A motivational speaker motivating a motivational speaker.
“It’s always two stories battling for space in your mind, in your heart,” he’d say, as if he knew my parents and my childhood intimately.
The story my mother would have had me believe was that my father, though she loved him, was a little strange. She never used the word crazy; she knew I would have rejected that word. But that he was strange was true; I know that now, though I should have known—and probably on some level did know—then.
Even so, I believed every word he said.
My earliest memory, as remembered for me by my mother, was the time my father went away. For how long, I can’t be sure, especially since it’s not really my memory, only what I’ve been told. I was four and didn’t stop crying when my father was gone except to sleep. So my mother says. My father went fishing and there was a storm and he couldn’t get home.
I had never known my father to go fishing. He didn’t own a pole, a tackle box; he didn’t even eat fish.
So the questions left to me now, years later, long after he’s gone, questions to which I have no answers: Where did he go if not fishing? Where does one go when one goes away?
Add to this story the story my mother told me about my grandfather, my father’s father, dead long before I was born—drowned, as I’ve been told, and even my father never denied this.
My grandfather was an alternately devout and lapsed Catholic who decided he could walk on water. Whether he made this decision during a period of devotion or not is unknown. He was out fishing, so the story goes, and walked off the boat into choppy waters and disappeared into the sea.
Whenever my mother wanted to use the word crazy for my father—if she looked out the window and saw him showing me and my friends magic tricks, coins from behind our ears, a dollar bill folded again and again and again, then gone in his palm—she’d use it for my grandfather. She’d tell the story of how he believed he could walk on water, how foolish, and one was to understand—I was—that the same might be said about my father: that he was a good man, a good provider, but had misguided beliefs about how the world works. By which my mother meant: my father didn’t care much for church, didn’t see the point of grace at table, and meant by the word God something entirely different from what my mother, from what most people, meant.
When my mother was upset with my father, her temper heightened by his unwillingness to raise his voice and engage her, she’d say, “They’re going to send you away to you know where.” Or, “Careful, you’ll end up like your father and the rest of the Newborns.”
I wasn’t ever sure what my mother meant. Maybe other Newborns had tried to walk on water and drowned. Maybe they’d all gone crazy, and my father was next and, after him, me.
One is supposed to learn from stories, whether true or not, especially stories about one’s forebears, but years later I tried to walk on water.
I was seventeen and trying to save my first girlfriend, who had no intention of being saved. It’s likely she didn’t need saving; she’s probably doing just fine now, whatever that means. She was two years younger, fifteen going on forty. She drank and smoked too much. She would sit on the edge of the subway platform and wait for the train, her legs dangling over the edge.
My father was gone by then, and she saw me as tragic, someone like her—her father was also gone—and that’s why she liked me. She thought we were all in this mess of a world together. We’d get high on my father’s grave, and I’d find myself telling her that happiness wasn’t as much a bunch of B.S. as she liked to believe. She’d laugh and tell me I was funny, then she’d fall asleep in the cemetery grass, and I’d wake her before dark and walk her to the train.
She was perfectly named Gail. She’s a passing wind in this story, a gust across the page, here only because she’s part of a pattern in my life, a desire to save, and because she was there the day I tried to walk on water. Not the ocean, but the lake in Central Park, beneath the arch of the Bow Bridge. Pretty wimpy, I know—hardly a test of faith—but it was cold.
Maybe it’s misleading to say that I tried to walk on water. I didn’t believe I could; in fact, I was certain that I couldn’t. The urge rose up in me suddenly. I said nothing to Gail. I didn’t jump or dive; I walked out of the rowboat and immediately sank. So, the laws of physics worked; they applied to me. This was good news. I swam to the base of the bridge and waited. I was shivering, jumping in place, shaking my arms to get warm. It was an exhilarating fall.
Dear Wile E. Coyote,
Your problem isn’t Road Runner; your problem isn’t that you can’t walk on air. Your problem is that you don’t believe. You’ve been left in the dust too many times; you’ve been blown up too many times, your coat turned to ash; you’ve been flattened by too many trucks; you’ve failed and failed again, and that’s what you believe.
You’ve accepted your role as Road Runner’s foil—he gets what he wants, what he already has, freedom and speed and a few more pecks of birdseed set out by you, a trap deep down you know will never work. You know the outcome every time before it arrives; one might say you create it. You will always be thwarted; you will always be chasing, always one step too slow; you will always be hungry.
Who knows, maybe that’s a good thing—never quite reaching your goal, never quite reaching the finish line, never catching the bird you must believe it’s your fate never to catch. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t eat Road Runner even were you to catch him, wouldn’t even harm him, wouldn’t ruffle a single feather. I’m not sure you’d know what to do with him except set him free, pretend you’d never caught him, and go back to your chasing, the only thing you’ve come to know how to do.
I tuned in every Saturday morning, hoping—even though I’d already seen every episode—that you might stop chasing Road Runner and let him come to you, that you might start acting as if you’d already caught him, as if you already had everything you could ever want, king of the desert, knock on a cactus and out comes a tall glass of water, a fat steak. I kept hoping just once you wouldn’t look down and see the air beneath you, the fall to come. Or that you’d look but believe anyway that you could fly.
Saturday morning had a feeling; was a feeling. The feeling when I heard the truck, trash can lids crashing onto the ground, the roar of the compactor, the sight of my father pulling up, smoking a cigarette without ever touching it with his hands.
Spray-painted in red on the side of the truck was an angel smoking a joint. Most of the tags were illegible, but I could make out a few—Curious Feet, Atom Bones, Iz the Wiz.
My father waved to me on the stoop, and the men he worked with said, Hey, kid, and I ran to the curb and watched the compactor crush trash—bottles and boxes, rotting food and old shoes, a vase, a rug, a broken vacuum cleaner—all of it gone.
Every day my father brought me something he’d found in the trash: a blue button that must have fallen off a sweater, a beekeeper’s mask, a white clown shoe, a transistor radio, rubber balls, beer caps, matchbooks. Whatever he brought home I saved in a trunk. The tongue from a baby shoe, the felt headband from a fedora, a blue tassel from a red fez. Birthday cards and breakup letters. Magic wands and handcuffs. A holy card of Christ on the Cross.
One day my father brought home a silver watch he found at the bottom of a trash can. “A gift for you,” he said.
I wound the watch, but the second hand didn’t move.
“It’s broken,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “we’ll have to fix it.”
He laid the watch in my palm and told me to close my hand carefully, as if the watch were an egg.
“Close your eyes,” he said, “and see the watch working. See the second hand moving.”
I felt him put his hand over mine. He tapped my hand a few times, then said, “Move. Come on—move!”
He had me say it with him. “Tell the second hand to move,” he said.
“Move,” I said.
“Say it like you mean it.”
> “Move,” I said.
“Like you really believe.”
“Move!”
“That’s more like it,” he said.
“Move, move, move,” I said, and each time he tapped my hand.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”
I opened my eyes, then my hand: not only was the second hand moving, but it was bent up toward the glass.
“Sometimes that happens,” my father said.
He told me it was probably a good idea not to tell my mother, given how she felt about such things.
My father brought home other dead watches, and together we brought them back to life, but the first one was always my favorite. The watchband was too big, so I carried it around in my pocket.
The games we played—magic, my mother said—became a kind of religion, which is to say they brought me joy cloaked in a mystery I couldn’t quite put into words. If given the choice of discovering God or my father as a fraud, I would have been better able to handle the debunking of God. If God were exposed as a figment of humanity’s imagination, no more than wishful thinking, a coping mechanism, then at least I wouldn’t be the only fool. But my belief in my father was mine alone, and I alone would have borne the disappointment should his powers have turned out to be mere tricks.
The day after Halloween, my father took me to the cemetery. I was ten. He had wanted to take me to Houdini’s grave the night before, at midnight, but my mother had said no.
Now, after a late-morning storm, trees dripped with rainwater; the grass soaked my sneakers and the tips of my father’s brown work boots.
We removed dead flowers from gravesites and propped up others, still alive, that had fallen. We passed a stone so old its name and date were unreadable; the stone had turned black. My father touched it; I was afraid he might catch death.
The stained glass of a mausoleum had blown in. We stopped, and my father looked inside. I was tall but not tall enough to see, so he lifted me.
Inside was a chair made of stone, nothing else. I imagined someone sitting in the chair, alone, forever watching over the dead. Then I thought: No one will ever sit in the chair. The names of the dead were engraved on plaques on the walls.
We continued through mud puddles until we reached a large monument with three steps leading to a statue of a weeping woman. I thought at first that she was Mary mourning Christ, but then I saw the bust: it wasn’t Jesus but a man wearing a bow tie, his hair parted down the middle.
“You were named for him,” my father said. “But don’t tell your mother—she doesn’t know.”
My mother had wanted to name me Cary, after Cary Grant. My father said kids would make fun of me for having a girl’s name, and besides, Cary Grant’s real name was Archie. My mother said Archie would remind people of the comic book. My father suggested Harry, but my mother knew it was for Houdini, so my father said what about Eric, and my mother liked it.
“She still doesn’t know it was his real name,” he said.
We sat on the steps, and my father showed me a trick. He never would have called it a trick; that’s the word most people would use.
He told me to empty my mind, close my eyes, and stare into the darkness beneath my eyelids. Then he told me to think of a number between one and ten, and to concentrate on the number, to visualize it, to tell him the number with my mind, to want him to know.
“Ready?” he said.
I tried to think of nothing but the number. I wrote it over and over on the blackboard in my mind. “Ready,” I said.
He closed his eyes, touched my head with his, took a few deep breaths.
“Got it,” he said. “Seven.”
“How did you do that?”
“I didn’t—you did.”
“Try again,” I said. “This time, any number.”
“Easy,” he said. “Just do the same thing. See the number. Want me to see it. Really concentrate.”
I closed my eyes tightly and in the dark saw three 2’s blink brightly in white and red lights.
Then my father said the number.
I liked numbers, equations, problems. I believed—and was comforted by the belief—that every problem was solvable, that every question had an answer. I spent much of my time solving math problems, then checking my answers in an answer key. It was satisfying to be able to make a check next to the questions I’d answered correctly, and to see how many I could get right in a row, and to see by how many right outnumbered wrong, and to be able to understand, when I’d erred, where my thinking had gone wrong, and to remember my mistakes so that I wouldn’t make them again.
When I ran out of math problems—when I’d finished all the workbooks in the house, even those for grades I was years away from reaching, I’d grow restless; my mind would form, in the absence of answerable questions, unanswerable ones. Why questions, my mother called them. Why would a good person go to hell if he missed Mass and was struck by a bus on his way to Confession? If God was God, why did He need to send His only Son to earth to suffer a painful death just to save the rest of us from our sins? Why not an easier way? She’d answer up to a point—the point at which she couldn’t, or had grown weary of my asking—and then she’d give me chores to do—fold the laundry, sweep the yard. My father would indulge me as long as I wanted, but rarely gave me answers. More likely he’d say, “That’s a great question” or “Beats me” or “What do you think?”
HAD I NAMED years then, twenty years before you started that tradition, I might have named it the year of the blackout or the year of the Son of Sam or the year of making things disappear. I might have named it the year of hearing voices. I might have chosen any number of names had the year’s name, in retrospect, not been so painfully obvious.
I might have called it the year I had to start a second, then a third box to hold all the objects my father brought me. Little gifts, little nothings, other people’s junk.
He brought me discarded postcards I’d read and reread before sleep, trying to imagine the lives of the people who had written them. At least once a week he brought me a postcard from San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Fe, small towns with the strangest names: Surprise, Arizona; What Cheer, Iowa; Come by Chance, New South Wales; Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; Hell, Michigan; Paradise, Pennsylvania; Ecstasy, Texas. Most of the notes were cheerful, overexclamatory, but in some, usually near the end, I detected a hint of sadness; these were the ones I tended to reread most. A man named Steven told a woman named Lee about a play he saw in Chicago called When Three Become Two, how it made him miss her, how he’d keep his promise, but in his PS, which was written in tiny cursive, he mentioned the despair he felt on the Skydeck of the Sears Tower, not because it was windy and he could feel the tower swaying, but because the sky was clear and he could see across Lake Michigan to Indiana, where he knew she was. It was, for a while, my favorite postcard. I had rotating favorites, which I’d bring to school and keep inside my books and read throughout the day; I’d daydream during class, wondering what Lee looked like, what Steven’s promise had been.
There was a Rita who wrote from Richmond that she was considering giving up, that she had tried and tried, but her prayers hadn’t been answered. There was a John in Austin who’d had the best day of his life with a girl named Linda he’d just met, and a Jon without an h in Vancouver who’d lost his wallet and had to sleep in a park and was about to hitch his way to Walla Walla, he might miss the funeral, please give his apologies to the kids. In my mind Rita hadn’t given up, John had married Linda, Jon had made it to Walla Walla for the funeral, and all these people knew each other, and they knew Steven and Lee, and somehow everything and everyone were connected, we were all part of the same story, and I wanted it to have a happy ending. I imagined that if I brought the right postcard to school, if I reread it often enough and sent the person who had written the note my best wishes and played out in my mind a happy ending for whatever story I had created, then all would be well.
But the next week my father w
ould bring me a new postcard from Salem or St. Paul or Baton Rouge, another note filled with exclamation points but with a passing sadness or regret, a parenthetical or PS that said, though not always directly, help me, love me, don’t leave me, come back, don’t give up, don’t let me give up, I’m sorry, I’ll try harder, do better, be better.
* * *
It was the year of hearing voices.
My father brought me a transistor radio he’d found in good condition, batteries included. In bed at night, I would roam the AM dial until a voice compelled me to stop; it could have been a word or phrase that stopped me, or just the tone or conviction of the person’s voice.
“The chaos around you has been put there by design.”
“You’re the boss, you’re the chief. I see bright skies for you. But you’re standing in your own way, man. Give up that negativity—dump it.”
“Doesn’t it seem true that we wouldn’t get into so many tight spots if we asked for God’s help a little sooner?”
“She set fire to the garage because she believed Satan was inside.”
“You’re lucky there isn’t a bullet in your heart.”
“I am protected and guided by the Divine at all times. Let us step into the Light together.”
I fell asleep with the radio pressed to my ear. Some nights I woke afraid someone was in the room with me; I would lie still, trying to locate the voice—closet, attic, under the bed.
“One son put him in the grave,” a man’s voice said. “The other wants to raise him from it.”
I felt the radio under my pillow, brought it to my ear, and waited, but there was only silence. I thought the batteries had died, but when I tried other stations, my room filled with voices again.
The Book of Why Page 4
