Stories for Boys: A Memoir (9 page)

Authors: Gregory Martin

BOOK: Stories for Boys: A Memoir

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My father tried to respond, but I cut him off.

“Why won’t you just admit it? She was
in your way
. She was
always
in your way. Wasn’t it nice to finally get her out of the way?”

I had not shouted at my father once since his suicide attempt. I had not shouted at him since I was a teenager. But now I shouted these questions and accusations into the phone, delivering each with cold, relentless force, like clubhunting a seal on the ice.

My father yelled back at me once or twice, but halfheartedly, and eventually I wore him down. He couldn’t match my resolve. Finally, resigned, defeated, he said, “Yes. I knew what I was doing. I wanted it to happen. I looked forward to the time your mother would be gone.”

“I knew it,” I said, and hung up on him.

The Best Medicine

I STRUGGLED WITH MY SENSE OF HUMOR.

Just weeks after my father attempted suicide, in a daring stakeout and crackdown on depravity, Idaho Senator Larry Craig was arrested by a plainclothes policeman for lewd toe-tapping in a Minneapolis airport restroom stall. Craig’s righteous, indignant, “wide-stance” denial deserved to be ridiculed. When the story broke, responsible comedy outlets took up the cause. But I could not laugh about hardcore conservative, rabidly anti-gay, straight-identified but who-did-he-think-he-was-kidding Larry Craig. I just … couldn’t. I intellectually understood that acid mockery was a powerful weapon in the battle against the evil forces of bigotry, and that the more innocent, unsuspecting citizens who could be brought, however reluctantly, to laugh at homophobia, the more homophobics would be vanquished. I knew that the purpose of satire, as Mark Twain put it, was, “the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, and the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.”

But I could not bridge the gap between wanting to laugh about Larry Craig and laughing about Larry Craig. I could barely manage a sad smirk. David Letterman said,

Several prominent Republicans are calling on Senator Larry
Craig to resign. And a couple are asking for his phone number.

In an interview Larry Craig and his wife gave to
The Today Show
’s Matt Lauer, Suzanne Craig said,

I knew immediately it was not the truth because the description he gave of Larry in some areas that only I might know about were wrong, on three counts.

Jon Stewart said,

Count number one: his balls are not plum-sized. They are, at best, apricot-like. Secondly, the description of his penis as “inside another man,” that has not been my experience…

My father? Gay? My sixty-six year old father? That had not been my experience. How had I missed that? Hadn’t I been paying attention? But when my father first told me he was gay, that afternoon in the ICU, in his hospital gown, I knew it to be true, though I had never once suspected it. I felt surprise followed immediately by inevitability. No. Yes. It was only later, when the shock of those days began to wear off that I felt impugned. Stupid. What I couldn’t reconcile, and what I struggle to reconcile even still, was the most common of feelings –
I thought I knew him
. If I didn’t know my own father, who else did I not know?

Inquisition

I PUMMELED MY FATHER WITH QUESTIONS. WHEN DID he first admit to himself that he was gay? Where did he go to have anonymous sex in Nebraska? Where did he go in New Jersey? In Virginia? In New Mexico? Had he ever had a relationship? Had he ever wanted one? Had he ever known socially the men he knew sexually? How could he have been such a political conser - vative all those years? Was he still a Republican? How much did he worry that he would be caught? Had he known all along that he would attempt suicide if he were caught? When did his father stop abusing him? Why didn’t he tell my mother about his father’s abuse? Had he worked as a traveling pharmaceutical representative so he could be gone for multiple days in a row and not have to be so cautious about being caught? Was that part of his conscious thinking? Did he tell himself that he couldn’t tell my mother the truth because he was afraid that she might have another “breakdown”? Did he tell himself that his care for my mother while she was manic or catatonic somehow made up for his secret life? Did he tell himself that she would not be able to go on without him?

Question after question in no particular order. There was vengeance in these questions, a satisfying vindictiveness. I knew most of these questions, if not all, were excruciating for him. But part of me wanted to hurt him, wanted him to suffer these questions as some small penance for all the pain he had caused. But behind this, also, was a sincere desire to know him. Who
are
you?

He told me about the rest areas off the interstate near Portales, New Mexico, and Morristown, New Jersey, about the public restroom near Children’s Zoo in Lincoln, Nebraska, about the basement bathroom at the community college in Rockville, Maryland. He never invited a man into our home. It always happened in a public place. When I asked him how it could possibly be that he never got AIDS, he didn’t say anything for a very long time.

Then he said, “I was always oral.”

Now it was my turn to be quiet. I didn’t want to know this, but I had wanted an answer, and he’d given me one. Finally, I said, “You can get AIDS that way.”

He said, “It’s not nearly as likely.”

“Didn’t you worry that you would give Mom AIDS?”

“Yes, I did. I worried about that.”

On the phone, my father answered my questions, one by one, with reluctance and resentment and without elaboration.

No. He’d never had any relationship with any man. He’d never wanted one. He had a relationship with my mother.

Email was different. In writing, he sometimes went on at length, telling me about his past, his feelings, then and now. Perhaps this was better persona management on his part. Perhaps it was easier for him to be the person he thought I wanted him to be – thoughtful, reflective, remorseful – over email. How was I to know whether my father actually meant what he said? After all, he’d spent his entire life successfully being the person other people wanted him to be. But I felt that too much was at stake between us for cynicism. Anger, yes. Cynicism, no. Trust was a choice. When the suspicion that I was being played for forgiveness occurred to me – and it did often – I chased it from my mind.

After a while, I ran out of steam. I didn’t know the next question to ask. But I still didn’t feel satisfied. I needed my father to do some of the asking now – questions for himself that he didn’t already know the answers to, and some questions for me. But I didn’t make that clear. Nothing was clear to me then. So we lapsed into silence broken intermittently by conversations about work and new furniture and three-inch-thick science fiction paperbacks.

My father would disappear from my thoughts for days, and I’d wonder why I had such a strange ache in my chest. Oh. Yeah. My father wanted to disappear – from my thoughts, from his own thoughts. He wanted to go away. I wanted to let him go, and didn’t want to, at once. A day or two after recognizing this strange ache, I’d call. He’d tell me about how his work was going, how many patients he had on his caseload at the nursing home. He’d tell me about the science fiction novels he was reading – plots, characters, settings. He was flying through them, staying up late reading, reading, reading, sometimes until three or four in the morning. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that; it had been years and years. Sometimes he asked about the boys or Christine, and I would talk for a while. There was relief in his voice when the conversation ended after ten minutes or so. Just because that part of him that had always been in hiding was now exposed didn’t mean he was going to stop trying to hide it. But to hide that part of him, he had to hide all of himself, from me anyway, the one with all the probing questions.

Renunciation

WHEN MY FATHER DESCRIBED HIMSELF READING SCIENCE fiction deep into the night, I understood that he was not just taking a little break from an otherwise fearless and searching personal inventory. Some might deride my father’s reading as lowbrow – it was, after all,
genre
fiction. I didn’t care about that. I had no problem with science fiction. But my father was not supposed to be absorbed in pleasure. Not when I couldn’t sleep for five consecutive hours. He didn’t get to escape to another galaxy. He hadn’t earned that yet.

Studying philosophy in college, I’d learned a little about the long discourse and debate about the nature of happiness. My father was not pursuing
eudaimonia
– Aristotle’s notion of the life well-lived. The virtuous life. A happiness that wasn’t really happiness – the emotional experience – but a path to aspire to and follow, a
way
of living, a “human flourishing,” rather than a feeling in a particular moment, or in my father’s case, hours of moments, until three or four in the morning.

Neither was my father’s happiness the brand spoken of by the bald Buddhist photographer monk Matthieu Ricard, who lived in a hermitage in the Himalayas and was buddies with the Dalai Lama. Ricard was once a biochemist and had written extensively about Buddhism and science and happiness. Ricard had volunteered for thousands of hours of neuroscience research on the long-term effects of meditation on the brain, after which it was determined that Ricard was “the happiest man alive.”

About this designation, Ricard has said, “It’s a joke which I find difficult to get rid of.”

Ricard’s Buddhist notion of happiness is better described as “well-being,” or better yet: “a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment, a state that pervades and underlies all emotional states, including all the joys and sorrows that can come one’s way.” It isn’t to be confused with pleasure, not even hours of it.

Pleasure is contingent upon time, upon its object, upon the place. It is something which changes its nature. Beautiful chocolate cake, first serving delicious, second not so much, then we feel disgust…

My father had never experienced Buddhism’s deep serenity. Not many people had. I sure hadn’t. But that’s what I wanted for him, anyway. I wanted him to be all done with pleasure. I wanted a deep searching that would lead him to something true and authentic and lasting. What did he have to lose? I wanted his suicide attempt and his permanent estrangement from my mother to take him somewhere. I wanted him to hit the existential road. I wanted him to start healing the deep psychological wounds he’d had since childhood, and I knew he couldn’t get there on his own. I didn’t want him to become a sexless eunuch, struggling to maintain a one-legged yoga pose in loose-fitting clothes. But I didn’t want him to sit in a La-Z-Boy in his cheap apartment all alone reading science fiction, either. I wanted him to stop being one of those “suspicious people in vehicles” at the park.

A couple of weeks before his suicide attempt, on my mother’s orders, my father started seeing a counselor. (My mother knew he had been molested as a child, but he hadn’t yet admitted to being gay.) After his discharge from the hospital, he kept going to this counselor, or claimed to be going, anyway. But a few months later, sometime that summer, he stopped going. He told me that he didn’t think he needed to go anymore. I was speechless. For about a minute. This infuriated me. No. It’s more true to say that it hurt me. I wanted a real relationship with my father, and I wanted him to do the work, yes, for his own good, but also I wanted him to do the work for me, for the sake of our relationship. It didn’t matter if my father didn’t think he was worth the trouble. Wasn’t I worth it?

It took a long time for me to realize that I felt this way. When I told Christine my revelation, she said, “You hear that all the time in Al-Anon. ‘Why won’t they just stop drinking for me?’ You know that expression ‘Expectations are premeditated resentments.’”

Right. I’d heard that. I just didn’t realize it applied to me.

In those first few months after his suicide attempt, I expected a lot from my father, and I expected it ASAP. I was like one of those animal rights activists who sneaks into the zoo, breaks the locks and flings open the cages, and yells at the lemurs and komodo dragons and koala bears,
Let’s Go! Let’s Go! Let’s Go!
But the lemurs just eat their bananas, and the komodo dragons don’t even blink or flick their forked tongues, and the koala bears grip their branches more tightly, turning their heads against all the noise. They don’t think they need to go to counseling.

When I told Christine about my father’s science fiction reading, it didn’t make her angry or exasperated. It made her sad. She said, “He’s barely hanging on.” I tried not to listen. Christine’s wisdom did not conform to or reinforce my plan for my father. Not after all he had done.

Ricard says,

No one wakes up in the morning and says, “May I suffer all day.”

I did not want my father to suffer all day. But I wanted monastic renunciation. And not the smiling Buddhist kind with snow-swept Himalayan vistas. I wanted medieval Catholic asceticism, the cold and damp kind, with stone floors, hairshirts, bad haircuts. I wanted atonement, not serenity. I wanted him out wandering the eastern Washington high desert, eating locusts, for forty days and forty nights, a number I understood to be the biblical signifier for a really long time.

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