by Len Vlahos
During these vacations—and always at my insistence—we’d pay a visit to the century-old Barnegat Lighthouse at the northern tip of the island. I was obsessed with that lighthouse. I knew everything about “Old Barney,” from the date he was built to the date he was decommissioned. I’d look up at his red and white tower and admire his strength and solitude. I’d wish that I could be a lighthouse, too.
Leaden clouds blanketed the sky from horizon to horizon as we stepped out of the car on one particular afternoon in 1979. I was craning my neck to stare at the top when something wet and cold nudged the back of my leg, startling me to the point of almost falling over. I turned around to find a beagle-lab-something-or-other mutt looking up at me, tail wagging, eyes full of expectation. I bent down to pet him and he licked my hand. The little guy didn’t have a collar. I scanned the parking lot but didn’t see anyone who looked like they were missing a dog.
“Mom?” My mother turned and saw the two of us standing there, probably both looking lost. If I’d had a tail I suppose it would have been wagging, too.
“Oh, isn’t he precious. Ben, come over here.”
To understand what happens next, you have to know two things about my father:
First, he’d grown to resent me. From the moment my mom found my flaming body dangling from that dogwood tree, my dad had become the odd man out in our house. Everything in my mother’s world revolved around me. She had no attention and no patience left for her husband. My dad dealt with it for a while, but eventually he got fed up. I would overhear my parents late at night, my father complaining that their life had come to a complete standstill, that they were starting to lose their friends, that it wasn’t healthy for them or for me. My mother, sounding shocked, would only say “But Ben … Harry!” A few months later the bickering turned to arguing, their voices reaching a decibel level that even a pillow held smushed over my head couldn’t keep out. After that they gave up all pretense and fought out in the open. If you’re from a happy home, you just can’t know how much this sort of thing sucks.
It didn’t help that my father was out of work at the time. A local news station had videotaped my dad’s latest political patron, a New York City councilman, coming out of a drag bar. He—the councilman, not my dad—was wearing a frilly green dress, matching shoes, and pearls. The photo beneath the Daily News headline, which read “Council Woe-Man,” showed my dad’s boss in the full getup, but without his wig. The story mushroomed into a citywide scandal, which, like all scandals, blew over as soon as the newspaper-reading mob moved onto the next big thing. But the damage was done. The councilman was forced to resign, and my dad was left to putter around the house and get in my mom’s way.
There’s an apocryphal story about my dad wanting to wash his boxer shorts in their new top-loading Maytag dishwasher, the first either of them had ever owned. “Ruth, if it cleans the glasses, it will clean the clothes.” My mom gave him a choice: find a job, or else. He didn’t know what “or else” was, and he didn’t wait around to find out.
My dad took a job working as a legislative liaison in the governor’s office in Albany, three hours away. We’d see him on weekends, at Christmas, during summer vacation, and most other times the legislature was out of session. He’d barrel into the house like a freight train, showing up with souvenirs from around the state: A refrigerator magnet from Skaneateles Lake, a “Relax at the Spa” button from Saratoga, a T-shirt with a picture of the Maid of the Mist in the foreground and a rainbow and Niagara Falls in the background.
The long-distance living arrangement seemed to solve the problem for my mother, but it never suited my dad, or maybe it never suited his idea of what his life should be like. My father imagined himself the king of his castle, a benevolent, enlightened man, presiding over life at his own Kennedy compound. Instead, he was an exile, granted visitation only when the government allowed, and he blamed it all on me. It was a feeling that had been gnawing at him and it needed an outlet.
The second thing to understand about my dad is that he really hates dogs.
My father was just about to go into the lighthouse when he heard my mother call. He walked over to where we were standing.
“I think he’s lost,” I said, motioning to the dog.
“Nonsense. He’s with one of these families. Someone is up in the lighthouse and they just left him to wait.”
“I don’t know, Ben,” my mother said, studying the dog.
My father muttered “For crying out loud” to himself, and, always desperate to prove his point, stomped off, systematically approaching the few other families in and around the lighthouse while my mother and I waited. Five minutes later he came back with his brow furrowed.
“One of the men inside saw a green station wagon pull up, let the dog out, and drive away. They think maybe he was abandoned here.”
“Oh, how awful.” My mother looked at my father with pursed lips, motioning at me with her eyes. “We can’t just leave him here.”
“What exactly are we supposed to do?” my father asked, his words clipped.
“Can we keep him?” I knew the answer before it was spoken.
“Absolutely not.”
“We can at least bring him to a shelter, dear.”
My father weighed his options, knowing that if he did nothing he’d spend the rest of his vacation with a sullen, angry wife and a disappointed son. He grudgingly agreed. “Okay, a shelter.”
Dad got down on his hands and knees a few feet from the dog and whistled, trying, I supposed, to mimic something he’d seen in a movie or on TV. “C’mere boy, over here.” The dog, who in my head I’d given the clever name of “Blacky,” wasn’t buying it. He inched back.
My father inched forward.
Blacky inched back.
My dad stood up and looked around, pretending to ignore the dog, thinking he could outsmart him. The dog never took his eyes off my father, so when Dad lunged forward to grab him, Blacky bolted.
In the instant the dog turned and ran, I heard a sickening scrape of bone on bone and I saw my father grab his back and fall to the ground. The pain must have been intense, because tears were streaming down his lobster-colored cheeks, and his breath was short and raspy. I held out my hand to help him up, but he batted it away.
“This is your fault, everything is your fault! Just get away from me you god damn freak!”
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There was no wind, no sound of the ocean, no sunlight. Just the reverberating echo of the word “freak” as it ricocheted off the lighthouse and the rocks in the flat, gray stillness.
“Ben!” my mother barked and time started moving forward again.
My father mumbled something, I didn’t know what, and took my hand, which was still extended in his direction. I didn’t even think about my reaction. I pulled his arm as hard as I could, jerking his torso and head toward my foot, which was moving in the direction of his face at the speed of sound. When my Converse sneaker connected with his mouth, I felt something crack. Three bloodstained teeth flew through the air and landed on his chest. I dropped knee-first onto his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. His arm was still in my grasp when I landed, and I could feel his shoulder separate
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Strike that. I couldn’t feel his shoulder separate or anything else, because, no matter how much I might’ve wanted to, that’s not what I did.
Here’s what really happened:
My father mumbled something, I didn’t know what, and took my hand, which was still extended in his direction. I helped him up. He didn’t look me in the eye, and he didn’t say anything else. I was so used to dealing with crap like this at school that I knew how to control and bottle up my emotions. I just pretended like it’d never happened. I didn’t even let myself cry.
I opened the car door for the old man, preparing to ease him into the backseat, when, without warning, the dog came bounding across the pavement and leapt in ahead of us, his tail wagging so fast it was just a black blur. My father hurled some insult at Blacky, and I did my best not to laugh.
After we dropped the dog at the local shelter, my dad spent the rest of the vacation lying prone on the floor of our bungalow. It was the beginning of a lifelong battle with back spasms, his vertebrae shifting without warning into configurations so painful as to require a cane for support.
He did apologize that night, looking up at me from the floor. A well-worn carpet surrounded him, making it look like he was floating in a beige-colored sea. He told me that sometimes, in the heat of a crisis, people say and do things they don’t mean to say or do.
“Pain and stress can hijack a man’s soul and twist it out of shape, like my back,” he said, trying to smile.
I nodded, but it didn’t matter, the damage was done. I didn’t believe his excuse anyway. My sorry little life had already taught me that things said under duress are always more true than not. But there was at least one unintended consequence from that vacation. I had the moral high ground and a “Get Out of Jail Free” card with my father.
LYING
(written and performed by the Woofing Cookies)
It was a Friday afternoon. My dad was home from Albany for the weekend and we were sitting across the kitchen table from one another. I was leaving on tour in a matter of weeks, and I hadn’t told my parents anything about it. In fact, regarding my future, I had told them a series of colossal lies.
Colossal Lie #1: I had applied to four colleges. They’d helped me fill out the applications, write my essays, and even took me to see all four schools. When everything was ready to be mailed, I drove my mom’s car to the post office—“Mom, Dad, this will mean more to me if I’m the one to mail the applications”—and pitched all four packages in a Dumpster.
Colossal Lie #2: I was accepted at the University of Scranton, my first choice. Johnny had applied to Scranton as a safety school and got in. He was too much of a choirboy to want to give me his acceptance letter and packet of admissions materials, but Cheyenne talked him into it. A little creative cutting, pasting, and photocopying, and I made it look like the package was addressed to me. I’d never seen Mom and Dad more proud.
Colossal Lie #3: I mailed the check my dad wrote to Scranton—for the first semester tuition, room, and board—to the same place I’d “mailed” the application, though I was smart enough to tear the check into little pieces before throwing it away.
It was against this fictional backdrop that I told my father I was going on the road.
“We’ll be gone about a month.”
“But that means you’ll be late going to school,” he said, a bit bewildered. I’d caught him off guard, which was my plan.
“It’ll be fine. I’ll be there for the first day of classes.”
There must’ve been something in my voice, because my dad did a double take. His eyes narrowed, and his usually fidgety hands went very still. His Spidey sense was working.
“Harry, how long have you been planning this? You said you have a van, you made a record, and you booked more than twenty shows, that’s not something you do overnight, is it.”
“I don’t know, I guess a couple of months.”
“And why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I was afraid you’d say no.”
“But what if I say no now?”
I was silent because we both knew the answer. I was going with or without his blessing. But he was digging for something else here.
“You know, the check we sent to Scranton hasn’t been cashed yet.”
This is the scene in the movie where the prisoner has just escaped from the cellblock and is skulking along the interior perimeter of a giant brick wall when a massive floodlight stops him in his tracks. Busted.
“Huh,” I said, trying to act cool, “that’s weird.”
“I should say so. Tell me, Harry, if I call the school and ask why, what do you think they’ll tell me?”
Stick with the lie, I told myself, ride it all the way to the end. “Probably some clerical mistake,” I said. “I’ll call them for you and find out.”
“Aha!” He pointed at me. My offer to call, or rather my effort to stop him from calling, was the clue he was looking for. “You never mailed the check, did you? You used that money for your band’s little tour!” When he got angry his Boston accent became more pronounced. The “a” in band was flattened, and “tour” became “taw.”
“No! Dad, I wouldn’t steal from you! Besides,” I said, thinking fast, “if I’d used the check, it would’ve been cashed, right?” This calmed him down a bit.
“Hmm. Yes, yes, I can see where that would be true.” But he still wasn’t convinced. “Then what happened to it?”
“Really, Dad, I don’t know. I’ll call the school and find out.”
“No, Harry, I’ll call the school.” He went to his home office to get the phone number and make the call, leaving me in the kitchen to sit and think.
I figured I had three options:
Option #1: Run. Get out of the house and get on tour. Things would sort themselves out. Only problem was, all our gear was in my parents’ basement. And I had nowhere to go and nowhere to hide for the three weeks until the tour started.
Option #2: Go find my dad right then and there and confess. Do it before he makes the call and maybe he’ll go easy. Tell him everything and let the chips fall where they may.
Option #3: Wait it out. Let an opportunity present itself to me.
I chose door number three.
Five minutes later my father came back into the kitchen. I was still sitting at the table. I didn’t look up.
“Isn’t that strange,” he said.
“Did they get the check?” I asked.
“Why you cheeky little bastard,” he said. I kept my head down. “You lied about everything, didn’t you?”
No answer from me. I kept my eyes glued to the Formica surface of that kitchen table.
“The school has never heard of you. Not even an application. You’ve been playing this charade for months. For the first time in my life I wish I was a violent man so I could beat the living daylights out of you.” My dad was just getting wound up. When he stumbled into a morally righteous position, all bets were off. His paternal soul gave way to his political mind as he figured out how best to eviscerate me.
I sat there with my head down as my father spewed a rainstorm of abuse on me. I was so wrapped up in my own world, trying to figure a way out, that I only caught sporadic words and phrases from his rant.
“Ingrate.”
“Thankless.”
“We sacrificed everything for you.”
“Toaster.” I looked up at that one, not sure how a toaster figured into what he was saying, but he was so lost in the brilliance of his own argument that he hardly noticed I was still there. It went on and on and on and on.
Then I heard “failure,” and “loser” in rapid succession. He was probably saying something like “I don’t want you to be a failure,” and “Don’t end up as a loser,” but I didn’t hear the context and the words were like a trigger. I’d had enough. It was time to play my one and only card.
“You’re right, Dad,” I interrupted him with an edge. My tone caught his attention and I could
see that he was shocked I was talking back. “I guess it’s just what us god damn freaks do, isn’t it.” I met his eyes and held his gaze. Let him stare at my mangled face, I thought. Let him see his son.
My dad knew exactly what I was saying. He was the only person on the planet with a more vivid and more painful memory of that day at the lighthouse than me. He knew this was my golden ticket, that there was nothing he could say. And I knew this wouldn’t work for me more than once. At least my deformities had taught me how to choose my battles.
He started to say something almost a full minute later, but then thought better of it. He flopped down into a chair. And just like that, it was over. I had won.
GONE DADDY GONE
(written by Willie Dixon and Gordon Gano, and performed by the Violent Femmes)
A few days after school ended we were loading equipment into “Dino,” the name with which we’d christened the Econoline. We made trip after trip from my parents’ basement and through the garage to the open and waiting cargo doors of the van.
We carried our cymbals stands, guitars, and amps past the lawn mower, the beach chairs, and the old Schwinn; around the tin saucer used for sledding, the bucket and brush and Rain Dance for washing cars, and the fifty-foot coiled snake of green garden hose; and over a haphazard collection of rakes, shovels, and sawed-off two-by-fours. My father stood guard, trying, but failing, not to scowl each time one of us went by. He was dressed in khaki shorts, a brightly colored, striped polo shirt, and boat shoes. A “NY State National Guard” hat covered his thinning hair. The skin on his exposed legs was translucent white, his veins and arteries tracing obvious lines down the length of his shin. He leaned on a golf putter, using it as a cane to support his ailing back.
