Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister?

by Wendell Jamieson

  8.

  The Strangest Species

  To children, grown-ups are an unusual species, sharing the same house or apartment or trailer but governed by different rules and driven by curious motivations. We dress ourselves in odd garments and make jokes that aren’t funny. We drink stinging amber-colored liquids and start laughing a lot, and we make a fuss over the joys of eating—not just fish, but sometimes even raw fish. We watch movies in which people talk a lot, but not much else seems to happen. We even criticize the president, who to a child looks like a genuinely nice man, a father, a lot of fun.

  “Daddy, do you think I’ll be president?” Dean once asked during breakfast.

  “Do you want to be president?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know, if you are president, you can’t just do whatever you want. You are in meetings all day, and you have to meet people who run countries that you’ve never heard of, and people write mean things about you in the newspaper.”

  “Do they always write mean things? Did newspapers write mean things about the other president, the one before Bush? What was his name?”

  “Clinton? Yes, the newspapers wrote very mean things about him.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, let’s see. He kissed this girl named Monica. And he was married to somebody else. So he really shouldn’t have. But then he lied about it. That was the worst thing. He got in really big trouble.”

  “I don’t understand how you can get in trouble if you are the president. I mean, you are in charge—you are the president!”

  “Yeah, but there’s Congress.”

  “Who’s he?”

  Politics is just one strange facet of grown-up life. So many questions from children focus on the odd customs and doings of the adult world, from clothing to cocktails, from the things we buy to our ability to make seemingly arbitrary rules for them.

  “Why do people buy things they don’t need?”

  “Why do grown-ups get to do what they want?”

  “Why do men wear ties?”

  Our entertainment choices get special attention: paintings with people just standing there; music with no discernible melodies; books with no pictures. Why do we find things so interesting that are so clearly boring?

  At the top of the list has got to be movies with no action, no cartoons and, worst of all, no color. How can we watch such things? But I love movies, always have—ever since my dad took me to see Truffaut films in revival houses—and I want Dean to enjoy them with me. So on weekend nights he’s allowed to stay up as long as he wants, to gain an insight into the secret nighttime world of grown-ups. The catch is that he has to watch a movie that Helene and I want to watch; we’re not watching Shark Boy and Lava Girl after 9:00 p.m.

  We look for movies that can be enjoyed on his level and on ours: he has seen Sabrina, and To Kill a Mockingbird, Some Like It Hot and Bringing Up Baby. He laughed out loud during Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He was riveted by The Wind and the Lion, in which Sean Connery plays an Arab chieftain with a Scottish accent and kidnaps Candice Bergen, who falls in love with him. I was riveted, too: my father took me and Lindsay to see this movie in the theater when it came out in 1975. He was having a fight with my mother and needed to get us out of the house.

  Dean has seen samurai movies and French thrillers, which totally baffle him because he can’t read fast enough for subtitles but that doesn’t matter—he’s happy to be awake when the rest of kid society is asleep, or should be. Of course, as the plots unfold in foreign languages, the questions come fast and furious.

  Not too long ago, he stayed up with us to watch Nightmare Alley, starring Tyrone Power, a film noir from 1947 in which a carnival fortune-teller becomes a renowned spiritualist, only to end up in the gutter, in this case as the “geek”—the drunk sideshow freak who bites off the heads of chickens for an amazed crowd. Dean was silent throughout, not a single question, and I figured he’d passed out: dialogue-heavy black-and-white melodramas, I’ve found, can act as highly effective sleep agents for children. The apartment was dark except for the gray glow of the screen, and then completely black when I shut off the television.

  But then I switched on the lights. Dean was wide awake.

  He looked at me and asked one question:

  “What was that movie about?”

  That got me thinking. I knew what had happened in the movie, knew the plot, but Dean seemed to be asking a deeper question. What, truly, was it about? What was the director trying to tell us?

  So I went in search of a movie director, someone who doesn’t only make movies, but has an intuitive love of the art’s history, whose movies themselves reflect that love. Paper Moon got a very good reception during one of our late weekend nights—it’s an adult movie, black-and-white, but the heroine is a ten-year-old girl grifter, played by Tatum O’Neal. Dean seemed to feel some kinship with her, although he was scandalized when she smoked a cigarette.

  I got in touch with Paper Moon director Peter Bogdanovich for an explanation of Nightmare Alley. I was hoping for not just a plot synopsis, but an answer that would put the film in a little more context, for both me and my son, as well as an insightful critical analysis.

  It’s always fun to get a famous person on the telephone: they sound thrillingly like they do on screen. Bogdanovich has a deep, resonant voice. He said he was fully prepared for the question. When he was young, he explained, he went to the movies obsessively and took notes. He filled out a card with a brief description of every movie he saw, and rated each one. All he had to do was pull out his Nightmare Alley card, which was apparently dated.

  “I saw it on a double bill with Thieves’ Highway in 1955,” he said.

  My dad and I had seen that film at a revival house a few months earlier. It stars Richard Conte as a truck driver hauling apples to San Francisco, bent on revenge against the warehouse boss who crippled his father. It contains a startlingly beautiful shot of hundreds of apples rolling down a hillside in the dappled morning sunshine, and the children of the apple growers scrambling to retrieve them.

  “That’s a great movie,” I said of Thieves’ Highway.

  “No—that’s a good movie, not a great movie,” Bogdanovich said, with some authority. “I wouldn’t say it’s a great movie. But it had some great things in it.”

  “Like those apples rolling down the hill,” I said.

  “Yes, those apples.”

  Here we got into a long discussion of that film’s plot, and our confusion about Conte’s love interest, a woman who lived alone in a dreary room near the fruit and vegetable wholesalers. “That was very strange. She must have been a prostitute, don’t you think?” he asked me. I wasn’t sure.

  Bogdanovich then read his review of Nightmare Alley. It was highly critical. He laughed at his younger self as he read. “Boy, I really didn’t like it,” he said when he was done.

  I enjoyed our chat. But what has stuck with me even more than his answer to Dean’s question was his method of teaching himself to make movies: going to them, obsessively, and writing down not only what he saw, but how he felt about it. He was only a kid, but he took himself as seriously as if he were the reviewer for The New York Times. He filled up those index cards. But at the same time, he was still learning—he excitedly picked my brain about an obscure plot point (the prostitute) in an obscure movie.

  I wondered: What will Dean love that much?

  At their darkest cores, Thieves’ Highway and Nightmare Alley are both about one thing: money—the lengths people will go to, and what they will give up, to acquire it. Tyrone Power surrenders his soul and becomes a con man; Richard Conte’s father, desperate for income, loses his legs.

  To a child, the handling, discussion and procurement of money is one of the most riveting aspects of the adult world—it can be exchanged for all sorts of wonderful things, from toy trucks to Power Rangers to sneakers with Velcro; too bad Dad has to spend all week at the office, sometimes late, to get it. Coins and dollars are co
vered with symbols and codes, pictures of people and places, all needing explanation.

  Not too long ago, I gave Dean a front-row seat as a pair of male human adults engaged in a strange mental contest over this fascinating commodity. The experience taught me that there was only one drawback to Dean being able to speak clearly, and that was the fact that he was able to speak clearly. Some things you just don’t want to do with a question-happy—not to mention, honest—little boy, and at the very top of the list is trading in your old car for a new one.

  It was finally time to replace our 1991 light blue Honda Accord, which I had bought from my mother when it had 62,000 miles on the odometer, just before Dean was born. In the subsequent months and years we had driven him home from the hospital in it, driven him around the midnight streets to calm his colic in it, taken it out to the cottage on Long Island in the summers, and generally banged it up on the streets of New York City. Now there were 114,000 miles on the odometer.

  The Honda had become something of a sore spot between Dean and myself. It was covered with a patina of dents and scratches, a faded paper parking violation was permanently pasted to the left rear window, the carpet was embedded with sand, and someone little had slipped a fistful of quarters into a square hole on the top of the steering column; the quarters couldn’t be found—two mechanics tried—but they could always be heard, noisily cascading like a stream of winnings from a slot machine every time we turned a corner or went over a bump.

  “Daddy, why is our car so old?” Dean would ask me from his booster seat. All kinds of crap was around him: groceries, a stroller, some old clothes I was supposed to take to the Salvation Army, and all the tools one needs to raise and transport a child these days. His eyes filled the rearview mirror.

  “It’s not old,” I said.

  “Well, it’s a little old.”

  “Okay. It’s a little old. But it runs great! Hondas, you know, you can put two hundred thousand miles on them. They are great cars.”

  “But it’s a little old.”

  I was defending my automotive pride to a five-year-old. And I was losing.

  “A little.”

  The traffic budged. I turned the corner. The steering column went Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!

  When Helene and I were dating, we bought (for $200) a really old car, a 1974 Triumph TR6, that we drove down to the Jersey Shore for one summer before it developed a worrisome tilt after hitting a pothole and our mechanic, Howie, told us that the H-frame was rusted through and had broken in two places. It had been a short but intense love affair, our time with the TR6, the air over the windshield golden with sun and heavy with the smell of salt water as we got nearer to the ocean after leaving work early on Friday afternoons.

  Now a parent, more than ten years later, I was forced to admit that not only were my British sports-car days over, but so, too, were my slot-machine Honda days. I was entering my station wagon era—I needed a place to put all the child-care tools and devices that were piled on top of Dean.

  I was experiencing the same emotions that my father, who had once owned a Jaguar XK120, had felt when he bought that Volkswagen station wagon, the one with the engine in the back. At least mine would have the engine in the front, I figured, and would benefit from all the important technical innovations of the last thirty-five years, like air-conditioning.

  Online research convinced me that a used Volvo V40 was the way to go. I found the year and color and (nearly) the price I wanted at a dealership nearby, one that handled both Hondas and Volvos; I figured I could drive in with one and out with the other.

  I planned my negotiating tactics carefully. I would offer to write a check right there on the spot from my home-equity account, no need to finance, so they’d probably give me a break on the price. I knew all about the car, its specs, etc., so I wouldn’t be taking up more than a few minutes of anyone’s time. And of course I had the Honda. I determined online that its trade-in value was $1,000. That should work fine.

  On the big day, to put the old car in her best possible light, Dean and I got her cleaned in a hand carwash. She nearly sparkled in the sun as she got toweled off in the parking lot.

  The Volvo salesman was named Ronald Charles. He had a picture of his police-officer daughter on his desk. He seemed like a good guy and I decided that he was someone I could do business with. Yes, he said, they still had the blue V40 I wanted on the lot, yes, they would be happy to take the Honda as a trade-in and, sure, it would be great if I could just write the check right there. Dean and I went out and looked at it, played with the sun and moon roofs and heated seats, and he gave his nod of approval. He was especially taken with the spring-loaded automatic cup holder.

  Back in the showroom, Ron and I got down to business. I gave him the VIN number for the Honda—1HGCB7540MA180450—and he punched it into a computer. “Is this car clean?” he asked me.

  “Sure it’s clean. My mother sold it to me. You think my mother would sell me a hot car?”

  “No no.” He laughed, shaking his head. I was charming him. I could sense the price coming down even as we spoke. Dean watched us.

  Ron said: “Has this car ever been in an accident?”

  “No.”

  Dean’s eyes went wide. “Daddy,” he said in a stage whisper. I tried to ignore him.

  “Daddy—remember that time. The bumper?”

  Ron looked up from his computer. “The bumper?”

  “Daddy—you remember.”

  A year earlier, while driving Dean, his sister and my mother-in-law to a barbecue in New Jersey in stop-and-go traffic, I had tapped—just tapped—the bumper of the car ahead of me when I turned around for a half-second to shut up everyone in the backseat. The driver of the impact vehicle and I got out, looked at our bumpers and got back into our cars to continue our journeys. Nothing was exchanged beyond dirty looks. It was no big deal. I told Ron this story.

  “No no,” Dean said. “Not that time—you know, the bumper. The time it got ripped off? The truck?”

  Oh, haha, right. I’d once parked the car on a corner, and a truck had turned a little too tightly and torn off the front bumper and the front lights and part of the radiator and flattened both front tires.

  “Is there anything else?” Ron said.

  “Nope.”

  He got up, we did, too, and we all went out back to have a look at the sparkling Honda. “Try not to say anything else,” I told Dean.

  Ron’s general manager came out to inspect it, got in the front seat, turned the steering wheel. Ka-ching!

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Um, change,” I said.

  Dean looked away for a second and I pointed accusingly at the back of his head, making sure Ron and his general manager knew who was the culprit responsible for all the loose change in the steering column.

  We all went back inside. Dean and I sat at Ron’s desk, under the gaze of his police-officer daughter, while Ron and the general manager huddled on the other side of the showroom. They were probably trying to figure out just how low they could go. I got out my checkbook. I told Dean to pay attention—he might learn something. “Now we’re gonna haggle,” I said.

  “Haggle?”

  “Yeah. It means compromise. I’m feeling good about this.”

  Ron came back.

  “Listen, that car of yours, that Honda.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s a donation case.”

  “A donation case?”

  “You know, something you can give to charity. We couldn’t sell it. But my general manager says, you know, we don’t want to insult you, so maybe we can give you three hundred for it.”

  “Oh. Hmmm. Okay. So you know, I can write that check right now, no financing, if maybe you guys can go a little lower.”

  “Oh no,” Ron said. He smiled firmly. “No. The price is fourteen thousand nine hundred ninety-five, minus the three hundred.”

  We don’t want to insult you.

  I tried to keep my poker
face, tried to think of a new tactic, but then an attack came from an unexpected quarter.

  Dean said: “Daddy, are you trying to pay less money for this car?”

  Ron followed right on cue: “Daddy, are you trying to pay less money for this car?”

  I was outnumbered. I sighed as I felt my internal engine run down. So I opened my checkbook.

  “Who do I make it out to?”

  “If we had a trillion dollars, would we be the same people?”

  —ALISON SHARON, age ten, Rancho Santa Margarita, California

  Brad Duke, Boise, Idaho, who won $220.3 million in the May 2005 Powerball Multi-State Lottery:

  “Yes, you would be the same people. But it would take a little bit of work to stay the same people, because the perceptions of the people around you will change. You have to be true to yourself, with your own mind, your own heart, to ignore whatever other people think based on you having a trillion dollars. People will react to you in different ways, from jealousy to admiration to awe to frustration, or even being angry because you have money that they don’t have.

  “Let me give you an example. I played the lottery a lot: it was a hobby of mine, a numbers game. I just wanted to see how close I could come to matching the numbers. After I won, I was asked if I had ever thought I was going to win. I said, ‘Oh, yeah. It’s a hobby. I wouldn’t be surprised if I won again.’ To some people, that was offensive. Someone took my picture out of the paper and put it under a piece of glass at the grocery store and wrote on it with a Sharpie: ‘GREED PERSONIFIED.’ Well, they don’t know that I still live in the same house, that I drive a used car.

  “I get lots of requests for weird things, like money to build a time machine. I got one handwritten note that I keep in my wallet: ‘I am a hardworking Minnesota girl but I messed up my checking account and I need some money. Ten thousand dollars. Please, please, please, please.’ I keep it to remind me about people’s perceptions of me.”