Secrets Buried With the Bodies of the Dead

Secrets will destroy us. Not all at once, mind you, but little by little. We hide them in the chambers of our hearts where we think they are locked away and have been forgotten about, but as they lurk in this dark place they are pulling tiny wires that connect to our every step and gesture and to every loved one we embrace. Each of our actions is affected by the secrets we keep, infused with a subconscious drive to set that secret free. And that’s the way secrets destroy us; if we don’t ultimately let them out, they will walk away with our lives and blot out who we might have become. I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know.

In the first ten years of this new millennium the race we call human has grown into a master race of secret-holders – our government agencies, our social system and our banks have all evolved into clandestine organisms. We may call it national security. We may call it the laws of capitalism. We may even call it individual privacy. But let’s call it what it is: it’s secrets running the show. A group of terrorists, working in secret brings down two buildings along with the nation where they stood, and that nation starts to drown in paranoia which leads to persecution which leads to more secrets. We grow a worldwide network of instantaneous access to people and ideas and instead of using it to unite the world, we use it to hide who we are through avatars and faceless chat and cybercrime that sequesters itself among the digital ones and zeros that now represent us. Banks with trillions in wealth that could have been used to save the sick, rebuild countries, and fill the bellies of every starving child, decide instead to use arcane financial plots that siphon every last drop of value out of our property and our people in order to build walls of money behind which these devious few can hide.

Yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about secrets as this decade comes to close. Working on these pages over the past months has caused me to think about many of the little secrets I’ve kept across my life - things I’ve thought but never told; actions I’ve taken but have been too ashamed to admit. And that has lead me to think about the secrets and lies we tell ourselves as a nation.

Like most of us with strong ethnic origins (which is to say all of us) I have been taught well to keep secrets. It evolved from a murkier time, centuries past, when men and women could not talk about the baby they had out of wedlock, could not share the loaf of bread they stole to feed their children, could not speak their innermost thoughts for fear of having these pieces of news bring a village or a church or a kingdom down around them. Those days may be gone now, but the fear under our secrets lives on – justified or not, real or not, we continue to keep secrets because we think they are saving our lives.

But you and I both know that secrets take more lives than they save. The root of the most hideous national events of this past decade have all stemmed from the secrets we withheld from each other or the lies we told ourselves. If you don’t believe me ask the families of the victims of 911 or Hurricane Katrina or the Great Recession. There are more than a few secrets buried among the bodies of these dead and in the empty pockets of those who have been broken.

Our own personal secrets may not have the potential to kill millions or to send a middle class into poverty and the poor into despair. And our secrets might be nothing more than a piece of family history we decided not to share or something done to us that we’d rather not talk about. But if nothing else every secret we keep locked up is one less opportunity to teach others about us and one lost chance to reconcile with ourselves.

So tomorrow on New Year’s Day - along with your resolutions to quit smoking or lose weight - resolve to share a secret or a thought that you have hidden inside. Share it with your child or your wife or your lover or your parent. Do it because you’ll be surprised by the forgiveness you’ll be granted and the understanding you’ll receive. Let it out because by sharing small secrets with each other we might teach others how to share those bigger secrets that could stop the water from rising and the buildings from crumbling and our people from dying before their time.

And if you don’t want to share your secrets and thoughts with someone close to you, share them here with us as an anonymous comment. We’re all here to listen. Go ahead, share a secret with us.  Go ahead, I dare you.  Share it and start to change the world.

Winter Noir

Dad Man Talking is on hiatus this week for the winter holidays. In its place we’re running an excerpt from a little known seasonal story by cult detective novelist Rex Handler. As fans of the crime genre know, Handler was born and lived in the Northeast and was a true suburbanite, taking the hard-boiled, Crime Noir style of such luminaries as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and transplanting it to the East Coast bedroom communities of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Those who knew Handler say that his fictional detective, Jake Mardo, was really a stand-in for the author who saw himself as a tough guy that just happened to have three kids to support along with a mortgage on a Dutch Colonial.

Note: This recently discovered story was rejected by publishers at the time as being too dark for the holiday season. Like millions of us who live on the East Coast, it is widely believed that Handler suffered at this time of year from seasonal mood swings which became even more acute around the holidays. Readers may recognize elements of Handler’s winter moodiness in the following excerpt.

'Tis the Season To Sleep My Lovely

By Rex Handler

I was sitting in my office watching an ant crawl across my desk like a lost man looking for something he couldn’t seem to find. The little bastard didn’t know where he was, but he knew he didn’t belong outside the house this time of year without a sturdy coat, a flashlight and a hand full of anti-depressants. To tell you the truth, I knew what this poor sap was going through – this ant and I we were just a couple of chumps trying to outlast the winter. It was 4:30 on a December afternoon and already it was as dark on the streets as the wrinkled skin under a nun’s wimple.

 Through a smudge in the window of my office behind the garage I could see Mrs. Minervini next door hanging her Christmas lights and happily whistling carols through a hole in her dime store dentures. Although I’m usually filled with the milk of human kindness at other times of the year, right at the moment I could have gone outside and wiped the smile off that old dame’s face with a snow shovel. Sometimes I get like this in the winter. Sometimes I also dance in my underwear to Ethel Merman singing Everything’s Coming Up Roses, but this dark day in December wasn’t that sometime.

 The phone rang and it woke me from the nap I had started to drift into as I fixated on my new pal crawling up the side of an empty carton of egg foo young. I had been doing a lot of sleeping lately and when I wasn’t doing that I was thinking about sleeping and when I wasn’t doing that I was eating my way through Chinese takeout containers, cold pizza and boxes of cookies. On top of always being tired this time of year, I was so hungry that if the little elves on the side of the cookie box had been flesh and blood I would have eaten them too.

 I picked up the phone from somewhere inside of my nodding head. “Maaaadoooo …” I yawned into the receiver.

 “Mr. Mardo?” A voice purred. It was a woman at the other and of the line and the sound of her voice alone could have made a monk rip off his sack cloth and break a 25 year vow of silence. I might have done the same if I my sex drive hadn’t already hitched a ride south for the winter.

 “Yeah, this is Mardo…” I said, seeing if I could get to any of the leftover egg foo young in the carton before the ant got there.

“Mr. Mardo, I have a problem and I was told by some very reliable people that you were a man who could handle a problem like mine.”

“Well, well, well,” I thought, “a job.” This could be good if it wasn’t for the fact that my spirits were sagging lower than Mrs Minervini’s upper plate. I felt like working right now about as much as I felt like smearing my body with bacon grease and waltzing with a grizzly bear. Come to think of it, at the moment waltzing with a grizzly bear would have been preferable to having to show up for a job. Then I thought of my kids. That was the problem with kids; they demanded the finer things in life, things like food, clothing and shelter.

“To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking,” I said in my best happy Tom, matinee idol voice. I didn’t fool her for a minute. From the way she replied I knew that this dame could see right through me.

 “You sound sad, Mr. Mardo, Is something wrong?”

 “Nothing that a few weeks of intensive daylight therapy and a month or so on a shrink’s couch couldn’t cure,” I shot back. “And you still haven’t told me your name.”

 “My name is Missy Horne, and I‘m offering a two hundred dollar a day retainer and a five thousand dollar bonus when you solve my problem. Do you think that might put a smile back on your face?”

 Probably not,” I had to admit. “Look, you sound like a nice dame and I don’t want to hurt your feelings but why don’t you call me back in April, say about the time we switch the clocks back from daylight savings. I’ll probably be feeling a lot better then, and I’ll be happy to take any money you want to give me.”

 “I don’t think this can wait, Mr. Mardo. You’ll need to let me know right now whether you can take the job or not …”

 This was the problem with winter - you had to find a way to fool the fools and keep making your daily bread even though the prince of darkness and the iceman were out there trying to kill you. I listened to Missy Horne breathing at the other end of the line while I watched the ant dig into the egg foo young. The little schnook could have it for all I cared. What I needed right now wasn’t at the bottom of an egg foo young carton anyway.

“Well, Mr. Mardo …?”

I could tell that Missy Horne was the impatient sort, and sooner or later I knew I’d have to say yes to the job. Out on the streets the fat man in the red suit was ringing his bell. Throughout the land, little children had stars in their eyes, and Mrs Minervini next store was about to flip a switch that was going to electrocute hundreds of innocent lights bulbs. Guys like me we pay a price at this time of year. It’s a price those happy saps who believe in Santa and Hanukah Harry never have to pay. It’s the cost of living through winter, my friend, and it’s a debt you pay off with the big sleep.

_________________

Dad Man Talking will be back with a brand new blog posting sometime between Christmas and New Years (if we’re not too tired or depressed to write it). Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good night.

MTV’s ‘Jersey Shore’ or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Guidos

All Italians are gangsters; all Jews are good at making money; all young inner-city African-American men are drug dealers; and all Asians are smart and sneaky. All Hispanics have too many children; all blonds are dumb; all midgets have big penises; and homosexuals are all bitchy and love show tunes. Stereotypes are helpful, don’t you think? These pigeonholes allow us to face the truth about ourselves and each other - and the truth is that we’re still just primitive cave dwellers who are not only ignorant about other races, religions and creeds but are even more ignorant about the tribes to which we ourselves belong.

This is why I’m getting a lot of entertainment value out of the MTV reality show “Jersey Shore” – not so much from the group of 20-something, gold chain wearing Italian American kids who are using too much hair gel, beating each other senseless and sleeping with each other’s boyfriends, but from the Italian American Anti-Defamation League, UNICO and other organized Italian Americans protesting to save society from this mish mash of hormones and cultural failings.

Speaking as a full blooded, first-generation Italian American, I can authentically tell you that we Italians have never been very good at seeing the truth about ourselves. We get mouthy and obnoxious about our dignity and ethnic pride, and while we are blathering on, carrying signs and having parades honoring our heritage, there always seems to be a group of Italian guys in the background wearing sleeveless t-shirts and slapping their girlfriends to the tune of “That’s Amore.” Yes, we Italians do have a long, lineage of men and women who have contributed mightily to society (just like every other ethnic and religious group on God’s earth), but we also have the MTV Jersey Shore “Guidos” out there acting like young gangsters in love (just like you might have a segment of your own ethnic group that makes you a little less than proud).

And whenever we think we have the lid down on these self-titled Guidos, they just pop up again to show us all how human and prone to stereotypes we are. It’s impossible to hide this behind censorship, or cancelled TV shows or parades or ethnic pride, so we really need to somehow learn to embrace it. After all, everyone has to start somewhere – even the Guidos need to be given the chance to evolve - and if we can face who we are, admit it to others and learn to fix the problems (not just the symptoms), then we might not have to worry so much about stereotypes.

I learned early on how important this is. And I learned it the hard way. We all did.

It was June 28, 1971 and I was a fat 15 year old riding with my father and uncle in a chartered bus filled with actual mobsters and a gaggle of other men who someday hoped they would be. We were on our way to Columbus Circle in New York City to rally for the first ever Italian American day. This might be a colorful image to you, but it’s important to note right here that Italian American day had been organized by Joe Colombo - a mobster who had done more than his share to give Italian Americans a bad name – and it was Joe’s stroke of genius to organize this day to protest the FBI’s harassment of Italian Americans and undo the image of Italians as gangsters. It seems to me that Joe was just asking for trouble.

And trouble is, of course, what Joe Colombo – Mr. Italian American Day – would get. No sooner had our merry band of murderers, thieves and wannabes arrived at the corner of 8th Avenue and 56th Street, no sooner had the ‘Little Tonys’ and ‘Joey Jockey Shorts' and ‘Mickey Eyeballs’ disembarked from our motor coach and lumbered up the avenue to join the crowd of 4000 at the edge of Columbus Circle, than did we learn that we had all been played for a bunch of suckers. Approaching the multitude, we could see that the horde of happy paisans that had come to celebrate their honesty and work ethic were either ducking for cover, looking for weapons or running for their lives. My father and uncle picked me up by my arms and ran with me back in the direction of Times Square, knocking over anyone who got in the way. I didn’t know what was happening to me. But I’ll bet that Joe Colombo knew what was happening to him. Joe had just been shot behind the Columbus Circle stage and right after that Joe’s bodyguards had shot the guy who shot Joe. It turns out that Italian American day was stereotypical business as usual for the mob, no matter what Joe wanted us to believe.

Having had this experience firsthand, I see the Guidos on MTV as not very threatening at all to Italian Americans. Stereotypes exist because we are all human and all humans do stupid, unforgivable things. We do kill each other, we do cheat each other, we are all at times dumb and some of us do have more children then we can afford, we are sometimes sneaky and too smart for our own good and evil does lurks at the edges of all our hearts. Taking this behavior off TV won’t make it stop or cease to spread the stereotypes, no more than having a day devoted to Italian Americans will make mobsters stop killing each other.

So I choose to laugh at stereotypes of Italians. What else can a sane man do? I try to teach this to my children as well. Have a sense of humor, I say. Then after we’re done laughing, we can get down to the business of what we can do to make a better world.

On Christmas Eve about ten years ago we gave our kids a guinea pig. My brother was over the house along with a good friend of mine who is Jewish (but who we all know really wants to be Italian). We named this little guinea pig 'Rudy' after Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and, once my kids had him out of the cage and were playing with him on the floor, my brother, my friend and I took one look at this fat, fury little rodent, and we starting making ethnic slurs about him.

“Hey,” my brother said, “why do you think they call him a guinea pig? Is he Italian?” “I don’t know,” said my friend, “but we should get him a tiny sleeveless, wife-beater t-shirt and a couple of gold chains.” “No,” I said, “That would just be wrong. He may be a guinea, but if we dress him like that he might start organizing the rats and mice in the neighborhood and then they’d try to rub out all the cats.” At this point the kids had stopped playing with Rudy, whereupon this plump creature on the floor gazed up at my brother, my friend and I. We all knew what Rudy was thinking, so one of us – doing our best imitation of Sonny Corleone from 'The Godfather' - said what Rudy might have if he could talk. “Hey,” we heard Rudy bellow, “Who you calling a guinea?”

It just goes to show you. It’s not just a stereotype. All guinea pigs really do beat their wives and if you don’t treat them with respect they’re going to have you killed.

The Man Beyond The Mirror

I am a well-built man with dark-hair and strong, clear features that end in a handsome smirk which women love. I’m really quite impressive. Impressive, that is, until I look in a mirror and see that this young man I think I am has been replaced with the much older man that I’ve become.

These days I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, pathetically adjusting the light above it, and I notice that my skin has wrinkled and the flesh under my eyes has pooled into comical flaps of sorrow. Stepping back, I can see that my stomach is now a silly little paunch that has spread out over my hips and down around my slowly sagging ass. Not wanting to look at this any longer, I sometimes step in closer again, only to find that most of the hair has dropped from my head and is now coiling from my ears, nostrils and brows. There are moles and pustules and all manner of protrusions sprouting from my face, and worst of all, as I glance behind me in the mirror I often catch a fleeting glimpse of pretty young women looking right though me. It would really be very funny, if it wasn’t me.

It’s as if all those who have aged and died before me are bending time, having a good laugh at my arrogance, not allowing me to ever again move the bathroom light or my body to an angle that will let me see the man that is in my mind. No longer can I find that young man who I once thought was eternal. Gone is that tireless father of baby girls who were as beautiful as he was. Absent from the looking glass is that newly married husband who had his chance with other women but who wanted his wife – and only wife - to love his looks.

Men of my age face their aging in various ways. There are those who, at the first sign of flabby pecs and graying or thinning hair, let themselves go altogether, throwing it all away in one toss, proudly pretending that they planned this all along as they eat and nap and smoke their way toward the grave in rumpled sweat pants. There are those who are Spartan and narcissistic and who build a dam against this aging with sun lamps and barbells and shaved heads, with extramarital affairs and diets of leafy greens and water and lean meat. There are those who have won the genetic lottery and for whom aging comes very slowly; their hair stays full and whitens only at their temples; their bodies stay trim and their skin smooth; they face very little in the way of aging until one day they wake up cursed and frightened like Dorian Gray to see that their peers have become fat and old and are dropping like flies around them.

And then there are the rest of us. Men who resist as best we can, who try within reasonable means to stay healthy and fit, but who by any means still continue to slide into old age first by inches and then – I am presuming – by feet, yards and miles. We ordinary men don’t eat any more than we used to, we don’t brush our teeth any less or take any less care with our grooming or exercise, but the returns are diminishing. One day we wake up and we can’t run as fast as we used to, the next our knees ache painfully when we run at all so we begin to walk as fast as we can until one day soon even walking fast will be a luxury that we will keep in reserve for the grandchildren we hope to have. There is only one thing that men like us can do - we have to lose our vanity to gain our peace.

No matter what the mirror tells me, I will always stubbornly look beyond the mirror to see myself as that young man who lived in part by his looks, who could attract and be attracted, whose body may not have been perfect, but whose imperfections only added to his beauty. This I believe is part of our survival mechanism, for if I truly allowed what was happening to me to register, I would likely not be able to go on.

And that brings me to the soul of who we are. And to the fact that we have to believe we are timeless. No matter how much the mirror argues with me, who I am is who I am and who I will always be. This is not vanity, but the path to something more promising than a perfect body and youthful looks. Those things will fade eventually no matter what we do, but the image of a young, fresh spirit – well that is something we can truck around with us forever, all through this life and into the next.

We must go on seeing ourselves as the young men in the mirror. We are 15 or 20 or 30. We are strong and vital and with our devil-may-care humor and our brazen intelligence we are making people smile and think. We are closer to the beginning of our lives than we are to the end of them and anything is possible. It’s all a cycle, anyway, and if you have been lucky enough to give birth to children or sound ideas or good work that has helped others even in small ways, than you will live forever as that man you see in your mind even if he can no longer to be found in the mirror.

Last week I was driving in a car with a female colleague, catching a ride from one work activity to the next. We were chatting about our parents, and this woman –who I presume to be in early middle age – just happened to tell me that her mother was born in 1954. If I had been driving the car at that moment, we surely would have crashed into a wall. This woman’s mother was only two years older than I am. How can it be, I thought, that this middle-aged woman in her thirties is so much younger than me that she could be my own daughter?

Well, I’ll tell you how it can be. It can be because God has a sense of humor and if we laugh along with him we will see that years and time and age are just the realities of a fool. When I thought of this in the car last week I started making jokes and talking as if I were a kid again. I became the young man with the smirk that women loved. I became strong and beautiful once more. And in becoming this, I was free.

Thanksgiving Redux

This Thanksgiving I watched my family fill an empty house. My wife and I have seen our small pack of children slowly move away to colleges and boyfriends houses along with more mature after school activities and weekend getaways, and most of the day now we walk from empty room to empty room, encountering no one but each other. So when my children, mother, brother, in-laws and extended family started to trickle into our house this Thanksgiving, the place felt full again. And it felt good. Like a home.

But, strangely, it also felt quiet. There were the noises of children whining and giggling and knocking over delicate objects, the sounds of adults stacking dishware and calling across rooms to get the correct number of chairs correctly placed at the table, the venerable hum of humans laughing and those few serious heartbreaking conversations about irresolvable family concerns. And yet somehow the house seemed controlled and settled, polite and nicely evolved. Looked at from a different angle you might also say that it was tepid and at times just a little boring.

I couldn’t help thinking about how much blood had been drained from Thanksgiving since I was a kid. My home now is infinitely larger than the railroad-roomed, one bath, inner city boxes in which I grew up, but when we fill it with people for the holidays what goes on is a mere blip on the holiday Richter scale compared to what it was like growing up in a place where the holidays were a time when people yelled and fought and laughed and drank until they passed out. A time gone by where eating was a sport and where we loved so hard that by the end of the day we were all panting in neutral corners.

On those Thanksgivings back then it was expected that the men would play the children - the clowns - and that the children would behave like full grow midget men and women. And the women … well the women were the queens. They controlled the flow of the cooking and food; they told those ridiculous guys where to sit and when to shut up; they threw the kids morsels of food before the plates reached the table and they hit these selfsame offspring with slaps and shrill voices if they started to act too much like those overgrown children whom they had married. All this would go on through the dinner and into the desert, until we were all sated with food and wine and after dinner sweets and then, if we were very lucky, all hell would break loose.

I can still see it clearly forty or fifty years later. It could be any one of a dozen different scenes, all interchangeable, but in this particular Thanksgiving set piece, my grandmother, mother, aunts and various other women relatives are cleaning the table while that group of scheming, clownish men – my grandfather, father, uncles, great uncles and second cousins – are entering the living rooms with their hands full of whiskey tumblers and their minds full of dirty jokes and exaggerated stories that they are going to tell each other. We children are nowhere to be seen, but that is only because we are doing some scheming of our own.

Camped out in an alcove behind a door, just off the living room where no one can see us, are my cousins and I. When that half drunk crowd of male relatives enters the living room, my youngest boy cousin (the one with a pair as big as all outdoors) jumps out and startles my grandfather who spills his tumbler of Canadian Club all over my uncle’s rayon sweater wherein both of the men start to chase the boy back into the dining room and around and around the large table. The rest of us children are given threatening looks by our fathers, but that does not stop us from also running into the dining room to crouch next to the little cabinet where my grandparents keep the liquor. From this vantage point we can watch the chase, and as we do we laugh so hard that snot begins running from of our noses.

In the kitchen the women have heard the commotion and have entered the dining room where they quickly comprehend that my grandfather and uncle will never be able to catch my sinewy jackrabbit of a cousin. My grandmother, who will not put up with nonsense from any boy or man, slips off her shoe and with this killer mule in her right hand, she joins the chase. Before you can say Bugs Bunny my grandmother traps my cousin in a far corner of the dining room, whereby she swats him twice across the back of his head with the sole of her shoe, basically putting an end to this portion of our entertainment.

There will be more of this kind of thing before the end of the day: heated, obscenity-laced arguments that will break out over the card game the adults will play; one cousin locking another out of the house until the exiled one breaks a window trying to get back in: one of the more recently married women sobbing hysterically to her mother because her husband has spoken crudely to her (as if he had ever spoken to her any other way). But for now, the men in the family have all recommenced their migration to the living room, where soon the snoring will be accompanied by the muted sounds of a lowly moaning TV set. The women too are subdued for the moment as they gossip softly and inhale the menthol cigarettes they have lit up now that their husbands are asleep. These women are slowly gassing us children with second-hand smoke as we hide not far from them on the kitchen stairs. But that’s okay, because what we children are doing on those stairs is simply plotting our next attack.

Am I crazy to miss this sort of Thanksgiving tumult - this holiday hullabaloo that was part of every Thanksgivings, Christmas and Easter of my childhood? Perhaps I am. At our house this Thanksgiving the men worked in concert with the women; we helped with the cooking and the setting and the clearing of the table, and if we weren’t doing that we kept the children quiet by playing with them or by reminding them to use their “indoor voices.” It was a picture of moderation where no one ate or drank too much; where we maintained level heads and monitored ourselves to ensure we were the lovely, heartwarming family we had always wanted to become. And while it’s true that nobody got hurt or punished or even swatted with a shoe at my house this past Thanksgiving, I secretly longed for that tiny bit of danger that comes from never really knowing what a truly irrational family might do next.

So here’s to the grandparents and mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and cousins of Thanksgivings past who kept us guessing and on our toes, the clowns and queens who loved us too loudly and yelled too frequently, who napped while the wives cooked and cleaned, and who ate and drank and kept secrets while their children played and plotted and practiced at being midget adults.

Four days ago I watch my family fill our empty house for Thanksgiving, but somehow it didn’t feel quite as full as it used to. How could it? The clowns and midgets and queens have now all disappeared.

Women and Children First

If someone held a gun on a women, her husband and her children and told this women that she had to choose one of them to die, she would look at the person with the gun and say, “I want you to know one thing … I’m really gonna miss my husband.”

Now for those of you without a sense of humor (and you know who you are), let me just say that I'm not advocating gun voilence or suggesting that this sort of thing happens a lot.  I'm just making a point.  Women love their kids beyond reason, and they're not going to let a little thing like their husband stand in the way of the kids' survival.

And just for the record here, I want you to know that I’m actually okay with this. I can see the natural advantages. Facing the chiseled reality of survival, a woman can always find another husband. On the other hand she also knows in that deep reptilian part of her brain that – when it comes to her kids - she can’t be replaced. By sticking around she’s ensuring the survival of the species. So the husband is a dead man. May he rest in peace.

I mean, say what you will about today’s father’s being capable, reliable, talented and every inch the woman their wives are. I’m here to tell you that this just ain’t so, Joe. We are not women. We might be a bit better at raising our kids than our father’s were – it’s not hard to compete against a man who’s idea of taking care of his kids for the night meant having the ten year old make dinner for the four and seven year old while he called his bookie and then took a nap on the couch. But let’s face it, even with decades of society’s unrelenting, forced-march toward sexual equality (with everyone from Sigmund Freud to Dr. Phil training us to find that sensitive little girl inside us while still allowing our inner ape to come out and beat his chest once in a while), not one of us guys could do all the things our wives do for our kids without eventually winding up in a corner swinging a baseball bat at anyone who got too close.

Are you, my fellow dads, going to be able to whip up breakfasts, lunches and dinners the kids will eat day after day after day … while watching over them to get their homework done … while staying up all night with the one who is vomiting into a bucket … while putting your daughter’s bed-head into a French braid … while driving the middle one to karate, the little one to ballet and the older one to the mall to find the perfect mate among that fine crop of mumbling 15 year old boys she has to choose from? Are you going to be able to do all that on your own? On top of that, will you have the endless empathy, eternal patience and rock solid unwavering ability to support your child no matter what, no matter when? In short will you be able to do all the things your wife does to make sure this generation lives long enough and well enough to take their place in the regenerative order? I think not, my manly cohort. If you face the facts of this and think about all that our children’s mothers do for our kids that we could never hope to do on our own, you yourself might even tell the nut with the gun to choose you when he pulls the trigger.

Okay. Sometimes women can take this save-the-child-at-all-costs instinct a bit too far. For instance, when mommy thinks daddy’s been too hard on the kids and mommy suddenly feels like she has to protect the kids from daddy, and then the kids know that they’ve got daddy just where they want him and daddy ends up locked out in the garage, alone, beating his head on the hood of his car wondering what the hell just happened. Well I obviously don’t like that. I don't like it one bit. But killing me to save my wife and my kids I can kind of understand – maybe I just started a book I’m really into or I have a business trip coming up that I shouldn’t miss - but I’ll understand.

Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that my wife and my daughters and my women friends are going to have a really hard time with this idea. And some of my guy friends aren’t going to like it much either.

Well to those women who find this difficult to swallow I say, let’s face it girls, this is a tribute to your gender. You know in your heart that you wouldn’t waste a second before you’d save your kids over your husband. And you also know that’s exactly how it should be. Men can help you make the children and we can coach you with sympathetic Lamaze breathing when they’re being born. We can bring in money and lift heavy things like nursery furniture and warehouse-sized cartons of baby food. We can lend a hand in raising the family and in feeding them and tucking them into bed at night. Heck, we might even be able to watch over the kids for a few days and make sure they don’t get hurt before you get back from your trip (well they might get hurt a little but it wouldn’t be anything that a quick trip to the emergency room couldn’t fix). But if you asked any Vegas odds maker to give you the probability of a kid turning out okay if he or she were raised by their father alone, you’d be looking at odds of a thousand to one … at best. If you think about this, it actually gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “lady luck.”

And to my guy friends out there I would tell them to all just calm down. This is just a hypothetical argument after all. Nobody’s really out there gunning for you. No matter where you are in your fathering, I’m sure your wives still love you and need you. We all know you are important to your family and none of your wives really want to see you die. Just avoid any dark alleys or the homes of any reputed, gun-toting psychopaths when you’re with your family and everything will be just fine.

Children Of Mad Men

Let me set you straight right at the top. This is not going to be about the TV show Mad Men. This is going to be about us. More specifically it’s going to be about those of us who were small children during the time in which the show is set – the 1960s to be exact.

There’s been a lot written about the show. And I watch the show. And I like it enough, if “like” is the right word. If you’ve ever watched it, you can’t help but be sucked in by the overwhelming sadistic sadness in every plot line, the obliviousness to which these chain-smoking, alcoholic characters are headed toward their own destruction, the unrelenting scenes - like something dug out of a time capsule - showing what happened when a privileged segment of society gained nearly unlimited freedom for the first time in its history. It’s like watching two gorgeous, gleaming bullet trains headed toward each other on the same track. You just can’t turn away. And it couldn’t be any more gripping if this gang of white, middle class men and women were to strip down to their underwear and drop acid while standing on the ledge of a skyscraper (which for all I know might very well happen in an upcoming episode). It’s all there – extramarital sex, slow suicide, heavy drinking, marriages crashing in on themselves, money earned obscenely being obscenely spent – and it nearly always ends in a tableau of people eating each other alive.

And yet, because I am not really a voyeur of other people’s pain, I don’t feel I’ve been compelled to watch the show because of any of the above. In fact, I wasn’t even sure why I was so eager to watch it episode after episode, until I realized the following. In the background of most of the scenes of family life are two little children: a boy of about 5 and a girl of about 8. They belong to the show’s main characters and these children are almost always there when we see one or both of their parents at home. At first I wondered why the children were always part of these scenes. They didn’t seem to further the plot in any significant way, and I know that the show’s writers are much too cunning and invested in making us think about ourselves to simply have these kids around as set decorations.

And then it hit me hard. The kids are there because the show is really about them and what their parent’s behavior is going to do to them. And that’s when I realized that those kids are really me. Mad Men is about the next generation - my generation – the one that would be set adrift after being raised by a group of mad men and their wives.

When I realized this, watching the show became like looking at hidden home movies that my parents never dared show us for fear of reminding us what they put us through. There is the eight year old daughter of the main characters mixing drinks for her parents over the course of a long Sunday, and there is that same little girl later that night trying to awaken her mother from a drunken stupor to remind her that she and her brother have not yet been fed their dinner. There is that sad little boy, undersized for his age, lying about breaking the hi-fi and being scolded by his father who has been lying all along about his own past, indeed about his real identity. There again is that second grade girl caught smoking one of her mother’s cigarettes in the downstairs toilet and there is her mother punishing her for this by locking the girl in a closet while she lights up just outside the door. And there again is the boy child yelling about his dinner at the black woman who cares for their home as his mother snaps back to tell him that he can’t talk to this woman like that because she works for her. These kids are doomed. And every time I see them in a scene, I feel doomed right along with them.

We know where these kids are headed. They’re headed toward the same place as the rest of us born in the two decades after World War II. Dammed by our parents’ ignorance and sense of entitlement, we inherited lives of confusion, wrong choices, drug addiction, bad marriages, anger, anxiety and guilt over everything from how much we should eat to how much we should love those who are trying to love us.

And lest you think that the scenes of these children in Mad Men are not from our own lives, I offer you the following from my life and the lives of one or two others whom I have loved. There I am at 12 years old accompanying my father into a neighborhood bar where he will introduce me to some friends of his, including a woman with whom he is sleeping and who is not my mother. There is a dear cousin of mine at 14 years old sniffing glue in a closet in his bedroom while his parents drink happily night after night in their kitchen, a cousin who barely 15 years later will take his own life. There is my innocent wife and her good-hearted sister, joyous young girls really, being abused by their father, a man who had endured the German blitz on London side-by-side with his mother’s abuse, only to prosper and come to America where he would drink heavily, hate mostly everyone and nearly destroy his daughters with his own needs. I’ll stop here. Those of you in my generation all have your own stories. And I’ll bet you all go to bed at night saying the same prayer that I do, “Oh dear God, forgive our parents sins and save us from ourselves.”

Has God heard us? Many times I think not. I still struggle daily with my fears and my guilt over the modest abuses that I have distilled down from my own parents’ more monstrous abuses and that I still, in my darker moments, act out on those I love.

But then sometimes in these later years of my fathering I catch a glimpse of my nearly grown children and I see that God has been listening. My children are strong and they are honest. Most of all they are happy because they understand – in a way that we never did - that the world will not give them everything but it will give them some things. These children of mine seem to know how to love us and to forgive us even though we may have trespassed against them.

Why is this so? Well the Mad Men-watching dramatic side of me likes to think that, because we took the bullet for our kids, they have escaped a bullet of their own. But I know it’s really not that. God simply answered our prayers through our children. After all they were not raised by mad men, and with the help of God we children of mad men have worked to make sure that the madness stops here.

Two Calls

On the day my first child was born I got calls from two different men. The first was from a man who was alive. The second from a man who had been dead for years.

The first call was from my father-in-law. It happened barely an hour after my daughter had been born. He was in Asia on business and had found out about the birth of his first grandchild in a call that we had relayed to him through his wife. News like this travels fast in families – even back then more than two decades ago – and, when my father-in-law called across seven time zones and three continents, the hospital quickly patched him into our room.

I can honestly say I forgot what I said to my father-in-law as soon as I handed the phone to my wife. I was never that close to the man in the first place and even this new generation which we both – oddly enough – had a hand in bringing into the world wasn’t going to change that. That unremarkable phone call was the high point of our relationship. Looking back, I can see how it went downhill from there.

The second call didn’t happen until later that night as I was coming home from the hospital after my daughter and wife were finally asleep. Once I got in the door it took very little time to figure out that another man was trying to get in touch with me. Walking in I turned on a lamp and the light popped like a flashbulb – the room went white with a spark and then again turned suddenly, startlingly black. It left phosphenes of light and the images of furniture and window casings playing across my retinas as if they were photographic paper.

I wandered around the room temporally blinded, not really knowing where I was going until my ankle rammed the bottom step of the bedroom staircase. Falling on the stairs, my knees hit the plane of the second step with a thud that shook the stairwell and knocked down one of the pictures we had hung on the inside staircase wall. I couldn’t see the picture but I could feel it; so I picked it up and groped my way into the kitchen looking for a light I could count on. That was when the phone started to ring.

I grabbed at the sound of the bell in the darkness until my figures touched the receiver, my legs still shivering from the bruises to my knees and ankles. But the line went dead as soon as I brought the mouthpiece near my lips. That’s when I’d had enough and I flipped up the wall switch in the kitchen only to look down at my hand and see that I was staring at a picture of my father.

When someone burning with love for you wants to get your attention, when they demand you answer their call no matter how much you may not want to talk with them, no matter what is unresolved between you or how much you might be trying to crawl out from under them - even if that person has been dead for five years – it’s just better if you answer that call as soon as possible. My old man was dead and he was pissed. He wasn’t there to see his first granddaughter. He hadn’t been able to call me on the phone from Asia or anywhere else. Where my father was there were no phones. All he had to work with were the supercharged, supernatural physics of the hereafter – the air of earth that could be electrified to pop a light bulb, the shove from a ghost he could use to send me careening into a staircase, the phone he could make ring through the will of his rapidly diminishing spirit. My father made sure he got in touch with me that night. He wasn’t going to let another man, another father (in-law or otherwise), take this moment for himself.

I walked back into the front room and hung the photo of my father back in its place above the stairs. I sat on the steps and looked at it for some number of minutes. In the framed photo my father was dressed as a soldier. He was smirking just like I do, cocking his head in those simple, youthful black and white shadows that I will always see when I look in the mirror. I don’t know what he was thinking in the picture. But I know what I was thinking. I was thinking that I would now have to use my own body as the bridge between my father and my daughter. That was really what my father had in mind when he called. He just wanted to make sure I knew that. And then he was gone.

Over the years allowing my daughter to walk across my back to get to my old man has not always been pleasant. Of this, I can assure you. When you take on such as task, somebody is going to get hurt and mostly it will be you. But this had to be done. How else to let the girl know that she is the daughter of an imperfect son of an imperfect father? In the absence of my father, I’ve had to be the one to lead my kids through the darkness and into the light of their history. I really didn’t have much choice in it anyway and it was really the only decent, fatherly thing to do to help them truly see who they are. I think my kids will be happy that I allowed them to use me to cross the river to my father’s humor, his rage, his crazy love. But who can say.

Do I believe in ghosts? Ask my first child. She just happens to be 21 years old today and she can now legally, officially, answer for herself. Ask her if she thinks I believe my father is still around us. Ask her if she believes her long dead grandfather is still with her. The way things have turned out neither of her grandfathers are in her life. But the call could come for her any time now. And when it does, I’m pretty sure she’ll know who’s calling.

The Tattoo

Fatherhood is like that tattoo you got when you were too young to know any better. There are days when you see the wrinkled skin and tiny gray hairs that are curling around that mark on your chest and you wish you could get it burned off with a torch, but mostly you’ve learned to live with it. Sometimes when you’ve had a few too many you actually enjoy looking at it, like a picture of an old girlfriend. And then there are times that you’re stone sober and you know that you’ll never be able to get rid of it but you love what it says about you anyway. For my money, that’s as good a definition of being a father as I could ever come up with.

Here's an example.

My middle daughter is working on getting into college and we’re working on helping her. I say “working on” with genuine sarcasm. My daughter doesn’t really want to go to college right now. We really don’t want to have to pay for it. And most of the colleges she’s applying for don’t really want her – they’ve got too many other kids banging on their door who don’t really want to go - and whose parents don’t really want to pay for it - to care all that much about whether or not they accept my kid. So it’s kind of joke. And it would actually be very funny if it wasn’t the rest of her life we were talking about.

Of course, I’m mostly just exaggerating. My daughter does really want to go to college – she’s just scared of growing up and that’s manifesting itself in teenage apathy and less than stellar SAT scores. My wife and I do want to be able to pay for her college – it’s just that we can’t quite figure out how to squeeze 50 thousand dollars a year out of grocery and mortgage money. And I’m sure many colleges would love to have my daughter, no matter her SAT scores – as long as we can pay the 50 thousand dollars a year in cash. And that brings me back to the tattoo.

Like the tattoo, this exquisite farce of trying to get my daughter into a college is just another reminder of fatherhood. I can’t ignore it and I can’t wish it away. The best I can do is to see her college education as something that is a part of me, something that is because of a choice I made a long time ago. My daughters and their futures are my tattoo and my duty is to accept and defend that which sits on my chest above my heart. It hurt when I put it there and I shouldn’t expect it to stop hurting now just because the ink that mixed in with the blood is fading.

Next weekend, we’ll face our fears of the future and take my daughter to visit a couple of colleges. My daughter will be anxious and non-committal the whole time. My wife will be stoic and encouraging while we walk the campuses. And I will look at the heavily endowed buildings and the state of the art music facilities and wonder how, in the name of all things holy, I’ll ever pay for it.

But when we’re done and we’re on our way back from the weekend and all is well, I might just make the following suggestion to my wife and daughter. Since we’ve come this far, I’ll say, why don’t we stop by one of the cities we pass on the way home and celebrate? We could go to a nice dinner. Or we could spend some time site seeing.

Or better still, since we’ve come all this way, perhaps we could take a little side trip to one of the seedier parts of town where I could find a place to mark the occasion with a tattoo.

Dispatches

These are dispatches from the front lines of everyday.

I’m the guy you see with his head swiveling in and out of traffic in the school drop off line, his daughter in the front seat next to him. He’s smiling. He’s chatting with the kid, but he’s thinking, “how does this end?” That’s me.

I’m the guy who works at that desk next to you (think of me as the same guy who works at every desk from Palo Alto, California to Bainbridge, Massachusetts) sucking my living off the internet, milking a paycheck from endless emails and IMs, living and dying from eye-chart spreadsheets and quarterly budgets. I complain about it. I do it. I threaten to leave. I do it some more. I dream of what I wanted to be and I swear that this is the last year before I make a move, and that was ten years ago. I love my kids. I hate the work. I love the money. I keep working. Love and hate. Hate and love. Just like you, I’m guessing.

I’m the father. You’re the father. We’re the fathers. We’ve got one kid, two kids, three kids … four. At some point it doesn’t matter. We’re all responsible for all of them. If childhood is a journey not a race, then fatherhood is the road our kids walk over when they put on their little backpacks to start that journey. I’m an American father with roots in the past and I’ve got farther to go before I finish my race.

At our age, we all seem to have come from the same place. Fifty, sixty years ago when we we’re born our grandfathers and fathers spoke to us with accents, added vowels to their words, dropped and broke their consonants, put a W where a V should be, turned a “three” into a “tree.” They stomped all over the soft spoken sounds coming from the America children we were – the American children we would someday father. They talked to us in languages scented with the sweat of Italy, Ireland, Germany, maybe Poland or Russia or France. But as good as they were, and as bad as they were, they are gone and going now. And we are left to translate their sketchy instructions and carry on the fathering with or without them and then to join them soon enough.

So there will be secrets and longings in these dispatches. Dreams and desires too. These don’t die just because you are in the last stretch of raising your children. On the contrary, they begin to well up with an intense pressure as you watch the last of your children stand and walk away on their own, pointing back at you smugly as you recede further and further into their distance. And the secrets are still strong too, but, honestly, they don’t feel much like secrets any longer. They may be dark, they may be laughable, they may not even be secrets to anyone except you, but they are now the only stories you really have to tell - the short one act plays you want to perform for the amusement and annoyance of your children – for the love of your past and the God that made.

These secrets and dreams and desires of my fathering are the dispatches I’ll send off to you …
I’m in the car riding with my father and he turns and smiles at me … or it’s me in the car riding with my daughter and I’m smiling at her … or I’ve just set the table with dinner, my wife is working late, and my first child (who is now a grown woman) will not eat; she falls to the floor screaming and crying and I fall on the floor alongside her and I begin crying too …. or I’m in a dark room alone, my wife has temporarily left me out of anger because I am still a scared child myself and will not yet give in and give her the children she wants … or I’m in another dark room alone and it’s 23 years later and my wife and grown daughters have left me for the day and I’m thinking about how miserable my life is going to be without the children I didn’t want to give my wife in the first place …

It goes on and on and on, and it will all be here, and together we will plot our course from these dispatches of our every day.