Ordinarily, Proust—the intrepid leader of the friendly black bears—would have brought his clan roaring back from the brink of annihilation by now, if not tipped the scales in the other direction. Proust sometimes did this with his unmatched skill in paw-to-paw combat. Sometimes he did this with wicked-looking bear knives and bear swords and such. Sometimes he used bear catapults and bear weaponry whatnot, but he always had a trick up his fur. He really inspired me. So much so that my books and backpack were covered with Proust stickers. He was a comforting, reassuring symbol whenever school became a lonesome, miserable place.
Proust’s past heroics notwithstanding, just before the penultimate commercial break, the unthinkable happened. The grouchy brown bears launched a fiery rock missile that severed an enormous tree branch that hit Proust on the head, rendering him unconscious. Buoyed by this stunning development, the grouchy brown bears then stormed the magical honey stores and took off with the whole lot, leaving the friendly black bears in disarray, their leader grievously injured, and the friendly black bear community in flames.
An extended downturn like this had never happened to my beloved friendly black bears before. Proust had always come through to save the day, and I, a young, white American boy alive at the height of his country’s power and influence, was used to the day being saved. It was inconceivable to imagine any other outcome.
This is not to say I had not yet witnessed or endured any of life’s disappointments—I had—but these letdowns had so far been of the standard childish variety, and always seemed to have something to do with cake. As in: no second piece of cake, no cake for breakfast, no cake between meals, no cake late at night, no cake before swimming. But nothing that turned one’s world upside down, made one reevaluate man’s place in the universe, or provided a glimpse of Death’s carnivorous leer.
Nevertheless, seeing Proust in a heap on the forest floor and the friendly black bear village in ruins made something resonate deep within my soul: a voice telling me that what I was seeing, cartoon foolishness aside, was not merely something undeniable and inexorable, but also a foretaste of what I would have to strive against for the rest of my days.
Simply put, what I heard was this: See? Life is no picnic.
*
“Gotcha!” the old man yelled, jumping to his feet. He was now staring at his hand in a way my adolescent sensibilities associated with Gargamel having at last caught the ever-slippery Papa Smurf, and indeed, my father had come into possession of an object that would turn out to have a significant impact on the events to come: a television remote.
Sadly, I could not bring myself to match his enthusiasm for this remarkable accomplishment, as I was still stunned at seeing Proust motionless beneath a large piece of tree and the grouchy brown bears hoofing it out of the friendly black bear village as fast as their grouchy brown bear legs could take them. The grouchy brown bears hadn’t sniffed this much magic honey in the entire run of the show, and when one considers the effect the magic honey had on bears in general, the questions now burning in my heart were: How much more powerful would the grouchy brown bears become with all the magic honey? And what would become of the friendly black bears without it?
Nothing in this world could hope to match the importance of what was to happen next. It wasn’t only the friendly black bears whose well-being was in the balance—my well-being was somehow tied up in all this, too.
At least it was until the old man turned the television off.
“Time for that pow-wow I’ve been promising you,” he said with a look on his face that suggested I should be jumping up and down and/or spinning around the room at the thought that he, my father, was about to sit down and talk to me, his only son, about something important. I can only imagine what a disappointment it must have been when I offered my customary response to his requests for audience by folding my arms and scowling at him.
Why would I choose to be such a bratty little shit? Besides the obvious (who are these morons who jump and spin at the thought of their fathers talking to them?) it was my birthday. The rule on my birthday was I got to do anything I wanted, and for this one—a dozen candles in—I wanted to watch cartoons.
What I did not want was to have a talk with my father, and certainly not when said talk interfered with said cartoons. By turning off the television, my father had not just stolen from me what I wanted, but something to which I felt entitled, making this one of my first experiences with raw, naked injustice.
And I must say, it was shocking; so much so that I couldn’t manage an intelligible response of outrage or even similar nonverbal expressions of fury—like a baring of teeth or a clenching of fists. This shock, so new and foreign, shot around the inside of my head uncontrolled, disoriented, unable to find the appropriate sector that would lead to a suitable manifestation of anger. Instead, lost and confused, it charged into whatever area of the brain makes me laugh and I, to my horror, heard myself do just that.
“Ha ha ha!”
The old man’s chapped lips stretched into a cracked smile. He took my laugh to be a sign that I was in fact bursting at the seams to hear what he had to say, which was an immense relief to him. As I would discover with the passage of time and the assumption of maturity, my father had confidence issues. Years later, he would tell me that there were few times in his life when he hadn’t been overwhelmed with paralyzing insecurity. During that confession he would reference my twelfth birthday in particular, and reveal that he had spent an extra five minutes pretending to search for the television remote when he had known where it was the whole time. Just so he could screw up the courage to talk to a twelve-year-old boy.
Which made it all the more surprising how often these discourses between us occurred. In the mornings on the way to school, in the afternoons on the way home, in the evenings at the dinner table, before bedtimes, even in the middle of the night—“Hey, Frankie, you still awake? ‘Cuz I was thinking about something you ought to know...” My father was one of those intolerable people who believed everything they said should be considered the very words of God. This trait, coupled with paradoxical self-doubt, pushed him to pester me twice as much than if he’d managed a reasonable amount of faith in himself, which kept his emotions in a constant state of agitation as he vacillated between a debilitating fear and an overcompensating bravado.
As to the content of these pow-wows, allow me to sum them up by relating that my father has worked in a hardware store for the last twenty-eight years, recently peaking as assistant supervisor of the lawn and garden department. And let’s not try to spruce this up by romanticizing him as the quintessential blue-collar worker: salt of the earth, heartbeat of America. He should have moved beyond L & G. Even now, at sixty-five years of age, he works under college students doing the gig for beer money.
And if you’re thinking of being generous by saying that perhaps the old man is a simple but dependable fellow capable of flashes of unpretentious yet penetrating insight, pardon me as I disabuse you of that notion too. Most of the “wisdom” he’s offered through the years falls under the category of Captain Obvious. Think: Don’t eat yellow snow, or, Get your finger out of there, not, Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world, as in being able to remake ourselves.
Pale and trembling, my father pulled up a beanbag and plopped down, his slightly misshapen head blocking a great deal of the now dark television set. He then lifted his hands to his head and rubbed his temples vigorously. This was a ritual known as “putting his thoughts together,” and was typically accompanied by a hyperventilation similar in style to the tortured breathing of a condemned criminal in front of a firing squad.
“Hee! Hee! Hee!”
I, as was typical during this behavior, ignored him and craned my head to get a glimpse of the television screen in the hopes that it would, because it was my birthday, magically kick back on. When it didn’t, I came to the shattering realization that magi
c had all but vanished from the modern world, an embittering thought that made me glare at the old man, mock his ritual via derisive pantomime, and then pretend to fall asleep. None of which stopped him.
After finishing his temple massage and hysterical gasping, the old man dove in, so I, with no other choice left to me, buried my face in the couch and made exaggerated snoring noises. With my head engulfed by the cushions and air rumbling in and out of my sinuses, what I heard from my father sounded a lot like this:
“Murgh florfen gothig meh hestempth gofsburg wiffley.”
4
A thought that has occurred to me from time to time—a haunting thought, to be sure—is the possibility that everything might have turned out differently if I had managed to fake snoring noises throughout the entirety of that talk. Curious and more than a little frightening how so much of one’s life can turn on whether one continues to smash one’s face in couch cushions while someone else is talking.
But I couldn’t keep it up; the couch was filthy. Try as I might, breathing in the noisome cushion odor of old fried chicken, stale corn chips, and a mysterious rancid smell became impossible to maintain after a minute or two, and once my gag reflex kicked in—upon my nose identifying the rancid smell as stale, sweaty crotch—I dropped the charade, flipped over, opened my eyes, and immediately found myself drowning in my father’s logorrhea.
“—gurgily-furgily—weeegtion,” the old man was saying. Then, clear as a bell: “Frankie, name some great men for me, throughout history.”
Ho boy. Despite having only just arrived at twelve, I was of the opinion that I was already pretty shrewd for that age, so here’s what I, a clever, crafty lad said, and with nary a trace of irony in my voice: “I think you’re great, Dad.”
Generally speaking, such shameless flattery could be counted on to elicit a belly-laugh, perhaps a tousling of the hair, and might even result in the old man losing his train of thought, bringing whatever tedious litany he had just begun to an abrupt, happy conclusion.
Not so this time. The old man didn’t smile. He did not laugh from his belly. He did not tousle my hair. Instead, he screwed up his face as one who has correctly identified a rancid smell as stale, sweaty crotch, and I knew beyond any doubt I had said something terribly wrong—and to the tune of another choked round of his wheezing.
“Hee! Hee! Hee!”
Then, super-choky, super-wheezy: “Don’t you ever say anything like that to me again, Frankie—hee! Do you—hee!—understand?”
My father struggled up from the beanbag and straightened.
“I am nothing special. I am nothing great, and I never will be—hee!” he continued, puffing out his chest. “I will never be anything more than Robert Richard Horvath. Important, yes, but only as a cog in the Great Horvath Machine—hee! As a part of the Royal Horvath Bloodline. As a—hee!—conduit for our blood’s journey, not the destination. It is what the Lord—hee!—has ordained.”
At this, the old man un-puffed his chest, let his arms flop to his side, and fell back on the beanbag. He had been at his proudest just then, telling me how worthless he was.
Concerning what he said:
Never in my life had I heard the old man use his full name in front of me. “Cog in the Great Horvath Machine” was new, as was “Royal Horvath Bloodline.” “Lord-ordained,” I’m sorry to say, was fairly common stuff around the somewhat Pentecostal household my parents kept—though, as the “somewhat” should indicate, we were what our pastor Reverend Phipps referred to as lukewarm Christians.
You know, the kind that makes Jesus puke.
Which meant that we weren’t as consistently gung-ho about the whole God thing as Phipps thought we should be—and he was right. Sometimes we Horvaths were into attending church and Bible studies and spending time with other church people and praying with them and singing songs and all manner of churchy activities, while at other times we were not so much into any of it. A good indicator of where the family stood was the old man’s language. If liberal amounts of profanity were heard during the course of conversation, then we weren’t all that into church, which in turn meant that praying, singing, and all manner of churchy activities weren’t likely to be on the docket anytime soon (thank God). If rather embarrassing substitutions for swear words were popping up more—like “futzdab” and “dignibbity”—then chances were there would be mandatory grace before supper, god-awful Christian pop music looping endlessly on the stereo, and constant interrogations about what this or that Jew did in this or that book of the Bible.
You might presume by some of the salty language I employ that this hasn’t much changed, but again, you would be wrong. Yes, sometimes I have doubted the Christian faith and have believed it to be lies, opting for a naturalistic agnosticism with a heavy dose of postmodern materialistic nihilism. Other times I have believed Christianity fully and with joy in my heart. But no matter which way I’m going, no matter my feelings and faith, my language remains rough. I like to swear. It’s just the way I am. Naughty words are my allowance.
Other great men in history had theirs: King Solomon got away with having seven hundred concubines; Charlemagne with murdering his nephews; Napoleon with wearing that silly hat. Don’t begrudge me mine.
Back to the matter at hand: the question I had answered so poorly by telling my father I thought he was great.
“Try again,” my father said, and lo and behold, I did.
I proceeded to spit out any and every name I could think of that might win his approval—Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Billy Graham, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Generals MacArthur and Patton, Harry Truman, Henry Ford, John Wayne, Theodore Roosevelt. I slipped up once when I said John F. Kennedy, and again when I mentioned the all-star basketball player, Michael Jordan. In the old man’s opinion, JFK had been nothing more than a womanizing, disease-ridden communist, while Michael Jordan, a fine athlete to be sure, was not to be considered as anything too extraordinary yet, as at the time of this conversation His Airness had failed to win any NBA championships. The old man furnished Larry Bird and Magic Johnson as more appropriate current selections (Jerry West and Bill Russell were his all-time faves) told me never to mention a Kennedy in his house again, and then demanded more. By this point I had pretty much exhausted my range of athletes and historical figures, but I still knew what to do. When a pow-wow reaches a crisis point, always go biblical.
Apostles Peter, Paul, John, and James. John the Baptist. Prophets Jeremiah, Elijah, and Elisha. Not so much Jonah and certainly not Balaam (confession: I did have an affinity for this man of God—as did many of the less pious kids in church—entirely because he was famous for having chatted with his ass, heh). Kings David, Jehoshaphat, and Hezekiah. Father Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and Noah.
I was rolling.
“Yes!” the old man said once I had paused to take a breath. “All great men. Giants among their people.” He then walked over to the living room window, clasped his hands behind his back, and gazed presidentially over our tiny, dead lawn. “Now name some great Horvaths for me.”
“Er...what?” I said.
My father turned from the window. “You heard me, boy. Name some great men from our family.”
“Ha ha ha...” I laughed. My mind, flailing again, had once more elected for mirth.
The old man had never really talked about the Horvath family tree other than the occasional reference to dead Pappy Horvath and his farm (a farm that had been Steinbeckian in its ability to reap poverty and despair as opposed to salable crops). The only other Horvaths I knew of were Uncle Victor, who wrote the Traditional Life column for a newspaper in Nebraska, and Aunt Rosie, who had settled down in Sioux Falls, Idaho, married a bottled water salesman (a.k.a. Uncle Chuck), and had three kids. That was it. All I had.
“And?” The old man loomed over me. Despite my feeling that I was already his intellectual superior, I knew I wouldn’t be able to come up with
an answer that would satisfy him, disentangle me, and sweep us both off to more preferable worlds. Me: back to cartoon bears beating each other up over magic honey. Him: back to whatever it was he did when he wasn’t tormenting twelve-year-old boys on their birthdays. So I gave up.
“I can’t think of anyone, Dad.”
“That’s exactly right!” the old man shouted. “There haven’t been any great Horvaths! Not anywhere in our history!”
“There’s no need for the noise!” railed my mother’s voice from down the hall. She was in bed with a headache. Headaches would one day kill her, but not this one. This one was humbly laying the foundation for its more successful progeny.
Oblivious to her suffering, the old man got to his feet again, rubbing his hands together and breathing desperately. This time, though, his wheezy-hees were happy, exultant.
“Hee! Hee! Hee! And you know what that means—hee!—son?”
Beats me.
“It means we’re due,” he said.
Laughing from his belly, the old man kicked the beanbag and tousled my hair. “Frankie, I was on my knees before the sweet Lord the other day, and He told me that He will soon raise up a Horvath in the midst of this wicked world who will go on to do great and mighty things!”
Ho boy. Though still in the waning days of my prepubesence, I was already something of a skeptic, especially when it came to the words “great” and “mighty” being used in regards to what an individual accomplished in the religious arena, the most indelible recollection being when the Reverend Mrs. Phipps had used these same words to describe the gruesome mural Mr. Huckaby of FaithWorks Services had inflicted on the church nursery the previous winter. A mural that had included a dwarf Christ with a beer belly, smeary angels with swords that looked grotesquely phallic, and crowds of people that looked like a sinister mist with eyes, all painted in a background the color of hospital scrubs.
The Antichrist of Kokomo County Page 3