Father's Day

by Buzz Bissinger

  Until the cell phone rings. It’s Evelyn calling about Boobie. She says he never came home. I ask if he went down to the Southside of Odessa where the drugs are. She thinks the answer is yes (although Boobie later says the answer is no). Zach hangs on every word of the brief conversation. The potential of chaos in others always perks him up. He is the child of two reporters.

  —He got lost last night?

  —I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. I just don’t know what happened. I should never give him money. It makes the problem worse instead of better.

  —He didn’t go to work probably lost his job?

  I respond not with derisive bitterness but sad frustration and discouragement. Another job most likely has been lost.

  —Probably.

  —Why didn’t he want to go to work?

  —I gave him money to help his family and he didn’t. It’s very sad. He’s a wreck. It’s hopeless.

  —How will he get money?

  —Not from me. I can’t give it to him anymore.

  —You think his parents could give him money?

  —His mom is alive, but his dad is dead. And his uncle who took care of him is dead.

  —Yeah.

  —You’re lucky because you’re well taken care of by your mother and your dad and Lisa and Paul.

  —But Boobie’s not well taken care of?

  —He’s kind of alone and very lost.

  —What does that mean that he’s very lost?

  —He just doesn’t know what to do with his life, and he’s not getting any younger.

  —Well it’s not like you’re Boobie’s dad or anything.

  —You’re right. I’m not his dad. I’m your dad and Gerry’s dad and Caleb’s dad. And I have to remember that.

  —How come you sort of would like to be his dad in some ways?

  This question is more than just astute; it shows an abstract thought process of trying to figure out my motivations for being a father to someone I am not related to. He doesn’t understand and he wants to understand.

  —Well, because I’ve known him for a long time, and when he couldn’t play football anymore he sort of lost purpose in his life. He wanted to be a pro football player, and once that dream was gone he became a wreck. He just floated from job to job. I gave him money, and I think he’s going to use it for his family, but now I’m not sure he does. It’s really stupid of me, and I feel really bad about it.

  —Boobie I guess is a very nice guy?

  —He’s a wonderful guy. He’s got a big heart. But he’s not responsible. Do you know what it means to be responsible?

  —No what does it mean?

  —What do you think it means?

  —You have to be responsible about your things like not losing your bags.

  Punked yet again.

  We drive in silence for about forty-five minutes and pass Monahans. Zach’s hard drive suddenly goes code red. He knows that Boobie once lived in Monahans because he must have heard me talk about it. He is also fascinated that Boobie has been to jail. It is a subject Debra and I had broached with Zach several years earlier after he had used the school e-mail system to tell his teacher that he wanted to “kill” him. It was the first time, and the last, I ever heard him express any thoughts of violence. He explained that the teacher had told him he couldn’t do something he wanted to do. I was upset, but there was undeniable gratification in Zach’s willingness to express his individuality, that he had grown tired in his life of only following commands and never being trusted, although using the school e-mail system was not the best way to conceal a threat. This was also the post-9-11 era and he probably would have been arrested had he been a regular student. The school let it go because it was Zach. I did not, although I knew he did not mean what he said. It was also an opportunity to explain some realities that most children at the age of ten would understand.

  —You’re lucky you didn’t go to jail, Zach. What you did was terrible. You threatened a teacher. Most kids go to jail for that.

  —What’s jail?

  —It’s a place where people go when they have done something wrong.

  —What do they do to you in jail?

  —They lock you up and bad things can happen. You don’t want to go there.

  —I don’t want to go there.

  —Do you understand?

  —I understand.

  —What happens in jail?

  —Bad things happen in jail.

  I believe he did get the ramifications. But an unintended byproduct is that Zach now becomes animated any time he hears the word jail. It excites him because it is taboo, and he does like taboo.

  —Where was Boobie in jail out here or somewhere?

  —In Odessa.

  —Oh in the city how many months was he in for like?

  —Just a couple of days.

  —Like a couple of days or a couple of months how many days?

  —Four or five.

  —Was he okay what did he do in jail?

  —He sat around. He was fine. It’s not a good place to be. You don’t want to go to jail. I’ve told you that already.

  —It wasn’t a lot of fun there probably?

  —No, jail’s not a lot of fun.

  —But then he got out?

  —Then he got out.

  —Annie your sister got put there for something.

  —Drunk driving. It was a bullshit charge.

  —Annie your sister’s birthday is next Monday August 6 do you think you’ll ever get over feeling sorry for Boobie?

  —I don’t know. I’m very disappointed with him. But I do feel sorry for him.

  —I think Boobie should go to like some psychiatrist like I did.

  —Well, maybe.

  —Well what about you do this do you still see Doctor Hole I saw Doctor Hole one time does Doctor Hole talk to people on the phone?

  —I don’t think that would help.

  —Well you could probably think of some ways to talk to Doctor Hole about trying to fix his life.

  The random threads of his hard drive have come together into a cogent and intriguing suggestion. The only word that comes to my mind is wow, although I am positive Doctor Hole does not make house calls. If he did, it would have been easier for him just to move in with me.

  II

  The itinerary is Phoenix tonight. Then Las Vegas tomorrow, where Zach and I will have our dream date. The best hotel on the strip. Fancy restaurant. Hot-ticket show. Gambling.

  After nearly three thousand miles, we still are still dragging bottom on the scenic scale. We have felt the epic vastness of the country, even from Milwaukee to Odessa. But with the exception of the Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Oklahoma City bombing memorial and a statue of a giant jackrabbit in Odessa to commemorate all the real ones that live there, we have seen nothing beyond the vastness. I am not sure the jackrabbit qualifies.

  I ask Zach if maybe we should go to the Grand Canyon on the way to Las Vegas. I tell him it is the only place in the world where you never feel any sense of disappointment or diminishment, a fissure so big it touches heaven and bores into hell. His feelings are still scarred by Yellowstone and the idea of having to walk in search of what he is convinced will be nothing. Plus he doubts he will know anyone there. I tell him all we have to do is park the car, take a look, and then leave. He says he’ll think about it.

  We get onto 10 West at the Jeff Davis County line in Texas. We are about twenty miles from Van Horn. A freight train crawls along a track to the side, dozens upon dozens of unmarked double-decker cars of green and red and blue. It is the only spot of color in the thirsty gray landscape. There isn’t a single structure in any direction except for a few shacks of pockmarked wood about to cave in with the next gust of wind. A handful of cattle graze, lowering their heads with slow rote to scoop what few odd-lot strands of grass still exist. A Southwestern Motor Transport truck moves west. Allied Van and Warner Enterprises trucks move east. The speed limit ou
t here is eighty miles an hour. You can get to where you want to go as quickly as you want. But I want to linger in the lost, beyond the groping chitchat of yawning babble. Out here, no telemarketers who butcher your last name. No friends who never feel like friends, going through some preprogrammed list of banalities before they ask you for something. No multiplex with sticky, popcorn-infested floor. No dry cleaners. No bank branch. No Starbucks. No competitor to Starbucks. Just a land that refuses to concede. The empty. The beautiful empty.

  —I could do this forever with you.

  —Yeah.

  —Should we just do it forever?

  —Yeah.

  —Just drive forever?

  —Yeah.

  —Stop at places where we know people.

  —Maybe.

  —But you would have to be in the car a lot.

  —It’s kind of uncomfortable.

  Thoughts mainline into my veins. Boobie. Friday Night Lights. The bungee jump. My future. My son’s future. My parents.

  My father has been traveling with me the entire trip, telling me I’m going too fast, telling me I’m going too slow, asking me if I remember the trip to Dartmouth, wondering if after all that happened I still thought he had been a good father. But in the lost land of West Texas, my mother taps me on the shoulder as well. I am a little surprised; I always favored my father over her. But it makes sense to think of her now, given how she and my father were so inextricably intertwined at the end. Of all the things that have happened in my life, none will ever come close to what I went through with my parents at the end. Except for what happened when my twin sons were born.

  I ask Zach if he thinks about them very much. He remembers when my father, whom he called “Goggie,” went to a section of Nantucket called Monomoy. My parents had owned a house in Nantucket since 1960, and my father moored his little sailboat about a hundred yards out in the bay. He trudged out to get it, invariably getting his pants wet, as the water was always higher than he thought and ran halfway up his chest. It was always at this point he also realized he had left his wallet in his pants pocket, followed by a “son of a bitch!” so loud it carried all the way downtown to the Unitarian church.

  As we near El Paso Zach offers several solutions to Goggie’s predicament.

  —Next time maybe he should have gone into the water without his wallet because maybe that would have been better.

  —Anything else?

  —He should maybe have worn a bathing suit.

  —Do you miss him?

  —I miss him so much.

  —What about your grandmother Ellie?

  —I miss her too although sometimes she got mad at me.

  III

  My father carefully pondered purchasing a house in Nantucket. So did my mother. Despite occasional agreements, they were an odd couple, mismatched in many ways. My mother generally liked being cheerful. My father, when he wasn’t the most charming man in the world, liked being sullen. For their honeymoon in 1950 they went to Bermuda. They were supposed to be there for two weeks but came back after one because they had nothing to say to each other. In the wooing stages my father claimed that he loved to play board games, which my mother adored. She figured that’s what they would do if all else failed, until he announced that he hated games. Yet they became inseparable. They also ended up working together with my mother’s brother and her mother at the investment banking house Lebenthal & Co. It was a family business that had been started by my grandmother and grandfather in the 1930s. As in just about every family business, the shouts and screams at the board meetings could be heard across the Hudson into New Jersey.

  My father was the president of the firm, and after a previous career in advertising where even the hat he wore looked beaten to death when he came home from work, this was a dream job. But he really lived by obsessions that started in passionate love and ended in blunt rejection. On impulse, after playing pool one night at a bar, he replaced the dining room table in our New York apartment with an antique pool table. He took hundreds of hours of lessons from an expert teaching pro named Joe Stone, an intense and demanding little man ripped from the pages of The Hustler, who generally told my father he was hopeless. My father kept a little pamphlet Stone had written called The Correct Angle, containing diagrams looking like Rube Goldberg drawings. My father gave it up without warning after two years, but the pool table stayed.

  When my sister and I, now adults, visited the apartment, we ate Chinese takeout on TV tables in my parents’ bedroom since there was no other place to eat. Worried perhaps that we weren’t getting enough variation, my father ordered from half a dozen different Chinese restaurants, proudly producing their menus in a special folder he kept. He was also proud that he never had to give his last name: they instantly knew from the sound of his voice. In the Chinese takeout capital of the world, New York, I think he finished first in the rankings every year.

  My father and mother thought the house in Nantucket was a reasonable deal at twenty thousand dollars as long as the sellers threw the furniture in. Things were different. The island had not yet gone through onepercentification. Over the years they put the house back together room by room. They wallpapered. They sanded and buffed the floors. My father was an impatient imperfect perfectionist. He did everything twice, condemning the first attempt as a “piece of shit.” He had a tendency to run out of things; I think it was just an excuse to go to the hardware store and make sure nothing new had come in given his pathological love of tools, most of which he never touched again after buying them because he didn’t know how to use them. They wallpapered three walls of the room off the kitchen in one style, then the fourth in a completely different style after they ran out of the original. “Fuck it,” he said, “no one will notice anyway.” Everyone did.

  My mother and father fought every step of the way as they remade the house. You see things when you are growing up. You surmise things more right than wrong because your feelings are still raw and unclogged. I never thought they were in love for much of their marriage. My father seemed to resent my mother’s charm. Underneath his life-of-the-party pomp and circumstance were insecurity and brutal self-denigration. I don’t think he ever felt particularly needed by her. She was fiercely independent, having gone to work in the 1950s when no wife worked. She never revealed her interior, to the point of being unknowable. I realized at an early age that my sister and I truly existed solely to prove our worth as her worth. When we disappointed, I did anything to avoid her airstrikes of humiliation. It worked, and it did not work. Sometimes I could feel my balls ache. But she had shine and such style and marvelous observational wit. She had high cheekbones and wore a brown fedora that made her look like Gloria Vanderbilt. She hugged people and called them “dear boy” and “dear girl.” She could solve the New York Times Sunday crossword in two hours. She gave to every charity imaginable, until my father enforced a ceiling of fifty dollars per year. But she exceeded it anyway, since she paid the bills. She was one of those mothers who became more and more golden over time. My fear of her lessened and her love of me found a home.

  But medical problems started in her forties when a tumor developed on her pituitary gland that affected her eyesight. She was treated with massive radiation and recovered but was never quite the same to me. After her retirement at sixty-two, she spent most of her time in bed. My father discovered a definable place with my mother as she became ever more fragile and delicate. He worried about her and took her to an endless series of doctors and rushed to her aid when she began to have a series of fainting spells. She also became increasingly disoriented and it was clear that her mind, which truly was a beautiful mind, was rapidly going dark.

  In the early summer of 2001 she fell off a curb on Fifth Avenue and into the street after blacking out. She was hospitalized at Lenox Hill. My father kept vigil fourteen hours a day. His only respite was an occasional meal at J. G. Melon’s with friends where the waiters sometimes decided you merited serving. He sat in the corner of he
r room, talking to her or reading the paper or watching television. He pushed her in her wheelchair along the corridors just to give her a different setting. They finally were together.

  Until the pain in his back became intolerable and he reluctantly knew he had to do something. He hated doctors. He also went by the theory that what you don’t know is the best thing to know. But he saw his physician and was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. I remember the call. I was standing in the kitchen. He called me at least once a week. He always said, “It’s your old man, just checking in.” I figured this was the usual weekly check-in.

  —I’ve got fucking leukemia.

  —Do you know what kind it is?

  —I don’t know what fucking kind. I didn’t fucking ask.

  —What hospital are you going to?

  —I don’t fucking know yet. I think Mount Sinai. They’re calling me fucking back.

  He didn’t want any more questions. We hung up.

  My father was admitted to Mount Sinai several days later. Just before he left for the hospital, I could tell he wanted something he had never expressed before. He was desperate for a kiss from his wife, a stroke of the head, a promise to visit as soon as he got settled. He wanted reassurance but she lay in bed with her head to the side, her left hand flapping up and down in agitation, unable to cope with his illness and his hospitalization and likely not understanding any of it. He threw a few things into a bag, a razor, shaving cream, toothpaste, and toothbrush. He looked at her with pain and hatred, fifty years of marriage filed down to this.

  “Bye, El,” he said. “See you later.”

  She said nothing. She was terrified without him.

  My mother only became worse. Two days later she fainted trying to get out of her wheelchair. My father had just been hospitalized, and now my mother was hospitalized. She was released without any precise diagnosis. Her days of walking even a few steps without assistance ended. She spent all her time in two places, the wheelchair and the bed. She became incontinent, and I had to change her diapers once.