My Father's Footprints

by Colin McEnroe

  Pizza is a wonderful thing, but it has become terrifying in our house because of the way the pies are cut in the Hartford suburbs.

  The pizza parlor, instead of cutting the large pie into long, tapering triangles, creates trapezoidal pieces with crusts along the perimeter and then, in the middle of the circle, a cluster of pieces that have no crusts. I have come to think of those as “filets,” although at the time of our troubles, I am incapable of irony about pizza, incapable, really, of any attitude save gnawing fear.

  My mother takes the position that

  the filets are intensely desirable, and that

  the way to preserve order is to create a social compact that states that only when all the outer pieces have been consumed can one then move on to the filets.

  (You would have thought that we were a large, grabby family, but, in fact, there were just the three of us, which somehow made it worse. We perhaps had too many choices about how we would eat the pizza.)

  My father takes the position that

  he wants the filets whenever he wants them, possibly when they are hot and fresh and when he is still hungry, and that

  he is not a signatory to any social compact.

  My position is that if I eat very fast, I might consume a certain amount of pizza before the inevitable argument comes.

  This never works because, after eating maybe one warm-up slice from the outer ring and thus creating the necessary channel to the filets, my father will take one of them, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if he were unaware that he was venturing out into disputed international filet-fishing waters, as if we were not a thoroughly crazy family.

  And my mother will start a steady drumbeat of sullen protest. “Bob, you know you’re not supposed to eat those pieces first. You’re just going to make me eat the other piece faster because I’m worried. I’m going to have stomach trouble tonight because of it. What do you think you’re doing?”

  “What I think,” my father will say, “is that people should do exactly what you tell them to do.”

  And we’ll be off.

  None of this is mischievous or playful or even the strange frictive pleasure that some long-married couples derive from getting on each other’s nerves in inconsequential ways. This is bigger and meaner than that. The pizza is a Great Mandala upon which some terrible, fateful game is being played out, and its center is a collection point for the bittersweet forces surging between my parents.

  Various reforms are attempted. At one point—something tells me this came after The Incident, which I am about to describe—we experiment with color-coded toothpicks. I might be green, my father blue, my mother red. (That seems symbolically about right.) In the fashion of sixteenth-century European explorers, one plants the flag of one’s toothpick in a piece of pizza and claims it for future use. Only when all the pieces have been claimed by various imperialists can we begin to eat.

  Actually, the flag method is a very satisfactory way of doing things, not because it is foolproof but because it makes us feel so silly that my parents are too embarrassed to fight.

  No such reform is in place on the night of The Incident, in the spring of my sophomore year. The filet battle is unfolding in its usual manner, which means that I do not have a speaking role. My part involves scrunching in my seat while my colon pulses to the dull, venomous rhythm of the argument.

  “Why don’t you stop acting like a two-year-old?” I hear someone say. It is me. I seem to be addressing my father. My parents are both completely horrible, but my father is the aggressor and, anyway, my mother, whose indoctrination abilities would have made her a person of significant rank in the Khmer Rouge, has trained me to feel protective toward her.

  “You are an ill-mannered, disgusting boor,” he bellows at me.

  “Don’t say that,” my mother tells him.

  “He called me a two-year-old!”

  “Well, you are acting like a two-year-old.”

  What followed exists, in my mind, only as a kind of white light, like the flash of a nuclear blast. I had never before, during all of my childhood, directly stood up to one of my parents. It would be satisfying, sort of, to report that I now let out a flood of righteous protest, but I do not.

  In fact, the “two-year-old” remark is the full measure of my rebellion. Even that is too much for the delicate balance of power in our house. We are three jiggers of nitroglycerine dangling from a Calder mobile. It takes only the trifling zephyr of my outburst to detonate us. This is not going to be like Tyler C. Tingley’s outburst. It is not going to make things better.

  I have a master plan to run the world by. There are many details to be worked out—many snags to untangle. With knowing smile, you nod and cluck tongue to palate. All madmen want to run the world; few get to do so. The rest finger beads and fondle wooden dolls.

  The Nemo Paradox

  What happens next? I’m honestly not sure. My recollection is that he leaves the house and doesn’t come back that night and that the next place I see him is the hospital, but I suspect I may have telescoped the events to increase the sense of cause and effect and deepen my own sense of guilt.

  Let us say that within a day or so, my mother comes to pick me up at school, which is unusual. It is a lovely late afternoon in the spring, redolent with the smell of cut grass and tenderly lit by the fading sun. I approach the car in a state of moderate chagrin, having just been cut from the junior varsity baseball team. After years of ineptitude in the outfield, I have been trying to adapt myself to my father’s old position, first base, and a throw from second has, on this day, somehow hit me in the head. Coach Gorham Smith, who is my Latin teacher and is fond of me, has cut me to save my life, I think.

  My mother tells me the news as if it were an egg whose yolk she is trying not to break. My father has been found in a motel. He is in a coma. He seems to have ingested quite a bit of alcohol and quite a few sleeping pills, although there is no way of knowing how much. There is no way of knowing anything really. There was no note.

  We drive quite some distance before either of us uses any word or phrase like “suicide” or “kill himself.” But eventually we do. We have no way of knowing, my mother says again, what this was. It might have been—just for example—a cry for help.

  It seems like an idea for a single-panel cartoon. A woman screaming, “Help!” leans out of an upper story window of a burning building. One fireman says to another: “You never know. It might just be a cry for help.”

  The word “coma” turns out to be somewhat misleading. Or maybe I just have a Hollywood-tinctured notion of what a coma is: a person lying quietly. The sleeping pills my father has taken affect the central nervous system, and the overload makes him writhe and thrash in his unconscious state. His hands and feet are tied to the hospital bed, but he twists and buckles like a man wrestling a ghost. Or like Prometheus, chained to a rock and gnawed in the liver by an invisible eagle. There is a bloody bandage on his face, suggesting some kind of nasal hemorrhage. He looks wild, untamable, dangerous.

  I am seized by the fear that he will wake up and try to finish the job he started. It strikes me that if he is not officially considered a suicidal patient, the hospital might not restrain or observe him.

  I find a doctor and tell him my thoughts: that it is crucial my father’s hands be tied, no matter what. This must sound a little strange coming from the mouth of a fifteen-year-old, but the doctor is very nice. He says he understands. My father will not be given any freedom to hurt himself until we all know what is what.

  After a while, I realize I don’t want to stay at the hospital. I want go to home and watch my favorite television show, which is on that night: Ironside, with Raymond Burr. It seems very wrong of me to want this, but I do, with a strange kind of desperation. Not even for the comforting bulk of Raymond Burr at this troubling moment but just because I want to watch the show. Because it’s my favorite show and it’s on, you know? How am I going to bring this up without seeming callous? I
worry that if I try to watch it, my mother will rebuke me for lacking the solemnity and full focus these circumstances demand.

  We do go home, and in the car, we talk over the possibility, no, the probability that this was a suicide attempt, and I tell my mother, “The only thing that makes it hard for me to believe is that I’m so important to him.”

  I really mean it. Even in the recent terrible times, I have never doubted my father’s love. The idea that he doesn’t want to be around for the rest of my youth just doesn’t fit with what I know about him.

  I’m forty-eight now, and I want to reach into the darkness of that car, driving through Hartford on a strange night, and tell that kid he’s working hard on a puzzle with three-fifths of the pieces missing. And it’s not that I know now what those pieces are, only that I’ve arrived at a gentle agnosticism about people. We don’t ever have the whole picture, and the child of the suicide is in pretty much the same boat as the biographer. People are pretty complicated, and we don’t show all our cards. If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, is there a person in the world who could really explain you? Is there anyone to whom you have told your whole story, omitting nothing?

  And kid, kid, kid, a person can hold two contradictory ideas in his head. A father can want to see every breath you draw and be off this planet, right now.

  We go home. I mention, with studied casualness, that I might want to watch television, just to give my mind a break. My mother leaps at the idea with a ferocious gratitude I hadn’t expected. She has been wondering what to do with me. She gets on the phone and starts calling anybody who might help her through this, which is a pretty short list because my parents have let most of their friendships lapse.

  So, still feeling guilty about having trivial impulses in a momentous time, I watch Raymond Burr. I sleep. By the next morning, two uncles are on the scene. And the maroon Impala wagon has been towed from the motel where my father overdosed. He is still in a coma, and my uncles, like the rest of us, are puzzled by the lack of a note.

  Yes, where is the note? How am I supposed to apply all my Beatles-tested skills to this situation with no text from which to extract clues? “She said, I know what it’s like to be dead.” I am trained in this stuff, but I need raw material. Where is the yellow pad?

  They send me out to search the car, to make sure no such scrap has been overlooked. Or maybe to get rid of me while they discuss some horrific new aspect.

  There is no note, but as I kneel in the driveway and reach under the front seat, my hand closes around something hard and smooth.

  I pull a black handgun from under the seat. I think it’s fair to say I have a moment of serious disorientation. Life is now a Magritte painting where objects will just kind of appear in discordant settings for no reason. “Ce n’est pas une gun.” “He blew his mind out in a car. He didn’t notice that the light had changed.” “Happiness is a warm…” Bang Bang Fuck You. There are suddenly too many clues.

  I walk in the house with the gun in my hand, thus provoking a startled response from the adults. And in my mother, when the significance of what I hold registers, I sense something else, almost hear her stolid Yankee fortitude snap, crumple, sag for the first time. She doesn’t cry or lose her composure, but, the way a dog can sniff out your emotive states, all of us in the room sense that somehow the hull of her toughness has been breached. She is taking on water.

  I climbed up on the end of my bunk and looked out the window. The sky is very blue, and the trees and grass are deep, rich green. I am like Lazarus. I see the world again. It is alive and extremely beautiful.

  The Nemo Paradox

  We get a call from the hospital. My father is conscious. When we arrive he is actually sitting up a little bit. He is, he reports, glad to be alive.

  “When I woke up, I looked out the window, and the first thing I could see was that parking garage. And it was so beautiful. What a beautiful parking garage,” he says.

  Had he tried to kill himself?

  “Oh, yes.”

  But he is happy he failed, he assures us again. He wants his hands untied. I don’t trust him.

  “It’s medieval,” he says, nodding his head at the restraints. Twenty-eight years later, he will use those exact words to complain about the hospital bed that hospice puts in his apartment.

  We spoon-feed him some broth and Jell-O.

  “How is it?” my mother asked.

  “Abominable.”

  This is said with a trace of a smirk. He is back in his old habit of choosing words to amuse himself. It strikes me right then that he is probably telling the truth about not wanting to be dead.

  Over the course of that day, he tells us a little bit more but not much. He tells us why there had been no note.

  “I was trying to do a Dorothy Kilgallen,” he says.

  I have no idea what this means, but my mother seems to know. Dorothy Kilgallen had apparently overdosed while so inebriated that nobody could really prove it wasn’t an accident. Most life insurance policies cover accidental death but not suicide, the idea being that insurance companies are offended by people having control over their own destinies. My father had hoped to leave us in a position to receive his death benefit. We don’t know it then, but this is a pressing concern because he has racked up ruinous personal debts during his downward spiral.

  We are broke and then some.

  How about the gun?

  “I had no idea what this would be like. If it were unbearably painful, I thought I would finish myself off,” he says.

  Jesus.

  SADIE

  What did the psychiatrist find out about your mind?

  WILLIE BURKE

  Nothing yet. I’ve only been to him seven or eight times.

  SADIE

  Then it’s foolish. You either need an enema, a chorus girl or a ride on a roller coaster. Try all three and you’ll still save money.

  The Exorcism

  My father is assigned to a psychiatrist who confirms that he no longer needs physical restraints. He is transferred to CCU-2, the psychiatric ward of Hartford Hospital. And there he stays for weeks. I visit every day, often taking the bus from Kingswood. My mother meets me there, and we eat dinner in the hospital cafeteria most nights. I wouldn’t describe it as an idyllic time, but the sheer bulk of the hospital, populated day and night by competent, purposeful people, is comforting. We feel safe.

  My father decides to tell most of his secrets to the psychiatrist and very few to us. That leaves, for him and me, a sort of Madman’s Biathlon consisting of uncountable hours of ping-pong and pool in the day room. We get especially good at ping-pong with lots of lightning rallies, tickety tickety tickety, punctuated by satisfying smashes. Probably something wordless and primitive is being worked out between us in those games. As the weeks progress I begin to notice a small knot of men standing off to the side, watching, waiting for the games to be over.

  These turned out to be members of a sort of cult or gang, of which my dad is the leader. They trail around after him as he agitates for various reforms, conducts his own explorations of life’s mysteries, and hatches plots to confound the authorities. What are the real issues of existence, not the dopey ones they make us talk about in group? Why are we stringing beads in occupational therapy? What has that got to do with man’s search for meaning? Who the hell wants ham and scalloped potatoes, mushed together in a casserole, once a week? Follow me, men. Socially awkward in most other settings, he is, in the psych ward, a kind of charismatic mountebank.

  My parents decide, in their usual forthcoming fashion, to tell no one about what has happened. I am instructed not to share this story with any friends. My mother warns me—in a style now familiar to the reader—of the dire consequences should this story be widely disseminated. My father would be unemployable; we would be uninsurable; we would all die in the streets.

  It would be necessary to say something to the world.

  “I have been thinking about that,” my father says on the first or
second day after his awakening, “and it struck me that ‘nervous breakdown’ might be the best we could do.” My mother vetoes it. She isn’t having any truck with nervous breakdowns. The official explanation is that my father accidentally took “a toxic combination of medications.” I say the words “toxic combination of medications” so many times in so many situations that it acquires the numbing meter of a litany. Another goddamned secret.

  My mother has a high-pressure, low-paying job as an office manager in an industry-lobbying firm. Every day, she holds that together without cracking, but at night, the anxieties overwhelm her. She cannot fall asleep unless I lie in my father’s twin bed. Welcome to Thebes-on-the-Connecticut. It’s sort of Oedipus Lite. I have almost killed Dad and am almost sleeping with Mom.

  And then one day he comes home. My mother and I are uneasy. We have come to find the whole nuthouse sky rather sheltering. Everything is so secure and professional over there in the hospital. Werner’s house seems, by contrast, infested with land mines and staffed by amateurs.

  But my father really is better. This is not a course of therapy I would recommend to most people, but in his unique circumstances, a self-induced near-death experience was just the ticket. He is happier than I’ve ever seen him, and his old gentleness, familiar from my childhood, has returned. It is nearly impossible to talk about my father without resorting to polytheistic imagery, with his gnomes and fairies and incubi and little people. So let me say that all that booze and Seconal appears to have flushed the demons out of him.

  “It sounds crazy,” he writes to me, years and years later, “but the act of suicide is a positive act and not a negative one. The suicider revs himself up and does the deed he feels must be done… Suicide is not a passive act. The man who puts his head in an oven or points a gun at his head may appear to be gently giving up the ghost. This is not true. It takes a great deal of emotional effort—misguided or not—to take one’s life.”