My Old Man

by Ted Kessler

  Howard Ross by Adam Ross

  It happened that my father and I ended up in Los Angeles together.

  This was in 2002, and I was there to interview Reese Witherspoon. Back then, I was writing for the Nashville Scene, my adopted city’s alternative weekly. Witherspoon, a Nashville native, had, out of respect for a local writer, bequeathed me a whole half-hour of her press junket – making me feel both small-time and small-town. This was exacerbated by the fact that I was on a shoestring budget. Along with the cheap hotel, my editor had allowed me to rent a car, but only on the condition that I go economy, in size as well as price, and driving around Los Angeles in a Dodge Neon had dimmed the event’s glamour. I was excited, don’t get me wrong, but I also felt like an impostor, like I didn’t belong with the Vanity Fair and New York Times reporters, and never would. The novel and short-story collection I’d been working on for a decade, the books that I’d promised my wife and sworn to myself would catapult me out of anonymity, not to mention earn me work in national publications, remained unfinished. My marriage was suffering from this and my meagre prospects. I was living with the constant possibility that I’d ruined my life.

  Meanwhile, Dad had flown in from New York to move his ninety-one-year-old mother into a nursing home. She’d been a widow for nearly a quarter of a century and had, until recently, remained doggedly independent. Part of this was a result of her being social: she made a daily four-bus commute to meet friends for a muffin and coffee. But a year ago she’d been hit by a car when she was crossing the street, and the accident, which had broken her legs and hip, had left her physically incapable of living alone. There were also small but telling signs that her mind was starting to fail: her attention faded out, like a weak radio signal; she occasionally forgot her grandchildren’s names; she regularly neglected to eat and, sometimes, bathe. ‘I spoke to your grandmother the other day,’ my father might mention when he called me. ‘I think she’s getting near the end.’ He made this grim prediction with a tone that was close to hope. She was burning through her humble savings. MediCal and Social Security would cover only so much of her assisted-living expenses, the difference my father feared he’d soon have to cover at a time when he was financially vulnerable. Plus his feelings toward her remained ambivalent at best.

  My father’s extended family resided in Los Angeles: his mother’s sister, her husband, and Uncle Ted, and various now grown-up children. And, of course, there was his mother, Miriam. She and her husband, Morris, had moved from Middle Village, Queens, in 1954 to start a fur-coat business, this on the same day my father returned from his tour in the navy. According to my father, his parents had met him in their car on 34th Street, in front of Macy’s, to say goodbye before making the drive across the country. They gave him two hundred dollars – the only money they ever would – then left him to start their lives anew. My grandfather’s business was a success but cut short because of his precipitously declining health and eventual death, in 1975, of a brain tumour. I had no memory of my grandfather, and could count the number of times my grandmother had visited with us, or we with her, on one hand. So far as my father was concerned, the whole California clan had abandoned him. He never said this directly, although he spoke of Los Angeles with spite. ‘I hate it there,’ he’d declare, and then add, with a New Yorker’s condescension, ‘Everyone lives in their car.’

  My father was an actor. Up until the early eighties he’d performed in Broadway musicals – he was a gifted vocalist – but made the lion’s share of his money doing commercial voiceovers, a lucrative gig if you can break into the cabal of actors who can engagingly deliver tag-lines and brought-to-you-bys in twenty-eight-to-sixty-second spots. At his apogee, his voice was ubiquitous, especially in the nineties, when MTV was in full effect and cable was proliferating.

  But commercial actors are the economy’s canaries in the coal mine, and whenever a recession hits, advertising budgets are the first to be cut. The past year had been terrible and no end was in sight.

  I make it sound as if my father were a failure, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. On Broadway, he had worked with some of the biggest names in the business – with Alan Jay Lerner, Leonard Bernstein and Joshua Logan. He’d voice-coached actors such as Lauren Bacall, Anthony Quinn and Barbara Harris. In what remains to me an act of pure nerve, he’d supported a family in New York City as a freelancer, never knowing on Monday where he’d get paid by Friday, putting my brother and me through private school and college, building a house in the Hamptons, buying an apartment on the Upper West Side. But there were times such as these when his entire livelihood seemed in jeopardy, when the fact, as he had observed, that there was ‘no graduation system in this business’ seemed inescapably true.

  The day before my Witherspoon interview, my father and I met Uncle Ted and my grandmother to take her to lunch. She wasn’t in a good way, physically or emotionally. She was weepy and felt like she was now a burden to her family. She cried over her eggs and toast, which she barely touched. ‘I’m ready for this all to be over,’ she said. ‘I’m ready to die.’ She’d shrunk below five feet. She was incapable of making eye contact. It was early September and she wore a heavy sweater: she couldn’t stay warm. Uncle Ted grew exasperated with her but my father seemed especially harsh. ‘It’s not over,’ my father said. ‘You’re going to be well taken care of!’ Afterward, he and I drove her home.

  My grandmother’s apartment was drab, a small place in West Hollywood whose furnishings looked like a set from the fifties. The television was one of those bureau-sized black-and-white models with a separate UHF knob and a domed screen that looked as thick as a hockey rink’s Plexiglas. Her radio was also enormous, as big as a toaster, with yellow fabric covering its speaker. Her refrigerator, which had one of those latch-pull handles, was practically empty. There wasn’t a book in the house – my grandmother, who had fled the pogroms of Russia and Poland, had had only an elementary-school education.

  There was, however, a wall full of framed photographs in her living room and one in particular caught my eye. It was of my father in his early twenties, a professional headshot, taken in a studio. He was wearing a turtleneck and holding a pipe – an absurd prop because he had never smoked in his life; he looked like a Jew trying to dress as a WASP. I should mention that my father and I are nearly identical in appearance, and as I gazed on his image I could see my own face in the glass’s reflection and suffered, in turn, my oldest fear, grounded in that very concrete conclusion that comes from resembling a parent: that I, too, would suffer my father’s fate, be doomed to repeat his life somehow. He had signed it, ‘To my mother: May all your silver screen dreams for me come true!’ They had not. He’d never been in a single movie. As for my own artistic aspirations, these, too, seemed as misguided as my father’s costume. I had one of the most powerful epiphanies I’d ever experienced: You can mistake passion for talent, hope for ability, then spend your entire life chasing a goal you were never equipped to achieve in the first place.

  I left to go and prepare for my interview but my father remained behind. To save money, he was spending the night on his mother’s couch.

  I showed up to the junket early, with over two hours’ worth of questions, which I’d run by our paper’s film critic ad nauseam. I’d seen all of Witherspoon’s movies and had taken extensive notes on each. I checked and triple-checked my laptop’s power supply, my Dictaphone’s readiness. ‘Testing,’ I said into its mike, this just like my father before he recorded a spot. ‘Testing one, two, three.’

  In person, Witherspoon was lovely and unselfconscious. The half-hour flew by but I came away from it relieved. I’d gotten the material I felt like I needed.

  That night, I took my dad to see the press screening.

  He was as relieved as I to be sitting in a movie theatre, but for very different reasons. He had spent the day looking at assisted-living facilities, confronting all of their attendant spectres of mortality as well as his own financial anxietie
s and now, more than anything, what he wanted to do was lose himself in a film. Since he was a boy movies had been a great relief to him, and tonight was no exception.

  Afterwards, we went to the Palm. I offered to pay, and my father accepted, with the agreement that we’d each order an appetiser, then split a steak. It was a meal I couldn’t really afford at the time, but it was my pleasure. Sometimes you need to spend money you don’t have. It’s an act of rebellion against circumstance, a fuck-you to Fate.

  I have a very clear memory of the steak, which was a New York strip. The waiter sliced it for us before serving, then set it between our plates. It was cooked perfectly: pink straight through, the meat almost silky in appearance and laid out like fallen dominoes in its own juices. The restaurant was jammed and, to all concerned, my father and I looked like we belonged, and for a while we forgot that we didn’t, and although this was enormously cheering, even more so was the recognition that neither of us was alone on our respective paths. We were men who had chosen difficult careers. I’d go back to Nashville and struggle to launch mine while he’d return to New York and fight to keep his. We didn’t know what the future would bring (my grandmother, it’s worth noting, would live for another decade) but right here, right now, we were keeping each other company, replenishing ourselves, gathering up strength for the next push. We left the restaurant feeling full.

  Adam Ross is a novelist. He lives in Nashville.

  HE BUST MY NOSE ON STAGE AT WEMBLEY

  Derek Ryder by Shaun Ryder

  My old bloke didn’t stop competing with me until I was forty. But now he’s seventy-three he’s calming down. He doesn’t move out of the house any more. He just sits watching movies, smoking weed.

  He started off as a postman and he did that job so that he could finish at eleven o’clock in the morning, then go out and either be a stand-up comedian or play in the Irish clubs with his accordion and banjo, or go over to the country-and-western clubs, just to earn a tenner. He was pretty funny and he’s one of those people who could turn his hand to anything. I can’t really play instruments. Our Paul was the instrument player. I can work something out so I can get a tune in my head, but my dad could pick up any instrument and be playing it in five minutes.

  When Happy Mondays took off he started working with us. First of all he was managing us and then, when it got to the stage where it was beyond him, he became the sound man, the tech, the roadie, all mixed in one. He worked with me like that for twenty-odd years, but it totally ruined my relationship with him for a long time afterwards. It came to a head when I played Wembley one time. I was shouting at him to sort out the monitors and in front of ten thousand people he walks in front of me and smacks me. He bust my nose! Our manager had to sack him. I was mortified.

  We didn’t speak for years. By the time we’d spent twenty years together on the road we couldn’t talk for a long time, but now we can. In the last five years we’ve started being pals again. Time heals. He’s a great old geezer.

  Shaun Ryder is a singer from Manchester whose groups

  have included Happy Mondays and Black Grape.

  HIS LIFE WAS BUILT AROUND

  PEOPLE NOT COMING BACK

  Alfred Downs by Jacqueline Downs

  Tuesday, 13 February 1979

  So, this is how it would have gone down. He’d have been sitting in his armchair, the one directly facing the telly. I’d have sat my ten-year-old self on his lap, or maybe on the pouffé (that’s what we called it in the 1970s) in front of him. He’d have given me a ten-pence piece from his pocket, and I’d have told him about my day. I didn’t talk to him for the money; I talked to him because we both loved having a chat between the end of teatime and my bedtime. But the money came in handy.

  I can’t remember what we spoke about that night. Maybe we discussed the excitement of the next day – his and my mum’s twentieth wedding anniversary. I know I was excited about it. I’d been saving those ten-pence pieces and had used ten of them to buy a china bell from the local market. It was wrapped and hidden in my wardrobe and the next day he was going to see it.

  Except he didn’t.

  Because on his way home from work he suffered two heart attacks. The ambulance crew brought him round after the first one, but his heart wore out. The second heart attack killed him.

  Wednesday, 14 February 1979

  I remember a lot about this evening from so very long ago. I remember us having our tea without him. I remember standing the china bell on the table with the anniversary card around it. I remember what I watched on TV while I waited for him to come home. I remember my mum going to the front door at regular intervals. I remember opening the door to the police officers. I remember saying to my mum, ‘He never saw the present I bought him.’

  That china bell.

  Way back when

  He was fifty-nine when he died. I was ten. That’s quite an age gap. He was older than most of my friends’ dads, but there were reasons for that. We were his second family. He’d been through this before.

  There are things about my dad that I never found out about until long after his death, things that made me think, quite simply: My poor dad.

  This is how it went down . . .

  When he was thirteen, he came home from school and found his mum, dead, in a pool of her own blood. My own mum told me this story when I was in my thirties. For obvious reasons it wasn’t something my dad ever spoke about to me. I was too young, and maybe even if he’d lived it wouldn’t have been something he wanted to dwell on. Somehow, somehow he managed to live with what had happened, what he had seen. He managed to go about his life, to form relationships.

  One of those relationships was with the woman who became his first wife. They had a son. When their boy was a toddler she left, with my dad’s best friend but without the son. Somehow my dad managed to live with this, managed to bring up his boy, managed to go about his life, to form other relationships.

  He met my mum, had another son, then me. And then he went to work one day and he never came back.

  His life was one that was built around people not coming back. It could have made him closed and wary. But he found a way to make it not matter. Maybe those losses made him crave company and family. I’m glad they did, because it meant for ten years I had a dad who took me to the park, to the seaside, to the fair, who built sandcastles with me, who watched me bounce and soar on trampolines embedded in south-coast beaches, who read to me, who talked to me every night before I went to bed.

  And so when I think about what he went through, how he suffered, what he lost, and what he was emotionally brave enough to look for again, I no longer think, My poor dad. I think, My amazing, open, fantastic, optimistic dad. And I feel so very sad that I never got the chance to say this to him, because it’s not the kind of credit he would ever have given himself.

  Jacqueline Downs lives in Crystal Palace,

  where she is a writer and an editor.

  I SAID TO MY MUM,

  ‘WHO’S DAD?’

  Anthony Monaghan & Roger McGough

  by Nathan McGough

  I had two fathers rather than one. I suppose it’s not uncommon nowadays, but it wasn’t typical when I was a child. I was born in Liverpool in 1960, in Knotty Ash, where Ken Dodd’s Diddy Men come from, where the Jam Butty Mines are.

  My parents were married very young. My dad was eighteen and my mum was just seventeen, eighteen by the time she had me. They were kids. My parents were from working-class families. My dad had refused National Service so he’d been conscripted to work in the coal mines instead. I guess they were happily married for a year and a half, but they were too young and they wanted totally different lives. My mum had a very artistic bent and she got offered a place at Liverpool Art School to do textiles and design when she was nineteen, but my dad was just a very traditional working-class man with, I suppose, all the prejudices that you might associate with that. He thought men worked and women stayed at home, which didn’t sit well with my mum at
all. Although her family were very poor, she always had a desire to better herself. She left my dad when I was eighteen months old.

  It was very uncommon to be a single parent in 1961, in Liverpool, but my mum decided that’s what she’d be. My mother used to take me everywhere with her. She couldn’t afford any childcare, so I was always down the art school with her, messing around, surrounded by art. I’d still see my dad on Saturdays, meeting him by the large clock in Central Station. At one o’clock there’d be a handover and he’d take me up to his parents’ house in Knotty Ash, but my dad liked drinking and going to the bookie’s. I have very strong childhood memories, and what I remember is being very, very bored at the weekend. He’d drop me off with his parents and then just go down the bookie’s.

  The most vivid memory I have of my real dad is him bringing me home to my mum’s when I was three, back to Princess Avenue, Liverpool 8. We got off the bus and it started raining, so we ran. We were laughing and running through the rain. We got back to the house drenched and my mother went absolutely nuts, kicking off at him: ‘Right, you’re not going to see him any more, bringing him home soaking wet.’ She was just looking for an excuse. I remember my dad pleading with her, saying, ‘He’s my son. I love him. Please don’t stop me seeing him.’ I can recall that moment when he left and just feeling incredibly sad because he was my father and I had this deep compassion for him. But I was so little that I was powerless to intervene. I couldn’t articulate it. She’d decided it was inconvenient for her, but he was my dad. He wasn’t hers. So if anybody was to say that I wasn’t to see him any more then it should’ve been me. But I didn’t have that intention, even though the Saturdays were boring.

  I didn’t see him again after that. I got a card on my sixth birthday that said, ‘Happy Birthday, Love Dad.’ I said to my mum, ‘Who’s Dad?’ I was really confused. Children just live in the moment and three or four years is an eternity. By the time I’d got to five I’d totally forgotten I had a dad.