchief he wore around his neck. I have no idea what dark inner visions he was seeing, but the terrible unhappiness I felt emanating from him seemed bleak, adult, vaguely sexual, and way beyond the powers of my teenage comprehension.
“Come on, James!” I remember telling him one night. “Our break’s been over now for nearly fifteen minutes! Don’t you want to get out there and play for the people?”
But James ignored me. He continued staring into space, and not long after that I was fired. I hadn’t quite realized that, for all practical purposes, he was my boss.
I ran into him two weeks later when my mom brought me by to pick up my final check.
“Sorry it didn’t work out,” he said. “I guess ya just didn’t know enough country tunes.”
“Yeah,” I told him. “I’m thinking about buying The Hank Williams Songbook.”
I’d seen it in the racks at Harrod Music Co.
This seemed to simultaneously amuse and distress James.
“You do that,” he said, looking at me from the depths of his despairing blue eyes, the ghost of Hank Williams, dead at twenty-nine in the backseat of a Cadillac at the Skyline Drive-In outside Oak Hill, West Virginia, no doubt imposing itself between us. “You do that. You learn them songs and th
en you come back here and you give it another try.”
“I will,” I told him, but of course I never did.
I never even bought the book.
SEX LIVES OF OUR CHILDREN
Translating the French road signs, our GPS leads us straight to the hotel in Montreal. It’s a bit on the très chic side, but after the place in Toronto—unidentifiable stains in the sink, toenail clippings on the carpet—I’m happy to pay a little extra. The staff seems friendly, ebullient even. A young French guy—blond hair, Gallic face, Buddy Holly glasses; in fact, he looks like a blond French Buddy Holly, if you can imagine such a thing—carries our bags to the room.
Leading us through the halls, he tells us that the hotel is over 150 years old, and when I tip him, he wishes me “et Madame Skibell” a pleasant stay.
“Mademoiselle Skibell!” I correct him. “C’est ma fille!”
I look at my daughter, Samantha. With twelve years of Hebrew, but no Romance languages, she’s deaf to the nuances we’re parsing.
“Ah,” the bell man says, “parlez-vous français?”
“Oui,” I tell him, “un peu, ober très mal.”
He gives me a strange look, and it’s only after I’ve closed the door that I realize ober is Yiddish and not French.
When asked how many foreign languages he could speak, Booker T. Washington is reported to have said, “I can remain silent in seven.”
I can—and probably should—remain silent in five, and since two of those five are Yiddish and Esperanto —Barbara chides me that I’m a master of dead languages—it’s not like there’s anyone to talk to anyway.
Dreamers and ghosts, mostly.
Samantha and I settle in. The room, on the second floor overlooking the street, is spacious, with two large beds and fluffy white pillows. Music drifts in through the open window. I step out onto the balcony. There’s a violinist on the street corner with a case full of coins at his feet.
Sami throws herself onto one of the beds. Logging onto her computer, she performs an adolescent magic trick, disappearing into it completely. I sit at the table and try to figure out what’s been happening with my credit card. It stopped working somewhere between Toronto and Montreal. I call my bank to straighten things out, but since, thanks to the worldwide economic downturn, my bank is in the process of becoming another bank, I end up talking to a series of bankers, each of whom puts me in touch with another banker.
It turns out you have to inform your bank when you leave the country, and if you don’t, the last thing you want to do is pay for gas with a credit card at a pump. Big Brother is watching you, but he has a short attention span and no understanding of narrative. Despite a charge for a rental car in Buffalo and a hotel in Toronto, our getting gas in the middle of Canada was economically suspicious.
FOLLOWING OUR CONCIERGE’S recommendation, we take the metro to a nearby vegetarian restaurant. We ascend to the street level at sunset and the city is glowing with a tawny, crepuscular light. Sami graduated from high school only this week, but she’s dressed up, and I wonder if here, too, people assume we’re a couple. Don’t we look like father and daughter? Is there no family resemblance at all? I wonder. At forty-nine, do I really look like a man who might have an eighteen-year-old wife? (And if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?)
We’re seated, I order a beer, and Samantha mischievously reaches across the table and takes a sip, raising the stakes in our father-daughter poker game. It’s as though she were saying to me, I am growing up, you know. I assume it’s legal for her to drink at eighteen in Quebec, and I begin to suggest that she order something if she wants it, but I lose my nerve.
We briefly discuss our interview tomorrow with Michael Greenfield, the reason we’re in Montreal. I’ve dragged Sami along on my trip visiting guitar makers. Yesterday was Linda Manzer in Toronto, tomorrow is Michael Greenfield, Friday is Ken Parker, in New City outside of New York.
Our salads arrive, and the conversation turns, as it so often does these days, though always in a veiled way, to the unholy trinity of teenage life: boys, drugs, and alcohol. The sex lives of our children: now there’s an undiscovered country. I’m not supposed to know half the things I know about Sami’s life, and whenever we discuss these things she leaves out any scenes she thinks will meet with my disapproval, even though our conversation makes no sense without them.
For my part, I pretend to be too dumb and trusting to realize this.
It’s hard to let your children grow up, I suppose. When Sami was smaller, I used to look at her and, with an exaggerated sense of wistfulness, say, “Do you really have to grow up?” until it occurred to me that, yes, she has to grow up, and the real question is: Do I want her to have to do it knowing she’s breaking her father’s heart in the process?
I’m aware of the dangers of naiveté. Still, I’ve begun to think that innocence is too often undersold. Yes, children must grow up, but no one wants his kid to be scorched by the fires of Love and Sex and by their ever-present handmaidens, Rejection and Betrayal.
“True, true,” Sami answers me philosophically when I say as much over dinner, “and that’s why I think a person might want to . . . you know . . .”
“No, I don’t know.”
“. . . experiment with a good friend,” she says, locking a strand of hair behind her ear and taking a provisionary bite of her food.
“A person?” I say.
We’re speaking in code again. Her boyfriend, Gideon, is back from a year in Israel—thanks to our trip visiting these luthiers, Samantha isn’t there for his homecoming—and I gather that the two of them, best friends and occasionally girlfriend and boyfriend, are thinking about collaborating with each other in just such a spirit of experimentation and cooperation.
But as I say, I’m supposed to be too thick to interpret this code, and so I play along.
It’s not up to me in any case. The girl’s eighteen, nearly nineteen. She’s given us practically no trouble as a teenager. Still, as though I were also speaking only theoretically, I suggest to her that a person might want to wait until he or she finds another person whom he or she really loves and who is also really loving.
“Preferably,” I add—why not go for broke?—“within the constraints of the marriage vow.”
The conversation goes back and forth like this. I’m aware that there are few societal norms to back me up. When Sami was in the eighth grade, her school brought in a psychologist to speak to the parents on the topic of sex and the middle-schooler. Her school was a community day school, a nominally religious school, but the psychologist, an older man with a white pompadour, seemed to have already thrown in the towel as far as the chastity of our children was concerned.
“But what can you do if you want your kid to get through high school without having sex?” I asked, raising my hand during the question-and-answer period.
I noticed a few of the fathers nodding their heads along with me.
“Ah! Oh?” The psychologist squinted in what seemed to be confusion. “Without having sex?” he said, as though this were the oddest question he’d ever in a lifetime of public speaking received.
“Yes, without having sex,” I repeated.
“Oh, well then. I don’t know.” He chuckled. “Good luck with that.” He shrugged. “Go work for Disney, I guess?”
MY OWN ATTEMPTS at first love were disastrous. I was a complete sexual maladroit. During my first year at college, I asked a woman from my French class out. Melanie was a little older than I was. I lived in a dorm, and she lived in a two-bedroom apartment off campus. That was the least of it. She also smoked and drank what I thought of as grown-up drinks. When I picked her up, for instance, she offered me a bourbon.
We went out to see a play, and when I brought her home, she invited me in, and though she was clearly flirting with me, sitting near me and laughing at my jokes, I was too shy to initiate a kiss. She was from Tennessee and perhaps too much of a good southern girl to make the first move.
She h
ad no roommate, despite the second bedroom, and this was part of my confusion. When she walked me out to say good night, we stood in her doorway for a moment. Looking over her shoulder, I could see into her apartment. In the hallway behind her were the doors to both bedrooms, and when she lowered her eyes and asked me, “Would you like to stay the night?” the visual impression of these two doors was so overwhelming I presumed she meant in her spare bedroom, and because I was wearing my contact lenses, which in those days you couldn’t sleep in, and because the bottle of saline solution and the little plastic case I kept them in were back in my dorm room, I said, “No, thanks, that’s all right,” and bid her good night.
I drove home, thinking nothing of it, happy to finally get my lenses out, happy to have had a pleasant-enough evening, and it was only during the summer following my freshman year—this was nine or ten months later—when I was home for the summer break, walking around town and thinking about her, that it occurred to me what she had meant: Would you like to stay the night?
I couldn’t believe it! I’d been propositioned for the first time in my life by an attractive woman, and to the offer of her body, to the offer of her love, to the offer of her sweet caresses, I had blithely answered, No, thanks, that’s all right.
I stopped in my tracks. How could I have been so dense, so thick, so stupid?
Melanie and I had gone out a few other times, and now images from those dates came flooding back to me. I remembered sitting with her on her apartment floor, studying, her face buzzing around mine like a flower hoping to be pollinated by a bee, a bee too shy, too inattentive, too myopic, to cross the air between itself and the flower. What if I’m misreading her signals? I remember thinking. How embarrassing would that be!
But now, I saw clearly that—of course! of course!—she had been interested in me. I’d been blind to all the signs. In our French class, she’d even given me a birthday card. She’d written “Je n’ai pas oublié”—(I did not forget)—inside it, though the significance of this gesture was lost on me because I didn’t know the verb oublier.
My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories Page 4