Father's Day

by Buzz Bissinger

  —Zach needs his own life. I really realized that in Las Vegas that being in the right type of environment and private group home is the right thing to do.

  —Kind of confirmed that? Or you weren’t sure before?

  —I wasn’t sure but he needs to be with friends. They may not be the kind of friends you have.

  —Probably not.

  —But I think he needs to be with other people.

  —But I also think he needs to be with people who, whatever you want to call it, are normal. He loves hanging around with people who aren’t on his IQ level. I don’t think he gets as much satisfaction with maybe some of those kids he went to school with.

  —He loves the dances and the outings.

  —Do you really think you could put him in a home?

  —I don’t know.

  —I think you do know.

  Gerry is speaking to me with authority; he is reversing the roles of father and son. I welcome the switch because he is such a crucial cog in it all. I also welcome it because I need more help making the decision than Debra alone can give. It will not come tomorrow. It may not come for ten years. But it will come.

  All I thought I had sorted out on the trip about Zach’s future hasn’t been sorted out at all. I thought I had figured it out in those moments of pitch-perfect quiet, maybe in Texas, maybe in New Mexico, maybe on that empty two-lane bisecting the mountains of Arizona with the clouds offering up darkness and light. A private group home with his friends seemed so right. But nothing is ever right with a child like Zach. Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.

  —Vegas and the casinos were kind of overwhelming to him. I wanted it to be perfect but it wasn’t. The show Mystère. He tried really hard to take it all in, and I look over at him, and I kind of get teary because he’s trying really hard, and I think of all that he misses in life.

  —But you can’t look at it like that. I looked at it like that for a long time.

  —You did?

  —And then you start to feel guilty.

  —What? That you were the first one out?

  —I struggle with that a lot sometimes. I guess when I look at it from the perspective of all the things that I get to do, and he doesn’t, I think I just feel guilty.

  —It was pretty arbitrary, those three minutes.

  —It sure was.

  Gerry has inherited from his mother and me his dogged work ethic. He has laid out the tracks of his life with the same precision I laid mine out—getting his master’s, becoming a full-time elementary school teacher for several years, then getting a PhD in administration to become a principal. Like me he often mumbles. But now he is making a confession I always sensed he wanted to make but never could.

  —It’s always “You’re a twin. Oh, what does your brother do? He works at a law firm. Oh, is he a lawyer?” Then I explain he stocks supplies, then a lot of people feel badly and I say, “Oh, you don’t have to feel bad.” And then going through that exchange a lot of times you start to feel, “Why wasn’t it me?” When I was younger, I guess I felt a lot like it should have been me. Then I went through this embarrassment of him a lot.

  —Do you ever feel embarrassed about him now?

  —No. I think sometimes I try to control him. So maybe subconsciously I do feel embarrassed by him. But not really. Just let him be him. Now I think he’s really happy, which is the best thing. It’s not that he doesn’t get to drive a car or didn’t go to college.

  —I guess it boils down to how you define a life.

  —You define life by happiness. That’s what life is about. For everyone that’s a different thing. I look at some of the kids I work with student teaching and they may not have the same limitations as him but they have nothing, no support. No parents. Nothing. So he has been lucky to have all of that.

  —I guess I’m the one who still feels guilty. I feel guilty that he misses out on so much. I just wish I knew him better. I know him, but I wish I could break through. I learned so much about him on the trip. He gave me so many surprises. I still wish I could have the same conversations with him that I have with you so we can interpret and talk and analyze.

  —But he can’t do that, and you can’t expect him to do that. It’s unfair to you and it’s really unfair to him.

  —But every parent has aspirations for their child.

  —The basis of my relationship with Zach has always been different than my relationship with anyone else, and a lot of that means communication in a different way or doing things—taking him out to eat, telling if you’ve seen someone he knows and what they are wearing and where they work and what floor they work on. Just doing things together has been the connection.

  I finally realize I’ve had it backwards. All my life I have had it backwards. Whatever happens with Zach, I know I can no longer think in terms of what is in my best interests, even if I think they are also in his best interests. Zach will be where he will be. Because he needs to be. Because he wants to be. Because as Oliver Sacks said, all children, whatever the impairment, are still propelled by the need to make themselves whole. They may not get there, but they forever try on their own terms.

  III

  Zach returns to the room. As the three of us discuss our plans for the day ahead, I see something I hadn’t noticed before. It is a picture of my parents propped up against the TV with an inscription to the side: “Good Times Were Had by All.” I am guessing it was taken three or four years before they died. They are shoulder by shoulder with the Nantucket house behind them. My father smiles broadly. His chest is slightly thrust out as if he were back in the Marines. He swells with pride. My mother is diminutive, a whisper. But she is leaning ever so slightly into my father, and part of the beam of his smile is that he will always take care of her for as long as he can.

  In the aftermath of my parents’ deaths, I had placed the picture in the bookcase in the family room in Philadelphia. I had passed it every day for almost five years, most of the time sweeping by it in the earnest haste of the mundane, but sometimes lingering in front of it to see what I wanted to see—the urgency of their mutual need, the infinity of companionship, their love of Nantucket, survivors of marital warfare who finally realized it is just easier to put down the arms and declare permanent truce.

  I am shocked to see the picture in a guest room at the Beverly Hills Hilton. It doesn’t take long to figure out the source. Just before we left Philadelphia, Zach quietly placed it in his magic knapsack and waited to take it out until we arrived here.

  —What made you bring it?

  —I just wanted to I thought it was nice we all stayed together here remember?

  —It is nice. It’s beautiful. Thank you, Zach.

  —Oh you’re welcome.

  It was in Los Angeles at this hotel on Thanksgiving of 2000 that we as a family last came together—my parents, my three boys, my sister and her husband, Mark, and daughter, Sarah. There is no coincidence in our repeat visit: I wanted to return to the hotel to see what feelings, if any, would be evoked in both myself and the twins by staying here again.

  Lisa and I were already living in Los Angeles in 2000. The rest of the family came in from their respective departure points—Philadelphia, New York, Nantucket. Lisa and I wanted the trip to be special, the highlight of a time we knew would be short-lived because of the daily bloodletting that was NYPD Blue. We spent Wednesday night on the road at the famed Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, where each room was modeled after a certain bizarre theme—the Jungle Rock room with rocks everywhere like a mountain slide, the Golfer’s Room with a carpet in the shape of a narrow and winding fairway leading to the bathroom, the Caveman room that really did resemble a cave, and on and on and on. The place was strange and creepy, no real fun getting up in the middle of the night to pee and smashing into a boulder. My father was ebullient, endlessly energetic, staying up until the wee hours with my sister at the hotel bar, getting so drunk they might as well have been speaking in tongues. We had dinner Thanksgiving day in th
e enchanting town of Cambria and spent the night there. Then we went to San Simeon and the Hearst Castle.

  My father was a joyous man at this point in his life since he was no longer working. But there was extra joy that holiday, and I could tell it was for my benefit. He knew I was struggling, and he was worried. He would never say it directly to me, but he wanted to stop my bleeding. My mother’s mind was already very hazy then. You could see it loosening. But she was determined with great nobility to keep up.

  The Hearst Castle was a maze of narrow stairways. The physical exertion was becoming difficult for my mother. There was an elevator, but she refused to take it, just as she refused her usual impulse to stay in her hotel room and take to her bed. She wore her Gloria Vanderbilt hat. She spent hours applying makeup. In watching her navigate those narrow steps with both hands on the lifelines of the guardrails, you could see the fight still within her.

  On the trip back to Los Angeles from San Simeon, she rode in a car with Lisa and my sister and niece. She regaled them with her wit and trenchant observations of others and word games and songs from Broadway musicals. All the best of her was on display in that car.

  The day before my parents left, we went to Universal Studios. We insisted to my mother that she stay behind to get some rest. She refused again. As we were about to get on the Back to the Future ride, she announced that she wanted to join us. She was adamant. She said it looked like fun. We believed her because we so wanted to believe her.

  Midway through the ride, she began to panic. “Get me the hell out of here!” she grimaced. There was nothing we could do. My sister held her hand and coaxed her the rest of the way. My father asked her how it had been. “Awful,” she spat out. It became clear that she had no idea why she was on the ride, and where exactly she was.

  The next day, trying to catch an early-morning flight back to New York, she fainted in the hotel bathroom. As in other fainting incidents, there was no discernible cause. But in this instance I knew—the exertion of the trip had pushed her too far. She wanted to be part of the family, not some invalid. It was her last hurrah. It was the last hurrah for all of us. There would be no more group trips to Los Angeles or anywhere else. Eighteen months later we would no longer be a family unless you included attendance at my parents’ funerals.

  For the first time since their deaths, I feel a sense of closure. Or at least a reckoning. The inability to say goodbye to both of them, the emptiness that accompanied their equally convulsive deaths, has loosened. The bitterness gives way to this pinpoint of memory nearly a decade ago here in this very hotel, where love and laughter flowed so freely.

  If Zach hadn’t brought the picture along, I would not have reached closure. Intermittent memories would have popped up, but because of the photo, and seeing my parents side by side in love and peace, they were now with me in my own love and peace of who they always were. Zach knew that would be the result. Otherwise why would he have brought the picture? I could have but it was Zach who did, placing it against the television as a symbol of their eternal presence.

  Good times were had by all.

  Zach made sure that would never be forgotten.

  18. Zach and Gerry

  COUSIN PETE INVITES US to the set of Hancock on location in downtown Los Angeles where a huge conflagration of bullets and fire and blood is to explode between the police and a gang of bank robbers. At the moment, filming is between takes. We shelter underneath a cabana-style awning that you see in fancy resorts where corpulent men with wormy curls of upper chest hair read the Financial Times next to women too young to read.

  Pete watches the scenes as they are being filmed on two monitors feeding into the cameras. A row of producers—Michael Mann and Akiva Goldsman and Scott Stuber—sit behind him in a row in high-backed chairs with the grim seriousness of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at Yalta. The fate of the world is not at stake, but a 150-million-dollar-budget film is, which in the minds of these men is equally important. Behind them is another row of flunkies whispering into their wrists. I think they may be finding out when the break in filming is and what’s for lunch. Equally serious business.

  The lead, Will Smith, isn’t in the current scene. He is dressed in a black neoprene suit playing a dissolute superhero tired of his job. Zach is in the cabana beside Pete, and his man crush once again has him seriously stoked. Pete gives Zach the megaphone and tells him that he can yell “action” for the next scene. He yells too early, and chaos prematurely erupts.

  —Zach! Zach! Zach! You need to wait.

  —Oh sorry.

  Then he giggles.

  Gerry hangs to the side, not wanting to step on his brother’s star turn. These moments of lucidity in Zach are riveting, and Gerry refuses to trample upon them. He instead laughs appreciatively at his brother’s quirks, Zach’s hard drive suddenly equipped with a new Intel processor. Gerry is dying to meet Will Smith but is too shy to introduce himself. Zach recognizes Will Smith from his music. He is not too shy to introduce himself.

  —HEY WILL SING “MEN IN BLACK” FOR ME!

  He looks at Zach and laughs as if it is some off-key practical joke. Zach looks intently at Will Smith, waiting for him to sing. Will Smith declines. Zach stops paying any attention to him. Why should he if Will won’t sing? It’s a song he wants. He’s not interested in idolizing a man whose birthday he doesn’t even know.

  We leave the set and walk the downtown promenade of Santa Monica. We duck into a Barnes & Noble at the far end. Gerry pokes and picks, still tired out from his cross-country flight. Zach speed-walks to the map section. He buys one of those combination movie star/crime scene maps. It is a curious purchase for Zach given what it highlights. He must have chosen it by process of elimination because he already has half a dozen maps of Los Angeles. He also chose it to further concretize Los Angeles with physical symbols. He was drawn to it in particular because the map showed actual locations and addresses of people.

  Unfortunately those people were movie stars, whom he has no interest in at all, their celebrity status irrelevant. The same is true of crime, where his eternal innocence and optimism shield him from the ghoulish desire to see the sites of horrible murders and fatal drug overdoses whose killers and victims he has never heard of anyway. Why someone with trace brain damage has his priorities in far better shape than the rest of us, who thrive on such idiocy, is a question for psychologists and philosophers.

  Like Gerry and me. We ask Zach if we can see the map because we do thoroughly enjoy both movie stars and crime scenes. It is surprisingly comprehensive, particularly on the crime side. The location of the alleged O. J. Simpson murders is shown, of course, as well as the Charles Manson murders. But there are some other incidents that might otherwise go forgotten. Like David Spade being attacked by his personal assistant with a taser. Or the death of George Reeves, who played Superman on television. Or Oliver Stone’s arrest for driving under the influence and felony hash possession. Or the somewhat symmetrical discovery of the body of producer Don Simpson on the toilet with a copy of Oliver Stone’s biography in his hands and twenty-eight different chemical substances inside his body including Valium, Vicodin, and Ativan. The map also comprehensively pinpoints the homes of movie stars, although there are some on-the-bubble stretches—Monte Hall, Nick Lachey, Jaclyn Smith, Peri Gilpin.

  I hand the map back to Zach because it is his.

  —Oh you and Gerry can keep it.

  —Then why did you buy it in the first place?

  —I don’t know I just did I liked it shows where people live.

  —You barely looked at it.

  —Oh.

  —Do you know who Tom Cruise is?

  —No who is he?

  —Do you know who Cher is?

  —No who is he?

  We continue walking the promenade. There is something aimless about the three of us, perhaps because the trip is winnowing down to the final full day tomorrow. Gerry is preoccupied with school. Zach is already talking about returning to
work at the law firm and the grocery store. I am distracted, thinking of when the boys were truly little boys with one on the left of me and one on the right as we ambled, fingers locked into fingers in the divine illusion of permanence. The long shadows of my mother and father follow us since we all walked the promenade together in that long-ago time of 2000. It is hard to think they are not here, except that they’re not. But the picture Zach carried with him for over three thousand miles helps me visualize them now.

  We navigate toward Ocean Drive, past the Travelodge and the Pacific Sands and the Ivy restaurant, where the rich and famous have their permanent tables far enough from the sidewalk so as to not be accosted but close enough to earn the excited whisper of recognition.

  We head for the Santa Monica Pier. We go through a piss-scented tunnel. We set foot on the pier and are hit with the scent of creosote and suntan lotion and funnel cakes and sausages pinging and popping on greasy grills. There is a flow of a breeze. We stop and take the breeze in, as we lean against the pier railings out over the water. The view stuns me because I never ever associate Los Angeles with the ocean. I forget it is there like you tend to forget that most of Los Angeles is there. People move through the sand with surprising lightness and agility playing volleyball. Others stretch themselves out to the anatomical limit to sunbathe, their own torture rack. Others walk along the edge of the beach in sundresses to immerse their toes in undulating waves creased with soft silver. They look incredibly happy, kind of like Bette Davis at the end of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? after she has buried her sister in the sand. It is still California.

  Down an incline of the pier is a small amusement arcade called Pacific Park. There is a roller coaster in a spaghetti of tracks in faded yellow. There is a Ferris wheel. There is a green contraption called the Sea Dragon that rocks back and forth faster and faster until it reaches its apex and then plummets down and repeats the motion. A store called the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company sells crappy T-shirts in uneven piles that have thoroughly been picked through. A mesh basket is filled with cheap basketballs. Stuffed animals hang like carcasses. The smell of creosote thickens.