So the last thing in the world he wanted was any kind of responsibility. When other soldiers came back and took advantage of the GI Bill, or put a down payment on a house, or started having kids and settling down, he just wanted no part of any of that, and my mother’s point with him always was that it’s time. She said, “Can’t you see? Look around you. Everybody else is growing up. Everybody else is coming into parenthood, everybody else has at least some ambitions as to what the rest of their lives are going to be like. Time for us to just do what everybody else is doing.” And my father just wasn’t in it, and he never would be.
He said, “I didn’t care about you at all. There was a poker game to go to. The track was there.”
JFB: How old were you when he said that?
RR: Well, I was probably in my late twenties, early thirties. I was going back [to Gloversville, New York] summers to work construction and save money for the next year of college.
JFB: It doesn’t sound like he was saying it particularly apologetically.
RR: No! No. I mean, there was an element of apology in it, in the sense that he said, you know, if I had to do things all over again I wouldn’t have done it exactly that way, but he’d come to the conclusion that my mother was just batshit. “I wasn’t going to live with your mother!”
He said, “I knew you were around and I knew I had responsibilities, but it was just easy on a day-to-day basis to forget, just easy to forget. There was always something going on.”
JFB: What did you learn from your father when he was around? Your novels lead me to suspect that now and again he would show up and take you off on an adventure of some kind, whether you’re fishing, or …
RR: Well, I mean, part of it was negative, and some of it was very, very positive indeed. On the negative side, [what] I came to realize—and it’s only become crystal clear in the last few years when I’ve thought about it more—was that my father was also really afraid of me. When he did turn up, it was almost always with someone else. He’d have a friend of his, or if he picked me up, we would go to New York City maybe and catch a Giants football game or a Yankees game, but it was always with my uncle Chuck, and they’d always meet a couple of other guys there. Later on, when I got to be a little older, we’d go someplace where he could always count on knowing people when he arrived. So even then the burden of what slender parenting he was doing he could share with a half a dozen other drunks.
I always thought when I was younger that it was just disinterest, and I didn’t recognize it as fear until much later. Or inadequacy.
JFB: What was he afraid of? Was it that you were the ghost of responsibility? That he shirked?
RR: Yeah! Or feelings of inadequacy from just not doing your job. If you don’t do your job ninety-nine percent of the time, you’re not going to have a really strong feeling of competence that other one percent of the time. And I was not an easy kid, in the sense that I think he thought of me as someone who as soon as he got home would be reporting back.
JFB: You were your mother’s spy.
RR: Her instructions to him whenever I left the house with him was always just a series of don’ts. I always had a sense of him as a very dangerous man, which, of course, at times he was. There were times when you did not want to be standing next to my father. Because something would come flying at him and it wouldn’t hit him, it’d hit you.
So it made me an alert child, but it also made me a vigilant child. When I was with him, I was always trying to figure out his absence. Always trying to figure out if he was the man that my mother portrayed for me. So he must have seen me as a kid that was always taking notes. Always disapproving. And I always had the sense that by the time he dropped me off again at my grandfather’s house that he had just about as much of me as he could stand.
The powerful and positive things I learned from my father had an awful lot to do with work. Because he did such hard physical work and he played so hard. I would watch him when we were working road construction together in the summers. I would watch him, absolutely slack-jawed at how hard that man could work. And he was then in his fifties and he could outwork and outdrink everybody. I mean, he would limp in the first couple of hours in the morning, but once he burned off the alcohol he was simply amazing. The amount of what I could only consider punishment that man could endure. And when he began to get older and have some physical illness and injuries that just come from a life of hard work, his ability to manage pain left me just amazed. And also, as he became ill—the first barb of lung cancer, then he went into remission for a while, and then he went into a second bout of lung cancer—he had an ability to absorb not only physical pain but psychological pain, of just knowing what was happening to him, and going through those radiation treatments without ever complaining, without ever showing any … he had to be afraid, but he never showed the slightest weakness. At all.
JFB: So do you think you got that as a son, a certain fearlessness, a certain dedication to work? As your friend, I’ve rarely seen you afraid, and when I have, you’ve been afraid for other people. I’ve seen you afraid for me, I’ve seen you afraid for Deedie when I was midtransition. I saw you afraid for our son Sean when he was born. But I’ve never seen you afraid for yourself.
RR: Well, I am a person who puts one foot in front of the other. I’m never afraid of something not working. I’m not afraid of failure in the traditional sense, because it’s just not part of the way I go about things. In the sense that I have seen other writers, I’ve seen students, I’ve seen people absolutely paralyzed, afraid of making a mistake and the mistake leading to failure. It’s something about my makeup that comes from watching my father work and seeing my grandfather also, through various deprivations in his life, put one foot in front of the other. That’s kind of what I do. And if I’m not afraid, it’s because I always have a kind of attitude about these things that, if this doesn’t work, we’ll throw it out and try something that does, and if that doesn’t work … That’s just how you do it, you put one foot in front of the other.
JFB: Rick, I think if I had been your father’s son—or daughter—I would have resented his absence. I would have been mad. I would have been hurt. And yet in your fiction, at least, these Russo Fathers, these Russo Males, you’re always very forgiving of them. Do you think that’s surprising? I think you have every reason to be damaged and angry. Instead, there’s a tremendous amount of love for him, for this man who said to you, “I never thought about you.” Why is that?
RR: I don’t know. [Laughs] I don’t know.
JFB: That’s not a very good answer, Rick.
RR: If I could sum up the way I felt about him as a child, he was simply wrong. As I got older, he was just a lot of fun. He was just an enormous amount of fun. He was wonderful, he was so full of shit.
I mean, I would just watch him in such amazement, the way he believed at times, in a kind of deep, almost philosophical way, that inanimate objects were alive. And I would see him try to fix something. He was not a gifted man with his hands. He was always buying tools. He’d go over to somebody’s house and work on a truck or something like that, but he was such an impatient man. If something didn’t come apart, the wrench that he was using that didn’t fit and he couldn’t get it in there, he’d resort to whacking the shit out of it with the wrench, you know? And [he’d get] angrier and angrier, and then he’d begin to talk to the tools. He’d say, “Ah, there, how do you like that, you cocksucker?” And at some point, he would take the entire set of tools out of the garage, and toss them, one crescent wrench after another, out into the woods. Screaming at each one of them as he threw them. “How do you like that, you asshole?” And he’d throw another wrench out into the woods. And then later in the afternoon he’d go buy another set of tools.
The pure entertainment value of the man was just astonishing to me. I had more fun when I got old enough and the longing was replaced; there’s some part of me that just said, you know, you can either take what he’s offering—maybe he should be o
ffering more—but you can either enjoy it and let the rest go, or you can be bitter and resentful and all of those things. For me, [it was] just an easy choice. It was always an easy choice. Just to have fun with him. For pure entertainment value, the man could not be beat. He was endlessly, endlessly entertaining.
He was always trying to, or was frequently trying … gosh … he’d frequently try to shame his enemies. And he had a fair number of enemies. He was always sending drinks, if you were at a bar or a restaurant, and there was somebody there he knew he hated, he would always send them a drink.
And these were often people who had a lot more money than he did and a lot more social standing, so in terms of both class and all the materials in the wake of that, with money issues, I’ve seen him when he didn’t have money, sometimes he’d borrow money, he’d borrow money from someone, to send a drink to someone he despised, because the message in that is, okay, you’re a judge or you’re a lawyer, or you’re whatever, but we’re in the same restaurant, and I’m going to buy you a drink, because I want you to know that I’m here, motherfucker. And the next time you look up, you’re going to see me, and you’ll see me in your rearview mirror, and I’m always going to be there. And he had a lot of class rage a lot of the time, but that’s the snapshot. That’s the kind of quixotic gesture that he was famous for. And in its own way too, entertaining.
JFB: Yeah, of course.
RR: Because the payback for him was the moment at which the waitress came over with the drink and set it down and said, “This is compliments of Jimmy Russo,” and she’d point and my father would be there with the glass and raise his glass to this guy … and sometimes, later, they’d have a shouting match out in the parking lot afterwards. He’d try to time it so they left the restaurant at the same time. You know, a shoving match, a shouting match. But there again, that’s the guy who didn’t do the GI Bill, who had no interest in getting ahead, but that, years later, was still at war. He was still at war, I think. A very ill-defined conflict. But he knew what it was about! And that was all that was necessary.
JFB: As a father, have you made quixotic gestures? Even though your philosophy is, to some degree, the opposite of his, are there things you’ve done as a father that you think you can feel the ghost of Jimmy Russo lingering there?
RR: Not so much as a father. I have been guilty of theatrical, quixotic gestures from time to time, although the kids are not usually involved in that. Although Kate did tell a story at Emily’s wedding about the day I couldn’t get my push mower going. I couldn’t get the lawn mower started, pulling on that rip cord, and I couldn’t get it to start. It would get up and then die, and I was swearing at it as much as my father used to swear at inanimate objects, and I finally picked it up and threw it over the fence. [Both laugh.] That had a profound effect on Kate, she remembered that and told the story. If Steve [Emily’s husband] was going to be a Russo, he had to understand that inanimate objects have life, that things cannot be fixed. You have to understand that things can’t be fixed. You swear at it, and you throw it over the fence.
JFB: I’m thinking back to the commencement speech you gave at Colby years ago, and one of the pieces of advice you gave to the happy graduates was “Have children.”
RR: I felt deeply that our lives changed with Emily and Kate, in ways that were quite extraordinary and quite profound. Certain things you anticipate about having children and certain things you don’t; one of the things you don’t realize is that you really don’t understand the meaning of fear until you have children. So in part I was saying to these Colby graduates, “You’re really going to like the fear.”
JFB: But what’s the fear? What’s that fear about?
RR: Of something happening to them. You now have something that you cannot afford to lose, and you can’t afford to lose it in a way that’s certainly more profound than your fear of losing your own life. And I think it’s more profound even than the fear of having your spouse fall ill or losing your spouse to a cardiac. I think that with children, for so many years they are so dependent. They depend on you for everything, and so for me it was just a new level of terror that came with having these little people and finding yourself completely won over by them. The terror that comes with knowing that you might not be there when they need you. And for me, of course, just the notion of being there was very, very important because my own father was largely not there.
And so for me I set the bar rather low as a parent. There was rule one and no rule two, but rule one was to be there. And I think that you’re not a father for very long before you realize that even with the bar set that low, you can still screw up.
JFB: I guess I’m curious if you think, looking at this now, another generation ahead: What has your daughter Emily learned from you [now that she is a mother herself], and what of yourself do you see in your one-year-old granddaughter?
RR: It’s had a more profound effect on me than I imagined it would. One of the best reasons to have children, of course, is because that’s when you become fully invested in the world, in a way that you have something more important than you.
JFB: What would Jimmy Russo do if he was around to look into the eyes and able to spend time with his great-granddaughter?
RR: He would tickle her till she wet her pants.
My father was a man who never knew how to stop anything. And he was wonderful with children. He was really good with old women and children, and he would be over the moon with that child.
And then he’d leave.
RALPH JAMES SAVARESE
© Tessa Cheek
The first time I met my son, [DJ,] he grabbed the pointer finger on my right hand, took me to the couch, and started banging his head against my head—not hard, but not soft either.… We performed this bighorn ritual for twenty or thirty minutes. Years later, when he was literate, DJ explained, “Dad, I was trying to say hello.”
Ralph James Savarese is the author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption. He lives in Grinnell, Iowa, where he is associate professor of English at Grinnell College.
JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN: Your son is one of the first nonspeaking autistic people to go to college—Oberlin, in fact. Tell me the story of how he took the SATs.
RALPH JAMES SAVARESE: It was the ACTs, actually. Because he’s a nonspeaking person with autism whose senses are poorly integrated, a person who can’t always locate his body in space and who has great difficulty with fine motor activities, we had to negotiate with the testing service to have each multiple-choice answer bank enlarged so that he could point independently and unambiguously at the answer.
He consumed two-thirds of the extended test time besieged by anxiety; he knew that the test would have a great impact on his future. When at last he stopped fidgeting and compulsively sharpening pencils, he moved through the questions rapidly. By February of the following year, he was accepted early decision at Oberlin College.
JFB: So let’s back up ten or twelve years. How did DJ come into your family? How did you come to adopt him?
RJS: My wife, Emily, was the assistant director of the Center for Autism and Related Disabilities at the University of Florida. In that capacity, she had begun to work with DJ. One night he and his sister were found on the street looking for food. DJ was about three and a half years old, his sister four and a half. The kids were taken from their mother, who had serious drug and alcohol issues. The sister went to live with their mother’s sister, and DJ, who was already in a five-day residency program at the hospital, went to live with a foster parent on the weekends.
A few weeks into his foster placement, Emily asked if I would play with him. He really wasn’t doing well, she said.
The first time I met my son, he grabbed the pointer finger of my right hand, took me to the couch, and started banging his head against my head—not hard, but not soft either. In the background Emily was mouthing, “Go with it,” because she’d never seen him reach out to somebody.
We performed this bighorn ritual fo
r twenty or thirty minutes.
Years later, when he was literate, DJ explained, “Dad, I was trying to say hello.” The pressure of his head on my forehead had allowed him to take me in.
The sensory stuff in his kind of autism is just overwhelming. After the adoption, I remember trying to wash his hair. He screamed at the top of his lungs. His scalp was incredibly hypersensitive. And yet he could swallow Tabasco sauce as if it were water.
JFB: So how did you go from a moment where you’re first encountering this child to thinking, We should make DJ part of our lives; we should be his parents?
RJS: One night—it was Emily’s birthday—we received a call from the Department of Children and Families saying that DJ had been terribly injured. DJ’s caseworker asked if we could come to the hospital because they weren’t legally allowed to ask the birth mother to the hospital, and the foster mother was under investigation.
I should say that Emily and I had just taught DJ his first communicative gesture: the American Sign Language sign for more. I would tickle him, make the sign for more by bringing the first three fingers on each hand together, and wait to see if he could copy me. One day, after much repetition, he did. He thought it was hilarious that by putting his fingers together he could get me to tickle him.
So we went to the emergency room and there’s this little boy, unbelievably bruised. His ear had been kicked inside his head; his ribs were black and blue. Somebody had savagely attacked him.
He looked up—he was making high-pitched gerbil sounds that I don’t ever want to hear again—and, seeing me, he made the sign for more. He wanted to be tickled. He wanted, I think, some kind of normalcy in the midst of his horror, and he wouldn’t calm down until I tickled him. Later, I realized that he wanted more of us, indeed more from us.
A month shy of his sixth birthday, DJ came to live with Emily and me.
Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders Page 7