| My dad died first, so I get to write first.
In the grand scheme, his death was sudden. Aged 62, he had
just about recovered from triple-bypass surgery when—surprise!—he
was diagnosed with bladder cancer. He had two rounds of chemo,
but he was too far gone for it to do any good.
My father never met Kurt's father.
† †
Aged 69, my dad died three months after David's
father, but he worked harder at it with 57 years of smoking
leading to asthma, emphysema, and congestive heart failure.
I have more difficult things to say about my father than David
has to say about his, and this is the natural place to begin:
Smoking is a succinct, yet elaborate, way of saying "fuck
you" to your wife, children, and grandchildren.
David never met my father, but I met his. David's
father was a famous philosopher, so much so that he rated
an obit in The New York Times. My father would have
been impressed by that—he was impressed by academics,
which is why my being a professor made him proud—but
he wouldn't have had much more to say about David's
father than "Wow, that's something. The New
York Times!"
I corresponded with David's father by email for
a year or so before we met. In fact, the first novel that
David and I wrote together, What the Shadow Told Me,
started out as a joke that I emailed to David's father.
I never sent an email to my father.
† †
When I first heard of email, my immediate reaction was to
call my father. It was the fall of 1989, and I was a new graduate
student at the University of Illinois. On the door to the
computer lab in the basement of the English Building, a sign
announced that this was the place to get an email account.
I phoned my father and asked him: What's email? Is an
email account worth having? He wasn't sure of the answer
to my first question, so he assumed that the answer to my
second question must be no.
It would not be long, though, before my father would be
sending bushels of email. I do not know if this is the last
email that I received from him, but it is the last one that
I have:
From: James Rachels <jimrachels@charter.net>
Date: Thu May 15, 2003 10:13:39 PM US/Eastern
To: David Rachels <drachels@rockbridge.net>
Subject: Contagious
Our next-door neighbor, Bob Rojas, is having bypass surgery
on Monday.
My father died on September 5. That's a long gap from
May 15, but for many weeks prior to September 5, he was in
no shape to be sending email.
† †
My father, to my knowledge, never used email. Maybe they
had email at the security firm where he last worked, but I
never heard of him using it. I don't know what he would
have written other than acknowledgments like "Okay"
or "Yes" or "Sure, I'll work a double
shift."
My father was one of the all-time great schmoozers,
but he was a listener and not a yakker. He had a friend wherever
he went because he would listen to people's stories
and absorb them. The three of us, my mother, my father, and
I, would be somewhere—an airport, a restaurant—and
my father would disappear and remain gone for a while, returning
to report that he had made a new friend. He would then relate
in detail this friend's life story. You can learn that
much about someone in ten minutes only if you let them do
all the talking.
So when I think of my father and email, I think of passivity.
If he had had access to it, he would never have used it, just
as he never initiated a phone call to me that I can remember.
When forced to answer the phone, he always did so reluctantly
and then terminated the conversation as quickly as possible
with the words "I'll get your mother," or,
"Your mother's not here."
† †
My father was always eager to talk on the phone, though
I think this may have changed, ever so slightly, early in
the summer before he died. He had symptoms of his cancer—all
dutifully reported to his doctors—for weeks before the
pain finally put him in the hospital (Doctors were unable
to diagnosis his problem until, with nothing else left to
try, they cut him open and looked inside.) Whenever I called
him during this period, my mother would answer the phone,
and she would find him sitting on the back porch at work on
his last book.
We knew that something was wrong with him, something that
was forcing him to live with a urinary catheter, but none
of us imagined that he was dying. Unless he imagined
it. As I said, there was something different about our phone
calls, something different in his voice. Of course, this may
have been a reflection of the fact that he had a plastic tube
up his urethra and a bag of urine velcroed to his leg. But
I wonder, looking back, if there might have been a bit of
conscious urgency in his voice and in the way that he conducted
himself on the phone because he suspected something that none
of the rest of us did. I think that he wanted to talk to me,
but I also think that he wanted to get that book finished
without delay, just in case his time was about to run out,
which, in fact, it was.
† †
My father had a urinary catheter, too, but he had a
second, more important plastic tube tethering him to an oxygen
generator. For the last two years of his life, this generator
rumbled away in his bedroom while he shuffled around the house,
trailing coils of plastic tubing, huffing, puffing, fighting
for air.
When his health problems erupted in grand fashion in
the summer of 2001, landing him in the ICU for three weeks,
I flew home to California. He was out of the hospital by the
time I arrived, living like a dying fish at the end of a hollow
fishing line. While I was there, we had to drive 60 miles
to Fresno to a National Guard office for my mother to renew
her military dependent's ID card. My father served 20 years
in the Air Force, guaranteeing both of them lifetime health
and other benefits, but in order for my mother to get her
ID card renewed, he had to go with her. I, of course, had
to drive.
It was so difficult for my father to walk the 100 feet
from the parking lot to the National Guard office that when
we left I borrowed an office chair and used it as a makeshift
wheelchair, steering him down the sidewalk, negotiating cracks
and bumps. Because of their small wheels, office chairs make
horrible wheelchairs. Every little obstacle jolts them toward
disaster: overturned chair, sprawled father. I know my father
felt humiliated by his ride on the office chair, and I felt
like crying, but more than that, I felt like disemboweling
the CEOs of R. J. Reynolds and Philip Morris and strangling
them with their own entrails.
† †
Kurt has already named three villains in the death of his
father: cigarettes, the makers of cigarettes, and his father
for smoking the damned things. In the case of my father's
death, the only verifiable villains were bladder cancer and
death itself. All evidence seems to indicate that my father's
death was a genetic fluke, though my pet theory is that he
was killed by Diet Coke. My father drank a six-pack of Diet
Coke every day and never drank water. If that won't make your
bladder turn on you, what will? [Note: Several months
after writing this paragraph, I found a postcard that my father
sent me more than 12 years before he died. In it, he wrote,
"Diet Coke. I now drink 4 or 5 a day. If NutraSweet causes
cancer, I'm a goner." Now, if that isn't a smoking gun, then
I don't know what is!]
Of course, my father was joking about NutraSweet giving
him cancer (though he may have been right!). Just as the cliché
says, my family never thought that anything like this would
happen to us. My father, in his 62 years, never had anyone
close to him die. Never. Even his parents are still alive.
He never had a chance to say "Why me?" until it really was
him. But when his chance came to say it, he didn't.
† †
I do know for certain one thing my father once said,
and that thing was "fuck." I was 11 years old the first and
only time I ever heard him say it.
My father and I were in our Volkswagen Beetle on Buhach
Drive in the town of Atwater, California, where I spent eight
years of my life, from fourth grade through high school, and
where my father retired from the Air Force. We were driving
somewhere, I have no idea where, when the topic of Bobby
and the Van came up.
Bobby Gomes was a distant relative of my mother's from
Cape Cod who was also in the Air Force and who was stationed
at Castle Air Base, which was right next to Atwater. Bobby
had four children by then and was thinking of buying a van,
which back in 1971 wasn't the same thing as buying a minivan
today. What my father said, as he slowed to make a turn, was
this: "What the fuck does Bobby need a van for?"
He immediately apologized, but, of course, it was too
late. I had heard him say "fuck." I know my father must have
said the word many more times than that because (1) he was
a guy; (2) he was a Hawaiian surf bum as a kid; (3) he was
in the Air Force for 20 years with tours of duty in both Korea
and Vietnam; and (4) he lived with my mother for 40 years.
But that time in 1971 was the only time he let the word slip
in front of his only child.
† †
I don't remember the first time I heard my father use the
f-word, but I do remember the last.
In his final days, my father was still trying to finish
his last book. The going was slow because he was confined
to his hospital bed and could work for only small stretches
of time. Some days he could not work at all. But he had all
the help he wanted from his two sons, both of us professors.
We fetched books for him, took dictation, read back to him
what he had written. On one occasion, he asked to see a copy
of "Behaviorism at Fifty," an essay by B. F. Skinner. My wife,
a librarian, found it in an online database. The print-out
was barely readable, three columns per page in a tiny typeface.
I took the print-out to my father. He thumbed through the
pages, studying each one briefly.
"This isn't it," he said. "This is the wrong essay."
But he remembered that he had a copy of the right essay
in a book at home, so I drove across Birmingham to retrieve
it. After five minutes of searching his study, I found the
book and the essay. Unfortunately, the essay was the same
one. It was much more readable in a paperback book, but the
words were the same. I decided to take the book to my father
without comment. Unsure how clearly he was thinking, I thought
that if he saw the essay in a familiar form, he might recognize
it.
So, an hour later, I was again at my father's bedside in
the oncology ward handing him a copy of B. F. Skinner's "Behaviorism
at Fifty." He took it and read the first few sentences.
"This is the same fucking thing," he said.
† †
My father held three jobs after he retired from the
Air Force: mail handler with the U. S. Postal Service, probation
officer with the Merced County Juvenile Hall, and security
guard with a firm that had contracts with several businesses
on the sprawling landscape of the now-closed Castle Air Base.
His tenure with the Post Office didn't last long. He developed
rheumatoid arthritis during his first year on the job, and,
though he tried to work through the pain, it eventually became
too much for him. I remember helping him take off his t-shirt
at the end of his shift when he couldn't do it by himself.
While spending five years on full disability, he took classes
at Merced Junior College, where, eventually, he earned an
Associate of Arts degree in Criminal Justice. When the gold
injections he was given for his arthritis were successful,
he went to work for Juvenile Hall, first as a Detention Hall
officer, then as the guy who drove around the county putting
electronic monitors on the ankles of gang bangers and other
juvenile offenders.
But he wrote! In the few papers he left behind, I have
found commendations from his supervisors for his written reports.
Apparently he was one of the best report writers at Juvenile
Hall, a distinction that could as easily be explained by the
horrid writing of his colleagues as by his own skills. Though
I won't rule out the latter possibility, as a professional
writing teacher I lean toward the former.
† †
I'm impressed by the commendations that Kurt's father received
for his written reports, and I mean that sincerely. Surprisingly
few people can write a report or anything else in a way that
is easy to understand. If you can do that, then you can really
do something.
I realized this for this first time while working a summer
job at the local public library. My boss asked me to write
instructions for some clerical work that I had been doing.
If I could come up with something comprehensible, then she
would give the instructions to the next person who had my
job. I wrote the instructions in a simple, direct way: a series
of numbered points that explained step by step what I had
been doing. When I presented my boss with this document, she
was amazed. "David!" I remember her saying. "I had no idea
you could write like this!"
And I was amazed by her reaction. I had explained, in intelligible
English, how to fill out a form. Why was this a big deal?
At the time, it made me wonder: Does she think I'm a moron?
Whatever talent I have for clarity was inherited from my
father, who got semi-rich late in life from his writing. In
1986, he published the first edition of a philosophy textbook,
The Elements of Moral Philosophy. The book did well
because, in making the subject interesting and easy to understand,
my father wrote a textbook that didn't seem like a textbook.
The book did so well, in fact, that after 15 years and four
editions it became the best-selling philosophy book of the
twentieth century. Or so someone told me soon after my father's
death. Whether this is true, I have no idea, but I quite like
the idea that Dad has outsold Heidegger and Wittgenstein and
all those other abstruse second-raters.
I must admit that thinking about my father's success as
a writer makes me feel sad about Kurt's father. I try to imagine,
if Jim Ayau had lived a different life, if he had gone to
other schools, worked in other jobs, what might he have done
with his talent as a writer?
† †
I'll remove any mystery from David's mind by answering
his question succinctly: Not much. Despite his admirable work
habits, my father was a man without ambition. My mother called
him lazy, but his job evaluations praised his hard work and
his knack for finding something constructive to do around
Juvenile Hall when things were slow and his coworkers, presumably,
were loafing. In fact, the only negative things I have found
in reading through his evaluations are repeated references
to "the incident."
I vaguely remember hearing something about "the incident,"
but it was a good long time ago, perhaps approaching twenty
years now, so I'm sketchy on the details. I'm pretty sure
it involved juvenile delinquents escaping, or trying to escape,
from Juvenile Hall, which, of course, is what the whole system
of probation officers and guards is designed to prevent.
My father's culpability in "the incident," as I recall,
arose from the same character trait that made him beloved
by coworkers and friends but infuriating to my mother: his
easygoing nature. He trusted people, especially young people,
so probably he let his guard down, befriending some teenage
proto-criminal, and the kid turned that trust into "the incident."
Although it would have been hard for him to distrust anyone,
my father would not have let his guard down again. The next
time, he would have been certain to do his job. But he did
not carry this work ethic home with him, so to my mother he
remained "lazy."
It is fun to imagine my father as a successful writer,
though. Maybe he might have written a Micheneresque novel
about Hawaii, except from a real Hawaiian perspective. Or
the definitive novel of the Korean War. Other possibilities,
of course, would be a series of vignettes about his ill-fated
stint at the Post Office—he might have called it Going
Postal and Other Stories—or a novel about his years
in Juvie, probably a sentimental story about a gentle, trusting
probation officer who befriends tough kids with hearts of
stone and turns their lives around. It never occurs to these
kids that they might take advantage of his trust and cause
an incident.
† †
My father read every night in bed, perhaps only a dozen
pages at a time, but a dozen pages every night adds up. His
favorite books were thrillers. His all-time favorites included
Marathon Man, A Kiss before Dying, and The
First Deadly Sin. He pretty much stopped reading literary
fiction after he graduated from college and was no longer
forced to do so. Occasionally, he would go on a self-improvement
kick and decide to upgrade his reading habits, but this never
lasted long. He once found Billy Bathgate on a remainder
table and took a notion to read it. Two or three pages into
the book, he quit, not in disgust over E. L. Doctorow's self-indulgent
prose style but in puzzlement. He could not understand why
anyone would choose to write in a way that impeded communication.
"I guess that's what makes it art," he said as he put the
book in the trash.
Sometimes he also took a notion to write a novel of the sort
that he loved so much, but he never got far. He would write
a chapter or two (at most) and realize (again) that fiction
writing wasn't his forte. He told me once, in an indirect
way, why this was so. He had been reading the latest Stephen
King novel the night before: "I was reading along, and it
occurred to me that, for the last two pages, nothing had happened
other than this guy going downstairs to get a Coke out of
the refrigerator. And it was interesting, too. That's what
I don't understand. How is it possible to write two pages
about someone getting something to drink, and make it interesting?
I could never do that."
† †
Despite my father's officially praised writing abilities,
he was not much of a reader. I once gave him a book for Christmas:
My Story by Anthony Quinn. I chose this book because
my father sort of looked like Anthony Quinn. I decided to
buy him a book in the first place, I suppose, because I was
trying to connect with him on an intellectual level, I, his
son the college student and budding writer, and he, the decidedly
non-intellectual Air Force retiree. Not surprisingly, his
supposed resemblance to Anthony Quinn was not enough to inspire
him to read more than 50 pages.
But my father did keep the book. I know this because,
since his death, my mother has been seriously ill and living
in an assisted-care facility, so I've been cleaning out their
house. I've found the commendations for my father's writing,
his job evaluations, and the Anthony Quinn book. But what
I've mostly found is SHIT. This word must be capitalized upon
its first appearance because those of you who haven't gone
through this brain-numbing experience have no idea what lies
ahead for you. At some point you will have to wade through
a lifetime's worth of garbage that your parents or grandparents
or aunts and uncles have accumulated, and you will ask yourself
a variety of questions including, "Where the fuck did they
get all this shit?," "Why the fuck did they keep
all this shit?," and "Why the fuck do I have to be the one
to get rid of all this shit?"
To wit: in my parents' home I have found piles of tax
preparation booklets for both federal and state tax returns
going back to 1974. Not just the returns themselves, but the
instruction booklets. Why the fuck did they keep them? I found
the World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1979
and odd anthologies that must have been sold by Reader's
Digest, books with titles like The Big Black Book
of Everything! that include chapters such as "Closing
the Cold Sales Call" and "Accounting for Small Businesses
Made Simple." Why? My father never sold anything, nor did
he run a small business. If he had lived another 69 years,
he would never have read this book.
† †
Too much shit in your parents' house is a bad thing, but
I submit that it may be better than no shit at all.
Late in his life, my father recognized a great truth about
comfortable living: the more of a pack rat you are, the more
unpleasant your home is. Rich people understand this. They
are not pack rats. Walk into a rich person's home, and you
will not find it cluttered with bric-a-brac—or, as Kurt
more accurately terms it, SHIT. Rich people don't even fill
their homes with expensive shit. Rich people buy
a few big and expensive things that they either keep outside—boats,
cars, summer homes—or inside where they can be displayed
against a backdrop of spaciousness and a decided lack of shit.
To people who aren't rich, however, every piece of bric-a-brac
can seem precious, despite the fact that it's all shit and
despite the fact that throwing it all away would make their
homes infinitely nicer places to live.
So, when my father converted the success of his textbook
into a fancy new house—not a mansion, but a much nicer
house than anyone else in my family has ever owned—he
set about streamlining his life. Put simply, I think that
he wanted to live like a rich person, which he imagined would
be a better sort of life than he had ever lived before. So
he tossed stuff out. Clothes he knew he would never wear again.
Books he knew he would never read again. Tools he knew he
would never use again. And so on.
When he was done, what a great house he had! "Look, family,"
he might have said to us, "no shit!" But none of us realized
just how much stuff he had thrown away until he was dead.
When we began looking around the house for bits of him, we
found surprisingly little. There were almost no keepsakes,
almost nothing sentimental, and certainly no bric-a-brac,
nothing readily identifiable as "Jimbo's shit." It made us
wish, if only fleetingly, that he had been a pack rat.
† †
Most of the shit in my parents' house was not my father's
but was, and still is, my mother's. They were both children
of the Depression, but my father was from the non-materialistic
culture of Hawaii, where people didn't have much shit to begin
with, and my mother was from a second-generation immigrant
family to whom buying things and spending money—her
father was a compulsive gambler—were signs of "making
it."
My father was a Catholic, but his Chinese ancestors were
Buddhists, and he had a Buddhist ascetic quality to him, or
maybe just a Catholic ascetic quality, that made him decidedly
uninterested in accumulating shit. When he died, nearly all
of his shit was in his bedroom. Going through the den, the
only shit of his I found was the Anthony Quinn book. Even
in the garage, usually the man's domain, precious little of
the shit piled in there was his.
Perhaps the most significant shit in my childhood home,
certainly the most voluminous, is the BETTY BOOP SHIT, which
deserves its own paragraph. For some reason I have never understood,
my mother is a Betty Boop fanatic. A Betty Boop mental case.
She owns all things Betty Boop. My former bedroom is now the
Betty Boop shrine. She's got Betty Boop snow globes, Betty
Boop lampshades, Betty Boop dice, and Betty Boop figurines
in quantities to boggle the Un-Betty Boop mind. There are
Betty Boop jewel boxes, Betty Boop coin purses, Betty Boop
calendars, Betty Boop key chains. Think of something, anything.
Now think of it turned into the huge-headed totem of Betty
Boop.
Betty Boop freaks me out. Look at her head! It's huge
and concave at the top. She's a deformed cartoon curiosity
with large breasts and shapely legs. A creepy cartoon Marilyn
Monroe before the fact. I've asked my mother many times, "Why
do you buy all this Betty Boop stuff? Why?" And this is how
my mother once answered me: "Because she's sexy."
So, on the four occasions I've been home since my father's
death, I've spent much of my time sifting through my mother's
landfill of Betty Boop. In so doing, I have found precious
little evidence of my father's life. I've found some old photographs,
paperwork from his jobs, a set of jazz tapes I made for him,
my old record player that he inherited when I left for college,
some clothes, an 8mm adult film, some novelty items that once
belonged to me (fake vomit, fake dog shit), a Gideon's New
Testament.
Perhaps the most significant thing, other than the 8mm
film, is a small, well-worn ring that he won in the Air Force
as part of the East Coast Division Champion volleyball team.
He was a good athlete, could play baseball, basketball, football,
tennis, volleyball, you name it. But volleyball was his best
sport, and he wore that ring for years after he quit wearing
his wedding ring.
† †
Obviously, Jim Rachels and Jim Ayau were very different
men. Which makes me wonder. First, I wonder how is it that
these men raised sons who, at some level, are so much alike
that we function—when things are going really well—as
if we are one writer with one brain? Second, I wonder what
would have happened if they had met? Would Jim Ayau
simply have listened and nodded to my father's life story?
Or might he have recognized that he had some kind of special
connection to my father, a connection that would reward an
effort to shake off his usual passivity?
† †
My father was not only very different from Jim Rachels,
but very different from me, too. We never talked about books
or films. I remember seeing only one movie with him: Pete
'n' Tillie, starring Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett.
We saw it at the base movie theatre—35¢ for kids,
60¢ for adults (your tax dollars at work). Suffice it
to say, ours was not an intellectual relationship.
But I did email and talk about movies with Jim Rachels,
who was a great movie fan. One species of shit that I know
he left for his family was a treasure trove of Laserdiscs
and DVDs. And, as I wrote earlier, if it were not for an email
I wrote to David's dad, you probably wouldn't be reading this
right now.
Here's the story:
David and I knew we wanted to collaborate on something
since we were both fiction writers and we were friends. We
tried a short story, but it went nowhere. We then turned to
a screwball project we call The Sentences. The concept:
1001 opening sentences to short stories or novels that writers
can use to spark their imaginations. Here's one of my favorites,
written by David: "She was like a Dickinson poem—short
and difficult to understand." And one of David's favorites,
written by me: "The best part, the part everybody loves, the
showstopper, really, is at the end when Necron and Mobitrexia,
the robots, copulate." We've not yet found a publisher for
these and our 999 other chestnuts, though several editors
have responded with good humor.
Our next project was a screenplay titled "Flagrant Fouls"
about four basketball-obsessed English professors and the
immoral lengths to which they go in order to win the intramural
championship at their university. We wrote it in a week, sent
it off to the Virginia Film Festival's screenwriting competition,
and were chosen as finalists. We didn't win the contest, but
by late summer of the following year, the script had been
optioned by a small Virginia production company with a promise
of good things ahead, and we imagined ourselves on the cusp
of Hollywood. In the meantime, however, we had entered the
original HBO Project Greenlight contest, which taught us in
a sad and tawdry way about "the movie business" and "what
sells." Disappointment in that contest led me to write an
email to David's father in which I imagined "what Hollywood
wants": "They're Young. They're Black. Their Father Is a Rich
White Guy. Martin Lawrence, Eddie Murphy, and Chris Rock ARE
Santa's Bastards."
I laughed as I wrote it, David's father laughed when
he read it, and somehow, over the next eighteen months, it
became What the Shadow Told Me, our honest-to-goodness
award-winning novel. This book would not exist if I hadn't
somehow felt a connection with David's father and written
him this facetious email.
† †
Not that either one of our fathers lived long enough to read
our book. My father, for his part, now spins in his grave.
I must still him by making the following proclamation: DVDs
are not shit. Did not someone just refer to a "treasure trove"?
The day of the Laserdisc, however, has passed, and my father
knows this. He is a desperate man. He wants to live like a
rich man, but he cannot escape the fact that he has invested
thousands of dollars in this now-outdated technology. Grasping
for a solution, he meets Kurt's father in the men's room of
a Chinese restaurant. He stands behind Jim Ayau, next in line
for the only urinal.
"I'll tell you what," my father says. "I'll trade you my
Laserdiscs for your wife's Betty Boop Shit. Straight up."
My father, though ever the gregarious type, is a bit
put off by this proposition from a man he doesn't know and
cannot see standing behind him, but the prospect of a house
devoid of Betty Boop Shit makes him catch his breath. He laughs
and says, "Hey! What the fuck? Laserdiscs? Ha-ha-ha." He is
embarrassed that he has no idea what a Laserdisc is, but ultimately
that is not important. He would trade the Betty Boop Shit
for pocket lint. "That must be the latest gadget. I don't
even use the VCR! My wife wants to buy one of those DVDs.
I tell her, ‘Hey, knock yourself out!'"
When he finally finishes peeing, he turns and looks
at Jimbo and suddenly it occurs to him: How does this strange,
portly white guy know that the sweat of his brow the past
25 years has been turned into the Western World's largest
personal collection devoted to a cartoon vamp with a pumpkin-shaped
head?
"Do I know you?" he asks.
"You might as well," my father says, stepping around Kurt's
father to the urinal and unzipping. He tries to relax and
coax a stream into the porcelain bowl. "It takes a while,
but it sure beats a catheter, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, that damned thing. I never got used to that feeling."
He fishes a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. "I thought
I must know you," he says, lighting up. "So what's a Laserdisc,
any way?"
"It's like a DVD, except it sounds worse than a DVD, it looks
worse
than a DVD, and it's the size of a Frisbee. But still, if
you like movies, it's better than Betty Boop, right?"
"Don't you need a special machine to watch those things?
You don't need a machine to enjoy Betty Boop!" He is negotiating,
trying to close the cold sales call.
He takes a drag on the cigarette, holds out the pack
to Jimbo.
"Smoke?"
"Are we allowed to smoke in here?" My father stands at the
urinal, still waiting for the flow to begin. He looks over
his shoulder around the room to see if they are alone. "You
got a cigar?" He looks down impatiently. "I'll tell you what.
Take the Laserdiscs, and I'll throw in the player for free."
"Yeah, I smoke in here all the time. About the only
place you can, these days. That and outside, but pretty soon
they'll take that away, too. The player, too, huh? That must
have set you back some. You must watch a lot of movies."
"You don't like movies?"
"Ah, you know, I'm not a real fan or anything. The one
time I took my kid to a movie, sheesh, what a stinker that
was. I told myself I'd never do that again! But if it's on
TV and I like it, sure, I'll watch it. What kind of movies
you like?"
Smelling the cigarette, my father wishes he had that cigar.
"Ah, I'll go see almost anything. A bad movie is better than
no movie at all. Your kid out there?" he asks, motioning toward
the restaurant's dining room with his large bald head.
"What? Oh, no, just the wife. My boy's in Virginia.
He's a professor." He shakes his head as though he still doesn't
believe it. "Yeah, a military college. I always wanted him
to try the military, you know? Retire after 20 years with
a pension, free medical, dental, the works. But he didn't
want to get up early." He laughs and takes another long drag
off the cigarette.
My father laughs, too, considering the coincidence. "I'm
sort of the opposite. It doesn't surprise me that my sons
ended up professors, but it's strange that one of them ended
up at a military college. We're about as un-military as you
can get." He zips up and goes to wash his hands.
My father walks to the urinal and throws his cigarette
in. "You're a professor, too, aren't you?" he says, as if
he just remembered this fact.
"Yeah, we're a family of professors," he admits. He moves
for the door. His food is getting cold. "I'm glad we met,"
he says by way of farewell. "And I'm glad about our sons.
But you should keep the Betty Boop stuff. It might be worth
something some day. Laserdiscs aren't worth shit."
My father follows him out.
"Yeah," he says. "Hey, who knows, maybe one day our
boys will meet at a conference or something."
"You never know," my father says. "Maybe they'll write a
book together."
They laugh. |
