Father's Day

by Buzz Bissinger

  “You finished?” asked the counterman.

  IV

  Zach wakes up as if on cue the second we pass the Milwaukee airport. He is on terra firma now.

  —I remember this place in Milwaukee it was like Soccer USA I also remember when Gerry was the goalie in soccer I only played soccer in 1991 I think because I had trouble I wasn’t good I guess.

  —Dad I remember when we were in Milwaukee I remember we first learned about Waldo in Milwaukee.

  —YEAH there’s the JIMBO’S CAR WASH Dad!

  —Remember they had that good hoagie place Cousin’s Subs!

  —BAKERS SQUARE!! We would eat there and get pies.

  We reach Shorewood, the suburb where we used to live. We get out of the car and walk for a little bit through the downtown. Zach recalls instantly what is still there and what has been replaced: the North Shore Bank and the Baskin-Robbins are still around but the Domino’s is gone, and the Kohl’s has been replaced by the Harry Schwarz bookstore. He immediately wants to drive to his old school. He just wants to sit in the car and stare at it. I tell him we’ll do that tomorrow. I don’t have the psychic energy right now. I’m just not in the mood for staring.

  7. Lost in Milwaukee

  I

  AT THE HOUSE of our friend Lois, on a white sheet of paper, Zach writes out a list of all the places he wants to look at today. He hasn’t seen many of them for almost two decades, but that doesn’t matter. I haven’t seen him this engaged and excited on the entire trip. He works with his customary diligence. His a looks like an o or sometimes a q missing its tail. He holds the pen with the characteristic firmness of a walking stick. He has been thinking about this list for a long time.

  Bradley Ctr.

  St. marys

  Atwater School

  DUNWOOd School

  COPS ICE cream

  winkies

  olive St.

  JCC

  It is a collection of schools and a toy store and several restaurants and the hospital where his half brother Caleb was born and the duplex in which we once lived. He doesn’t particularly want to go inside all these places. He just wants to look at their outsides. He wants to see what’s still there; he wants to see what if anything has changed.

  Shortly before we leave, I finally pull out a clump of pictures from the green duffel bag I’ve been carting in and out of the minivan each night. When Zach was nine or ten he would pull out scrapbooks from the red drawers in his room and stare at some of these pictures for hours and hours. He sat on his bed with the rainbow-stripe bedspread from Ikea on top of the rug from Ikea, where all men shop after divorce, the silent Ikea secret handshake as we write out with a stubby pencil the list of furniture we must have by this evening because the kids are staying over for the first time and we need to provide a stable atmosphere fast and try not to get too upset when you put something together and there are still very many pieces left.

  I mostly left him alone while he studied those scrapbooks in his boy-in-the-bubble mode. I had preoccupations of my own. I was in the thick of work on a new book that was paralyzing me with the fear of failure that always found me. Amid my fear, I wondered how Zach could possibly occupy himself looking at those same pictures hour after hour by himself, sifting through his life like that, turning pages gone flaky and brown like a dying autumn leaf. I wished we could commune together about sports or the weather or even that I could help with homework until I only made the outcome worse as I inevitably did with my other children. But I didn’t want to look at old pictures—part of the phobia of going backward—and I had come to the truth that Zach doing something, anything, was better than the tendency of talking to himself and walking on his imaginary back-and-forth gangplank when unoccupied. I thought the study of pictures made him lonely, but I was imposing my own template upon his. The pictures reignited his memory, came alive for him. Still, I felt out of fatherly duty I should at least make some attempt to engage with him. So every half-hour or so, I checked on him.

  —Are you okay?

  —I’m okay.

  —Aren’t you bored looking at those pictures? You look at them all the time.

  —No I’m not bored.

  —Want to come down and watch the baseball game with Gerry and me?

  —That’s okay.

  —You’re sure.

  —I’m sure.

  Zach went back to his scrapbooks, running his fingers over the faded colors of the familiar, reexamining cousins and former babysitters and nurses who had taken care of him when he had been so sick and old friends of mine I had long ago forgotten. It wasn’t some idle pursuit to fill in space until bedtime. It was important to him, refueling the hard drive.

  Knowing how much Zach had loved looking at pictures throughout his childhood, I thought the pictures in the green duffel bag would help bind us together, give us a common ground. But Zach is surprisingly disinterested in the photos now. Lois and I look at them—my mother and father; Zach and Gerry in red blazers lifted up in each of my arms like barbells at the birthday party I gave them when they were four; Zach at our first house in Milwaukee in 1989 after he had just learned to ride a bike, something I was convinced he would never do but Sarah was convinced he could do and tirelessly worked with him as she did so often.

  The pictures bore him. He much prefers to tell Lois about his job at the law firm. He sounds like Sergeant Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma’am.

  —I know my way around I start on 51 then go down to 50 deliver mail to the secretaries the home office is on P2 used to be on 49 when I first started working but now I am on P2 so it’s interesting down in the basement in P2 you can’t get cell service so I am enjoying the job and it’s interesting you walk everywhere and I’m downstairs it’s interesting if you take the elevator it stops at the lobby then at 38 and then 51 to get to my mailroom you get on this elevator and you have to put your card in and push the button.

  Are there any questions?

  If not, let’s recap so far.

  —So me and Buzz we started driving me and my dad you know it’s funny he gets me at four fifteen on Sunday and he says like should we leave tonight so we go have dinner with Gerry and we go to Chestnut Hill and my dad finished packing and we got on the road at eight o’clock then we stop in Pennsylvania it’s also nice because if we left Chestnut Hill yesterday we would have had to left at five in the morning but we kind of left at eight thirty at night that’s not early so we got to Chicago around three thirty instead there was no traffic it was nice we were gonna stop in like Cleveland or Toledo for lunch but we just went to a rest area because we just wanted to get here.

  His cadence is beautiful to me, the breathless engagement with which he talks. But abruptly he stops his account and starts the pacing back and forth, the talking to himself. He is depleted. Lois and I finish looking at the pictures. There is nothing we can do to reel him back; he has entered his trance until it is time to take on the list.

  II

  We drive along Murray Street on the way to the Atwater school, the first school Zach attended in Shorewood in 1989 when he was six. We had just arrived from a year in Odessa, Texas, where I’d been doing research for my first book, Friday Night Lights. Until the school district determined proper placement for Zach, there was no choice but to send him to Atwater, the local elementary school, which offered no real additional support for kids with special needs.

  —Do you think Dad I did good when I was there?

  Before the trip I would have mumbled “fine.” Now I will say the truth.

  —At Atwater you had a lot of trouble. What do you remember about Atwater?

  —I remember my teacher Miss Lauren and I remember she gave me a book to put my baseball cards in.

  —You were lost.

  —What do you mean I was lost?

  —You were having a lot of trouble keeping up.

  —I couldn’t keep up with things?

  —Do you know why?

  —I couldn’t really figure out
what I was doing?

  —Do you know why that is?

  —Because I wasn’t born great that might have been it.

  —It was hard for you. It was hard for you to follow. You needed other teachers. You needed help.

  We get out of the car to examine Atwater more closely. It is hot. It suddenly feels much hotter, each step leaden, like wading through the thick silt at the bottom of a river. We look at the field adjacent to the school where he and Gerry once played soccer. Zach remembers not being very good at soccer. The other kids were frustrated by him and vocal about it, a chorus of groans when he showed up in his uniform. He played only one season.

  We walk a hundred yards to where he attended school, a one-story brown annex. Zach crouches and stares through a grimy window to look for his old classroom. There is a playground nearby with the sounds of families and their kids. I can hear squeals from the swing and the seesaw. But they are faraway echoes that dissolve in the heat. Zach continues to look inside. Then he gets up.

  —I remember a couple of times when I fell asleep during class and you had to come get me.

  —You’ve been through a lot in your life; you know that?

  —Yeah.

  —You know you were really tiny when you were born. You know how big you were?

  —How big?

  —One pound, eleven ounces.

  —Yeah.

  —You know how tiny that is?

  —No how tiny?

  —Like a package of chicken parts.

  There is more to say, but not now.

  Zach remembers the names of other kids who went to school with him. He calls them his friends, though they never were.

  I have my camera bag with me. We walk to the playground. There is a molded dinosaur for kids to play on. I take a picture of Zach sitting on the dinosaur and smiling. It’s something to do. He makes a suggestion.

  —Dad let’s get a picture of me next to the school sign that would be fun.

  We head to the main school building. Cars pass like sighs of breath. I take a picture of him on the steps of Atwater. I know why he wants to memorialize this, another concrete point in his space, but I wish he did not. Nothing good happened here.

  He was at the school for only a few months before it became clear that he needed to be placed in a self-contained program with extensive one-on-one teaching. But the time it took to place him in that program seemed to last forever, the walk to school every day without any expectation. Other parents congregated after they had dropped their kids off. They knew. I knew they knew. I could hear the whispers I never heard:

  That’s the father of the poor little boy who is a retard.

  “How is he doing?” I would sometimes ask the teacher. I felt like I should say it to show vigilance.

  She mentioned his sweetness and effort, a nice little boy. But there was also the look that said, Are you kidding me? How do you think he’s doing?

  It was only much later, when I finally gathered up the courage to open the blue box, that I discovered her summation of him:

  Extremely short attention. Needs constant pulling back into lesson. Cannot attend. When sharing usually states the same thing. Little or no communication with teacher and peers. No eye contact. Body acts spastic at times. Fine motor inconsistent, able to cut some days, unable to hold scissors on others. Math readiness is below grade level. Reading readiness—at times aware of upper and lower cases, has some letter correspondence. Very dear, pleasant and agreeable. Cannot follow directions when in kindergarten workbooks without one to one help. Severe attention difficulties.

  It was obvious that Atwater was not working. He could never be a part of regular kindergarten. Her assessment was part of the deconstruction of Zach when he was six and everybody was trying to find the proper placement for him in the Shorewood school district with reams of reports and psychological analyses and observations and tests:

  Auditory Sequential Memory. Beery Buktenica Visual-Motor Integration. Bender Gestalt. Benton Visual Retention Test. Brigance Inventory of Early Development. Daberon Screening. Detroit Test of Learning Aptitude. Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children. McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities. Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices. Stanford-Binet. Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence.Wepman’s Auditory.

  The results, except for memory recall, gauged by the ability to recite back strings of numbers, were numbing. Visual perception (0 of 10). General knowledge (13 of 30). Gross motor (4 of 12). Unable to write numbers in sequence. Unable to do simple addition. Unable to recognize money. Unable to tell time. Unable to print uppercase letters sequentially. Unable to print lowercase letters sequentially. Unable to print simple sentences.

  Was there anything he could do? The final paragraph summation was always the same. Such a nice little boy.

  Fuck your summation. Fuck your patronization. This is my son. Not a house pet.

  As part of determining the proper school placement, he was personally observed by a special-education supervisor one day in the classroom at Atwater. It was time for sharing what had happened over the weekend. All the other children sat on the floor looking at the teacher, rapt and ready, while Zach rocked back and forth. He was desperately trying to keep up. He raised his hand to say that he had ridden his bike. He did not look at the other children when he said it. Suddenly there was a chorus of cries that he was ignoring them, as if he was being haughty and condescending by not sharing in the proper way.

  The teacher then put on a record, and the kids sang along. Zach couldn’t keep up with the words. After that, the children sat down and were asked about what it meant to eat a good breakfast. Zach was called upon. It struck me as taking a bucket of shit and forcing his head into it. Why would the teacher call on my son when she knew by then that he could not adequately answer? He repeated the question several times before blurting out that he had cereal for breakfast.

  The children stood to do a step-movement to a poem. Zach rocked back and forth again and played with his shoe. The teacher called his name to regain his attention. He looked in her direction but continued to play with his shoe.

  It was a teacher and thirty kids against one, his incapacities like a thousand open sores for everyone to gape at.

  I think of the irritated grumbles toward him when I see the main building. I think of him not looking at the teacher because he was scared and confused and shy and did not know what to say. But then I think of him raising his hand when he was asked what he had done over the weekend. I can see the hand rising up above the murmur of the other kids, a little boy with something to tell even though nobody else thought he had anything to tell.

  I rode my bike.

  And yes he had, defying all age-appropriate behavior, flying down the street in the brace of the fall wind and the first creep of cold, the master of the world. Then I think about him playing with his shoe in the classroom of Atwater, twiddling the laces with his slender fingers, the silence within him like every voice yelling at him at once with no idea of what to do except not say a word.

  We walk back to the minivan and drive to the next place on his list: the house on Olive Street where we used to live. I pull over in front of the house, jerking the shift into park. I am fumbling to find things I cannot find, although I know they are there because I just put them there.

  —Goddamn it goddamn it goddamn it!

  There is the lone bark of a dog in the cooked sunlight. There is a disembodied voice yelling, “Kenny, come here!” The house, in the center of the block, is a sprawling red brick converted into a duplex. The street is empty. The world is empty. Zach peeks inside windows on the first floor, where we lived, looking for his benchmarks. I peek inside windows with him with no interest in any of it. We left this place long ago, and I can see no reason to ever return.

  A woman who lives there sees us lurking and opens the door to find out what we’re doing. Zach explains.

  —My name is Zach we’re driving across the country to places where we used to
live.

  She lets us inside. Zach makes a beeline for the room that Gerry and he shared, only to find that it has now been converted into an indoor sauna. The woman, recognizing my last name, pulls out a copy of Friday Night Lights for me to sign. I sign it. She brings up the television series.

  The doorbell rings, and the woman goes to answer it. There is a policeman at the door asking if she’s related to the person who parked in front of the house because there is a problem.

  —There is no parking on the street.

  I tell him that’s my car.

  —Sorry, that’s me.

  —Are you okay? Are you tired? Seriously, take a look at your van.

  The driver’s side door hangs open. My cell phone is on the seat.

  —Are you okay? Even your demeanor, a little bit . . . Are you tired? You under the influence of anything?

  —No, I’m not under the influence of anything. It’s just an emotional trip, but I’m not under the influence of anything.

  The woman, a former assistant district attorney, comes to my defense.

  —He’s fine. I can tell you we’ve just been through the house.

  The cop is still unconvinced.

  —I wonder if it’s okay to let you go at this point?

  —My demeanor is fine.

  —I know, but your welfare.

  The woman promises that I will get a cup of coffee. The cop reluctantly relents.

  —I guess I’m not going to arrest you. I’m looking out for your well-being.

  The cop drives off, and I thank the woman. Zach and I climb back into the minivan to fulfill the rest of his bucket list. We head toward another school, this one named Dunwood.