Public Apology: In Which a Man Grapples With a Lifetime of Regret, One Incident at a Time

by Dave Bry

  I was right there for all of this. And very conscious of how I was holding my face. I smiled a lot but tried not to show my teeth, so as not to appear goofy or joyous. I wanted to support everyone who was so sad and emotional. And I remember thinking, as I looked out at the swirl all around, This is what it feels like when your father dies. But I didn’t really have a good gauge on it.

  Sometime around that time, the day after the funeral, or two days after, I was upstairs in your room with Mom. She was on the phone. I was emptying the drawers of your bureau, going through your stuff, deciding which socks I would take, which belts, should I use your old wallet?

  “Yes,” Mom was saying to somebody. “We’re sad. But we’re okay. We think it was a good death. A blood vessel burst in his brain. The doctor said it would have happened quickly, and he wouldn’t have felt any pain. And David was there with him. He would have wanted that.”

  Listening to her, I thought of myself on the plane, standing outside the bathroom, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the voices I was trying to figure out. I thought of the moment I realized that the other sound I was hearing, the faint, recurring, plaintive sound, was you calling for help. And those two seconds of delay, and the fear on your face when I finally opened the door.

  I still think about it.

  Dear Winnie Loeffler,

  I’m sorry for making you feel uncomfortable.

  This was January 1991. You were in a good mood, perhaps because you were to be graduating that spring. We had just returned from winter break. We hadn’t seen each other in almost a month when I bumped into you on the second floor of the library. We hugged hello. Then you got that look like you’d just remembered something. “Dave,” you said. “I didn’t know your dad made pens.”

  I gulped. This was not a conversation that would end well. “Umm…pens?” I said.

  You then pulled a pen out of your pocket and held it up for me to see. It was one of those click-button pens with the clear plastic top with liquid in it. The type you find at a gift shop at a tourist spot, with a skier skiing down a mountain or a sliding San Francisco trolley car. In this one, though, there was a small man dressed in a blue suit. You turned it upside down and the suit fell away, revealing his large erection.

  “That’s him, right?” You giggled devilishly, readying your zinger. “You must be so proud!”

  I laughed, too. This was a funny joke. Of a kind we’d often enjoyed together. I’ve always liked dirty jokes. Especially ones about friends’ family members or, in turn, my own family members. The fun of being good humored about topics that make other people uncomfortable, I guess.

  But now there was a problem. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable. You were my friend, whom I liked to laugh with so much, who was also good humored about topics that made other people uncomfortable.

  You were about to be uncomfortable, though. I knew this. Part of me thought that I shouldn’t say anything. But I knew you’d find out soon; you’d talk to Carter or Todd or someone else who knew. Someone would tell you and you’d feel bad then, probably even worse. I thought we might as well get it over with.

  “Umm, Winnie?” I started. “I don’t want you to feel bad about this. It’s really okay. And I’m sorry this is happening this way. But I guess you should know: my dad just died.”

  Your face fell. You went white. You knew I wasn’t kidding. Then your cheeks blushed bright and you giggled. But not in the nice devilish way this time. You covered your mouth.

  “I mean not just just,” I said. “Like three weeks ago. It’s okay.” He’d had cancer for a year and a half. It’s likely that you didn’t even know that. I didn’t talk about it a lot.

  “Oh my god,” you said. Your eyes were wide.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to sound as okay about it as I could. “I would have told you. We hadn’t seen each other. I didn’t mean to tell you like this.”

  “I…am…so…sorry…”

  “It’s really okay.”

  It really was. Your joke didn’t make me feel bad. It’s not like you telling me that the guy with the big dick in the pen was my father reminded me that my father had died. Like I hadn’t been thinking about it up to that point.

  In fact, just the night before, some guys in my dorm had rented Lethal Weapon 2 and put it on the TV in the living room. There were a bunch of us watching, like twenty people, and it came to the part where Mel Gibson has to save Danny Glover, who is trapped in his bathroom, sitting on his toilet because he has discovered that the Afrikaner bad guys have rigged it with a bomb that will explode if he stands up.

  Danny Glover is scared and says to Mel Gibson, “I’m gonna die on the toilet.”

  “Guys like you don’t die on toilets,” Mel Gibson says.

  And I thought about what that meant, by implication, about my father, who was a guy, it just so happened, who had died on a toilet.

  I got up off the couch without saying anything to anyone and went upstairs and lay down in my bed. It actually hadn’t bothered me, watching that scene. At least, not in the way that I thought it might have. I didn’t catch my breath or feel a stab of pain in my heart. I had seen the movie before, so I’d known it was coming. And I knew it was just a stupid Mel Gibson movie anyway (stupid but very exciting and funny and with one of the all-time great endings when the racist South African villain says, “Diplomatic immunity,” and Danny Glover shoots him and says, “It’s just been revoked!”) And what did that have to do with real life? Except, yes, reaffirm that there are certain circumstances under which people die that seem less dignified to society at large than other circumstances might. But I knew that already, and it didn’t much matter to me.

  Mostly I went upstairs because it struck me that I should be feeling upset upon seeing such a scene in a movie three weeks after my father died. And the fact that I was not feeling upset, but was only thinking about how, on paper, in the abstract, someone in my situation might feel upset—well, that’s what made me feel bad. Or not even bad, but just extra introspective and like I didn’t want to be sitting in a living room with a bunch of guys watching Lethal Weapon 2 anymore.

  Honestly, if anything, your joke made me feel better. It was good to be back at school. Back with friends. Away from home, where the credenza in the kitchen was covered with condolence cards and the fridge was filled with whitefish. (I love whitefish. But Jesus, you can only eat so much of the stuff.) It was good to be subject to the dirty jokes, the teasing, the bullshit back and forth that marks normal life. In fact, as much as I felt bad that you had to learn the news in such an unfortunate way, a devilish part of me was glad.

  Talk about a zinger.

  Dear Riders of the Powell-Mason Cable Car Line in San Francisco,

  Sorry for flashing you.

  I was living at 1612 Mason Street that summer, in 1991, in an apartment on the bottom floor of a gray-and-purple building at the corner of Green Street in North Beach. A particularly picturesque San Francisco spot. Pine trees rose above Russian Hill a steep block to the west. There was a view from the roof out over Grace Cathedral and Fisherman’s Wharf to Alcatraz in the bay. Cable cars ran right past our front door.

  The only way I was able to afford such a nice place was to share its two bedrooms with four friends from college. I’d been asked to take what a kindly dean referred to as an “academic hiatus” after a sophomore year that had ended with my grade-point average somewhere around one-point-four. I thought I’d get a job and start a new life. But that was a recession summer. Jobs were not to be found. I ate tuna fish sandwiches and potato salad every day, saving every spare bit of cash for rent and the amazing pot a friend of a friend brought us down from Humboldt County every week. The only furniture in the apartment was a kitchen table and chairs. We slept on futon cushions and didn’t much decorate.

  Or hang curtains on the windows in my bedroom. Those windows looked out onto Mason Street, down the middle of which, every half hour or so, a red-and-yell
ow trolley full of tourists would slowly clatter and chug its way toward the intersection. My roommates and I joked about being a sightseeing attraction and living in a fishbowl and carried our clothes into the bathroom to change after showering. But as the months passed and I got more comfortable in the apartment, I started walking back into the room in a towel and changing there. You could hear the cable cars approaching from a block away, so there was always time to cover up. Eventually, though, due in part to the listlessness of unemployment, in part to the Ginsberg and Bukowski poems I was spending a lot of time reading in the reading room at the City Lights bookstore a few blocks away, I stopped making the effort. What did I care if a couple tourists saw me naked? Consider it an extra perk or a hidden tax that accompanies the price of a ticket. Either way, a different kind of San Francisco treat.

  This was early in the handheld video camera era. I was struck by the number of people who rode the cable cars with these things fixed to one eye, making such effort to keep them steady, filming the façade of every building on the route. I always thought they were missing a lot that way, sacrificing 360-degree scenery for dull documentation. Didn’t they want to look around? It didn’t seem like a fun way to spend a vacation day. Perhaps for this reason and perhaps because of the potency of the Humboldt pot, I got a real kick out of it the first time I saw a guy’s face pop out from behind his camera, eyes and mouth open wide, having spotted the whole of me through his lens. That’d give him a story to tell. Spice things up a bit. Soon I took to air-drying after a shower, staying naked on purpose, waiting to hear the trolley come and standing right up in the window, hands on my hips, giggling stoned to myself as it passed. It was rare that anyone noticed—only two or three gawkers and pointers over a month or so of this—but I very much enjoyed the thought of the people who might have caught me on camera without noticing in real time. That would be a fun home movie screening. Greetings from San Francisco!

  But if you didn’t find it fun, well, sorry. Also, please keep in mind what Mark Twain said about how cold it is in San Francisco during the summer.

  Dear Bob Mould,

  I’m sorry for ruining your solo acoustic concert.

  It was fall 1991. You were playing the Fast Lane in Asbury Park, New Jersey, near where I grew up. And near where I was living then. I had failed out of college the previous semester and gone out to San Francisco, but I was unable to find a job and so had to move back home with my mom and my little sister.

  I was and still am a huge fan of your music—that which you made with Hüsker Dü in the ’80s and the solo albums you’d released more recently. At school, before I left, my friends and I listened to you all the time. It was pained, angry music, and we were a pained and angry bunch. Though I doubt we would have copped to that description at the time. We wore ripped jeans and baseball caps and drank too much and issued the kind of unrelenting stream of obnoxious banter that tries a bit too hard to prove it doesn’t care about anything.

  We’d seen you play the year before at Toad’s Place in New Haven—a blaring, stomping, glorious performance with the new band you’d assembled that left our ears ringing and our minds blown. So when I heard you were coming to the Fast Lane, I called Will and Carter to see if they’d want to take the train down. They did. I got tickets.

  The day of the show, I picked them up at the station with beers in the car. I was psyched for a big night. I was realizing around that time how much more I liked being at college with my friends than at home with my mom and little sister. We drank through dinner like we were making up for lost time.

  The club was crowded when we got there. We went straight to the bar and bought as many double vodkas and Long Island iced teas as we could carry before pushing our way to a spot at the front of the stage, which was the perfect height to rest our drinks on. We’d each smuggled in a couple airplane bottles for refills, and we lined them up there, too. We screamed with laughter as we waited for you to come on. We were surely the loudest people there, getting rowdy, throwing each other elbows. We were ready to rock.

  Needless to say, we were taken aback when you walked onto the stage alone, holding an acoustic guitar, and sat down on a stool. We were far too drunk to stand still and watch anything quiet and intimate. We wanted to slam dance.

  “Fuck that!” Carter yelled while the rest of the audience clapped and cheered. “What is this, Jim Croce? Plug that thing in, Bob! We wanna fuckin’ rock!”

  Of course, you aren’t Jim Croce. You started with “Wishing Well,” a favorite of ours, and you strummed hard. So we got into it and proceeded to have a great time. Unfortunately for you and everyone else in attendance that night, we did this by basically pretending we were at the full-band, full-throttle electric rock show we’d come hoping to see. We whooped and hollered and screamed along with the lyrics. We continued to demand more and louder rocking. We jostled each other back and forth, knocking our glasses and bottles over, and eventually started something to the effect of a three-man mosh pit. This while you were sitting down. This much to the dismay of those audience members in our vicinity who were, in fact, trying to stand still and watch something quiet and intimate.

  People were clearly and expressively unhappy with our behavior. We ignored them. At one point, you flicked a still-lit cigarette butt at us, hitting me in the shoulder. (A nice shot. Must have been fifteen feet.) Carter took off my baseball cap and threw it up onto the stage. But throughout the evening, despite the cigarette butt, despite the frown on your face, I imagined you as somehow approving of our shenanigans. (The cigarette butt could’ve just been joining in on our fun. And back then, you always had a frown on your face.) You must appreciate our enthusiasm, I thought, the fact that we knew all the words to your songs. And how proud of us you must be, for flying the loud fast punk rock flag, even at a solo acoustic show. Or at least, how proud you ought to be.

  I was mistaken. You glared at us after finishing your last song, “Whichever Way the Wind Blows,” and violently unstrapped your guitar. When you bent down to pick up my hat, I thought you were going to toss it back to me. I held out my hands and got ready to thank you. You held it up for a moment so I could get a good look at it, then threw it as far as you could out into the crowd at the back of the room. Then you flipped me the bird and stomped your combat boots right offstage. Now that’s punk rock!

  Of course, as I’ve grown older, I feel less and less like there was anything to be proud of in the way I acted at that concert. The music, from what I remember of it, was awesome. Quiet and intimate but still powerful and pained and angry. And I don’t like the thought that, even for one stupid night during a troubled time of my life, you were pained by me, angry at me.

  I’m different than that now.

  Dear Derek,

  Sorry for stinking.

  You were seven years old at the time, which was December 19, 1991. I remember because I had just turned twenty-one. The day before, as a matter of fact. You were in the first grade at a school for emotionally disturbed children in New Jersey, where I worked as an assistant to your teacher, Suzanne.

  You had been having a hard enough year already. Your mother had died. She’d been murdered, Suzanne had told me, and—and this is beyond anything I can imagine—you saw it happen. You were living with your mom’s family, your grandmother and your uncles. But it was not an optimal situation. There were drug and alcohol problems in the household apparently. You had been removed from your local mainstream school because you’d been having trouble controlling your anger. You’d been lashing out physically, and it had become a safety issue. Much of my job for the first couple of months you were in Suzanne’s class consisted of sitting with you on the linoleum floor, holding you in the official restraint position I’d been taught—your arms wrapped across your chest in an X, each of your legs pinned under one of my own—as you screamed and thrashed against me. You hit me and kicked me plenty of times. It never hurt too badly. You threw a chair at me once, which hurt a little more. But still, you wer
e just seven.

  And a really lovely kid besides. You were smart and warm and wiseacre funny, and we spent a lot of calmer time talking. My father had died that year. And one of the reasons Suzanne assigned me to you directly, she said, was because you were able to open up to me.

  We were sitting at your desk once, working in your math workbook, when you got quiet and turned to me and asked me if I had pictures of my father at my house. I said yes, I did. Your family had recently put away all the pictures of your mother; seeing them had been making you too upset.

  “I don’t even remember what she looks like,” you said, and you held your head in your hands and started to cry in a different way than how kids usually cry.

  In many respects, that job at the school is the hardest I’ve ever worked. It wasn’t long hours, 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. But though I usually drank four or five cups of coffee in that span every day, as soon as I got home, I’d fall into my bed and sleep for the rest of the afternoon. In hindsight, I guess I might have been suffering a touch of depression. As much as I liked you and the other kids in the class, as rewarding as I found the job, my life was not the way I wanted it to be. I was living with my mom and my sister, getting used to the house without my father in it. My mom had turned my old bedroom into her office, so I was sleeping downstairs on a convertible couch we left open, in what had been a waiting room for my dad’s clients—he was a psychologist with a home-based private practice. The moss-green carpeting in there was left over from the ’70s, and it made a squishy sound when you stepped on it. Most of my friends from high school were away at their colleges. I was taking night classes at Brookdale Community College and spending a lot of time alone.