The father of a murdered son, a man I had felt so sorry for that just thinking about his plight racked me with poisonous guilt and shame and anger and grief . . . well, he had been feeling sorry for us. How many miles will I have to run before I can equal him, in his integrity and strength and grace?
When I was sixteen, I swore to rescue my mother, get revenge on my father, and make some mark on the world. Wonder of wonders, I was able to make good on my arrogant, adolescent vows . . . just not in the manner I’d envisioned.
In June 2013, exactly twenty years after I swore through angry tears, at our final, sodden, tragic yard sale in the driveway of our house in New Hampshire, that I would restore my mother, I bought her a little house in California. I chose it because it was only eight miles away from Tatyana’s house in Fallbrook, so my mom would be able to spoil the rotten kids rottener. It’s technically located just over the line in the neighboring town of Rainbow—somewhere over the rainbow, if you will, fitting for the house I’d dreamed of for so long. It’s a tiny, brick three-bedroom on half an acre, perched so high on a hillside that you often wake up in a cloud. Every penny of the money I put down on it came from writing. I resist naming cars and guitars because I understand now that things are just things, but I had to name the house: Sweet Revenge.
My dad drove the eight hours down from Sutter Creek with a load of tools in his Volvo to help with the renovations. We worked together in the blazing hot sun, ten days in a row, fourteen-hour days, like we had when he helped me build out the Brooklyn loft ten years earlier. We worked side by side for a while, then branched off to do separate jobs after a couple of days. He took the opportunity to listen to his iPod and was rocking out to Guns N’ Roses while he hung sheetrock with his shirt off, occasionally stopping to wipe the sweat from his face and fist-pump or howl tunelessly along with the lyrics, the gray hair of a grandfather and the heart of a teenager.
Working in the kitchen, I found a newspaper clipping in a drawer: some 1950s housewife perched atop a column of brickwork. So what? I’d been working for twelve hours, still had hours to go, and there was no end in sight. I skimmed the article. The woman had spent three years building a house and was still only halfway done. Looking again, I realized it was the house I was standing in.
I read the whole article now, my heart thumping. The house I had bought for my mother was built by Carol Coast, a mother of three, just like my mother. Carol Coast was a sculptor who had been experimenting with the local clay. When she realized the soil was the right consistency for brick, she designed a house, then built it herself—pouring each of the bricks by hand, then laying them herself.
I walked through the gently curving hallway at the center of the house, running my hand over the bricks, Carol’s bricks. How much work had she put into it? Hundreds of hours, at the very least. Thousands of hours?
The fireplace was her crowning achievement, with bricks of many sizes that she had tinted different colors, according to the article. I’m more careful about swearing oaths now than I was when I was sixteen (as they can be a real pain in the ass to fulfill), but I swore that one day I would peel the decades’ worth of paint off of Carol’s fireplace and restore it to its original beauty.
It was perfect: the house had been designed and built for my mother by another mother, an artist, a nurturer, and one hell of a hard worker, a woman who had toiled patiently, year after year, building her life one brick at a time. Just like my mom.
My mom came by one afternoon after most of the renovations were done, and I gave her the tour. She had been in China teaching English to preschoolers while I was in the process of buying it, so she had never seen it. We had never even really talked about it. She seemed happy, but then she always does.
“So . . . what do you think, you old bag of bones? You like it? Do you love me now?” I said to her after the grand tour.
“Oh, my darling boy, of course I love you! And I loved you just the same when you didn’t have a penny to your name.”
“But you like the house? You deserve a home of your own. And I will fight to my dying breath to ensure that no one ever takes this one away from you.”
My mom put her arms around me and looked in my eyes. It’s a much different gesture now than it used to be because I am over a foot taller than her. Since the day of the last yard sale, I had dreamed of this moment.
“Mishka, you are a sweet boy. But I’m just a young woman of sixty-six! I can’t be tied down to a house now. I have lots of things I want to do before I get old. I want to travel! I’m not ready to settle down.”
A friend of mine once asked me how you know what a woman is thinking. I replied, “Just ask her,” and marveled silently at my own brilliance. I had never asked my mom if she wanted a house. In many ways, my life has unfolded like some ancient Chinese curse: may you be forced to understand the wisdom of the advice you have given. Yes, my mom was rescued, but not by me. It was very sad that dark day of the last yard sale when she collapsed in our driveway and I had to carry her into the house. But the very next day, she rescued herself, and she hasn’t needed rescuing since. If anything, it was she who saved me over and over in my life, more times than I can count, almost every single day.
I got my revenge on my father. I froze him out of my life for long enough—seven years—that he cracked before I did and asked me if I would try again. I wasn’t bluffing when I bid him a final farewell at twenty. Reaching out to him only to have him ignore me and let me down again and again was more painful than having no relationship with him at all. I didn’t shut him out to hurt him. I was convinced that he didn’t care at all, that I was just something he could cross off his job list. I alienated him to save myself from pain. But yes, I had been perversely delighted to hear how it had hurt him. I had sworn that I would hurt him, and I had succeeded . . . but winning that vendetta had damaged me a thousand times worse than it did him.
It’s taken us many years to sort things out, but we’ve done a lot of work. It was devastating to hear that the cruel things I’d suspected for years were true, that he had never wanted to get married or have children and that, when he divorced our mother, he wanted to divorce all of us, that entire life. And it was an incredible relief to find out that what I’d felt to be true actually was true, that I hadn’t just been crazy.
“It’s weird, Dad,” I said to him on his back porch one evening, “you not wanting to get married and not wanting to have children and not wanting to have a family . . . and I feel now not just that you’re happy in your marriage to Theresa but that you’re proud of us—”
“Oh, I am.”
“And, you know, that you love us.”
“Mishka, I did from the day that you were born. I remember building this cradle for Tatyana before she was born. Working frantically, last minute, to build a cradle that swung just right. I was there when she was born, and I remember thinking, Oh Jesus, she looks like hell, ’cause when babies are born, they don’t look so great. And then I saw her later and got to hold her for the first time, and I was like, holy shit. That was it—I was in love with that kid. I would have done anything for her. And it was the exact same way with you.”
It’s funny, you know, I’m a big tough man, got the tattoos, can run all day, and I will fight anyone, even if I know I will lose (especially if I know I will lose). But hearing my old man tell me he loves me sure fucks me up.
It took me a while to believe him, but now I know it’s true. He ignored my writing when I was younger, but now he can’t wait to read every new piece. He bugs me to finish a story while I’m writing it, then bugs me to send it to him while I’m editing it. When I send it to him, he dives right in . . . and then takes a while to get through it because it’s painful for him to read about the hard times I endured before my transformation.
The way I see it, parents have two responsibilities. They have to care for you until you reach reproductive age—you know, propagation of the species and all that. And parents have to ensure that their kids co
me out a little less fucked up than they did. Not a lot, just a little. My father did both of these things. He made mistakes, but he loved us, in his way, and I’ve spent most of my life vilifying him.
My father never terrified me, never oppressed me, never brutalized me, never tortured me, never degraded me. All the shit he endured—ostracism, teasing, alienation, his mother picking BBs out of his ass with a butcher knife, for God’s sake—it stopped with him. He took it, and he absorbed it, and he never made us feel it. He is a relic from the age of corporal punishment, and as a kid he saw a lot. A friend’s father broke a two-by-four over his kid’s back. At school, you were disciplined by having your knuckles rapped. Not with a ruler, with a yardstick, and the teacher buried that thing deep in the sensitive flesh of the fingers, breaking the skin on each one. “Getting your ass kicked” didn’t mean losing your soccer game. If you showed up late for dinner, your father told you to turn around and touch your toes, and then he kicked you in the ass as hard as he could, lifting you off your feet, sending you sprawling. None of that came down to us kids. My father never hit me. He never lifted a hand as if he were going to hit me. He never even verbally threatened to hit me. Not once. For all the drinking and drugging his parents did, I have never once seen my father drunk. The childhood that made him who he is was a barbaric one. He went to great lengths to make sure that none of us got even a taste of what he endured.
My father made some really big, shitty, painful mistakes. So have I. I know what it’s like to realize suddenly in the middle of your life that, out of weakness, you have gone down the wrong path. I built my adult personality around the foreclosure and The Letter, proof of my father’s infidelity. I’m struck now by how comparatively generous the bank in New Hampshire was, and I’m touched by my father’s hopeless but sincere gesture of trying to write love letters to the wife he knew he had to leave. I protested aloud for fifteen years that I didn’t need him, that I hated him, that my father was irrelevant. I only proved that I need him, that I love him, and that my father is incredibly important to me. Even in my early sobriety, when I told myself there were no angels, I was surrounded by them. I have treated women brutally, and more often than not, my angels were women: Allison; Izgi; Tracy Helsing, who did more to make me quit drinking than anyone who told me to quit drinking; Sofia, the doctor who kept me running; Eva, the physical therapist who got me running again; Zsuzsanna, who taught me everything she could about running; my sisters; my mother.
I told my father once that if I had a friend who acted like him, I would no longer have that person as a friend. But you have more than one friend, and if you lose a friend, you can make another. You only have one father. Mine was gone for most of my childhood and all of my early adulthood. Keeping him away, now and forever, would not remedy that hurt.
I have forgiven my father, and I’m trying to forgive myself. It’s tricky. You can’t just forgive someone once and then it’s done. You have to keep forgiving them; you have to keep them forgiven from that day forward. I forget sometimes, but, as I’ve taught myself, you have to try every day.
I guess I made my mark on the world. Thousands of people have read my writing about how I have screwed up and screwed up and screwed up and somehow made it out alive. More than alive—I have flourished, not despite but because of my mistakes. I am a one-man mistake industry. And despite my protestations, the story of my life has one word applied to it, over and over again: “inspirational.” That I have become not just a success but a sober inspirational success strikes me as the greatest irony of my life. But I’ll take it.
One good morning, I drag myself out of bed at 7:30 a.m. It’s late in my father’s house, and I have been waking slowly to the sounds of my father and his wife talking and laughing together for a while, the cat yowling, their coffee cups scraping on their saucers. I stumble to the bathroom, then out into the living room in my PJs.
“He lives!” my dad says, big grin on his face, same tired joke he’s been making since I was a little kid.
Theresa smiles at me from her overstuffed chair, cappuccino in hand, sheepskin slippers on her feet, her ancient Himalayan cat Rosie Belle scowling up at me from her lap. Even I can’t begrudge Theresa her sweet spot right next to the wood stove—even on her days off, Theresa works longer and harder than my dad and I put together. She is both Catholic and Republican; yet somehow we’ve never argued. She’s only ever treated me with kindness, kindness I can’t fathom.
“You must be sore today,” she says. “How are your legs?”
Each month, my father’s gym has a stationary bike race: people post their times for completing a computerized “course” to compete for a prize. Each time I visit, I go to the gym with my father and destroy the competition, winning not just my age group but the entire thing, not by seconds but by minutes. And my dad fucking loves it. I don’t think he called me when I graduated from Simon’s Rock, and I know he didn’t call me when I graduated from CU. We weren’t even speaking when I got my master’s. He never remembers to call me on Christmas, and only sometimes grudgingly calls me on my birthday. But I win a dumb exercise bike race at an old people’s gym in a tiny town, and he gets pumped: “Hello, can we get someone over here to verify his time? My son has done it again!”
Yesterday, I gutted the thirty-five to fifty-five category by a four minute margin and beat the best time overall by fifty-four seconds. It’s a small victory—last year’s prize was a pair of wool socks—but I’m not above small victories these days.
In answer to Theresa’s question, I bust out five fast, deep squats, to hoots and guffaws from both Theresa and my dad. Even I’m surprised by how I feel. My legs don’t feel okay or even good; they feel great, fresh, hungry for more.
We don’t go to the gym this morning but linger over oatmeal with raisins and sunflower seeds and a second cup of coffee. It’s not enough food, and I’m not satisfied, but then I’m never satisfied. I am the Unsatisfiable Hunger, the Unquenchable Thirst, and I’m pretty well used to it by now.
On the way out to the car, I snag a couple of fresh persimmons from Theresa’s tree in the front yard. They look like orange tomatoes, and this early in the season, they’re harder than unripe pears. Still, they taste so amazing—like honey and melon and citrus—that it’s as if they are made-up, some ancient fruit from before sin.
It was a mistake for my father to marry my mother. The first time he told me that, I hated him for saying it, instantly and for years afterward. I mean, I hated him already, but I hated him with new, specific venom for saying that: “I never should have married your mother.” It took me until now—twenty years since he divorced her—to figure out what he meant. He wasn’t saying that no one should have married my mother, that she was a vile witch no man could tolerate, that she was an unmarriageable monstrosity who should have been bricked into a high tower with no staircase or buried alive in a tomb so that no man should ever gaze upon her. He was saying that he shouldn’t have married her. Which is probably right. And also, she shouldn’t have married him.
It was a mistake. A big mistake. Out of which came me. And Tatyana. And Tashina—at least the Tashina I know. That epic mistake of my mother and father marrying the exact wrong person created that person I love more than almost anyone on earth, my sister Tashina, as much as it created Tatyana and me. And then Mika. And Brianna. And Koko. And Kai. That’s seven people, created by mistake. Seven people so far.
If you think about it, my parents really blew it. They made their mistake, and the consequences keep getting bigger and broader and deeper, long past the point of no return. Thank God for that. Thank fucking God in Heaven, driving a long, shimmering, silver-white stretch limo with a moon roof and plasma TVs and a hot tub in back full of fat, frolicking, naked little cherubs that my foolish parents fucked up so badly, wed the exact wrong person in error, and then compounded that mistake by making me. I am finally grateful to be here.
We drive out of Sutter Creek, past a strip mall and several big-box stores, p
ast homes that get smaller and further apart, to a tiny airfield with a miniature runway. There is a long open shed there with stalls, like a flea market or a firing range, and a turquoise port-o-potty. We park, and my dad gets out and greets the other old guys there: Leon, in a round, wide-brimmed straw hat, and Ron, in a baseball hat and a silver ponytail. He introduces me.
“You’re the writer from New York,” Leon says, pumping my hand, “and running all those crazy long marathons! Congratulations on all your success. What a good son you are to come out and visit your dad.”
I glance over at my dad to see if he’s put Leon up to this, but he’s just taking it all in.
“Murray,” Ron calls out my dad’s name after a quick hand-shake, “you know lots of stuff . . .”
My dad and I both laugh, recognizing a setup if there ever was one. Ron starts quizzing my dad on the minutia of some remote-controlled model-airplane quandary.
My dad knows lots of stuff, lots and lots of stuff. He is an electrical engineer, he’s a nuclear physicist, he’s a fucking rocket scientist, for God’s sake. The program he was part of was actually called Star Wars—yes, like the movie—and they sent shit up into outer space and then blew it up with motherfucking laser beams. My dad builds superconductors and semiconductors and particle accelerators and duopigatron ion sources. What a duopigatron is, I don’t know. But my dad does. My dad is a fucking awesome dude.
I Swear I'll Make It Up to You Page 32