by Mike Edison
Recently, one of my friends added to the equation. “That sucks,” he said. “I was right there when my dad died. He told me he was proud of me, and then turned to my mom and said ‘I hate you, and have always regretted marrying you. You were the biggest mistake of my life.’ And then he closed his eyes and that was it. That kinda fucked her up for a while.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” I laughed, and then I apologized for laughing, before starting up again, because it was funny. How could she not see that coming?
UNTIL I BEGAN WRITING THIS, I didn’t for a second think that beyond the obvious there was anything my father and I had in common. But it’s interesting what you find out when you start asking questions. Maybe it’s no surprise that a man so obsessed with being perfect—a father who couldn’t suffer less-than-stellar saxophone playing from a ten-year-old, or tolerate earnest idealism in a teenager—was hiding some sort of rhubarb in his own closet. There had to be some inadequacy that was chewing at him.
Despite what I had been led to believe, my father never graduated from the MIT business school. I was always told he went to Brown, and then MIT for a master’s in business. The fact that he never finished had been willfully overlooked. I never would have known if not for an offhand comment my mom made to me when I had asked her to confirm the year he graduated from MIT, mainly just to keep my time line straight.
“Nineteen sixty-two. His mother wouldn’t let him get married until he graduated, that’s why we were supposed to wait. But now that I think about it, I don’t think he ever finished. He was in a real hurry to get married.”
Being a journalist has its advantages. All it took was for me to put my press card in my hatband and politely ask around the MIT registrar’s office to confirm that his obligations to graduate were never met, and that no degree was ever conferred. In other words, he dropped out… for a chick!
And that chick was my mother!
It was almost too crazy to fathom. My old man, the rebel!
Actually, I had heard a story from one of his cousins that he had wanted to get married while he was still in high school. He had a girlfriend of some sort, and told his mom that he was going to marry her, and she (his mother, that is) said “absolutely not”—he was only sixteen years old, and that is certainly not how it was done in Boston—and he was just crushed. I guess he was pretty desperate for affection, an affliction to which I can relate, which sucks, because when I see myself in him I end up despising us both, which I admit is pretty twisted.
I remember being so devastated when I broke up with my first girlfriend that I was actually writing poetry. And yet somehow I got over it—I found another girlfriend and started writing prose. I was never so freaked out about the future that I would ever let it be the enemy of the now. But in Dad’s worldview, getting hitched must have seemed like the one irrevocable solution to filling that void permanently—so much so that he dropped out of school in the final lap to throw himself at marriage like some lovelorn Quixote. Sadly, it was only thirteen years (and three kids) later when he decided that he had backed the wrong pony and was acting out in pizza restaurants.
MAYBE FIBBING ON YOUR RÉSUMÉ isn’t the worst crime? There is no denying my father was gifted at business. In fact, put at the top of my list of disappointments that I didn’t inherit the gene that makes one excel at earning money. Mostly I just got the genetic code for male-pattern baldness.
Short of actually getting a diploma to hang on the wall, whatever they taught him in school worked like a charm, but that little omission was downright oily coming from a guy who browbeat me terribly that “not finishing something you started” was the distinct hallmark of “lack of character,” and not the sign of someone likely to “ever be successful.” He had used this reasoning to spin my college career as some sort of cautionary tale for my younger brothers.
Coming home from the hospital with Brother No. 1, the night when the old man shot his last breath telling me what a colossal bummer I had been, emotions were running pretty high, as you can imagine. We drove in silence for a few minutes, tooling through the hospital exit and out onto the freeway before he got into it with me.
“Dad was right. If you didn’t drop out of school, your life would be a lot better right now.”
“Hey, get off my case, toilet face. No, seriously… It was thirty freaking years ago. I’m doing just fine.”
“You’d be a lot more successful now if you had finished college. That’s just how the game is played.”
“I’m not playing the same game you are, or haven’t you noticed? And the only thing you learned in college is how much beer is in a pint. I remember you took a bowling class for credit. By the way, how much beer is in a pint?”
“I don’t know. Twenty ounces?”
“I swear I have no idea how you even get through the day.”
“It doesn’t matter. I have a degree, you don’t. Which makes me smarter than you. I’ll show you my last year’s tax return, which proves it.”
“Did I write the essay on your grad school application?”
“You helped.”
“So where’s my cut? I want a piece of this action.”
“Very funny. Dad gave you two bites at the apple, and you failed both times. My kids are going to college. And if they drop out, I’ll cut them off, too, just like Dad did to you. You deserved it.”
That wasn’t my brother talking; that was the old man talking through him. “You had two bites at the apple”—that was word-for-word from the old man’s playbook. I had heard it many times before, although I still had no idea what it meant. He had a quiverful of this folksy crap. “You should stop fishing and start cutting bait” was his favorite.
The old man had done a pretty good job of painting me as some sort of a black sheep to my younger brothers. Then again, I didn’t really need his help. I did a good job of painting myself a very decent shade of indigo without anyone’s malevolent charity.
“Remember the time you vomited out your bedroom window? That was classic.”
It was pretty good. I drank the better half of a bottle of Canadian whiskey I found in the basement, left over from their bar mitzvah (marginally less crappy than mine was), and then puked out my second-floor bedroom window, since I knew I would never make it to the bathroom. The entire front of the house was covered in vomit, and the next day both my parents, in a rare joint appearance, monitored me from the front lawn like a couple of UN peacekeepers as I washed off the house with a garden hose. A few neighbors observed from a safe distance. I was sixteen, about par for the course. I didn’t regain my sense of humor for hours.
“What about the time you came home at six a.m. from a Grateful Dead concert and Mom tried to make you go to school?”
“What about the time… What about the time… Blah blah blah…”
“What about the time YOU GUYS NEVER GOT IN ANY TROUBLE AT ALL???” That usually shuts them up.
Both of my brothers, it seemed, were fairly certain that I had made a hash out of my life, which they saw reductively enough as a series of bad choices. At dinner not too long after Dad died and the Summer of Suck had begun taking casualties, they demanded to know just how did I measure success? Because being forty-plus years old, single, unemployed, and in mourning for a cat was clear proof that I was not even remotely in possession of the formula. I am sure my father would have had some earthy bromide to illustrate the point.
“Well,” I offered, “I can’t afford a Kandinksy for my beach house, but that’s okay, because I can’t afford a beach house, either.”
That might have been a bit zen for them. Also, I am not sure that they knew what a “Kandinksy” was. For all I know, they thought it was a kind of sandwich, which would understandably have confused them. I tried again.
“Well,” I said, “how about, how much time you spend smiling?”
They pondered that for a few hot moments, but they were still looking for something more, well, quantifiable.
Numbers are good. They are
, as Timothy Leary once said, maybe the best way to describe objective reality, if there actually is such a thing. That’s one reason he loved baseball so much, because baseball had come up with an astonishingly accurate way to describe its own universe. Baseball stats bordered on kabbalah—you could look at them and divine the order of things. The numbers didn’t lie. If a guy couldn’t hit left-handers, and a lefty came in from the bullpen, you’d best start thinking about pinch-hitting for him.
More important, baseball is a sport measured in failure. Failing to get a hit 60 percent of the time is considered excellent: It means you are batting .400, and you will be rated as one of the greatest hitters in the history of the sport. For a baseball team, winning one hundred games in a season is a benchmark for success. But in a 162-game season, it also implies losing 62 games. That’s a lot of drinking beer in the shower wondering what the hell just went wrong. Still, it could be worse. You could lose 120 games, an all-time low, like the New York Mets did their very first season. Then again, they were still getting paid to play baseball.
I ALWAYS THOUGHT that if I had met the right woman, and that having children were the natural extension of our love, I would have been all-in. I think I would have been a terrific dad. At any rate, that’s what people keep telling me.
It didn’t work out that way—I just didn’t meet the right girl at the right time. But in no way does it compromise or diminish the love I have in my heart. I love kids and can generally relate to them pretty well. The eight-year-old with the hyperactive imagination; the disenchanted, hormone-crazed fourteen-year-old; and the insouciant fifteen-year-old pothead are still alive and (more or less) well somewhere inside of me. And that’s not to mention the three-year-old who loved to run around the house wearing a blanket as a cape and screaming “Superman!” at the top of his lungs; the eight-year-old who built the computer; and especially the child who grew up suffering for some love and attention from his dad.
I have lots of friends who are parents, and I am always amazed at what great moms and dads they are. I watch them answer their children’s every question and speak to them like adults. They don’t talk down; they are patient, playful, and interested. What is really amazing—they sometimes find that they actually like the same things, like superhero movies or hip-hop. I guess that’s the post-modern world for you.
And, since these are my friends we are talking about, you can bet that they have also enjoyed their fair share of teenage hijinks. You would think that they’d be generally unflappable, since they embrace the basic job description of a teenager as being “to get into trouble.” At some point you have to figure that if your kid doesn’t break curfew at least once, or give you a hard time, then he is just not trying hard enough.
But I have seen the best parents in the world be terrorized by children who have misunderstood the “get in trouble” clause in their contracts as “be a complete fuckup.” And then what do you do? The cops call in the middle of the night—“Johnny got popped tagging the school with a can of spray paint,” or worse, “Johnny’s got a gun.” It must be seriously fucking scary when your kid goes very wrong.
Before we became of age to actually raise children, whenever the topic came up among my friends, the great-est fear seemed to be that our kids would grow up to be squares. We used to joke about hiding our favorite, most subversive records—Raw Power, Kick Out the Jams, Trout Mask Replica—but not so well that our kids wouldn’t find them. And when they did, they would think it was contraband, attach a high value to every note and groove, and forge themselves in a crucible of cool.
I have one pal—the only guy I knew in junior high school with whom I am still friends—who has done a great job of teaching his kids to question authority, as we did when we were kids. They will accept no bullshit. They ask direct questions. If you get caught patronizing them or condescending to them, they will cut you in half. They are awesome young versions of human beings—and a huge annoyance to their teachers and their friends’ parents, who consider their impudence a bad example for their own children, who are starting to ask too many damn questions. My friend is understandably very proud.
My biggest fear these days certainly wouldn’t be that my kids would turn out to be—God forbid—the kind of little terrors who track mud through the house, or the dunces who comes in third in the spelling bee, or the slobs who never learn the difference between their salad fork and the dinner fork. But what if they have no awe of nature? What if they aren’t interested in the world around them? What if they think making money is more important than making love? What if they are jerks? What if they are mean?? And what if they get sad, or depressed, or sick? What if they have problems? What if they are human? It happens.
What can you do? Well, if your daughter wants to go to the ballet, you take her. If your son wants to play baseball, you play catch with him and teach him that real men throw the breaking ball on full count. And if he wants to go to the ballet, you take him, and encourage him. Tell him Baryshnikov got more pussy than Frank Sinatra. Unless he’s not into pussy, in which case—who cares, you love him just the same. Ditto, you play ball with the girl if that’s what she wants. Maybe she’s going to be the baseball star and get lots of pussy. As long as they are kind, and happy, and healthy, I really don’t know what more you can ask for.
AFTER MANLY, MY CHAMPION OF A CAT, DIED, I got a new kitten. He was a very wounded rescue, picked up in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, by some crazy cat ladies and delivered to me on Christmas Eve. He was a Christmas miracle! In fact, I was going to name him Christmas but one of my female friends told me that a cat named “Christmas” could be a liability for a straight, single dude, and that I might want to rethink that. (I still think it is a sweet name.) Anyway, I finally landed on “Jeepster,” after the T. Rex song, which was actually a failed attempt to name him “Jupiter,” after the Mozart symphony. I had a few in me at the time, but that’s another story. Anyway, the point here is that he was the worst kitten imaginable.
Jeepster was gorgeous—about the size of a tennis ball, all-white fur, with a nose the color of bubble gum and beautiful eyes like Errol Flynn or Elvis Presley—but unlike those guys, he had a thing for peeing in my laundry. And then on my couch. He’d pull towels off the rack and pee on them, too. And then he would hide for days.
He was clearly terrified—a dog had bitten him before he was rescued, and he was just so traumatized. I felt awful for him. But there was a point when I was faced with making a pretty tough decision—the cat was making my house smell and had turned my life into some sort of waking nightmare, never knowing when he was going to be inspired to mark his territory. One of my neighbors complained about the smell. I had a date over one time, and he managed to find her coat hanging in the closet, pulled it down, and let her have a dose of his finest. Needless to say, despite cunning and stealth worthy of a Navy SEAL Black Ops Team, she was not impressed.
I truly didn’t know what I was going to do with him. Even my vet told me that I had to consider my own happiness—he wasn’t advocating anything per se, but I couldn’t let the cat take over my life and make me miserable, either. But, in the end, there was no way I was going to do anything drastic with kitty Jeepster.
Not giving up was the right answer. Every day I picked him up and told him that I loved him. I know—he is just a cat, not a child. I’m not that confused. But like I say, sometimes you just have to take it where you find it. He taught me more about patience and unconditional love than I had ever known.
He peed in my laundry, so I picked him up and told him I loved him. I tried to take him to the vet for a checkup, and he sliced me up like a brisket. I looked like Iggy Pop after a particularly rough night. But I picked him back up and told him I loved him.
And then one day, Jeeps turned the corner and decided to be the best cat ever—loyal and loving and impossibly purry and trusting, perhaps my greatest success story. He was on his way to kitty reform school or worse, and with a little love and encouragement, he blossomed into a
rock star.
I grew up in a jungle. Pretty much everyone who was a little kid in the early ’70s did. It was like a minefield out there—today’s stroller brigade would plotz if they saw the environment we grew up in. There was secondhand smoke everywhere—the park, the shopping mall, on airplanes. They used to let you smoke in hospitals. Both my parents used to smoke in the car, with the kids in the front seat. Special car seats for kids? Air bags? Forget about it. I didn’t even see a seat belt until I was seventeen.
The playgrounds we were dropped off in were populated by metal jungle gyms and slides that broiled in the sun—I don’t know a single child who didn’t suffer second-degree burns every August from a swing set that had cooked to near incandescence. The sandbox (do they even have those anymore?) hid shards of broken glass and dog poop. No one wore helmets, ever, on bikes or on skateboards or snow sleds, the old Flexible Flyers with the sharp blades. We used to run them at breakneck speed down a hill that faced a highway, and if you couldn’t turn in time you had to bail out and watch the sled careen across two lanes of traffic, praying that it would make it without being run over by the next Chevy Impala that came flying by. The alternative—not ditching and dying—was only marginally worse.
There was zero supervision. There was blood everywhere. My neighborhood was a cabbage patch of skinned knees and elbows, cracked foreheads, and missing teeth. We played street hockey of such a violent nature that we once assessed a two-minute penalty for crying. Kids got stitched up all the time. When I came home beaten up, I didn’t get a second look. It was all very normal back then.
I was a latchkey kid, the product of what they now call “free-range parenting”—some sort of backlash to the insanely paranoid helicopter parents who fret about every moment of little Jack and Jill’s over-structured life and every morsel of organic mush that goes into their mouths. Today’s mommies and daddies would be appalled at the crap I was fed as a kid. Health food was for weirdos. Never mind the prefab and frozen dinners, my mother thought Marshmallow Fluff® was a vegetable. She fed me Twinkies® and Drake’s® cakes every day for lunch. Breakfast was nonexistent, unless she forgot to go shopping for dinner, and then out came the pancake mix. And despite it all, here I am.