Father's Day

by Buzz Bissinger

  Zach has been to his share of baseball games in Philadelphia. He loves the food court set behind the outfield fences at Citizens Bank Park where the Phillies play. The lines are such that he usually misses the first five or six innings, but he does it on purpose. He understands who is winning and who is losing, but if a pitcher was pitching a perfect game with two outs in the ninth and I teasingly suggested that now was a good time to beat the crowd, Zach would be out like a bullet. I doubt he is listening to the agony of Ron Santo. But we at least have progressed from Cheetos to cookies.

  —We’re having a good time, aren’t we?

  —Yeah.

  —We’re eating cookies, right?

  —Yeah.

  —We’re listening to the Cardinals game.

  —Yeah.

  —What else could be better? It’s dark out. The moon is pretty.

  —Yeah.

  —So what could be better?

  —Nothing.

  —Name anything that could be better.

  —Anything.

  III

  —Do you ever wish you had a girlfriend, Zach?

  —I kind of do . . . like Shanna.

  —Is she not your girlfriend?

  —Yeah she’s just kind of a friend who I just see sometimes.

  —But you wish you had a girlfriend?

  —Kind of yeah.

  —Why?

  —’Cause I just wish I did.

  —Somebody you could do things with all the time like Gerry and his girlfriend Alli.

  —Yeah Gerry lives with Alli and I don’t.

  —Would you like to live with Gerry and Alli?

  —Gerry and Alli yeah.

  —You would?

  —I would like to maybe I was gonna say maybe I can stay over like on Tuesday maybe like on a Monday night or even a Wednesday night when I am working in Philly the next day.

  As part of his array of activities, Zach goes to dances with other disabled adults. He dances with Shanna when she is there. They work together at the supermarket, and she is a lovely girl with lovely parents. They are faithful companions to one another, going to movies together or having dinner just the two of them at Oriental Pearl on Kings Highway in Haddonfield. He talks to her in a way that he doesn’t talk to anyone else, never bombarding her with questions except for “What have you been up to?” and then listening and then telling her what he has been up to and then ending the conversation with “maybe we can hit a movie sometime.”

  When Shanna isn’t there, he dances alone.

  —Does that bother you?

  —No it’s okay.

  —You don’t mind dancing alone?

  —I don’t mind.

  —Are you sure?

  —Yeah I’m sure.

  I look over at my son. I can visualize him dancing by himself, earnest and awkward movements to a syncopated beat. The sweet confluence of baseball and Cheetos and cookies gives way to the image of my son in that isolation. As social as he is, even with people he has met for the first time, he spends much of his time that way. He engages at a gathering and then, because of the limits of his comprehension, disengages. He starts talking to himself, while everyone else converses. When I break the trance, because it is a trance, and ask him if he is okay, he always says that he is fine. He never complains or expresses boredom as the world circles around him. In his own way, he is expressing acceptance of who he is and what he will be.

  He dances alone.

  We clear the border of Illinois, past Roscoe and Rockton and Rockville. We cannot see the landscape in the black night, but we can feel it: farmlands and weary, worn-out machinery still churning out crops of bounty. I have never been in this part of Illinois before and I feel serenity, worth going deeper and deeper into the unknown lands. I can see in the night without having to see at all the humble white-painted house of a farmer with cows lingering outside in lazy obliviousness next to the machinery that has needed fixing for at least a decade. I see lights on at the kitchen table, and I see a husband and wife and kids dishing out mashed potatoes and meat and gravy and beans. The other version of this vision is that too much work and too little money have made the parents so depressed they watch Dancing with the Stars without even voting, and the children, no longer addicted to methamphetamine, are making it instead. Which is why it is always good to travel at night.

  We stop at McDonald’s. We lay out our maps and our meals on a hard wooden table. We ignore the smell of cooking oil and the other customers who look too much like roadkill survivors. Together we make a momentous road trip decision.

  —Zach, I think we need to skip Branson.

  —Why?

  —Because we won’t get there until tomorrow night. The amusement park will be closed.

  —What about the rides?

  —We’ll go instead to Six Flags near St. Louis.

  —I’ve been to Great Adventure in Jersey with my friends I like the rides it’s nice there except for the bathrooms they really stink.

  —St. Louis is a nicer place than Jersey so maybe the bathrooms will be okay.

  —Okay.

  It is still an ambivalent choice, at least for me. Forget Silver Dollar City. No Yakov Smirnoff’s Moscow Circus. No Andy Williams Moon River Theater. No Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede. Not even Twelve Irish Tenors. Zach pries his cheeseburger from the thin white paper and pulls it apart like Turkish Taffy. I choose the Southwestern Salad, as if it will somehow negate the potato chips and Cheetos and Slim Jims and Snickers and cookies that I carry out of every gas station like a disorganized looter. He looks at the Rand McNally atlas and studies a little bit and traces the route. We will take route 39 and then get on route 74 just for a minute and then go down 55. I don’t care to question him. Fuck the GPS.

  A child comes in whining for ice cream. An ample woman comes in and orders two hot fudge sundaes. I do not see anyone else with her.

  —Are you sure you want to go to Six Flags?

  —I want to stay all day.

  Back on the road, we pass by LaSalle and Peru near 10:00 P.M. The Cardinals-Cubs game ends. Ron Santo’s misery goes silent. Zach falls asleep in the back seat, piled into his bird nest. I am happy to be away now, happy to be with my son, happy we planned the next stop together. I am now comforted by the jagged sounds of his sleep, unlike the beginning of the trip when the sounds seemed so agitated and labored. There is a now familiar rhythm in the pump jack rise and fall of his breathing, the oxygen gulped in and out. The miles meld into enduring nostalgia—Gerry and Zach in Odessa in their bright red boots and bandannas; touch football when I was a kid on the wide expanse of the sidewalk outside the Guggenheim Museum where white-haired Park Avenue doyennes occasionally got hit on the shoulder and did not react positively; my first kiss, in a cemetery with the white slab of a tombstone staring at my genitals. I never thought Zach and I would reach such a place of unity and contentment. But we have on this night. We are gliding. We are finally what I’ve dreamed we would be since I first hatched the idea for this trip: a father and son together on the road.

  9. “It Will Be Okay”

  I

  WE ARE HEADED for Six Flags today. Zach has forever felt liberation in amusement parks, his primal screams unplugged, his dance upon the moon. The ratchet of the roller-coaster cars to the top before the perpendicular plummet. The loops upon loops upon loops in increasingly perilous circles. Right side up. Upside down. Compressed. Contorted. It is all part of his rush.

  I like them as an uprising against middle age. Unlike my son I am not fearless. There is no rush, just the hiccupping heart and the churning stomach straight to the rooftop restaurant of the throat. Some of the rides, named after a natural disaster or a misshapen comic book villain, accompanied by the ennui of teenage operators in striped shirts and scratched-at pimples most likely distracted by trying to come up with new slogans for the front of black T-shirts, offer neither sympathy nor solace.

  We haven’t slept much, about six hours, but everything a
bout the day seems right. The trip is now truly beginning, Chicago and Milwaukee far more tense and intense than I anticipated. The Carlinville Best Western is midwestern womb, no bites of bedbugs in blood feast, no faint odor of difficult sex. The room is square-angled like the region itself, bed to the right, blond wood desk to the left, instant coffeemaker of plastic components promising only tepidness. Pets are allowed as long as they don’t weigh more than fifty pounds. The microwave costs an extra twenty-five bucks. The trip has been like a board game, one step forward, two steps backward, two steps forward, one step backward. But this day will work. He will not be disappointed. I will not disappoint him.

  I knock on the hollow door of Zach’s room at seven.

  —Are you up?

  —I’m up.

  I go inside. He tells me he has already been to the computer in the little business center of the Carlinville Best Western. He has Googled the phrase “Six Flags” and carefully studied the rides he wants to go on and in what order—Batman, Sling Shot, Screamin’ Eagle, Rush Street Flyer, Mr. Freeze, the Ninja, the Joker, the Boss, the Big Spin.

  It all sounds dreadful.

  —Are you packed?

  —I’m packed.

  —Did you brush your teeth?

  —I brushed my teeth.

  —Did you remember your toilet kit?

  —I remembered my kit.

  —Give me a second, and then we’ll go.

  —Okay.

  I go back to my room. All my bags are in a little huddle. I hoist them on my shoulder. I put them down.

  I taste panic.

  The camera bag is missing.

  It contains about five thousand dollars’ worth of equipment, which can be replaced. But the rest cannot. I have taken hundreds of pictures, but I haven’t had a chance to download any of them onto my computer. The tape recorder I used to record Zach and myself is also in that bag. Since Zach’s birth, I have taped and taken notes with the possibility of one day writing about him. A book is immaterial now; I cannot replicate hundreds of hours of recordings no matter how great the writerly claim of an audio memory. The panic spreads, the awful feeling of nausea at being unable to undo what has been done. I need a scapegoat. I am good at that.

  Zach is to blame for this. Why can’t he help me with the fucking driving? Why can’t he carry to the room more than his own fucking suitcase? Didn’t he notice that when we pulled into the motel last night at one in the morning I was fucking tired after driving three hundred miles? Why do I have to be the one to keep fucking track of everything? Can I please, just for a second, get some fucking help here?

  I race into his room.

  —Have you seen the camera bag?

  —No.

  —I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I can’t fucking believe it. We’re fucked, Zach. Do you understand that?

  —Yeah.

  —We’re fucked.

  —Yeah.

  —This is a fucking disaster. A goddamn fucking disaster. What am I going to do?

  —I don’t know.

  —Of course you don’t fucking know.

  —Can we still go to the amusement park?

  —Fuck the amusement park.

  He looks at me. He is scared and wounded.

  —I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.

  —It’s okay.

  I can’t handle the stress of the trip anymore. I am falling apart. The last time I lost something invaluable I was with my father. It was an omen of collapse then, and I take it as an omen now.

  II

  In the summer of 2001, my father, then seventy-five, was diagnosed with leukemia. We took a cab together from the New York apartment to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was to be admitted. He cried in the cab. It was the second time I had ever seen him cry. The first was forty-four years earlier when his mother had died at the age of fifty-five. He was the kind of man, like so many men of World War II and the “Greatest Generation,” who loathed having others do things for him because it meant vulnerability and weakness. But there was no chance for that now.

  “I’m scared,” he said.

  He had never ever said that to me before.

  The cry turned into a wail in the dank smell of the cab, heightened by the incense sticks hanging from the rearview mirror. The plastic partition was filled with patterns of greasy fingerprints from impatient passengers pushing crumpled bills through a little tray. My dad was making a confessional inside that crappy shitty cab with the ill-aligned passport-size photo on the faded license and the click of the meter. He hated showing himself like this to me. I held his hand but my grip was weak and limp out of my own fear and confusion. We both knew it. I had to say something.

  —It will be all right.

  The thing that everybody says in a situation like this. The thing that nobody ever means in a situation like this. We both knew he was going to die. We let go of each other’s hands. It was a role reversal of father and son that neither of us could handle. He wiped his eyes, willing the tears back inside him, suck it up, soldier.

  —Fuck it.

  I helped him get settled in his hospital room. It had the familiar mask of disinfectant to ward off the shit and the piss and pus as death takes its time working through you. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could. I hated that fucking smell, the same smell that had permeated the hospital after my twins had been born. I could feel my withdrawal: I had played the role of caretaker with people I loved enough in my life. I didn’t want to do it again. I didn’t know how to do it again. My father, whom I did so dearly love, was evaporating behind his hard shell like melting candy. So was I in my own wallow of helplessness, knowing that whatever I did and whatever I said would be superficial and transparent.

  It will be all right . . .

  Bullshit.

  I left the hospital and walked several blocks to the Lexington Avenue subway on 96th Street. I could not escape the guttural siren of his wail inside the cab. It flooded my head. As I approached the subway station, I reached for my wallet to get my Metro Card. The wallet was missing. I once again tasted panic, the stinking coat of bile as your mouth goes dry. I had a bag with me that contained a sandwich. I had put the bag on a ledge of a brownstone window to get the sandwich. I wondered if I had put my wallet there too for some reason. I also wondered why the fuck I had gotten a sandwich. My father was dying, and I was hungry? What the fuck was wrong with me? I knew why. It was a way of further distancing myself . . . take your dying father to the hospital, then get a roast beef special on rye with extra Russian.

  I went back to the ledge, but no wallet. I ran back to the hospital, but no wallet. I combed the streets and the sidewalks like kicking for quarters in the desert. The wallet was gone, and I knew why. I could not deal with any of this, my hands a juggler’s mess and my mind frayed and frazzled like a rope being pulled beyond tautness, a dead son walking to his dying father.

  Day after day, I returned to the hospital, feeling lost without my wallet. It was metaphor of course for how lost I felt within myself, not knowing what to say, so saying nothing, preoccupied with my own future instead of with my father and his own lack of future. I acted in ways that were uncharacteristic and despicable, computing inheritance and IRA accounts and how much I would end up with. I am ashamed to this day, and I will always be ashamed. It was a symptom of the continued withdrawal, a way of fixating on something besides the death of a man I worshiped. It was not crass avarice. But my father didn’t see it that way. He never said so, but I think he saw me as an ingrate after that, a son-of-a-bitch son. All those years of a beautiful relationship splintered. He said he did not know me very well, when I thought he was the one person in life who did know me well. He was angry and inconsolable at the end. He hated me at the end. He hated everyone at the end. He was terrified at the end.

  My detachment was just a front. I so desperately wanted closure. I just wanted him to say, “You have been a wonderful son, and I am so proud of you,”
and for me to say, “You have been a wonderful father, and I am so proud of you,” but the mutual damage done once he was sick hardened into stubborn scars. He told me he had sat in bed one night unable to sleep, thinking of all the horrible things he had done in his life. He told me that when I was seven, he had umpired a pickup baseball game in which several of my friends were playing. I was frantic to do well. He called me out on strikes even though he knew the impact would crush me. I didn’t remember the incident, and I could not come close to understanding why he would do something like that to his own son, his tentative and always fearful son. He apologized for it from his deathbed, but he must have felt some perverse satisfaction at the time.

  I moved from Philadelphia to New York to be with him. I was a dutiful son and believed in duty. But there was only sulky silence between us.

  If anything held my father and me together, it was the Yankees, who were making their epic playoff run in the aftermath of 9-11. They were magical; the strength of their victories seemed to reflect and enhance the enduring strength of New York. We sat there at night together in the gray glow of the television hooked into the wall. The Yankees brought us solace, and I remembered the time thirty-seven years earlier when he had taken me to the fourth game of the Yankees World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. When Ken Boyer hit a grand slam to wipe out a 3–0 Yankees lead, he held me as I wept.

  I was with him as he lay unconscious at the end. He was stoked up on morphine, the leukemic cells dancing through his veins in one final hoedown. All he could do was gasp as if he was being slowly smothered. I held his hand. But that is bullshit. I did not hold his hand. He did not want to be touched in those final moments anyway. Just get the goddamn motherfucking thing over with. I am not ready to die but I am dying and fuck all that closure shit. Let you and your sister and your mother fucking sort it out. I got problems of my own.