When you’re twenty-four and buying Chuck Taylors, you strive to be incredible. When you’re forty-four and buying Chuck Taylors, you strive to be credible.
Is this too much to hope for?
I’ve always loved music more than almost anything else, and especially discovering new music, which was a consistent and often glorious touchstone of my life with John. Yet when I was in my twenties and professionally wanted more than anything to become a rock critic, I also developed an inflexible theory that no one should become a rock critic after age thirty, such that when I was actually offered the position of rock critic at the newspaper where I worked at age thirty-four, I turned it down. Yet at the same time, I felt no discomfort continuing hungrily to seek and consume and talk about the newest music and the most obscure older music, which—a fact somehow lost on me—is precisely the job description of a rock critic.
* * *
Right in the middle of this uncertainty, at the age of twenty-nine, I made a more or less accidental connection with Mike Judge, who was, most important in this context, thirty. He was also the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head. The cartoon had just hooked into the cultural consciousness, and MTV wanted to ram it forward into mass production. Our meeting happened almost entirely by chance. I was a columnist at a small Ohio newspaper. Beavis and Butt-Head had suddenly become controversial (and huge) after an Ohio mother blamed Beavis’s pyromania for leading her five-year-old son to start a fire that took the life of his younger sister. It was tragic, but it seemed to me that the parent was wrongly deflecting blame. I wrote something about this and, on a whim, sent it and another piece I’d written about the show to Mike Judge, care of a generic address I found for MTV Networks on the label of a promotional package that had been mailed to the newspaper’s entertainment editor. Pretty much a message in a bottle.
A few days later, I received a handwritten note:
Dear David,
Thanks a lot for sending me your articles. I showed “Tooning in to the news” to everyone. It’s funny as hell. It’s been a rough couple of weeks and it was great to read something like that. In fact, if you ever want to try writing a B+B episode, let me know. You could make 500 dollars huh-huh-huh.
—Mike Judge
He included his phone number. I called him and we talked, and soon I was learning how to write a TV script by copying from the samples he sent me. He took the first idea I pitched, an episode called “Hard Sell,” and I continued to contribute in a small way throughout the show’s mid-nineties run. I wrote a Cornholio episode, and one of the Christmas specials, and a few others. I was not a major contributor by any means—rather, a cog in a big and busy machine. It was something I did mostly for fun. I pitched regularly, had ongoing conversations with Judge and Kristofor Brown—the head writer and producer whose humor, earnestness, and organization were a secret weapon behind the show’s success.
The part of the experience that had the most lasting personal effect was also the smallest and most mundane: talking on the phone to Judge occasionally about the other parts of our lives, the parts that had to do with being regular-guy sort-of grown-ups.
We were both married. He’d recently become father to a second child; my wife was pregnant with our first. We both had a habit of perpetually fiddling with our wedding rings, and shared the consequent madcap tales of chasing them when they popped onto the ground. I was living in my native Ohio; he was wishing he could get away from New York and back to Texas, where he felt at home. We’d both played in bands while also experiencing the awkward transition into our early professional careers. He’d worked in an office and hated it. This was the inspiration for the cubicle drone Milton, Judge’s first foray into animation, and the seed material for Office Space, which in retrospect seems more than semiautobiographical.
When we were chatting, I’m sure we sounded far more like Hank Hill and Boomhauer than Beavis and Butt-Head. We once had a conversation about the best way to set a fence post.
And now I realize there isn’t much difference between those cartoon friendships and those of our real lives. In middle age, stuff still sucks, and stuff’s still cool, and life goes on, but it doesn’t, but it does.
This experience helped me understand what felt normal about being thirty, but also introduced the unique modern complexity of American adulthood. The thing Judge always understood best about his characters, and maintained so deftly, was that he wasn’t writing for teenage boys. He was writing for the men those teenage boys had become and always were: us.
Some fifteen years later, MTV enlisted Judge to produce a season of new episodes. Beavis and Butt-Head were still fifteen-ish, and we kept getting older, but we also kept being the same. I watched those new episodes with my sixteen-year-old son, each of us occupying an end of the living room couch, slouched, wordlessly chuckling. Huh. Huh.
Simple math might not be the right measure for this generation of middle-aged American middle-class males whose culture has always been defined by stuff that sucks and stuff that’s cool. I find myself amid the first wave of first-world men for whom the notion of a midlife crisis is irrelevant, because we don’t really know how old we are. First-generation Black Sabbath fans are entering nursing homes with their heads full of “War Pigs.” It’s not that we’re in a state of arrested development or denial but, rather, a legitimate temporal disorientation.
If my father had wanted to listen to the same music I was listening to when I was a teenager, he would have to do as I had done—painstakingly turn the coat-hanger-enhanced boom box antenna toward Cleveland in order to pick up the distant college rock station signal and then, upon learning that, say, the Meat Puppets were playing an all-ages show at a homemade underground club, going to the show because that was the only place to buy their record.
Now these experiences are delivered through the same machine I clock into every day when I go to work, and nothing seems absurd or desperate about such access. The new Best Coast record is there upon log-in, whether I’m searching or not. If the Velvet Underground had been delivered automatically through drill presses in midwestern machine shops in 1968, our world would be a very different place indeed.
In the modern world, my peers and I can’t measure our career span against our target retirement date, because we don’t really believe we’ll ever retire. We can’t claim existential alienation from technology, because it’s inextricable from existence. We can’t complain our bodies are breaking down, because science will no longer let them. We have been groomed to live out not the days of our lives but, rather, the days of our lifestyles.
R.E.M. broke up in 2011 to preserve their cultural credibility, as the Rolling Stones announced new tour dates for the very same reason, and what should represent a paradox instead feels entirely correct.
When I turned thirty, I kept trying to figure out if I felt thirty. I couldn’t tell. When I turned forty, I didn’t feel a decade older than thirty, nor a decade younger than fifty. Instead, I felt a chronological void, like maybe math was the wrong application. On that very day, my fortieth birthday, in New York City with John, I got carded by the barmaid at CBGB’s, the fountainhead of punk rock. I gleefully complied.
And so, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I became consumed by a central truth: that I was arriving at a confounding and fascinating landmark that John and I should have reached together but never would. And that we would no longer be able to measure ourselves against each other.
* * *
What I did instead was set out to celebrate deliberately. Not to celebrate my birthday so much as to celebrate what I’d been given in life and what I still had. Grief has a way of becoming about everything in one’s daily existence, and that had been the case with me and Gina for the past eight months. Everything bathed in the sadness of loss. We who are new to this experience are warned that the holidays are hard, and I expected that, and yet when the feeling hit, it came in completely unexpected ways. A few nights before Christmas, I found myself curled in a ball on the liv
ing room couch, crying inconsolably for two hours, a blindside meltdown triggered by happening unprepared across a photograph of me and John sitting together on my patio, smiling for the camera. I cried so hard that night that I was actually sore the next day, as though I’d been exercising. And yet in that same state, I felt a small catharsis, as though I had somehow given difficult passage to one of the great gallstones of mourning inside of me.
Part of this clunky and enigmatic evolution had come by way of the other sudden central development: at Thanksgiving time, my father revealed that he had been diagnosed with a lung tumor. At first this dragged me further down the rabbit hole of mortality obsession, until I accompanied him for a long day of tests and consultations with doctors at the Cleveland Clinic, where one message was pervasive, profound, and impossible to ignore. Over and over, he was told how fortunate he was, at age eighty-one, to be so vibrant and healthy. None of the nurses or interns or receptionists that day believed him when he answered (over and over) the hospital standard, “What’s your date of birth?” He was living in a particular time—when a tumor in an otherwise sound body can be treated aggressively with an astounding modern arsenal and great optimism for recovery—and a particular place—under thirty minutes from one of the world’s premier hospitals—and in a particular body that had, among my friends, earned him the nickname Iron Man, a body that would allow him to take on the most extreme radiation treatment available.
So where John, whom I thought of as young, had left me with the dark concern of vulnerability, my father, who was one of the oldest people I knew, offered a hopeful counterpoint: he was entering this strange new year as the most alive person I knew.
During a family dinner at our house one evening that winter, he said he was not afraid to die. He didn’t say this in a philosophical, or maudlin, or resigned, or courageous way. Rather, he said, he’d done in life what he’d wanted to do, and now he felt like he was being given the gift of extra days and would repay that gift by making the most of them. He had begun telling more and more stories about his past, more and more candidly—about women he’d chased and women who’d chased him, mischief he’d gotten into and mischief he’d caused. I’d always known he’d dated a Playboy Bunny, but I’d never heard the whole story, which, honestly, once you got past the lead, wasn’t all that much.
And it wasn’t until that winter, after half a century with him, that I learned the story of his Army Corps of Engineers battalion building a bridge across the Rhine. How does a man get this far into life without knowing his father built a bridge across the Rhine River?
As someone who had always been fascinated by bridges, who had designed and built a countless number of them, many of them more impressive and certainly more permanent than that one, he may have just never considered the Rhine bridge particularly noteworthy. But still, we sat together, Gina and I and our kids, and observed the growing delight in his face as it dawned on him that, yes, this was a story worth telling.
In 1957 the 17th Armored Engineer Battalion constructed a temporary floating bridge across the Rhine, spanning about a quarter of a mile. More than a thousand men got to work on a Saturday afternoon, using air compressors to inflate canvas pontoons. These were then outfitted with metal saddles and deck runners. At midnight, the Rhine was closed to water traffic, and the soldiers got to work. An advance crew stretched a cable to the opposite side of the river, and the men began using a bulldozer to feed one pontoon after another into the water. Each piece was attached to the next by a heavy pin, driven in with a sledgehammer. The men worked through the night into the next morning, slowly covering the distance to the far shore. When they were done, the battalion cooks made breakfast. “You ate it outta your tin hat,” my dad said.
At midday, the commanding general of the 2nd Armored Division (nickname: “Hell on Wheels”) was chauffeured onto the bridge, stopping in the middle of the Rhine. He exited his vehicle, raised the American flag, and posed for pictures.
“Then,” my dad said, “he drove back off, and we proceeded to reverse the process.”
By midnight, the bridge was gone.
* * *
As his eighty-second birthday approached, Dad kept finding new ways to stay busy. Once he’d learned of his diagnosis and received his treatment schedule, he planned an ambitious backyard barbecue—which he dubbed the “Holy Smoker”—for early June, giving himself something to look ahead to, a place to drive his energy. For the second time in two years, he had a malignant tumor inside of him, and this did not seem the central fact of his life. Indeed, it seemed to be a benchmark against which his actual life was being measured. He felt confident in the doctors’ prognosis and confident in his own resolve to take this all pragmatically, a step at a time. A Cleveland Clinic team of doctors known as the “tumor board” had conferred and determined that he should be given the most rigorous treatment, that he could handle it, and that it offered the best prospects for a continued quality of life.
So he did not share my curious fascination with the seemingly fated, perhaps even allegorical, timing of everything: his five-day sequence of radiation treatments was to begin on my fiftieth birthday, a Monday, St. Patrick’s Day.
He was far more interested in the party Gina threw for me the Saturday before.
He showed up in a green cardboard leprechaun hat, carrying a large heavy wrapped box, which he asked me to open early in the evening so it could be shared. He’d arranged with a local brewer to have a set of custom labels made for a case of “Davey O’Giffels Irish Stout.” He had designed the labels himself on his computer, with a picture of me and script lettering above. They now adorned a dozen twenty-ounce brown bottles. I unwrapped the package, opened the first bottle, and poured us each a glass.
The house filled with people, and music, and the billowy smells of homemade pasta on the stovetop, and carry-out chicken, garlic and spice. Voices and laughter filled the downstairs. It was a big party in the way a big party is really a bunch of small parties all under the same roof. A gathering in the living room, another in the kitchen, one near the stereo, another in the smoky alcove outside the back door. Gina made sure everyone was overfed because it is her genetic belief that no one has ever had enough to eat. If acute restlessness is my family’s disease, pathological hospitality is hers.
At the center of it all was my father, in his dopey green leprechaun hat. He joined in as a group of us raised our glasses to John. A friend invoked an Irish toast:
May those who love us, love us
And those who don’t love us,
May God turn their hearts
And if He doesn’t turn their hearts
May He turn their ankles
So we’ll know them by their limping.
The party carried well into the early-morning hours of Sunday. The few of us who remained started digging deep in my record bins, and without irony or reservation, we blasted the Go-Gos, and Adam and the Ants, and Supertramp. The enduring image of that night, captured on a cell phone video, is of a friend whose name shall be stricken from the record, passed out flat on his back in my attic at four A.M., arms in crucifixion pose, an acoustic guitar lying across him, fingers in the death grip of an E chord at the top of the neck, the Cars’ “Good Times Roll” playing at full volume two floors below, echoing through the room.
* * *
On Monday, my father received his first radiation treatment. He had to lie on his back, raise his arms above his head, hold his breath, and remain perfectly still while the technician aimed at the tumor, then blasted it with an intense dose of radiation.
That night, he came over for dinner. Said he felt fine. Normal.
On Tuesday, he returned to the clinic, received another nuclear blast to his chest, then went that night to a basketball game with my brother.
Thursday, he attended an event at the downtown library, where I was giving a reading to launch the release of my new book, which I’d dedicated to John. During the question and answer, a hand went up in the front r
ow of the full auditorium. It was my dad.
“Your book is dedicated to John Puglia. Can you tell us why?”
Caught off guard, I gave my first response directly to him. “Really? You just did that?”
I took a long sip from my plastic water bottle, choked through the first words, then found my voice and explained as best I could this friendship that had defined so much of what was in the book I’d just read from. When my answer was finished, I scowled at him. “Thanks, Dad.”
He smiled.
Friday, he returned for the fifth and final dose.
Saturday, I called and asked how he felt.
“I feel fine,” he said almost quizzically. “Maybe a little tired. But not really.”
18: BOB DYLAN’S BRAIN
* * *
“This coffin,” Gina said one morning as we sat with coffee at the kitchen table, slowly dismembering the newspaper. “Where do you plan to store it?”
“I have an idea,” I said.
I had no idea.
I had begun to do a thing I do, which is to deal with problems by diligently hoping they will go away on their own. Sometimes this works with plumbing. It often works with mild depression. It never works with property taxes.
As the box had slowly taken form, its physical and spiritual presence had taken on both size and shape that I hadn’t entirely calculated. It was becoming real in the cosmic way people think of as “real” when they say things like “Shit just got real.” It’s one thing to determine on paper that my resting corpse will be sixty-nine inches long and twenty-three inches wide at the coffin-pose elbow span. It’s another to see and feel the wooden surface against which my postmortem self will rest.
Furnishing Eternity Page 12
