by Jason Good
After finally settling into my old routine and accepting that my autonomic nervous system will likely continue to function for at least a few more years, I receive an email from Mom. She and Dad couldn’t go to a movie the previous evening because the elevator in their building is broken, and Dad feared he wouldn’t be able to climb the stairs back up to the apartment. I imagine them housebound: Mom reading, Dad catching up on episodes of his favorite crime drama while eating salami and intentionally breaking his laptop so he’d have to fix it. Had I been there, I would have encouraged him to try the stairs and helped him if needed. Mom can’t do that. She’s as old as he is. Though in good shape for her age, the idea of her providing any physical assistance is absurd, and Dad would refuse to put her in a dangerous situation, anyway. For years, it’s been a running joke that they’re afraid one of them might break a hip: “Don’t fall off that step stool. You’ll break a hip!” So sweet, sad, and accurate. A sixty-eight-year-old woman helping a sixty-eight-year-old man climb concrete stairs can only end in two ways: success or paramedics.
Feeling powerless and needy, I reach out to Jeremy, Todd, and Patrick: my best friends in high school. I wanted to connect with people who knew Dad then. Over the past thirty years, these three have seen Dad napping on the couch in his underwear enough to think of him as a second father. They would want to know what’s going on.
I call Jeremy first, and somewhat disappointingly, he reacts as expected. He has always been emotionally inscrutable, especially with men. He was the only member of our youth group who opted out of the co-ed “cuddle puddles” during our biannual retreats to Camp Agape. Mom and Dad were reluctant to let me join this cult, but after seeing it was “ecumenical” (and would therefore technically embrace atheism), they gave their “blessing”—my pragmatism would be preserved. On the phone, Jeremy offers the proper condolences and support, but it’s clear that he does so for my sake, as my friend. Dad’s life doesn’t have much significance to him apart from me, but that’s not his fault. I appreciate his sympathy, but it isn’t quite what I’m looking for.
Todd takes the news hard. I’m glad to see someone is finally living up to my ridiculous expectations. Todd spent his junior year of college with us in Florence, Italy: one of Dad’s finer years. After soaking in the news, he says, “The old man will figure out a way to beat this. I’d like to talk to him, but only if he wants to. Have him call me if he does.” I tell Dad later; he’s touched but offers little indication that he’ll call.
In first grade, Patrick and I appeared in a newspaper article together when our class made a ten-foot-tall papier-mâché T. rex. Over the next twelve years he was the guitar to my drums. Two inseparable boys in a band. As adults, we haven’t kept in touch as well as we should have, and I don’t want this to be the reason I talk to him for the first time in five years. So I text:
Jason
Hey man, I thought you’d want to know that my dad is very sick with a kind of leukemia and has about nine months to live.
He responded quickly:
Patrick
That kind of took the wind out of me.
Jason
Sorry. I probably should have said hello first.
Patrick
Maybe. Shit. I know your dad as your dad, not as Professor Good.
Jason
Yeah, I like that. It’s why you’re one of the few people I’ve told.
Patrick
Damn man. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.
Jason
Thanks. I will.
We have an idea of the age we might be when our fathers die, and it isn’t forty-one. My grandparents died when Mom and Dad were sixty-somethings. I figured I would have at least twenty more years before facing this. Now I’ve forced my best friends to consider it for themselves.
Patrick tells his mother, who still lives in our old hometown of Delaware, Ohio. From there, the news metastasizes. I receive numerous Facebook messages from friends offering condolences and “prayers.” Sickness is the new death in the age of social media. I thought this might frustrate Dad, but he has too much on his mind to care. “It’s going to get out one way or another,” he says. I imagine the hardest part of dying is everyone finding out.
When our neighbors in New Jersey ask about our sudden visit to California, I am met with some sad faces, but nothing feels real. Our block feels like a quaint, backlit movie set, and I am the only nonactor. I enjoy all the attention, but the gooey warmth of empathy isn’t sticking.
Cori Lynn, who lives a few doors down, asks Lindsay how I’m doing. Lindsay tells her that I’ve been crying a lot, and this elicits another sad face, but I’m fairly certain women enjoy it when men cry. It helps them believe we’re human.
In our small social circle, we are open about our mental health conditions and medications (we all know what each other is “on”). Cori Lynn suggests to Lindsay that I increase my Prozac dosage. I take her advice and am, predictably, stricken with diarrhea. It’s uncomfortable enough to take my mind off Dad, though I don’t think that’s the effect she had in mind.
Cori Lynn’s husband, Erik, recently lost his father to cancer. He’s the consummate nice guy, always concerned with the emotional well-being of others, and I accept his offer to have a drink at the local pub. An enormous, six-foot-seven Norwegian with chiseled cheekbones and sunken, empathetic eyes, he picks me up in his Toyota Sienna, and I feel good, nurtured, like a babysitter getting a ride home.
At the pub, he orders a Guinness. I get an O’Doul’s and wrap my hand around the label so no one can see it. There’s a certain shame in being dry and Irish.
“Oh, I forgot you don’t drink,” Erik says.
“Now would be a great time to start again,” I joke.
He stares. I’m often facetious with people who don’t know me well enough to understand that I’m almost always facetious.
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to.”
“Oh, well, that’s good, then. So how are you doing with all this?”
“Way worse than I would have thought.”
Erik beams another dose of concern. His cavernous eye sockets cast small shadows across his cheekbones. Like most husbands and fathers our age, he’s accustomed to consoling women and children, most of whom prefer understanding and listening over troubleshooting. His therapeutic gaze opens me up, and I tell him the story: the original diagnosis, the new diagnosis, Dad’s current condition, and a few of the morbid, though humorous, anecdotes of our trip. Still, I feel ridiculous. Erik’s father actually died, and mine has merely been penciled into the schedule.
“So, what kind of cancer did your dad have?” I ask, abruptly.
Erik soaks in my question and strokes his Disney-hero chin. His father’s story is tragic: multiple remissions, an organ transplant, perilous fainting spells. All tallied, it was an eight-year process.
He orders another Guinness. My O’Doul’s is still half full. There’s no hurry with nonalcoholic brews.
Erik shifts the conversation back to me. “So, your dad had no symptoms?”
“None. They found it during a routine blood test for a kidney-stone procedure. Lucky, I guess.”
“So it’s acute?”
“As in it came on suddenly?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, but something had to trigger it, right? I mean, it’s genetic, but the mutation had to be activated somehow.”
“Could be any number of things.”
“He’d been working out a lot. Maybe he pushed himself too hard.”
Erik stares again, smiling this time. “Jason, exercise did not give your father cancer.”
“Damn. I was hoping to use it as an excuse to cancel my gym membership.”
He laughs, finally accepting that humor is the only means I have of coping with any of this.
Sledgehammer
Though age has calmed him, so many of my childhood memories of Dad are anchored by his ridiculous, often hilarious outbursts. By the time I was
eight or nine, I could see that Dad was less settled and more angst-ridden than my friends’ fathers. I understand now that much of this came from his fear of stagnation. The mind-numbing predictability of going to work, coming home, having dinner, going to bed, getting up, going to work, coming home, having dinner, going to bed, getting up. . . . This is what killed his own father. Avoiding it was the gas in Dad’s tank. But he rarely sought out new experiences. Instead, he waited, poised to pounce on any opportunity to demolish his routine and rebuild.
Most fathers respond to restlessness with golf, fishing, skeet shooting, boating, or chest waxing, but Dad didn’t care about “man time” or getting away from his family. He desired real challenges, true change, not trifling corrections for a mundane life. In 1986, when I was thirteen, the Syracuse University study-abroad program in Florence, Italy, offered Dad a one-year teaching position. He accepted the offer without hesitation.
Uprooting our lives would be “hard,” he said, “but easy isn’t good enough.”
I disagreed. “Easy is great! And what about my band? We might have a gig at the community pool! We’re changing our name from Bearded Clam to Clam, so it’s a real possibility now! And I have friends! And, and, and, umm . . . I know how to work the microwave.” Leaving home was not an option for me. I swore I would stay in Delaware while they went to Italy.
Seeing that I’d gone emotionally feral, Dad attempted to tame me by asking for my help with a project. I didn’t much care for “projects,” but when he told me what it was, I started salivating.
We wouldn’t be leaving for six months, and Dad needed a home office in which he could work nights and weekends while preparing to teach new classes in international and Italian politics. Already feeling impulsive, he decided to demolish the old coal room to make an office. And what better way for a thirteen-year-old boy to work through his frustrations than with a sledgehammer, four concrete walls, and the thrilling opportunity to, at any time, turn his new weapon on his father and captor? In retrospect, it was bold of him to include me.
I was already almost six feet tall, but weighed only 130 pounds. Dad gave me the ceremonial first swing. The hammer was heavier than I expected, and I whiffed, lost my balance, and stumbled. Dad didn’t make a sound. He stood back—way back—and let me continue until I did some real damage. After the fourth swing, the wall started to show some weakness. An animal sensing vulnerability in its prey, I continued to attack until there was nothing but rubble remaining. Is there anything else I can destroy? Dad’s edits to the Father to Son book suggest he garnered some wisdom from this experience (and the countless others like it).
Lesson: “Hug him before bedtime every night. Even when he’s eighteen.”
Dad’s revision: “Even if he threatens to punch you!”
The four-by-eight-foot space cleared, I helped him with framing, and hammered in some drywall, but eventually grew tired of taking orders and left him to finish the job himself—I presume happily.
When complete, the office was a luxurious solitary confinement cell—exactly what he wanted. Surrounded by thick books with foreign names and tiny type, he would make amends, read the classics, reinvent himself, stop straightening his hair, and change his name to Michael X.
Dad worked tirelessly preparing new lectures and syllabi. The only noises drifting from his cell were those of him banging on the wall to let me know I was playing my drums too loudly. I’d never seen him so committed to anything.
But, of course, a few hours of demolition hadn’t convinced me to move to a country shaped like a boot. Mom and Dad sweetened the deal by suggesting I invite a friend to join us. Why take one teenager abroad when you can take two? I knew only one kid in Delaware who craved adventure enough to say yes.
Sigmund Polk Jones, or SP, and I had been close childhood friends, but we had grown distant in recent years due to his excessive weirdness. Still, I asked SP, and he accepted our offer. It was odd for a thirteen-year-old to up and leave for Europe with his friend’s parents, but SP wasn’t normal. By the age of twelve, he had thick black leg hair, a man-sized penis, wore colorful neckties to school, and had “dear friends” who were girls.
The trip was an annoying mess before it began, and not simply because Sigmund had already started wearing a beret in anticipation of extreme Euro-ness. After marching through the scanner in the Columbus airport, the four of us stood waiting as Dad’s carry-on bag passed through the X-ray machine. The conveyor belt paused, reversed, and then stopped. The agent motioned for a colleague to come over. They spoke, pointed, and nodded. The belt started again, and when Dad’s bag appeared, he reached for it, but the grizzlier of the two agents plucked it off first.
“Is this your bag, sir?”
“Yes. Yes, it is,” Dad answered.
“Do I have your permission to inspect this bag, sir?”
“Do I have a choice?” he asked, unable to resist an opportunity to broach the subject of civil liberties.
He was about to make a scene, so I blurted out, “Oh, yeah right, he totally has a gun in there.”
The airport fell silent, except for a snapping noise, which I think came from the ligaments in Dad’s neck as he whipped around to disown me with his eyes. Had this occurred after 9/11, we might have missed our international flight while a powdery latex glove attached to a GED recipient searched Dad’s cavities.
Two more men came from a back room; one of them requested ID and asked, “Is this your son, sir?”
“Yes, he is my son, Jason. He didn’t mea—”
The agent cut him off. “So, why would your son say you have a gun?”
I can’t remember what Dad said exactly, but I assume it was some PG-13-rated version of “because he’s a fucking moron.” They searched his bag and body as I watched in horror. Finding nothing, one of them said, “Tell your son not to joke around like that.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I will,” he responded.
Walking to our gate, Dad was quiet, brooding, and probably regretting every decision he’d made over the last six months. Mom and I were silent; we knew that saying anything might spark an outburst. But SP, the new member in our small family, naïvely muttered, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” I imagined running back to the agents for protection, but Dad laughed. Then Mom laughed, and SP joined them, pleased that he’d impressed the grown-ups with his maturity. Sigmund was glad we were leaving “Kansas,” and all I could think of was throwing my new brother onto the tarmac.
After landing in Rome, jet-lagged and overburdened with luggage, Dad decided that instead of taking the train to Florence (like sane people might), we’d be better off renting a car. My mother’s father had told him it was a breeze. Unlike Dad, my grandfather was calm and affable.
When the attendant saw our mountain of bags, he chuckled and pointed to a white cargo van. Instead of the Fiat Dad envisioned driving, he would have to commandeer a beast three times its size. It was also August, and if you’ve spent your life thus far avoiding Italy in the late summer, there’s no reason to die of heatstroke now. It was easily a hundred degrees and the van had no air-conditioning, because sweat is sexy on Italians.
By the time our van was cruising down the autostrade with taxis and cars whizzing by us and honking, Dad’s shoulders were soaking wet. I remember Mom looking over in support, but Dad waved her off, beads of sweat flying from his wrist. I glanced at SP sitting next to me. We were both a little frightened, but I was happy not to be alone.
Dad might have been able to handle this stress by himself, but with so much human luggage, I’m sure he was pretty jacked-up on that paternal cocktail of angst, no doubt thinking, “Jesus, not only is Jody here, but also Jason and this other kid in the backseat dressed like a poet. What the fuck have I done?”
For the first time in decades he probably prayed, prayed to return to the mind-numbing routine of his old life.
If he did, it didn’t work.
Soon after exiting the autostrade, Dad made a wrong turn, placing us in
Florence’s medieval center. Built when humans still had furry feet and died before the age of thirty, its cobblestone streets are barely large enough to accommodate one obese American, much less a cargo van. We were probably visible from space, a giant white dot ticking through terra-cotta roofs and domed cathedrals.
Dad reached out to pull back the van’s side mirror as a friendly Italian guided us through the archway where Dante met Beatrice. “There’s no fucking way I’m getting through there!” he yelled with little regard for whether he was understood. We were everything Europeans already knew about Americans: big, entitled, and stressed out.
Finally arriving at 90 Via Iacopo Nardi, our new landlord, Signor Fiorvanti met us. He was a small man with a gray goatee and horn-rimmed glasses: Italy’s answer to Colonel Sanders. When Dad used what he calls “Sid Caesar Italian” to communicate that we were from the United States, Signor Fiorvanti broke into a broad smile. He let out a hearty chuckle, and in a jowly staccato rumbled, “Chattanooga! Chattanooga! Chattanooga!” Dad laughed nervously. “Yes, Chattanooga. That’s in Tennessee.”
After napping, we went out to dinner. Northern Italian food has a way of vanquishing regret and anxiety, and feeling satiated (a difficult achievement for a thirteen-year-old), I looked at Dad and asked, “Can we stay two years?” He laughed. Then Mom laughed, and, after seeing that I’d impressed his new parents with my adorable teen wit, SP laughed, too.
It was somewhat of a shock for SP to slide into our one-child family. His home in Delaware was chaotic, with two demanding toddler siblings. I think his parents were relieved that their eldest preferred to be a free agent. Dad was nervous being in charge of two teens in a foreign country, and he frequently clashed with SP.
One afternoon, a few months into our stay, Sigmund and I were lying on our twin beds having what we thought was a deep discussion about U2’s The Unforgettable Fire. Dad burst in. He was waving two sheets of paper, and I knew somebody was in deep shit, but I was relieved to find out it wasn’t me.