My Father's Footprints (17 page)

The pizza parlor, instead of cutting the large pie into long, tapering triangles, creates trapezoidal pieces with crusts along
the perimeter and then, in the middle of the circle, a cluster of pieces that have no crusts. I have come to think of those
as “filets,” although at the time of our troubles, I am incapable of irony about pizza, incapable, really, of any attitude
save gnawing fear.

My mother takes the position that

1. the filets are intensely desirable, and that
   
2. the way to preserve order is to create a social compact that states that only when all the outer pieces have been consumed
   can one then move on to the filets.
   

(You would have thought that we were a large, grabby family, but, in fact, there were just the three of us, which somehow
made it worse. We perhaps had too many choices about how we would eat the pizza.)

My father takes the position that

1. he wants the filets whenever he wants them, possibly when they are hot and fresh and when he is still hungry, and that
   
2. he is not a signatory to any social compact.
   

My position is that if I eat very fast, I might consume a certain amount of pizza before the inevitable argument comes.

This never works because, after eating maybe one warm-up slice from the outer ring and thus creating the necessary channel
to the filets, my father will take one of them, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if he were unaware
that he was venturing out into disputed international filet-fishing waters, as if we were not a thoroughly crazy family.

And my mother will start a steady drumbeat of sullen protest. “Bob, you
know
you’re not supposed to eat those pieces first. You’re just going to make me eat the other piece faster because I’m worried.
I’m going to have stomach trouble tonight because of it. What do you think you’re doing?”

“What I think,” my father will say, “is that people should do exactly what you tell them to do.”

And we’ll be off.

None of this is mischievous or playful or even the strange frictive pleasure that some long-married couples derive from getting
on each other’s nerves in inconsequential ways. This is bigger and meaner than that. The pizza is a Great Mandala upon which
some terrible, fateful game is being played out, and its center is a collection point for the bittersweet forces surging between
my parents.

Various reforms are attempted. At one point—something tells me this came after The Incident, which I am about to describe—we
experiment with color-coded toothpicks. I might be green, my father blue, my mother red. (That seems symbolically about right.)
In the fashion of sixteenth-century European explorers, one plants the flag of one’s toothpick in a piece of pizza and claims
it for future use. Only when all the pieces have been claimed by various imperialists can we begin to eat.

Actually, the flag method is a very satisfactory way of doing things, not because it is foolproof but because it makes us
feel so silly that my parents are too embarrassed to fight.

No such reform is in place on the night of The Incident, in the spring of my sophomore year. The filet battle is unfolding
in its usual manner, which means that I do not have a speaking role. My part involves scrunching in my seat while my colon
pulses to the dull, venomous rhythm of the argument.

“Why don’t you stop acting like a two-year-old?” I hear someone say. It is me. I seem to be addressing my father. My parents
are both completely horrible, but my father is the aggressor and, anyway, my mother, whose indoctrination abilities would
have made her a person of significant rank in the Khmer Rouge, has trained me to feel protective toward her.

“You are an ill-mannered, disgusting boor,” he bellows at me.

“Don’t say that,” my mother tells him.

“He called me a two-year-old!”

“Well, you
are
acting like a two-year-old.”

What followed exists, in my mind, only as a kind of white
light, like the flash of a nuclear blast. I had never before, during all of my childhood, directly stood up to one of my parents.
It would be satisfying, sort of, to report that I now let out a flood of righteous protest, but I do not.

In fact, the “two-year-old” remark is the full measure of my rebellion. Even that is too much for the delicate balance of
power in our house. We are three jiggers of nitroglycerine dangling from a Calder mobile. It takes only the trifling zephyr
of my outburst to detonate us. This is not going to be like Tyler C. Tingley’s outburst. It is not going to make things better.

I have a master plan to run the world by. There are many details to be worked out—many snags to untangle. With knowing smile,
you nod and cluck tongue to palate. All madmen want to run the world; few get to do so. The rest finger beads and fondle wooden
dolls.

The Nemo Paradox

What happens next? I’m honestly not sure. My recollection is that he leaves the house and doesn’t come back that night and
that the next place I see him is the hospital, but I suspect I may have telescoped the events to increase the sense of cause
and effect and deepen my own sense of guilt.

Let us say that within a day or so, my mother comes to pick me up at school, which is unusual. It is a lovely late afternoon
in the spring, redolent with the smell of cut grass and tenderly lit by the fading sun. I approach the car in a state of moderate
chagrin, having just been cut from the junior varsity baseball team. After years of ineptitude in the outfield, I have been
trying to adapt myself to my father’s old position, first base, and a throw from second has, on this day, somehow hit me in
the head. Coach Gorham Smith, who is my Latin teacher and is fond of me, has cut me to save my life, I think.

My mother tells me the news as if it were an egg whose yolk she is trying not to break. My father has been found in a motel.
He is in a coma. He seems to have ingested quite a bit of alcohol and quite a few sleeping pills, although there is no way
of knowing how much. There is no way of knowing anything really. There was no note.

We drive quite some distance before either of us uses any word or phrase like “suicide” or “kill himself.” But eventually
we do. We have no way of knowing, my mother says again, what this was. It might have been—just for example—a cry for help.

It seems like an idea for a single-panel cartoon. A woman screaming, “Help!” leans out of an upper story window of a burning
building. One fireman says to another: “You never know. It might just be a cry for help.”

The word “coma” turns out to be somewhat misleading. Or maybe I just have a Hollywood-tinctured notion of what a coma is:
a person lying quietly. The sleeping pills my father has taken affect the central nervous system, and the overload makes him
writhe and thrash in his unconscious state. His hands and feet are tied to the hospital bed, but he twists and buckles like
a man wrestling a ghost. Or like Prometheus, chained to a rock and gnawed in the liver by an invisible eagle. There is a bloody
bandage on his face, suggesting some kind of nasal hemorrhage. He looks wild, untamable, dangerous.

I am seized by the fear that he will wake up and try to finish the job he started. It strikes me that if he is not officially
considered a suicidal patient, the hospital might not restrain or observe him.

I find a doctor and tell him my thoughts: that it is crucial my father’s hands be tied, no matter what. This must sound a
little strange coming from the mouth of a fifteen-year-old, but the doctor is very nice. He says he understands. My father
will not be given any freedom to hurt himself until we all know what is what.

After a while, I realize I don’t want to stay at the hospital. I
want go to home and watch my favorite television show, which is on that night:
Ironside,
with Raymond Burr. It seems very wrong of me to want this, but I do, with a strange kind of desperation. Not even for the
comforting bulk of Raymond Burr at this troubling moment but just because I want to watch the show. Because it’s my favorite
show and it’s on, you know? How am I going to bring this up without seeming callous? I worry that if I try to watch it, my
mother will rebuke me for lacking the solemnity and full focus these circumstances demand.

We do go home, and in the car, we talk over the possibility, no, the probability that this was a suicide attempt, and I tell
my mother, “The only thing that makes it hard for me to believe is that I’m so important to him.”

I really mean it. Even in the recent terrible times, I have never doubted my father’s love. The idea that he doesn’t want
to be around for the rest of my youth just doesn’t fit with what I know about him.

I’m forty-eight now, and I want to reach into the darkness of that car, driving through Hartford on a strange night, and tell
that kid he’s working hard on a puzzle with three-fifths of the pieces missing. And it’s not that I know now what those pieces
are, only that I’ve arrived at a gentle agnosticism about people. We don’t ever have the whole picture, and the child of the
suicide is in pretty much the same boat as the biographer. People are pretty complicated, and we don’t show all our cards.
If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, is there a person in the world who could really explain you? Is there anyone to whom you
have told your whole story, omitting nothing?

And kid, kid, kid, a person can hold two contradictory ideas in his head. A father can want to see every breath you draw
and
be off this planet, right now.

We go home. I mention, with studied casualness, that I might want to watch television, just to give my mind a break. My mother
leaps at the idea with a ferocious gratitude I hadn’t expected. She has been wondering what to do with me. She gets on the
phone and starts calling anybody who might help her through this, which is a pretty short list because my parents have let
most of their friendships lapse.

So, still feeling guilty about having trivial impulses in a momentous time, I watch Raymond Burr. I sleep. By the next morning,
two uncles are on the scene. And the maroon Impala wagon has been towed from the motel where my father overdosed. He is still
in a coma, and my uncles, like the rest of us, are puzzled by the lack of a note.

Yes, where is the note? How am I supposed to apply all my Beatles-tested skills to this situation with no text from which
to extract clues? “She said, I know what it’s like to be dead.” I am trained in this stuff, but I need raw material. Where
is the yellow pad?

They send me out to search the car, to make sure no such scrap has been overlooked. Or maybe to get rid of me while they discuss
some horrific new aspect.

There is no note, but as I kneel in the driveway and reach under the front seat, my hand closes around something hard and
smooth.

I pull a black handgun from under the seat. I think it’s fair to say I have a moment of serious disorientation. Life is now
a Magritte painting where objects will just kind of appear in discordant settings for no reason. “Ce n’est pas une gun.” “He
blew his mind out in a car. He didn’t notice that the light had changed.” “Happiness is a warm…” Bang Bang Fuck You. There
are suddenly too many clues.