Helen drove us back to the house after dinner. Chuong was pretty lit. We sat in the kitchen and talked. He showed me pictures of his family, Chin’s boys, Chase and Chandler, and his son, Charles. All boys, he said, all Ch names, like him and Chin. I wanted to explain to him that it was a little ironic for a Vietnamese boy to be named Charlie, but I thought better of it.
It was hot in the kitchen, so Chuong unbuttoned his shirt. I saw ink.
“You have tattoos? Let me see.”
“No,” he said, pulling his shirt closed.
“Chuong, he shy,” Helen said. She reached down and grabbed his lapels and spread his shirt. Chuong didn’t resist, just rolled his head to glare drunkenly up at her.
He had one tattoo. A shaky outline that covered his entire torso, a star inside it. A handmade poke-and-stick tattoo. He had taught me how to do them when we were kids, a sewing needle stuck in the eraser of a pencil, thread wrapped around it to hold the ink. It was the outline of Vietnam, with a star for Saigon, his hometown.
“Where did you get this done?”
Chuong hadn’t said anything about going to prison, but this looked an awful lot like a prison tattoo.
“Right here.” He pointed to the floor, indicating his kitchen. “My buddy, we copy from Vietnamese menu. One night only.”
“Chuong, he very drunk,” Helen said. “So, so drunk like crazy. Take long time.” She petted his hair, rubbed his neck.
“Chuong, when you found me . . . when we talked for the first time . . . how did you feel? What did you do?” I said.
He shrugged.
“I feel . . . good. I feel happy. Here,” he said, gesturing at his chest with pursed fingers, “in my soul.”
“Oh, Chuong,” Helen said, smiling gaily, shaking her head. “Chuong cry. He cry and cry and cry!”
My whole life, I’d felt like an alien, exiled in America. I’d thought of myself, romantically, as a wild orphan, a lost boy. But I had never been lost—I had been hiding. Chuong was the lost boy; he had been all along. He had been trying desperately to be found, to find his way.
One day an envelope from Amazon came in the mail. I weighed it in my hand—had to be the check. I recalled the feeling I’d had, when I got my acceptance letter from Simon’s Rock, that my whole life was about to change. Christ, almost twenty years ago. I brought the envelope upstairs and carefully slit it open in the kitchen. I read the numbers on the check. I read the numbers again. Then I put it back in the envelope. I took it out again. I read the numbers again.
I brought the check with me to work that night. When Mike Stewart showed up, I asked him if I could talk to him outside for a second.
“Of course, man. After you,” he said, pointing to the door.
I felt like shit for what I was about to do. Mike had been a friend for a long time, long enough to know that he should have never hired me in the first place. But he had, and he had become one of the pillars in my new life.
“What’s up, man?” he said when we were outside.
“Shit, man. I feel like I’m breaking up with you! I need to quit.”
Mike nodded.
“I understand. This bar, it’s a way station. It’s not a career, it’s just a gig. You do it till you get something else happening, and then you move on. I’m always glad when that happens. Can I ask why you’re quitting?”
I withdrew the check from my pocket and handed it to him. It was the biggest check I’d ever seen in my life—more than $9,000. And that was just for my first month of sales.
Mike’s face lit up. His jaw dropped, and he looked at me, then whooped.
“Holy shit, dude! I’ll quit, too!”
Mike wasn’t big on hugs, but he shook my hand for a long time that night.
My trips to visit my father had become more frequent, twice a year or more if I could squeeze it in. Each visit was a little less treacherous, a little less fragile, even occasionally approaching something I would call fun. I was curious about my father’s life, and I asked him if he would let me interview him on tape. To my surprise, he agreed, so we sat down one day, my iPhone between us on the dining room table, recording the conversation.
“Should we just dive right into it, Dad?”
He snorted.
“Is there any other way to do it?”
“Okay. I guess . . . when did you realize that you had to leave the marriage?”
“Well . . . I can’t just give you a time and a date, you know? I’ve got to go a ways back. I always felt stressed and strained. When we were living in Los Alamos, there were two occasions when I blacked out. In one situation, I’d had maybe two glasses of wine. I biked to my friend’s place, and I got off my motorcycle. Then I woke up on his couch.
“But the second time, I was stone sober. I woke up in an ambulance headed to the hospital in Los Alamos, strapped to a gurney, getting pumped full of antianxiety drugs ’cause I was convinced I was dying.”
I hadn’t remembered this. As my father spoke, I recalled it happening and little snippets of information filtering down to us kids from my mother. But it wasn’t something I had carried around in my head while I was taking cruel measure of my father.
“When we moved to New Hampshire, I stopped blacking out, but it wasn’t unusual for me to have ‘brownouts.’ I’d be driving into work, then wake up on the highway going sixty or seventy miles an hour with no idea where I was. Sometimes I’d overshot my office by forty-five minutes.
“I figured, I have to do something, I can’t keep on going this way. At your mother’s urging, I went to see a psychiatrist who specialized in work-related stress. The second meeting, the shrink said, ‘Your problem isn’t work. Your problem is your home relationship.’ I went ballistic. I was ready to walk out of there. After I calmed down, she said, ‘I think you just proved my point.’ I wouldn’t accept it. I just couldn’t accept it. Then, for whatever reason, you guys all decided you wanted to move back to Canada.”
“Dad, I don’t . . . I don’t remember this at all. I mean, the way I remember it, you sought out a job in Vancouver because you were so unhappy in your job in New Hampshire.”
“I was unhappy, but by this time I was beginning to realize that it wasn’t the job. You always have disagreements with your bosses and so on but, working with this psychiatrist, I began to realize what the problem was. The problem was that I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be a husband. I didn’t want to be a father. I didn’t want to have to do all these things that my father kept telling me I needed to do. And I didn’t want to always feel guilty about doing something for myself.”
It jumped out at me that my father was speaking as though his father had been present: “my father kept telling me . . .” When we moved to New Hampshire, his father had been dead for more than ten years.
“You guys just hated it in New Hampshire. You hated the people, you hated the kids; it was such an awful place to live. I had a really good job. I was making lots of money. The housing market had gone way down. I didn’t want to move. But the way it was put to me was, ‘We all want to move back to Canada.’ Alright, so . . . that’s what I have to do.
“Recruiters had always been wanting me to move, and one of them was from Vancouver. So I moved to Vancouver, which was the worst job situation I have ever been in, bar none.”
My dad realized that he’d been talking a lot. He looked at me, waiting for me to say something. I couldn’t speak. It was starting to come back to me. We had mounted an extended campaign to move back to Canada. Mom & the Kids vs. Dad, the way it had always been. Finally, he had capitulated. I had forgotten this completely. Or wiped it from my memory.
“Uh . . . just keep going, Dad,” I finally got out.
“Okay, so . . . I was in Vancouver working with this guy, and I couldn’t believe how crooked he was. It was unbelievably bad. I was kind of ready for the police to burst in at any moment and haul us all off to jail . . . because I was complicit in some of this stuff. Even with that bullshit, I’d had no p
roblems in Vancouver—no brownouts, no blackouts, nothing.
“To answer your original question, I realized my marriage to your mother was over during that second visit with the psychiatrist. But I didn’t accept it till a lot later. You guys came up to Vancouver for a visit in April.”
I remembered that trip. We stayed not at my father’s apartment but in a hotel room. Freddie Mercury had just died, and his farewell concert had been the only thing on TV, an endless loop. I had been miserable.
“Ten minutes, fifteen minutes after you guys arrived, I was like, okay, the shrink was right. This is the problem. The family is the problem. And if I don’t do something, I’ll be dead by my own hand in a year. That’s when I accepted that I had to do something about it.”
Unloading the silverware from the dishwasher once, I had grabbed a heavy, sharp knife by the blade. I realized what I had done and loosened my grip without letting go completely, and as the knife slid out of my hand, it cut deep into the pads of my fingers. To finally hear my father say how much he hadn’t wanted us, how much he hadn’t wanted me . . . it was exquisitely painful.
“Even after that trip, I wrote some of these really loving love letters to your mother—this was after you guys had been there—trying to convince myself. But in the morning, when I read them . . . well, I couldn’t send them, because I knew that it wasn’t true. I mean, I say I accepted it, but, really, I vacillated wildly. It was an incredibly dark time for me, walking around Vancouver alone, worried I was losing my mind.
“Because to me, I was an absolute failure if I got divorced. Everything my dad had drilled into my head said that getting divorced would be admitting that I had completely failed in my role. But I was convinced I was going to be dead soon if I didn’t.”
“Were you able to make a distinction between being a husband and being a father?”
“At that time . . . no, I don’t think I could distinguish. Mishka, realize that in our family there was Elaine and the kids . . . and then there was Murray.”
“As I’ve gotten older, that’s become clearer to me. And Dad . . . I’m sorry.”
“Well, it wasn’t anything that you did. Apparently, from talking to various different counselors, this is pretty standard: the mother builds a wall by, you know, having the kids have dinner first, and then Dad has dinner by himself. Each time, there were good reasons for it, but the aggregate result . . . Listen, Elaine’s family situation was pretty dysfunctional as well. Her father was an alcoholic, like mine. I don’t hold a grudge against her. She did what she thought was right, you know, what she had been programmed to do. As did I.”
“I try to put myself in your shoes, you know, putting in a long day’s work to provide for your family, fighting your way through traffic, then walking in the door to a family that is united against you. That would be incredibly hard for me.”
“It’s interesting—a year or so after we broke the news, I was up in Boulder, talking with Tatyana. She said, ‘Dad, you should have done it years before. It just wrecked everybody for you to stick around that long!’
“But, Mishka, let me tell you, it was the most difficult thing I had ever done in my life. That’s why, as much as the Simon’s Rock shooting had an impact on you, I couldn’t be there for you. I was thankful that you’d survived, but I was just completely burned out. That whole period is a blank in my memory.
“When I told your mom I wanted a divorce, she laughed at me because she said she didn’t think I had the guts to do it. You remember our old dog, Princess? Well, Princess came over and put her nose and one paw on my foot, like she was trying to comfort me. So I remember little things like that. But that’s it.”
“When I found out about the divorce, I went and got a roll of quarters . . . because I thought you had to have a roll of quarters in your hand to punch somebody out. And then when we got to the airport and I saw you . . . I couldn’t. ’Cause you were my dad, you know? I felt like a total failure because I couldn’t do it.”
He looked at me with sympathy and shrugged.
“Looking back, even shortly after I’d left, there were many things that happened where I should have just bailed. But it took all of those things for me to get my courage up to admit that I was a total fucking failure. Which is really what it was. For me, I had to admit that I was a complete failure as a man because I could not do this husband-father thing.
“When I wrote up the thing for the annulment, I had a really difficult time with it. The priest said to me, ‘Don’t you think you’re coming down just a little too hard on yourself?’ And my reaction was, ‘Well, no, of course not. I’m a complete failure. I have completely failed.’”
“There’s no such thing as being too hard on yourself.”
He nodded.
“But as soon as I said that to the priest, I was like, oh shit. It wasn’t just me. Because all along, everyone—myself included—was convinced it was just me. It was always my fault. Even if someone was laying a guilt trip on me, it was my fault because I allowed them to do that. That process helped me realize that, though I had made mistakes and I had certainly done things wrong, that I hadn’t done every single thing wrong.”
“If you had it to do over, what would you do differently? Are you able to articulate specifically what you would have wanted? I mean . . . did you ever want to have children?”
“Nope. No. I never saw myself as having children. I never saw myself as being married. I saw myself as a hermit scientist. If I had to do it over again, would I do something differently? Yeah, there’s one pivotal thing that I would have done differently. When Elaine showed up at my door and said she was going to move in with me, I would have said no.”
I had to hand it to him. He had picked the right decision to undo. Undoing his marriage to my mother erased her, erased me, erased all of us. One discrete correction, and we all disappeared.
“Letting Elaine move in was a mistake. I should have said no. But I couldn’t because I felt guilty. I wasn’t ready to get married. I wasn’t ready to settle down. It wasn’t part of my picture. I’d had it drilled into me that when you get married and have a family, you don’t count anymore. My father would say, ‘You’re not better than the rest of them because you’re smarter. You’re less than the rest of them.’”
“Wow. Dad, that’s . . . totally counterintuitive.”
“I know. But as far as he was concerned, it was my responsibility to take care of others. Anyone, but especially my family.”
“It strikes me as bizarrely ironic that, from a young age and then very much so as I got older, I told myself, I’m going to be totally different from my dad. I’m not going to do what he did. I’m going to do my own thing. Instead, I’m very much like you—the guilt, holing up and tinkering with my guitars late at night like a mad scientist, going on long runs alone . . .”
“And you’re doing all the things I wish I had done.”
“All the shit I felt would be a colossal disappointment to you.”
“Mishka, I always wanted to be a musician. So many of the good scientists I knew were musicians, whether it was a flute or a piano or a guitar. I wanted to do that! But I chose a different path. No, to be honest, I feel like I had a different path chosen for me. When you grow up in an alcoholic family . . . my mother was a champion at guilt. It took me a long time to realize how easily manipulated I was. And I didn’t have the courage or faith in my own convictions to say no.”
“You weren’t incredibly supportive.”
“No, I wasn’t. You have to understand, I had it drilled into my head from a very young age that you had to support your family. That was job number one, and there was no job number two. I’ll say it, Mishka: I was wrong. I wanted you to do something more practical. Or at least have something to fall back on. Because, shit, it’s hard to make it as a musician or a writer! And I’ll admit it, I didn’t think you could do it. And I’ll say it again, Mishka: I was wrong.”
His arms were crossed, as they were always crossed. I noti
ced it, and he noticed me notice it.
“I’m sorry. I know that this is kind of a . . . closed position. But if I let my arms hang down, I just feel like a chimpanzee. So I’m like, fuck it, you know? I’m comfortable this way.”
“It’s cool, Dad. I know. That’s like the default Dad position. We can leave it here, if you want.”
“No, let’s keep going.”
“You sure? I feel like I’ve dragged you through a lot.”
“It’s not fun, but look at it from my point of view. It’s important for you to know some of this. For the first time since the divorce, you’ve asked me for my side of the story.
“It’s been tough for you guys. I know that. I remember one time—this was in Pleasanton when I was living with Lis—Tatyana came to the door. She’d been there earlier that day, and she’d gone away to do something, and then she’d come back. I looked out ’cause there was this little side window and . . . I saw her just standing there, frozen, not knowing what to do. She didn’t know whether she could just walk in or whether she had to ring the bell. And I thought, How bad are things that she doesn’t feel she can just walk into her Dad’s house?
“So I know it’s been hard for you guys. But—and it’s taken me a long time to be able to say this—it’s been tough for me too. Very tough. The hardest thing I’ve been through in my life. All of it has been tough, from long before the divorce up until, oh, maybe a couple of years ago. I’ll even say this: thank you for asking me about it. It’s a great relief to be able to tell it. And Mishka, even if I remember it wrong, this is how I remember it.
“People misremember things. One thing that bothers me . . . a couple years before Marilyn died, I went up there to visit her, and we went through our old report cards from school.”
“She had your report cards? I don’t think I have my grade school report cards. Hell, I don’t have any of the fancy degrees I haven’t paid for.”
“Oh yeah, Marilyn kept all that stuff. It was really curious to go through them. When I was a kid, I was the golden boy. My parents put a lot of pressure on me. I had to be at the top of the class. There was no question about that. And then the reason I was at the top of the class was because I was their little genius. It wasn’t easy pulling down those grades because life on the farm was hard. From the day school let out, I worked from dawn to dark, sometimes later. But I remember being the smart one—getting the grades, getting the awards, getting the praise. And Marilyn hated me for it.
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