Fathers (and Philosophers) by Joel Turnipseed
And how could I have communicated my thoughts, buried as they were in the roots of my being, inaccessible even to me, to the razor's edge of philosophy, in a long-frozen well that only subsequent love warmed open: beneath the furrowed brow and heavy chest lay the oblivious brain and tortured heart. In the silence, silent even to me, I recounted all my losses, those that had mounted in the years since I was born, and the loss sitting next to me. Mark, my great friend, my second brain and second heart now steering his way to deliver me to the future and to loss. Consciously, I knew that I would see him again, in the morning at the airport in fact; after the war and for the rest of our lives, as best friends do. But beneath ran the deeper, archetypal currents of my life and losses-a deep panic which ran through me and inexplicably constricted my chest when I asked him, in my parent's driveway at last, if he wouldn't like a cup of coffee,
"or something? You know, just come in and say 'hi' and whatever. Rest before you have to drive home."
Mark continued to stare straight out through the windshield, already filling in with white stains, and replied, "No. No, I think you should spend some quiet time alone with your family. I wouldn't want to interrupt. And it's still snowing." He turned to me, his eyes as tired as his voice. He popped the trunk. "Need help with your bags?"
"No," I said, eyes focused just below his. "No, I'll get them alright. See you at the airport, right?"
Mark looked at his watch, and laughed, smiling still as he replied, "One MORE reason why I should get going, it's only nine hours away for criminy's sake."
"See you then, huh?" I said, putting a hand out.
"See you then."
Still, the sense of loss came hard, hitting me in all the right places. I stayed to watch, standing chilled on the one-step cement stoop, looking out into the darkness beyond the halo of light extending from the bare bulb above me. Mark wheeled round the driveway and out onto the highway, off into the falling snow and silent night.
Family. Home. I sighed deeply as I stood before the door, green seabags stacked at my sides. Love in my family was a sort of hate-buried thing, a bond whose powers of attraction were no stronger than a child's plastic letter, a purple L desperately clingning by a weak clay magnet to the refrigerator. Like the purple L, a lot got dropped, bounced or shaken off in our house-it had to.
I stepped into another world when I crossed the threshold: one of stenciled ivy borders, pot-pourri, brass tea kettles, oak trim, well-polished oak floors, faux-country painted cows, and faux-feelings.
"What? What's this? No garlands? No wreaths? Olive oil? A son, prospective hero, and no glorious good-bye? No bacchanal cup to pour? Well-"
"Ahhhh, shut-up with the intellectual crap," my brother Michael called out from the living room, his voice flowing forward as he walked through the kitchen. "You should be happy just to be going. Shit, the Army won't even let me volunteer." He pulled his hands out of his jean pockets long enough to pull a Coke from the refridgerator during a short, considered silence that weighed like damp clothing.
"Michael!" my mother cried out as she bounced down the stairs, "Don't even talk like that. Besides, don't they have laws against that, like, they can't send both sons or something?"
"Has Congress declared this a war?" I asked, "I don't think so. Well, Mike, perhaps they could send both sons to a police action. Would that lessen your ardor at all, Mike, if it turned out to be a police action and not a war? I mean, would you still go?"
"They better let me go no matter what. Shit, it's the only war I'll ever be able to fight. What the hell did I join the military for anyways? To sit on my ass while everyone else gets to go?"
"Well, Mike, if the Marine Corps agrees, I'll let you take my spot on the C-5 tomorrow, and I'll go back to the coffee shop, how's that sound?"
"Like you're a pussy."
Her voice calm, but raised, my mother said, "Like a bunch of baloney, that's what, both of you," Then, while opening the cupboard to pull down some coffee cups and saucers, "why don't we all just act like a civil family, hmmm? I want to enjoy what may be the last night I spend with both my sons, OK?"
"Fair enough," I said, shrugging at Michael, rolling my eyes and mouthing a silent riposte.
Enjoyment mostly turned on the banal, as family enjoyment mostly does, often harmlessly enough, and in this instance culminated in my dressing up for war: donning the camouflage utilities, the H-harness from which my canteens and ammunition pouches and first-aid kit and knife and flashlight hung, my A.L.I.C.E. pack, the acronym short for the what must have been named after the acronym itself-"All-purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment." A gas mask was slung across one hip, my flak-jacket and helmet on my chest and skull. I dressed in the privacy of the library, tucked just around a corner from the living room, wishing to surprise everyone with the sudden transformation. As I changed from intellectual to infantryman, I glanced at the shelves, newly filled with my books-my prized Emerson and Thoreau editions, the turn-of-the-century Houghton-Mifflin editions in blue cloth, a two-hundred year old Gibbon in twelve volumes, dozens of philosophy titles, the Princeton Kierkegaard volumes with their colorful greens and reds and blues above black bottoms. All were out of place and jam-packed on shelves that were used to accomodating National Geographics, Woodworking Manuals, and Management How-To's. As I looked down at the books on the bottom rows, I laughed at my feet-I was still wearing the blue and green and yellow argyle socks, and would continue to wear them as boots were strictly prohibited on the carpets, regardless of the occasion's special nature. I straightened myself and announced my presence,
"OK, are you ready?"
"Don't come out yet!" my mother cried cheerfully, "I've got to wait for the flash to warm up!"
To pass the time I looked down at a new, leather-bound book lying on the library table, big like a Gutenberg, with thick pages. It was entitled simply, "Family." Our geneology. I opened it up to see ancient sepia portraits and foxed documents from the old world, and the new world in its infancy, from a time before Europe was "a bitch, kicked in the teeth" from two wars and before the American Frontier had closed, when individuality counted for more than protest against the machine and the masses, when it made sense. I turned toward the present, flipping pages while my family talked in the living room, building excitement for my entrance. When I came to my mother's page, on which my information had been posted, I ran down it quickly, noting the words I'd submitted in self-description and--
"OK! You can come out now!" My mother cried. But my head jerked away even before she called out.
I paused, face red, my pulse beating in my neck, pulsed through the cat-gut tightness of my chest. My voice fumbled as I searched for an excuse, a reason to pause and collect myself. I bit the inside of my cheek, drawing blood, and took a deep breath. "Fuck this," I muttered, just barely under my breath.
"Aren't you coming?" asked Bill.
I smiled, I really did, and walked around the corner into the living room, looking and feeling like a clown.
"Diogenes in dog-tags," I said, "Socrates with a sling." I smiled and inside felt a profound sadness, humor and melancholy mixing like beer and wine-poorly. As poor as it was, it was better than the purest distillation of sadness to come, two-hundred proof, in fact, a sadness that exploded rather than poured into me as, shortly after I changed back into my civvies and settled onto the couch, my mother asked,
"Will you call your father?"
When the words were spoken, I was ready for them. I had been ready for them for a long time, had rehearsed them for years, my response ringing through my head even as my mother asked again against my silence,
"Will you call your father?"
"Will I call my father? No, I will not call my father," I replied. My father. What ironies could wrestle with the pounding, punishing resonances of the words, "My father"? Better to meet it head on, standing as tall and stiffly as possible. Below the telephone in the library, the nearest to where I was standing in the living room, that's where the book was laying: the latest family chronicle, or geneology. Foolishly, with little care and less wisdom, someone had entered the name of my biological father-yes, I am a bastard, born a palimpsest-and, as I was reading the words chosen by me to most accurately represent me to the world-"I should like to show the world the way of wisdom by walking it," or some such philosophical naivete-I had seen the beginning of the forbidden name, "D---." Or was it "G----." At any rate, I pulled back and slammed the pages in anger, because it was well know within my family that I did not want to know anything whatsoever about my biological father. Betrayed, is how I felt. I had known one father too many already, the man my mother suggested I call, and who, though I regretted with a mix of hate and pity, and who, further, lowered more than raised me, I insist be called my father. At least he tried, and so earned the name if not the love or respect. A palimpsest of half-assed execution, ever and always aware that someday I would take on the task of writing my own self, the task of doing the job right.
In me the two worlds of my mother and father-the nominal, and not biological, about whom nothing should be known-met and mixed. My mother is college educated, speaking French and Swahili, old volumes of Beckett and Sartre and Camus and Brecht collecting dust on the shelves in her library. She is also successful, a regional vice-president for a large mortgage company. My father, by trade a carpet layer, is un- or oddly or ill-employed, depending on which year you talk to him. He had let the bank foreclose on his house in Duluth without protest, and moved into his Wisconsin cabin.
Married at 17 and 19 respectively, my parents were only married for a couple of years, till she finally tossed him out of the trailer and he, in a rage, tossed all the paperwork she'd assiduously collected and tallied, all the records from what was by all accounts a thriving carpet laying business of theirs, into a dumpster or out of the window of his van as he drove down the highway. The I.R.S. did not see the humor in this and charged him taxes on all income, not caring to search the ditches or landfills for evidence of deductibles. This was not an exceptional, but characteristic action, much as losing his house had been.
Coinciding with their break-up when I was three is my first memory, like a still photograph accompanied by feelings, like a faded and milky Polaroid: a white car with a black top, sitting in flames on the side of the road, along a stand of tall brown corn. It must have been a windy or chilly fall afternoon, because I remember being cold, and the sky was a kind of pastel blue. I also remember running faster than I could, dragged along by my mother who must have been hauling my little brother away in her arms, reaching back desparately to drag me along. Smoke billowed out of the car and the flames licked and lashed out from the black . . . and then the memory ends. Again characteristically, that car was all that my father left my mother after the divorce.
I walked back into the library, and, as I picked up the phone, my stomach turned and grumbled as though I'd eaten stones for dinner. My hand trembled as I dialed. My father never had anything to recover, and I was a great loss to him, a further cause of sadness in a life whose course was set on a direct path along the axial lines of sadness.
"Hello, what can I do for ya?" answered a shrill and drunken voice.
"Lonnie?" I asked. My stepmother.
"No shit. Who's this?"
"Uh, well, it's Joel. Remember me?" I asked. "Is my father around?"
"Yeah," she said, startled, then clumsily muffled the phone. I could hear her calling, "Ron! Come 'ere. You'll never guess." She turned her attention back to me, "So what's up?"
"Well, I'm leaving for Saudi Arabia tomorrow morning."
"No shit? They called you up, huh? Some of the kids of the guys down at the bar got called up too. They must be calling everybody up. Hold on." She put her hand back on the phone and warbled the information to my father, who was no doubt remodelling something, even though drunk.
"Hi there," he answered nervously, though trying to sound together, "It's been awhile."
"Yes, it has, hasn't it."
"So they called you up, huh?"
"Yes, yes they did. I'm leaving tomorrow morning for Camp Pendleton. Then to Saudi Arabia."
He paused for a long time, and then spoke with a tremulous hoarseness. "Well, Joel, I have to say that I'm very proud of you . . . I really am. And maybe a little ashamed in front of you. You, the politician and big talker and writer and fraternity man . . . I never really dreamed of those things, but saw them in you even as a kid, in your eyes, always so proud. A proud little shit. When my time came, I just ran away, that's what I do, I run away . . . jail wasn't so bad."
He had run away from his parents in Gary, Indiana, from drunkeness, profanity and the fiery hell brought home from the steel mills. He ended up in boot camp and then, right in the middle of that version of hell, just up and walked away. I've heard drunken tails of fist-swinging get-aways, but know only that he ended up in Duluth using an assumed name, a roadie and hanger-on with my uncles' rock band. At that time my mother's mother lived in a giant white house, with pillars and gargoyles in front, and was the station manager at the CBS radio and television affiliate. Coming from Gary and his Family, my mother and uncles and their family must have seemed damned attractive, more so even than the safety of Canada just a few hundred miles away. When my mother became pregnant, my father led my uncles and some other guys in beating the crap out of the guy who'd knocked her up, and so seemed like a hero. He offered to adopt me at birth if my mother would marry him, which was unconscionable to my grandmother, but my mother accepted. When my grandmother gave him a job, he used, again characteristically, his real social security number, and ended up spending my mother's pregnancy in jail in Colorado. The stone in my stomach worked its way up my esophagus, causing me to choke on the words that did not come easy anyway, "Yes," I said, "that must have been hard." What could I say to this man? He who seemed to take on the opposite task of Atlas-he would fail for everyone and become a bumbling martyr, in his own way almost worthy of pride. It was too much.
Holding the phone close up to my head, I could smell the alcohol, the cigarettes, feel against my skin the thick, swollen knuckles of calloused hands, curled into a fist, see the lazy eye, slightly blood-shot and squinting, taste the long-familiar bile and hear the silence as he paused, searching for the absolving-something to say. What could he? This man of anger and sorrow, sorry catalyst of sad fates, persecutor and victim of wasted youth and wrong living. There are words for this, but they weren't coming. Instead, long, labored breathing, a meditation on his failure in the one good and gracious act of his life, the adoption of a forlorn bastard baby, me. No, no forthcoming words, no solace, no comfort, but now broken and hard-labored breathing, the breath of sobs, of S.O.B.'s, of drunks, cons, cheats, brawling, wife-and-child-beating sons-of-bitches, liars, fathers. My father, all of these and now a repentant as well.
"Do you have an address so I can write you?"
"No, but I'll call mom when I get to Pendleton. Mike gave me your address. Well, I'd better get some sleep. I've got to be at the airport at six-thirty, and I'm not sure how well the roads are going to hold up. It's snowing like hell down here."
"Here too." He paused again and I could hear the breathing again. "I want you to know," he said, "I want you to know, in case you die or something, that I love you. I do. You don't believe it, but I have to say it, 'I love you.' My eldest, the first and promising son, the bright one who picked himself up . . . Don't be a hero, hey. Don't do anything crazy, alright?" We both paused and then he spoke again, saying simply, "I love you."
The words trailed off into the universe, perhaps being remarked upon by a God who ticked off a lonely check in the plus column of my father's file. He was sobbing freely now, and tears welled up in my own eyes. I began to search for absent words. "Yeah," I said simply, "Yeah . . . well, I'll have mom send you my address, OK?"
"I'll write, I promise. I'll send one of those care-packages. Lonnie'll bake something. You be sure to write me, too, huh?"
He never wrote. Or, if he wrote a letter, never worked up the courage to send it. In the end I had decided that it didn't matter one way or the other, and consoled myself that, as I was a philosopher, I might raise myself-what other course was open? Isn't this the way that Nature provides society with philosophers?
The snow fell heavily, in globs like white wet bugs against the windshield for all of the long, silent thirty-five miles we drove to my mother's house: Five acres of apple, hawthorneberry, cherry, willow, oak and pine trees, maybe I'm leaving some out there are so many, with a pond at one end of the property. A half acre garden. Fence posts with fallen rails dangling from them. A rope swing hanging from the gnarled and ancient arm of a willow out front, down the gently sloping hill from the porch that surrounded two sides of the house. All covered in a thick blanket of snow and darkness. It was already late when Mark came to pick me up, and it was getting later as Mark drove slower and slower beneath thickening sheets of snow, over fast-gaining drifts. The dash and panel lights of the car gave off a faint orange-mellony glow in the dark night. The radio was turned off and all things culminated in a universal silence. A silence in which the purr of the engine and susurrous run of wheels over slush intruded only at the margins-otherwise pure silence, the silence of thoughts.
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