My Father Before Me (13 page)

What should I make of this? My cheeks warm, I walked out the front door and around to the back of the cabin. The pillow lay in the high weeds. I picked it up and brought it back inside. The boy yanked it from my hands again and, to the others' glee, held it out the window for a moment, then dropped it, chanting, “Tigermaster! Tigermaster!” Trembling, suppressing tears, I asked him not to do that anymore and retrieved my pillow. He did it again. Then he grew weary of it, plopped onto his bunk, and stared at nothing, flicking his tongue against his top lip.

Later that first day, my assigned counselor, a wiry, crew-cut high-schooler, observed in front of the assembled boys that my hair—which had begun to creep over my ears, Brady Bunch–style—was too long,
didn't they agree? Did they have a hippie in their midst? He promised them he would scrounge up some scissors and, that night as I slept, sneak up on me and do what the barber had neglected to do.

I was a Forhan, mired deep in the habit, when unnerved, of retreating into rigidity and good manners; I requested that he not do that, please. Each morning after that, at the bugle's call, I rose immediately and made my bed neatly. After each meal, I brushed my teeth with vigor. I asked the counselor if he needed assistance carrying those dodgeballs. On the last evening before going home, I received an official commendation: the counselor had named me honor camper, the most obedient boy in the cabin.

I had successfully kept my head down—including literally. Throughout the week, whenever I walked toward the boat dock on the lakeshore, I avoided raising my gaze to the top window of the big main lodge. With hushed voices, shaking their heads, the counselors had warned us about a former colleague of theirs, a young man who had worked at the camp a couple of years before, someone who had been quite a jovial fellow, immensely popular, but who had gone absolutely mad. Stark raving. He'd been separated from the rest of the camp, confined to the attic of the lodge. If he got loose, he'd be dangerous. It had happened once already, and the consequences to an innocent camper who'd found himself in the madman's path were something they didn't care to discuss. Occasionally, throughout the week, one of us boys would glimpse, he thought, the silhouette of the insane man materialize in the window, then vanish.

Stay where you are,
I thought as I walked past the lodge.
Just stay where you are.

31

My father was miles away, but who needed him? Who needed parents at all? Our little street was the children's street, the children's world. Squeezed between Puget Sound to the west and Lake Washington to the east, the city of Seattle had rapidly developed northward, and our secluded dead-end street in the far northeast corner of town was lined on both sides with houses now. At the closed-off end, where I had once dropped that lit match, there were no woods at all anymore: just a tract of upturned dirt, a vast construction site, where a final few houses were rising shoulder to shoulder around a cul-de-sac. Adults had bought these homes. Adults would live in them. But we didn't have to think about that. Where once, stepping into the rich shade of dense trees, we imagined we were vanishing into the frontier wilderness, we now called to each other across wide concrete slabs sprouting rebar. We gaped at colossal bulldozers and backhoes, ponderous single-minded beasts, inexorably erasing the landscape we knew. And we loved them: their hugeness, their grinding and grunting, their smokestacks puffing black exhaust, their treads with thick muck stuck to them. Who needed parents? We befriended a bulldozer operator, Nels—someone who would greet us with a grin and a salute as we stood, rapt, at the edge of the work site, who would load up his arms with a pile of scrap lumber and hand it over to us, telling us we ought to build something,
too. One evening, the construction crew gone, dusk settling in, my friend William and I strayed, as if pulled by some deep invisible current, up the street to the work site. Nels' bulldozer sat empty, idle. We clambered up and in, plunking ourselves down behind the wheel. We were grown-ups. We were tough and taciturn construction workers. Then we saw what we had half hoped we would not see: the key in the ignition. What choice did we have now? William reached forward and turned the key. The engine sputtered awake. We leaped from the bulldozer, leaving it running, scampered off, and told no one.

Up and down the street, there were yards to frolic in, expanses of grass on which we gathered and had no parents. At dusk in summer, we played a game in which one of us, dubbed the “ghost,” tried to tag the rest of us and imprison us in his dungeon. Stepping hesitantly across the grass, holding our breath, or fleeing full-tilt, we played and played as darkness rose and swallowed us. No parents. On drizzly afternoons, in dim basement rooms, we played Twister and Hands Down and Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots or, with a mouthful of Cheez-Its, stared at afternoon reruns of
Gilligan's Island
or
The Jetsons
. No parents. On sunny days, anyone's yard might be good for Slip 'n Slide or Simon Says or fireworks—a children's world, world without end, world of utter fun, except on the day, waving a lit sparkler, I misjudged my reach and slashed Kathy's chest, leaving a thin pink scar, like an embedded worm. Our street was a gradual, steady incline, ideal for picking up speed on a sled or a bike, ideal for rides of unabated pleasure, except that morning when Jennifer, at the bottom of the hill, steered her hurtling Yankee Clipper into a parked truck, and her spleen exploded, and her dad jogged from the house and picked her up and carried her, limp and moaning, to his station wagon, and except that Saturday when my feet couldn't find the spinning pedals on my five-speed and I stopped my momentum by slamming my head against a mailbox, then woke on the couch, my mother's palm warm and soft on my forehead.

One afternoon, in the backyard next door, I met a gangly, sandy-haired high school boy, Bill, who introduced me to a new game: pickleball. It was cartoonish and amusing, a kind of cross between Ping-Pong and badminton involving a paddle, a net, and a Wiffle ball. The neighbors were holding a party for the man who had invented the game: a moderate Republican—there were such things then—running for Congress. The house was full of his well-heeled supporters, and their kids, including Bill, decamped to the backyard. I didn't stand a chance against Bill on the court: he was four years older and an old hand at pickleball. However, the budding and permanent passion of Bill—who had come to the party with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Gates—was computers.

Kevin liked to fiddle with machines, too. In his downstairs bedroom across the hall from mine, he sat contentedly for hours among wires and switches and capacitors and batteries and bulbs and circuit boards, teaching himself how they functioned and how they connected. He was testing reality with his own hands, his own mind, trying to get to the bottom of it. Kevin was the one who, two decades later, would prepare for every Christmas by inventing and painstakingly constructing an original gift for his girlfriend—some intricate gizmo with little purpose but to charm: a miniature scene of skaters on a pond who would move when it was plugged in; an alarm clock that, when it went off, played one of their favorite Graham Parker songs:
I want to wake up next to you. . . .

I had been lucky, when Patty moved out of the house, to inherit her room: the one beneath our parents' and therefore identical in size and shape—the largest of the kids' rooms, half buried in the earth, with a window that offered a ground-level view of the backyard: the wooden steps that led down from the deck, the small irregular rectangle of lawn, the raised plot of cherry and apple trees. I kept to myself in that room, listening to Top 40 music on my transistor. It did not occur to me that any other music mattered—or that there was any other music. The songs were playing nonstop on the radio, after all, and playing nonstop
in my head, making a pleasing shape, and some sense, of reality: “O-o-h Child,” “No Matter What,” “Cracklin' Rosie.” After saving my lawn-mowing money and a few months of allowance, I had enough to buy a thirty-dollar portable record player at the drugstore. That gave me a reason to buy records: mostly 45s, starting with “Indian Reservation” by the Raiders. From friends and church bazaars, I bought used records by the Beatles and Three Dog Night and the Turtles. My enthusiasm had a scholarly, or at least archival, component: I set aside a college-ruled notebook in which to transcribe the lyrics of my favorite songs. I wrote about how the world is a ball of confusion. I wrote about how a poor, dying man burdens his son with a reminder that he is the only one left now to ensure that the family survives. With Casey Kasem counting down the top hits each week on the radio, I felt the necessity of ranking the records in my bedroom—of determining my personal cosmology. I still own my single of “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” with a small numeral
1
written in pencil on the picture sleeve.

I had been issued an acoustic guitar—even that late, with the 1960s over and the folk boom having waned, it was almost compulsory that middle-class adolescents own a guitar on which to strum Pete Seeger tunes. With the aid of a beginner's book, I learned a few chords. And I started writing songs that sounded like what someone would write if he were pretending to write songs. A blue-collar anthem:

I'm a workingman, I get a workingman's pay,

Even though I work an eleven-hour day.

O Lord, O Lord, there must be another way.

A piercing insight into social injustice, inspired by a poster:

There's a child, she's hungry,

Hasn't had any food for days

And she's about to die.

But people don't realize what's going on.

They don't want to take the time.

But who's going to save the children?

A lament in which, if I remember correctly, I was imagining myself as a black person:

Yesterday I came to this town.

People stood and stared, they didn't make a sound.

They just said, “You'd better leave. We don't want any fight.”

They just wanted me out of their sight.

But I don't want any sympathy, I don't want any tears.

I've been unaccepted in many places over the years.

It seems I've gone this road before many times in the past,

So I'd best get out of here and hope this time's the last.

Most of my melodies made prominent use of the E-minor chord, a heartsick sound I could make with only two fingers.

I did not share the songs with anyone. Maybe I feared they weren't good enough. More probably I kept them private because they
were
private: I sensed that, in them, I was most nakedly myself, most free to try my feelings on for size without risking censure, even if that meant pretending to be a black man.

I was recognizing, more and more, a distinct difference between what I felt and what I did, between what I imagined and created behind the closed door of my bedroom and what I professed to care about in public. I was discovering what mattered most to me and keeping silent about it.

32

For my eleventh birthday, I had a date with my father. I hadn't seen him in weeks, maybe months, but we arranged that he would drive to the house after dinner and take me out for the night. My mother had decided I was old enough to dress smartly for the occasion—old enough, she said, to own a decent overcoat, so she bought me one: calf-length, charcoal gray. Before my father arrived, she made sure that I put on my best shirt and pants and that I polished my shoes. On our way out, my father and I paused in the doorway of the house so she could take a photograph. What did my parents say to each other in that moment? Probably something brief, safe, and not impolite. In my new coat, I looked stiff and small and affected; I looked like an idea.
Little Dad
.

What did my father and I do first? Stop off for an ice cream sundae, maybe, and for harmless, perfunctory talk about how school was going? I remember only that I felt pleased to be with him after so much time apart, and hopeful—he was still my dad; his life still intersected with mine—and I felt a little awkward, conscious of the formality of the occasion, of its being a plan that we were executing. How did my father feel? Pleased, too, maybe, and hopeful and a little awkward. The central event of the evening was a trip to a downtown movie theater to see
Beneath the Planet of the Apes,
about a world turned upside
down, with apes—the self-styled superior species—ruling humans. We watched the movie's astronaut hero journey underground in search of his lost colleague, Charlton Heston. We watched the astronaut struggle to communicate with his companion on the quest, Heston's beautiful, mute female mate from whom he'd been separated. But we witnessed no stirring, permanent reunion of the lovers—only, in the end, a battle between an army of apes and a race of mutant humans who worshipped a doomsday bomb, the one that could eradicate the planet. In the last scene, Heston, shot and dying—Heston, a believer in amity, rationality, and forbearance but seeing no solution to the interminable stupid stalemate between civilizations—with his bloody hand pushed the button on the bomb and blew up the whole damned dirty thing.

We stood up. I tugged my new overcoat back on, and my dad drove me home.

The next month, a second Christmas passed without our father in the house, and then my parents began speaking to each other on the phone, calmly and kindly, not as antagonists but as partners with a plan. My father was saying the right things. He had changed. Partly with a psychiatrist's help, he could see things more clearly. His health had improved; the psychiatrist had prescribed medication, and he was taking proper care of his diabetes. Still, when my mother asked about the particular source of his troubles, he spoke vaguely, dismissively. What was his condition, exactly? Had there been a diagnosis? How could she help him? “I'm fine now,” he would say. “Let's leave it at that.” She called his psychiatrist. “I'm sorry, Mrs. Forhan,” he replied. “Everything you're asking me: it's confidential. I can't speak to you about it.” If her husband seemed newly stable, even chipper, she would just have to trust that there were reasons for it. She would need to have faith that he would stay that way.

“Okay,” she told him, “you can come home.”

He had done what my mother had required of him: he had sought professional help, and now he was better. After he moved back in with us, he stopped seeing the psychiatrist and stopped taking medication. He was a grown man, a responsible man: he could do the rest himself.

My happiest memories of my father during the next couple of years involve a single ritual: from time to time, having returned home from work and shared dinner with the family, he would say, “You kids interested in seeing the Sonics tonight?” We always were—
we
almost invariably being Kevin and Dana and me. Peggy was usually content to stay at home with our mother and help take care of Kim and Erica, who were too young for evenings out.

The Sonics were Seattle's professional basketball team; they were in just their fourth year and had never come close to having a winning record, but they were the only major pro team in town and were a plucky, endearing bunch of underdogs. On the roster were a thoughtful, soft-spoken point guard doing double duty as coach; a floppy-haired sharpshooter; a backup forward with a good jump shot and a bad stutter; and a twenty-one-year-old phenomenon and renegade, undrafted and underage by league rules, who'd leaped to the team from another league and, to set foot on the Sonics' court, needed the permission of the Supreme Court. The first thing I remember doing with my father after he came back to the family was driving down the freeway on a February evening in his white Dodge, along with my brother and sister, heading for a game. It was a special game we were going to: the team had designated this Tom Meschery Night. Meschery was a power forward—a fan favorite—who had announced his retirement. He was a bruiser, a brawler, a fearless enforcer under the boards, and there was something exotic about him. He was an immigrant whose Russian parents had escaped their homeland during the Bolshevik Revolution; he sported a thick handlebar mustache; and he was a fledgling poet. The year before, he had published a collection
called
Over the Rim,
on the cover of which he was pictured in game action, crouched tigerlike. Forty years after Tom Meschery Night, I was talking with the poet Mark Strand, who taught in Seattle when I was young, and I mentioned Meschery. “Oh, I knew Tom,” Mark said. The two of them had struck up a friendship when Meschery was with the Sonics, and Mark later advised Meschery that he owed it to himself and his writing to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which he did.

On that February night in 1971, as my father and brother and sister and I entered the Coliseum, we were handed two souvenirs: a paper program entitled “A Poet in Motion” and a false handlebar mustache made of thick black construction paper, shaped so that we might slide two hooks into our nostrils and it would stay there.

Later, in his warm-up outfit, Meschery strode onto the court to receive his gifts of thanks: plaques and trophies, a set of crystal, a color television, an electric typewriter, a round-the-world trip for him and his wife. As we watched him walk to mid-court to be honored, I lifted my false mustache to my nostrils and attached it; the paper pinched and tickled. Kevin attached his mustache. Dana, too, and our father. I gazed around the Coliseum, row upon row, section upon section: ten thousand mustachioed people, men and women, boys and girls. It was stupid; it was beautiful. For a moment, all of us were poets. All of us were big-hearted rebounders.