We were fools, my father and I. He was a fool for women. And I was a fool for him.
It started in a saloon with a woman sliding her fingers up the outer edge of my pants pockets. I was three years old and standing on the floor in a thicket of trouser legs and nylon stockings. This woman raised her hands up along the little xylophone of shivering ribs behind my shirt and then she hooked me under my armpits and lifted me onto the bar whereupon my chin fell into her cleavage. Raising my eyes and looking up at her face I could see that it was not my mother’s face. My mother did not look like that and she never would.
The woman was young, but I know now that this was the kind of woman who was never really young. She was painted to be pretty and she smelled of smoke and I could almost taste her perfume as I tried to fit my head in a comfortable place above her breasts. My father was there somewhere, but fixed as I was in her bosom I know longer knew where. Until this woman kissed me on my cheek. Then something happened.
My father appeared from over the top of the woman’s right shoulder and he put his hand on the back of her neck and for a minute all three of us were connected. The woman buried her lips deeper into my face and that’s when I remember thinking the thing that begins and ends this memory. When this woman kissed me, I closed my eyes and found myself believing that it was my father and not this woman whose lips were hidden in my cheek.
Sometimes these days when my wife lowers her book or mutes the TV to look over at me and study some hare-brained, personal theory I’ve just hatched, I want to beat myself in the head until I forget that my father ruined me in this way. Through that practical attitude that women have when they are tagging a man out on his self-pity, I can see that nobody much cares about why I let my father trick me into accepting his lust for women other than my mother. My wife looks at me and laughs using only her eyes, and I know that - between my father and me - I am the bigger of the fools. But then my son Marshall, in all his brilliance and goofiness will wave a perfect math score in my face (as if he believes that this is what will matter between us in the long run), or he’ll sit me down in front of some tilting tower of art he’s built for me out of junk he’s found at the edge of our neighbor’s lawn, and I can see how easy it would be to turn this kid’s desire to love and please me into a smoking cartridge of backfired passion.
My wife gets that my father was a womanizer and a kind of emotional pimp for me. But she’s also told me that – because she loves and understands me so much – she’d bounce me to the curb like a cartoon Tomcat if she ever caught me cheating on her. So we’re all good there; except for this. My wife knows that I won’t cheat on her. In fact, she knows that these days I won’t even let other women get close to me.
Ten years ago I stopped speaking to my father. For a time, it was the best thing I ever did. I’d tell my mother to let me know when he’d be going out so I could stop by and see her and with that little scheme I quit the old man cold turkey. Then about a year ago, my mother called to tell me he had cancer and that it wasn’t looking good. Talk about an emotional pimp. The guy would do anything to get me back.
Looking at it now I don’t like to admit how easily I went along with it for all those years. The truth is that the women of John Tosca, Sr. were good-looking and hard to resist. These women had a veneer of beauty and they were as tempting as soft pillows which could be molded to the head of any man who laid on them. They complimented you in public and they didn’t fight back in private (as might your scorned and jilted wife). As far as I could see back then the only problem with these women was that they were also crazy – crazy, I believed, because they thought that having sex with John Sr. could make him love them.
It took me years to figure out the truth about my father and these women. I certainly didn’t know it that first time in the saloon at three years old. Nor did I even realize it that day years later when my father took me to the beach to introduce me to the second of these women and tell me in unspoken but no uncertain terms that he was fucking her without the express consent of my mother.
You’ve got to hand it to him, my father worked hard to turn himself into someone who could attract the type of women that would have affairs with a married man. I heard guys call my father handsome John. But they flattered him. He wasn’t handsome. He was balding and stooped shouldered and he had nothing much in the way of a chin. His nose was flat and broad, and his lips didn’t fit his face. But none of that – not one bit of it - stopped my father from believing he was beautiful. And that made all the difference. He lovingly tended to himself and he walked the earth as if the earth should be glad that his flat feet trod on her dirty ground. He fluffed and styled his thinning hair. He scissored his mustache until you were drawn to admire it above his thin upper lip. And when his gut started to grow and he couldn’t make it stop, he sucked it in and pinched his shoulders back to the blades, whereupon his chest would get large and his eyes would get bright and his smile would tilt until it turned the crow’s foot above his right cheek into a web of character and charm. God knows after all the work he did you could fall for this guy. God knows I did. God knows that first time at the beach I fell hard.
As I recall my mother had turned her back on my father’s philandering early on. I came to see it as her way of getting even with John Sr. She made the old man work and work at his high-commissioned insurance job to keep her in style in a late model sedan and a large house with her one devoted son, and in this way she could pretend to her friends that this was all she really cared about. Revenge and ego made a potent chemical mix in the social circles where my mother traveled.
So whether or not my mother knew what he was up to when my father put me in the car to take me with him to the beach that day is anybody’s guess. My guess is that my mother saw me being carried off in my oversized 1980s flip flops and day-glow t-shirt and she figured that - one way or the other - she had lost me and there was nothing more she could do about it. I remember waving to her out the car window as we drove away; she was standing on the porch sorting through the mail and she didn’t even look back at me. The feeling I had is that she had been waiting for me to leave with my father for quite some time.
In the car on the way to the beach that morning I figured my father had finally seen some potential in me and that he was taking me alone with him to the beach for the first time to start to try and make something out of me and my joyless lump of a soul. The old man loved the beach; he tanned as if it was a sacrament and the beach was his altar. So on that summer morning of my thirteenth year as my father and I drove into the breeze coming off the shore, I felt as if I was about to be inducted into the priesthood. I had no idea what was coming my way.
She stood out right away, shimmering in the emptiness of low tide even before my father pointed her out to me. This woman was hard to miss. She had laid down a flawless, white bath towel near the edge of the water at the exact point where the sand had started to dry from the retreating ocean, and she was reclining there on her elbows. Her back was arched and her eyes were looking up through moon-sized designer sunglasses into the admiring faces of three young city girls in bikini tops and stringy cut off shorts. Across the scooped neckline of her candy-striped bathing suit she wore a tiered necklace of red and white stones that was never meant for the beach. When one of the girls pointed to the necklace and then leaned down to touch the tip of it nearest the woman’s breasts, I thought I would burst through my swim trunks. And when the girl started fondling the jewelry and the woman arched higher and tilted back her massive head of feathered hair, I opened my mouth and started to stare like an idiot boy with his nose in the flap of a circus tent. That’s when my father called out her name and put a stop to the whole thing.
“June.” At the sound of my father’s voice, the three girls broke off and scattered away. “That’s June,” my father said more quietly, not taking his eyes off her. It was clear from the way John Tosca, Sr. looked over at June when he called her name that he had temporarily forgotten I was there.
June got up from her towel. She fluffed out her hair with one hand, dusted the sand from the arches of her feet with the other, and then she tip-toed toward us backlit by the sun that was still rising in the east. We spent the rest of the morning with her sitting on our blanket, she and my father laughing and making small talk and me laying on my churning stomach reading my Jean Craighead George novel about a boy who leaves his family to move into the woods and build a home in a tree From time to time June would attempt to bring me into the conversation in her own flirty way, tickling my back and asking me about school or some such other inconsequential nonsense. But, even though each touch of her fingers sent my groin burrowing deeper into the sand, I knew what this poor woman was really asking me. She was asking me how I might like it if she were my mother.
My father did nothing to stop June’s unspoken question from hanging out there in the salt air around us. He knew that I didn’t want June to be my mother. Knew that what I really wanted was for her to be my girlfriend. He knew it and that’s what he was counting on.
At one point June got up to go to the bathroom and that’s when my father looked out at the ocean and said all he needed to say to me about June or any other woman like her.
“Some women are just fun to be around and some aren’t, and you’ve got to admit that this June is fun to be around.”
I nodded yes, and with those words about this one woman my father made me complicit and bought my loyalty to him forever, guaranteeing my silence about any woman of his to whom he would ever introduce me. By getting me to admit to myself that I wanted June as much as he did, my father made me his ally and assured it that I would never speak a word about any of this to my mother. Even though I was still a kid, my father knew that I would feel as guilty as he did, simply because I was becoming a man.
When June returned from the bathroom, my father took a quick walk with her to the shoreline and when they got back to our blanket he told me that we would be dropping June off at her apartment on our way home. In the car as we drove, June hung a cigarette out the front passenger window and hummed along with the tape deck. Once we got to her place she blew a kiss to me and then my father and she disappeared up into her apartment for the next hour and a half. The time went by surprisingly quickly given that my father had, for the first time ever, trusted me with the keys to the car so that I could sit alone and listen to the radio.
A couple of years ago, I was working at the rickety kitchen table which is my desk in the unfinished basement where I write freelance for a couple of agencies in New York. The basement is also where Marshall has his desk for homework along with the building toys and other stuff he tinkers with as he takes apart the 21st century and puts it back together into something that resembles the world as seen through the mind of a twelve year old boy with an IQ roughly double that of his parents. Marshall and I are both down there because the house above us is only five small rooms. And the house above us is only five small rooms owing to the fact that I’m not what you’d call an ‘earner.’ I’m content with my life and my relative failure, but contentment, satisfaction, happiness, ease of living – that whole bag of inner peace which we kid ourselves into thinking we have sewn up tight in our middle age - can be very unreliable. So when I saw that email a couple of years ago while sitting down there at my wobbly table, I suddenly felt anything but content.
I’d almost completely forgotten about Amy Rainey. Amy Rainey. Amy Rainey. Amy Rainey. After we broke up, I used to say her name over and over again until just the sound of it tongue-twisting together like that could make me want to cry with longing. I loved Amy Rainey. But in truth, I have to say that I fell in love with quite a few girls back then.
When Amy’s name popped up in that email, I gasped and said the words ‘my god’ out loud like some guy who’s taken his wife’s Subaru into a body shop to have a dent taken out and then come back to find that they’ve painted it to look like a Porsche he once owned. My audible disbelief brought Marshall to my desk. “What?” Marshall asked, and then he zeroed in on the screen and asked “Who is Amy Rainey?” Who indeed? By that night Marshall had already told his mother and within five minutes she was telling me that I should get back to Amy Rainey just to see what had become of her. Thanks Melissa. And thank you Marshall. You smart-assed little shit.
The truth is I wanted to see Amy Rainey again. But I couldn’t let Melissa or Marshall know that. So I told them both that I had no desire to get in touch with Amy, let alone see her again.
Still, for some reason Mellissa kept teasing me about it until I got a little angry and told her she should leave me alone; that I did not want to see Amy and that was that. But this only made Melissa kiss me on the forehead and laugh at me like she was a little too polite to tell me that I needed to have my head examined. I mean, come on. What married man doesn’t want to see one of his old girlfriends? What man wouldn’t be thrilled if his wife were giving him permission to do it? The truth is I was just trying to prove to Melissa how different I was from my father, and Melissa – god bless her - was just trying to prove to me that she trusted me more than I trusted myself. I was a lucky man to have a wife like Melissa and as soon as she went to bed that night I showed how lucky I was by going down to the basement and replying to Amy’s email.
Within two hours I had set up a time to see Amy and I was feeling really good a couple of days later when I was supposed to meet her again after more than twenty years. Really good, that is, until I actually saw Amy so beautiful and so alive sitting in the window of the Dunkin Donuts. And then I went a little crazy.
Twenty-two years ago on the night that Amy broke off with me for good, I let her off at her apartment and went directly to a club where there was another girl with whom I was also in love. Robin was a bartender at a place called Woodhaven’s and I sat on a stool and waited for her to cash out after which we went back to her place and had sex until Robin got up to make us breakfast at 4 a.m. “I love you, Robin,” I said as she climbed out of bed. But Robin didn’t answer me, preferring to let the sound of eggs cracking into a bowl do the talking for her. I can’t say I blame Robin for not telling me she loved me on that or any other night, nor for the fact that Amy had broken off with me even though I’m sure she really did love me. Though I had fallen in love with each of these girls (and a few more during those years), I think they probably knew better.
Watching Amy sitting in that Dunkin Donuts from inside my car in the parking lot a distance away, behind a ridge of landscaping through which she would have a hard time seeing me, I found myself with a bad feeling about why Amy had gotten in touch with me in the first place. Irrational as it was, I couldn’t help thinking that she was going to lure me out into the open and then ambush me along with every other girl who I ever said I loved. There I would be, brazenly walking across the lot waving at Amy, believing that she had come to see me to tell me how much she missed the times we had together, when suddenly Robin Rizzo and Donna Sherman and Paula Cavanaugh and all the other girls I ever told I loved would emerge from cars all over the parking lot while Amy got up, kicked open the door of the Dunkin Donuts and unfurled a sign that read, “You Never Loved Any of Us!”
And what would I have done then? Would I have tried to tell them that I actually believed that the only thing that separated me from my father was that I had the decency to let myself fall in love with a woman after I had sex with her? Would I have shouted that I understood that women needed love to get to sex and that men needed sex to get to love and that this was a nice little arrangement as long as you weren’t like my father who only needed sex to get to more sex? Would I have tried to calm them all down by letting them know that – in any case – I was now happily married and in love with my wife? Would that have made them feel any better? Would it have helped if I told them that I believed I was not my father simply because I could actually fall in love over and over again?
I looked at Amy softened by the glare of the window while I sat in my car shivering from my guilty delusion, and all I could think of was what my father would have done in this situation. He would have waltzed into that Dunkin Donuts and seduced Amy with a good haircut and crooked smile. He would have put his manicured hands around her and told her any god damn thing he needed to tell her – that she was everything to him, that he was going to marry her, that she was meant to have his children – anything, as long as she would let him fuck her. The real problem was that – at that very moment - I also wanted to be able to do the same exact thing with Amy.
When Amy finally got tired of waiting for me, she rose from the table, got up and left. Just got in her car and drove away. For her, it seemed as easy as could be.
After that things changed. I had not seen my father for years by then but after I saw Amy that day I wanted nothing more to do with any woman who might even make me think of my father and what I might do because I was his son. Melissa and Marshall saw the difference in me, saw how I avoided social situations, how I stayed in the basement and worked much of the time. But they never asked about it, and I never told them. How could I tell them that I was avoiding women I might fall in love with simply because of how much I loved them too?
It wasn’t until after I was out of college for a couple of years that trouble finally caught up with my father and me. Thinking back on it now, when it came our way it wasn’t even all that hard to miss. I could see just from the way she sat on the bar stool and crossed her legs with that sharp right knee pinched up so high above her left that she was going to be some kind of trouble.
She was taller than any of the other women I had met and she had a hungry look, like someone who had been starving herself so she would more effectively be able to devour what it was that she wanted when it came her way. Plus she was older than any of the other women my father had introduced me to those times between my thirteenth and, what was then, my twenty-fifth year. John Sr. was by then in his late forties but this woman was older than that, pushing fifty-five, maybe pushing it closer to sixty. Still, she packed up her tall frame very well - slim waist, big chest, high cheekbones, long, wiry legs - and when she drilled her eyes into my eyes, I knew that this woman was taking this kind of care of herself because she was looking for something she had never been able to find. I also found myself thinking that she could probably do serious damage to a man when she didn’t get what it was that she was looking for.
This bar I had been working in as a waiter was my prize for an English degree that my father had largely paid for during the six years it took me to get it. So I wasn’t feeling all that good about having had to work here for the last year and a half, especially when my father was around. Still I had my own apartment by then and I was pretty much supporting myself, so when my father came in with Sondra that night I was ready to prove to him that I was just as much of a man as he was. Sondra, on the other hand, was ready to prove to my father and me that she was just as much of a woman as we were men.
Between that first time at the beach with June and that night with Sondra, my father had found two or three other occasions to put me in front of these women in his life. Not all that many as I think back on it now, but more than enough for me to get the point of all this. There was that time John Sr. summoned me one midnight deep in the winter to help him jump start his car which had died in front of his latest girlfriend’s apartment, and we couldn’t get it started and ended up sitting at a kitchen table with this woman drinking hot cocoa like we were the fun house mirror version of June and Ward and Beaver Cleaver. And there was that insurance company picnic where my mother didn’t come and my father sat me down at a bench and let little curly-headed Shirley what’s-her-name - the executive secretary to my father the regional VP - tell me what a great and caring and powerful man John Sr. was and how she “just loved” working for him, all while my father stood at her back with his hands on her shoulders. There was even that one night in high school when I found myself in a park singing grunge rock songs along with a couple of my guitar playing friends, and my father actually walked by with a women and they applauded and whistled at our depressing and badly-tuned aria of pain.
So by that night when my father walked in with Sondra I had pretty much figured out what my father was doing all these years. With each of those women he put in front of me, he was both seeking my blessing and asking me to understand him. I think he believed that if his own son could accept and identify with these terrible betrayals of his mother – a son who, after all, had been sent to him by God and who was already complicit in God’s plan for him– than it must be that God would also understand why he was fucking other women. You’d have to admit that the guy did have a set of balls on him.
In the bar that night, Sondra started drinking the minute my father started buying. And after I had run down my side work and stuck my punch card into the clock next to the walk in freezer, I started drinking one-for-one right along with them. After a while we left and walked the three blocks to a late night place that my father knew and when that wasn’t enough for them we staggered to a dimly lit, all night bodega and bought a bottle of scotch and a six pack of off-brand club soda to take back to my two room walk up. As odd as this situation was becoming, until we got to my apartment there was only one thing that seemed just a little wrong to me – just one little oddity that I caught winking at me from time-to-time through the heat waves of my fuming alcohol buzz. While my father and I got drunk and drunker, Sondra looked to me like she hadn’t touched a drop.
Once we were settled into my apartment, my father immediately started rambling on about what a great son I was, how much I meant to him, how much he loved me - liquored emotionality flowing from John Sr. like piss from a race horse. I could tell that he was doing it for the benefit of Sondra; nothing like this ever came out of his mouth when we were alone, drunk or sober. But Sondra, dear girl that she was, just sat quietly across from us, listening to my father blather and smiling like she was waiting for a child to talk himself to sleep. I kept glancing at Sondra and each time I did her smile had gotten a little larger, her mouth opened wider, her teeth a bit farther apart exposing more of the dark inside of her throat. Drunk as I was, the more I looked at Sondra, the more I thought that she might be getting ready to walk over and sink her teeth into me.
“Johnny, you make me so proud of you,” my father gushed. “Sondra, don’t I tell you how proud this kid makes me?”
Sondra nodded at my father and then removed the thin, beaded sweater she had been wearing over her strapless dress. With her shoulders exposed I saw a mature, chiseled angle to her body that was kind of attractive while at the same time being more than a little frightening for a young man like me alone in his apartment with his father and his father’s mistress.
“This kid … this kid … he’s really gonna be something,” the old man bellowed.
What exactly I was going to be, John Sr. couldn’t have told you. This was largely because - as he knew - I had no firm plans to be much of anything at that point in my life. Still, that didn’t stop my father from kissing me with wet lips and stinking breath just below my right eye.
“Okay, get up off the couch now Johnny and let your father lay down and close his eyes for a few minutes.”
I got up and let him raise his feet onto the stained couch that also pulled out to be my bed. And now there was no place in the apartment left for me to sit, the only other chair being the one Sondra was on - a springy, three-legged recliner that I had found in the street and propped up on its back left side with a patio block prosthetic. When my father closed his eyes and started to snore lightly, Sondra shrugged her naked shoulders and then patted the seat of the recliner next to her folded legs, slightly rocking the sad old chair with her invitation and sending me into the kitchen to hide.
But that didn’t stop Sondra. Once in the kitchen I could hear the leatherette whoosh of the recliner’s seat cushion as it inflated and - after what seemed like minutes inside my liquored time warp - Sondra and her naked shoulders appeared in the kitchen doorway. Turning away from her, I muscled up as much sobriety as I could and pretended to look for something inside my doorless and nearly empty kitchen cabinets.
“Your father really does think the world of you,” Sandra said, clear and ominous as a bell on a foggy night. “You really are a sweet boy. And you’re so good to your father.”
I turned around to look at Sondra, starting to sober up and not liking what I found myself thinking. For her part, Sondra lightly kicked off her heels, sending them into a corner near the stove and then she slipped over the linoleum until she was about two feet from me, backing me loosely against the sink. Though she had been just a little taller than me before this, with her heels off we were now just about the same height. This, I abruptly realized, was the whole idea behind her taking them off in the first place.
“What is it you said you wanted to do with your life?” Sondra asked. And this was odd since I’d never mentioned it to her and – even if I had – this did not seem like the time to get into it.
“I’m not really sure … I like to write.”
“Well, I’ll bet you’d be good at that. But you know what else I’d bet you’d be good at? I’d bet you’d be great at acting … you certainly are handsome enough.”
I nodded and felt as if was I about to lose control of my bodily functions. Sondra could see that I had nowhere to go from here and that’s when she closed the gap between us. Stepping in to me, she put her hands around my waist, and then she opened that large mouth of hers and kissed me until I felt like I was being pulled inside her.
And, here again, I lost my mind. I closed my eyes tight like I was trying to hold out brilliant sunlight and I kissed Sondra back, my hands blindly tugging at a dress for which I could not seem to find a way in. There in my insanity I remember that Sondra was very helpful. When she felt me struggling, she neatly dropped the top of her bodice to reveal her breasts while simultaneously – and may I say expertly – she unbuckled my pants with a single one of her hands. It wasn’t until she started pushing my head and body down toward the floor, until I was about even with her beaten down breasts and surprisingly hard nipples that I caught sight of myself in the reflecting glass of the oven door and became overwhelmed with a feeling of sorrow, as if it might be tears and not sperm that would soon be leaking from me.
Who I was, what I was doing, what was going to happen to me and exactly what my future would be all came rushing in on me at that moment. Kneeling on the floor, Sondra getting ready to come down there with me, I suddenly knew what love was and I knew what love was not in a way I’ve never been as clear on since. I didn’t actually cry, though I may have whimpered as I sprung up, buckled my pants and ran out to the street without a coat or jacket, leaving my father and Sondra behind to explain god knows what to god knows who.
They must have gone to a hotel. Or maybe my father just took Sondra back to that hotly lit and artificially scented place in which I imaged she lived. Whatever happened to them, when I got back to my apartment Sondra and my father were gone.
After that I never again met another of my father’s women. After that, I started avoiding my father more and more, using every excuse I could think of to stay clear. After that I met and married Melissa and three years later Marshall was born. After that, this was how I said I love you.
In truth, I often wonder how it is a father is supposed to say I love you to a son. Most of us turn out to be clanking lug heads who thump our way around our boys with shop talk and sharp tools, deploying an increasing array of sports equipment or bad jokes until we hit on something that kind of works. I don’t know one single man who does it well from beginning to end. And after all that’s happened to me, the best I can tell you is how I said I love you to my own son on a hot day in July when I decided that my father and I were finished.
Marshall was outside crawling around on the little kennel of grass that we call our backyard, and Melissa and I were hovering over him like sheepdogs tending strays. Marshall was not thinking of us, nor was he thinking of the effect he was about to have on our lives. My boy had just turned one and he was out there in his disposable diaper and snap-crotched t-shirt, his chubby thighs and pork chop feet poking out the bottom of the leg holes and chafing against soft spears of grass as he scooted toward my father who was waving and waiting to receive him with open arms.
By this time, John Sr. and I had really been little more than civil to each other for the past five years. Even still, I let my father see his grandson from time-to-time, doling out my kid to my old man like John Sr. was a heroin addict and I was the keeper of the methadone at a clinic. I wanted John Sr. to see the job I was doing with my own son. I just didn’t want him so close, so often that he might have a chance to steal the kid’s love from me in the way a junky will steal anything from you that he can use to get himself high. So far my father had given me no reason not to trust him around my son. No reason at all except for all those women he had been with over the past 30 years.
“Look at this boy go. Look at him crawl. Come on Marshall, get over here.”
I didn’t like the way my father was enjoying this. I didn’t say anything about it.
“This kid is a thoroughbred. How can he not be with these blood lines, right Melissa?”
My wife smiled and nodded and tilted her hand toward my mother who was on our back porch smoking and blowing it into the sky. I pretended to play sheepdog again and reached down to course correct my son so he was actually now just a little out of true with the point at which my father was standing.
“I’ll tell you Johnny this kid is going to break hearts … Over here Marshall. I’m over here ...” My father shifted position so he was once again in line with Marshall who crawled toward him all the faster now. I felt myself resisting the urge to pick up Marshall and carry him off.
“That a boy, you got it Marshall.” Marshall squealed and covered the rest of the turf to reach my father in a sprint that left my old man breathless and apparently unguarded as he lifted Marshall up high and into the sun, yelling, “When the ladies see you, Marshall, we won’t be able to keep them away from you.”
I looked at my father and he looked at me, tender-faced and wagging his head slightly as if he were trying desperately to say something that would persuade me to do other than what I was about to do. But I did it, anyway. I stumbled toward my father and Marshall at exactly the speed the earth might have been moving had it not stopped beneath my feet. I took my son from my father’s arms and I walked past my mother on the porch and through the peeling French doors into the house. And that was how I said I love you to Marshall on that hot day in July - by deciding in a single moment that I would never again see my father or let my father see my son.
There were no words, no hesitations, no sorrowful glances. Not on my part anyway. Though in that last glimpse I caught of John Sr. for what would be the next 10 years he looked to me like someone had beaten him black and blue before cutting him in places that would slowly drain the blood from his body little-by-little over time until he had been completely bled dry. So I guess I won. So what?
When my mother asked me why I wouldn’t see my father any longer, why I wouldn’t let him into my house or allow him to see my son. I told her she’d have to ask my father that question. If she did and what he might have told her, I don’t care to know.
I got used to living without John Sr. pretty quickly in the years after that. If most men believe that sooner or later they have to kill off their fathers, I guess I just believed I had a better reason to do it than most. I actually felt pretty proud of myself for those ten years that I lived without my father. Proud and pleased right up until the instant I found out that my father actually would be dying and that soon I really would go on living without him.
Still, I can’t exactly say what it was that caused me to change my mind about seeing my father again after my mother called me a year ago with the news. There is one thing that I kept thinking about, however. It was a single moment when I was ten years old when my father was just about perfect.
I had started riding my bike a mile every morning, up a hill, past some old factory buildings, on my way to school. This lone bike riding in a poor section of town made me feel free every day until one morning when I found myself lumbering up that hill in the pouring rain. With water dripping from my slicker and running down the legs of my pants, the front tire of my bike skittered into a rut in the sidewalk and my freedom and I went flying over the handlebars into a sopping patch of grass and mud that bordered the street. Down there on the ground I could feel the parts trucks stinging me with evil chuckles of rain each time one of them flashed by on their way into the factory lot and I truly believed that at any minute one of these motorized monsters was going to slip their chain and crush my skull into mash. I was a mess of a boy with bloody hands and nothing left of my pride and I felt certain I was about to die. I froze and started to cry, moving toward a full on panic. If those two hands of my fathers had not picked me up from the ground where he found me as he passed by on his way to work, if he had not pulled me into the dry front seat of his car and let me slosh rain water and tears on his suit, if at that moment he had not told me that he would stay with me as long as I needed – all day if I needed it – I don’t think I would have found the strength to see him again in that last year of his life. In the end I guess it was just as simple as that.
We got along pretty well in those months that I took to him to medical clinics and hospitals, keeping track of things for him and driving him to restaurants where he could still hold down the food, escorting him into barber shops and shoe stores where all the guys liked him and knew him by name. Though you might think otherwise, we didn’t talk about anything truly important during those times together and I actually found it easier to be with him than I had ever found it before. He never said a word about what had happened between us and he never asked for my forgiveness. It was just as well, his silence about it and the things I saw during those months were more than enough for me.
One day as I was pulling my old man’s steadily loosening flesh out of my car to walk him into a place we were going for breakfast, his day planner fell off his lap and onto the sidewalk. Why he still carried this thing, what important appointments he still had to keep track of (save for one last one that I knew about), I really had no idea. Anyway, this ancient planner with his “Regional VP” title etched in white onto the black leather now laid on the sidewalk and when I reached down for it a bookmark fell out. This 2x4 inch slip of heavy paper lay face down on the concrete and when I picked it up I could see that it had The Our Father printed on the front: The Lord’s Prayer, the gold standard of forgiveness. John Sr. never went to church. John Sr. was as profane in the life I saw him lead as ever a man could be, tempted away from the finer movements of the spirit day-by-day, dollar-by-dollar and woman-by-woman. John Sr. must have known that he was going to have a hard time getting into any heaven he could envision but when I picked up the card to put it back, John Sr. told me to keep it and put it in my pocket. It was as close as I would ever get to seeing that my father was asking someone - maybe even me - for forgiveness.
During those final weeks there came a night when my father called me up at home and asked me if I could pick him up from his house and just drive him around for a while. When I got there and got him in the car, he told me that he had lied to me and that he didn’t just want to drive around, that there really was someplace that he wanted me to take him. He knew I didn’t like the sound of it but he didn’t seem ashamed nor did he hold back in telling me the truth. “You don’t have to come in with me Johnny, I just need the ride. Please.” I held the car key in my hand for so long without putting it into the ignition that John Sr. finally opened his door to get out. That’s when I shoved the key in the ignition and started the car. He shut the door and I drove him the 15 miles out of town without saying another word until he had shown me the way out to that old house in the middle of nowhere.
The place looked haunted out there in the dark, dimly lit as it was by the wicked glow of a fly flecked bug light on the porch. The shingles sagged against the cinderblock foundation and the windows were all drawn down tight with snap spring window shades. I couldn’t help wondering how many of my father’s old girlfriends might actually be rattling around inside. Was it just one or had June and Sandra and all the others gathered together tonight in a single place to say goodbye? Were Amy Rainey and Donna Rizzo in there too? Was it a farewell party that everyone had been invited to except me? Had I been invited and actually not realized it? I have to say that I was desperate to know the truth of who was in that house.
And yet there was no way I was going in. Nor was I even going to help my father out of the car and up the front steps. You might think it was agony for me to watch him find his own way in. After all, here was a man in the last stages of a disease that was eating him from the inside and that would kill him in less than a week, a man who hadn’t walked a single step on his own for days now. That I would pity him as he walked the path and looked for things to hang onto - a post mailbox, the stouter branches of a hibiscus bush, a porch railing that shook when he landed his hand on it with his full weight – is an honest mistake you might make. That I would be compelled to get out of the car and run to his aid is just what anyone with a heart would have felt they needed to do. And as proud as I would have been of anyone else who did that, on that night I was more than happy to watch my father take this walk alone. Call me an asshole, a stone-hearted fucker, a sadistic piece of shit of a son without an ounce of love left for his father. Call me what you will, I found myself thrilled with the old man’s struggle. I knew that there would be plenty of time left for agony and sorrow and at that moment I couldn’t have felt more at peace.
So sanguine was I that when father got himself up the steps and onto the porch I actually even shifted my position a little so I could get a better look. I had a nice view now as he knocked on the door and I was settling in to see who would open it when my hand brushed my father’s planner on the seat next to me. There would have been no reason for him to bring it into the house with him and there was no reason for me to even look at it except that I did and when I did I saw a white envelope sticking out. For a moment I didn’t think anything of it and then I realized that whatever was inside this envelope was meant for whoever was inside that house. I couldn’t stop myself from pulling it open and when I did I found a greeting card. It was one of those sap filled thank you notes where the only words that make any sense are the ones that you write in them. And though there was no name written above the printed words inside the card, there was a name written at the bottom. The name was “John” and the words written over it were “I love you.”
Now maybe God would forgive John Tosca Sr. for loving whoever was in that house. Maybe John Sr. actually did love this woman. Maybe he loved all of them. So maybe God would understand and he would forgive my father for loving over and over again like this. Maybe. I just knew that I never would.
Last night I was putting Marshall to bed and he started asking me questions about my father. He’s at the age now where this seems to have become critical for him. Still because Marshall is who he is, so much wiser than his years and much too smart sometimes for his own good, his questions can drive you a little nuts and pull you into places where there are no easy answers.
“Did your father make you laugh?”
“Do you think your father was smart?”
“When you were my age, what kind of things did you want to do with your father?”
For God’s sake, Marshall, I wanted to tell him, just go to bed now, will you? Just go to bed and get some rest. Please. Please … my broken boy … just rest.
