I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (17 page)

What about the time he threaded a freshly caught gray mullet into the seat springs of his friend’s new car?

“Yep,” I said. “
And
the time you were coming back from Tijuana in that car. You slurred to the highway patrolman, ‘I can tell by the cut of your cloth you’re not a communist,’ puked, and still got off scot-free. You’ve told me all of them. Many times.”

These were our bedtime stories, back when me and my sisters had to share a mattress after Hurricane Andrew. Before hitting the lights, Dad would selectively re-create his life for us. The time he woke up to a dead British tourist in his apartment? I know it better than any fairy tale. When he fell into a canal, drunk, on his way to ask Papa for Mom’s hand? Could sing it like a griot.

Usually, he cut these stories up with long, interstitial jokes. For instance, there was the one about the Chinese junk merchant who lurked around some soldiers’ camp, now and then popping out at them, shouting “SUPPLIES!” There was another I can’t quite piece together—something about a camel race, a laggard camel’s dangling scrotum, and two bricks?

Anyway, they were all obliquely self-congratulatory, his stories. Collectively, they added up to the kind of no-show, all-tell coming-of-age that’s so packed with oddballs and locales and cock-and-bull that, eventually, you can’t make heads or tails of what’s going on. You just tag along because you’re held in the thrall of a voice.

But in rewriting his nightly bildungsroman, he left out a lot of stuff. Namely: the mimesis. Also, the
repercussions of his actions.
These got elided by fits of giggles. To hear him tell it, you’d think the man never suffered any fears, inadequacies, or shames.

Like most other wondrous things about this nation, the exaltation of Daniel Boone began as a scam. An okie-doke. Boone was on the downswing of his life, just a few choice claims of Kentucky land to his name, when a freelancer approached him with a can’t-miss opportunity. This freelancer was a former schoolteacher who had quit his job, turned his inheritance into twelve thousand acres of same, and decided to chase his dream and just
write.
Together, he and Boone partnered in this plan: pen a bestselling book; boost immigration to Kentucky and drive up land prices; profit.

The freelancer’s name was John Filson. He was an easternly dandy whose “mournful eyes bespeak a hopeless despair … Stiffily bound up in a high-buttoned vest, a cravat, and a coat in the style of pre-Revolutionary France, this melodramatic little man bears slight resemblance to the stereotype of the American frontiersman.”

Word of Boone had reached Filson thirdhand, after having been spread first by Boone’s fellow travelers, the frontiersmen. Frontiersmen met infrequently, clearly, but when they did, they got up to bragging contests. And they bragged about none more than Boone.

From their stories, Filson recognized that Boone had in him the distillate of the frontier experience. He contained the many faces of the new god worshipped everywhere throughout the young country. There was a great, foundational meaning here, Filson knew. And he believed he was just the man to release it.

So for two years, he trailed and interviewed Boone. His problem was that he very much considered himself an artist, so he took Boone’s statements and the legends he’d heard and repurposed them into his idea of a masterpiece: literary myth, artfully contrived to appeal to men concerned with literature.

In Filson’s hands, Boone became the Rousseauian natural man,
Emile
in buckskins, content to lounge in the shade and philosophize. Filson made no mention of the time Boone threw a dude to his death from a rope bridge, all because the dude was standing in his way. Nor the time a guy mooned Boone, whereupon Boone shot him in the ass. There was nary a peep about Boone getting cuckolded by his twinnish younger brother, and Boone shrugging at this, saying of his daughter-to-be, “She will be a Boone anyhow.”

The Boone in this book had little of the man’s rude grandeur. He was a projection of Filson’s. An expedient. Which was fine by the man himself. The only thing that mattered to writer and subject alike was that readers believe this Boone’s world existed. “Incredible as it may appear to some,” their book would begin, “[this] is not published from lucrative motives.…”

Unfortunately for the odd couple, their book flopped. It was never reprinted in their lifetimes. Filson went on to trade in fur, found Cincinnati, and get murdered by Indians. Boone continued to hunt, trap, and tow his family from one temporary home to another. He wasn’t carrying them
to
anything; rather, he was spiriting them away from everything.

In the end, Boone forswore the United States and moved to Spanish Missouri. “He had settled in [America] to end his Days,” reported a grandson, “but they got up so many squabbles over land, that it annoyed him, and he Did not want to Die among them.” Before he quit our country, Boone supposedly told a young acquaintance, “I have lived to learn that your boasted civilization is nothing more than improved ways to overreach your neighbor.”

Unbeknownst to either Filson or Boone, their book had been pirated in Europe, where it became a minor sensation. (Lord Byron was a big fan.) Decades later, it reappeared stateside when a Connecticut printer deleted Filson’s philosophical
digressions and published the more audacious bits of narrative under his own name.

It was a smash hit. After that, writer upon writer felt compelled to set out and tell the story of the “real” Daniel Boone. They quickly discovered that, while the man’s deeds spoke volumes, he was unreflective about the subject of himself. Luckily, there was very little about him that could be fact-checked. So, with Boone unwilling or unable to flesh out certain aspects of his own story, his tellers filled in the rest. Thus, following Filson’s Boone came Hall’s Boone, Brown’s Boone, Peck’s, Eckert’s, Metcalf’s, Draper’s, McClung’s, Farragher’s, Flint’s. Each was different, a synthesis of Boone and the writer who looked into him.

William Carlos Williams’s Boone was “the antagonist of those of his own blood whose alien strength he felt and detested.” James Fenimore Cooper’s Boone-clone was a quiet, guileless hunter, one deemed by the
Cambridge History of American Literature
“the most memorable character American fiction has given to the world.” In D. H. Lawrence’s hands, Boone turned into “the myth of the essential white America.… The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Regarding these print treatments, one of Boone’s few friends resigned himself to the fact that “they may say what they please of Daniel Boone.” Boone himself said, “With me the world has taken great liberties, and yet I have been but a common man.”

Depending on the time and the teller, that common man would become: an untutored republican philosophe; a white savage; a slayer of Indians; a principal agent of Manifest Destiny; a stooge for the landed elite; a paragon of racial superiority; a bumbling, garrulous family man. Most often, though, he was written up as the avatar of that particular American—practical and not theoretical, active and not contemplative. The
hunter, whose acts of love and sacred affirmation don’t sustain his wilderness. They destroy it in the name of something higher.

His story has endured and will endure because, like as in crystal balls and mounted trophies, whatever it is writers want to see in it, they see themselves.

“I know you’re tired of my stories,” Dad said from under a blanket, his gray eyes on the game. “But at least I
have
stories. Your mother ain’t got no stories.”

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t
want
her to have stories.”

“Hell no! When I met her, I’m, what, thirty-eight, hanging around with my ball-playing, shitheel friends—and here was this girl who knew nothing bad. She didn’t even know bad
words.
Her favorite song was the theme to
Swamp Fox,
for Christ’s sake. It was fucking
amazing.
”

The Gators punched one in from the four-yard line. Dad put the fight song on blast. “Every now and again, you do get lucky,” he called out.

Although, according to Mom, how it actually went down was:

It’s the night of the deciding game of the ’77 World Series. She neither knows this nor cares, but she’s at a tavern with some colleagues regardless. There, she espies this little tomfool in Dingo boots and a three-piece suit.

Everybody knows him, or else they’ve got a story about him. He’s convivial. Amenable to mayhem. Precipitates lots of toasts, and also grab-assing. He carries himself like he’s the main character in the place—and lo, he is.

He’s no braggart, but it doesn’t take much begging to get him to spin yarns. A captivating rake. That’s more or less his role at the small Miami law firm he’s transferred to: generator of tall tales, self-mythologizer in chief. He’s the guy taking clients
to outlying tonks and houses of ill repute, helping them to indulge in their grodier passions. The rainmaker, who beguiles people while simultaneously trimming from them the deep fat of their money. He is the very picture of charm. A soft power, charm, but power nonetheless. A way of asking for nothing and still hearing
yessir.

Alcohol, of course, is his go-juice. It grants him momentum, which he uses to barge through the world, announcing his place in it. (This place, one imagines, was more often than not the urinal next to another middle-aged white guy pissing with his hands on his hips.)

You might not be able to count on him,
Mom’s friends tell her,
but neither can you help but root for him.

Somewhere between Reggie Jackson’s second and third home runs that night, this unreformed sailor, this pickled picaresque—he gets around to Mom and starts chatting her up. She’s struck by the magnanimity of his abandon. The bright, vicarious thrills. He tosses off unbelievable anecdotes like they’re shiny coins; he flings them to hungry hands from his death-bound sleigh. He has hair then. He seems
fun.

“But, seriously, never get married,” he was telling me as Florida ran away with the game. He’s been telling me this since the second-grade summer he started dropping me off at Red Berry’s Baseball World.

“If you should choose to disregard the cautionary tale that is my life, okay, then at least do me the favor of settling for nothing less than: the only child of recently deceased parents who stands to inherit their chain of liquor stores and strip clubs.”

“And watch out for the Chinese!” I added, reciting the practical addendum to
Never get married
before he could.

“Jesus, yes,” he agreed. “Stay close to Ryan, Kent. Stay close to the guys with the guns. It ain’t zombies you’re gonna be fighting—it’s the fucking Chinese.”

When the final whistle trilled, Dad turned up the fight song one last time. I told him my own story of how, in honor of the Gators’ 2005 victory over Tennessee, I played Edward Fortyhands—twice—and then swam naked across the campus lake without getting mauled by one of the team’s namesakes.

“You idiot,” he said. “The world has changed. It started when people began to
record
all this shit, okay? Used to be that you could just
pour it out.
There was nobody and nothing there to capture it.

“Now, the world has precious little room, or lenience, for dumbasses.
Especially
dumbass writers. Did you type up that little lake escapade? Make some nominal coin off it? Isn’t there something else you could be doing to get rich?”

I lifted my leg, countered with a chortling fart.

“Can you teach?”

“Nope.”

“Can’t fall back on teaching?”

“Na uh.”

“Gonna always have to slave for the Huffingtons of the world?”

“Yep.”

“Create content? Be a ‘content creator’?”

“We got a problem here, you and I?”

“Yeah, we got a problem. You got smarmy, somehow, is my problem. You turned into the
intelligentsia
all of a sudden. You’re
ashamed
of me. And now you’re going to tell the world I’m this socially unacceptable rube.”

“You gotta be fucking kidding me.” I gestured at my Kirkland glad rags, old gifts from Mom. I gestured at my can of Coors. I gestured at the life he’d made for us.

“All I’m seeing is Generalissimo Nibshit, rubbing his hands mentally, transcribing what I say.”

Right. But what I’d add now is: It’s not all betrayal. I am
doing this for reasons beyond the personal. I think. I have to unearth and drag into the light the hissing, congenital demons that are bleeding me dry. Yes. I have to stake them right in the heart. I have to, because I won’t allow them to sink their teeth into one more member of this family.

It having become apparent to him that his was not the brightest of futures, Bob Probert punched out another boy’s upper bridge of teeth.

He didn’t know what else to do. His junior-league teammates and opponents had caught up in terms of ability. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t the most talented guy on the ice. He still scored okay, and professional scouts still came to his games—only now they were watching the wispy under-agers who toyed with the puck as though biding their time. Probert was getting left behind, and he knew it. He saw but one way forward: become a tough guy.

So he swallowed his pride and assumed the role of his team’s enforcer. He made sure no liberties were taken; he fought when they inevitably were. And, as it turned out, he was good at it. A kind of outlaw artist, like some juke pianist, rowdy types arriving from all over to see him mash ivory. Scouts took a renewed interest. Before he could say
goon,
Bob Probert—Probie, as he was known to his teammates, enemies, and cultish fans—was launched on a sixteen-year pro career. Along the way, he collected millions of dollars and 3,467 minutes in penalties (the vast majority for fighting), and he came to be known as the most
dreaded tough guy—the most indomitable man—in ice hockey’s recent history.

Probert died three years ago, age forty-five, after collapsing on his boat on the Ontario side of Lake St. Clair. Surrounding him as he went were his wife and four children. Though results of his autopsy were never made public, Probert’s biographer revealed that he had been taking eight OxyContin per day at the time of his death—two in the morning, two with lunch, two with dinner, two before bed. He liked to dissolve the pills’ time-release coating by dipping them in Coca-Cola; then, he’d grind them into powder and inhale them in lines.