My Father's Footprints (19 page)

It strikes me that I have my parents over a barrel for once. If I want to become a juvenile delinquent now, who is in a position
to remonstrate with me? My father tried to kill himself! I can shoot up on public buses, and nobody can really fault me. But
I do not avail myself. I take no drugs or chances or liberties.

One afternoon in late May, my father picks me up at Kingswood. We walk through the gates to where his fateful
Impala—you wanna talk about a car named Angst—is parked on Outlook Avenue. There is an ambulance idling by the side of the
road, its driver slumped back in the front seat, his elbow hanging out of the open window. He turns his head toward us and
calls to my father by name.

It is Norman Cristina, our ex-neighbor and disgraced fire-fighter, reborn as an ambulance driver—a rather terrifying thought.
In fact, a month or two later, he is in the paper again, this time for delivering a baby in his ambulance. “I bet he pulled
over and waited for the little bastard to come out,” my father says delightedly when he reads it.

This time, though, Norman asks if he can have a word with my father in private. I step away and they speak briefly. My father
walks back to his car laughing and wagging his head. He tells me what was said.

“The last time I saw you, you didn’t look so good,” Norman told him.

In an odds-shattering twist, Norman was the ambulance driver who arrived on the scene of my father’s suicide attempt.

“When I saw it was you, I really stepped on the gas,” Norman said.

Considering Norman’s penchant for heroism, my father muses, “I was probably in a hell of a lot more danger from crashing in
the goddamned ambulance.”

And he laughs until his shoulders shake.

The next fall, I, a lifelong boy, become an Oxford girl. And our household welcomes a new arrival in the person of Henry Nemo.
Why does this sound like a sitcom installment?

Kingswood, a boys’ school, and Oxford, a girls’ school, have done the paperwork necessary to merge the two institutions, but
the sticky feat of getting boys and girls to sit side-by-side in classrooms has yet to be accomplished.

The campuses are about three miles apart. In this, my junior year, the planners begin stirring small amounts of us into one
another. A handful of classes are set up as evenly mixed boy-girl blends, and a shuttle bus runs between the two places. The
driver is Charlie, a pudgy and lecherous man who entertains us—when only boys are on the bus—with filthy talk. He is our Charon—the
figure in Greek mythology who poled the ferryboat across the river Styx to the world of the dead—but our passage is from the
safe, arid, monastic world of a boys’ school to the damp, viscous caverns of Oxford.

In that handful of mixed classes is my fourth-year Latin class with Mr. O’Brien. So few people have stuck with Latin that,
in order to have a respectable quorum (“of whom,” genitive plural, right Obie?), it is necessary to combine the boys and girls
classes and throw in the one and only guy who is taking third-year Latin.

We read the
Aeneid.
If you are already feeling a little protective of your father, the
Aeneid
is a damn strange thing to read, because it is nearly obsessed with “paternitas,” the Roman ideal of fatherhood. The epic’s
most memorable image is probably that of Aeneas bearing his father Anchises on his back from the burning ruins of Troy.

I am also trying to study French and am required to take American history, and it is all kind of impossible to schedule, unless…
unless… Would I be willing to spend most of my day over at Oxford, taking American history and French courses in which I would
be the only boy?

I am weeks shy of sixteen. I have a hard time, in these days, imagining problems for myself. After what I have been through
recently, what could be so bad?

“I’ll do it.”

Word gets around to my peers. There are raucous expressions of envy. What a deal! Be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Oh, yes, I say with a weak grin, shooting fish in a barrel.

Inside, I am already beginning to wonder about those fish, that barrel.

I am a slightly lonely, awkward person. I have been attending a school where almost everybody else has more money and better
clothes. I am commissioner, and, for that matter, Yahweh, of an imaginary basketball league. My father communes with fairies.
I am entering my fifth year at a boys’ school. I know more about certain microorganisms than I know about girls.

Worse still, I look absolutely horrible.

Hormones have been working me over, jabbing me with a stick.

I am skinny and pimply. My hair is ill-shorn, and my clothes never seem to fit right. The effort of keeping all my secrets
and maintaining the requisite sangfroid and cynical detachment in a school full of would-be Holden Caufields has done something
even worse to my face than the ravages of acne. My visage is crimped and tight and unsmiling.

In the recipe for romantic success, I seem an unlikely ingredient.

Stirring in my father’s mind is the character of Henry Nemo, a writer convicted of terrible crimes against women. Emerging
from a four-year fugue state into a howling, violent rage, Nemo is given a lobotomy. (“They bored two 1¼-inch holes in my
skull so that they could get at the underside of the frontal lobe. The cutting was orbital—whatever that means.”)

My father is back at the business of staying up late, flashing black lightning down on his yellow pads, but this time it is
a novel, his first.

It is my idea.

“Why don’t you write something about what it was like to
wake up surprised that you were still alive?” I tell him. “Make it a novel. You’re getting nowhere with plays.”

I am actually beginning to suspect he doesn’t like plays. He hasn’t seen one—written by himself or anybody else—in years.

I also donate the name, explaining that Nemo is Greek for “nobody.” I touch upon the confusion this causes between Odysseus
and the Cyclops.

Nemo awakens from his lobotomy and cannot recall his own name or any details of his past. He is terrified. A note on his chart
reports, “Patient told maintenance man that God didn’t know what he was doing. God very inefficient, confused. Job too big
for God.”

After several days of recovery, locked in a cell, Nemo is allowed to use the washroom.

In his makeshift journal, he writes, “I couldn’t bring myself to write down what I saw. What I saw was me. I don’t know what
the hell I expected—some sort of happy-go-lucky guy with a decent, well-meaning face, friendly and open with a warm smile
and twinkling eye. Forget it. Let’s not talk about it. We’ll talk about something else.
I’m ugly!
I’m the ugliest-looking man on earth! I jumped when I saw myself in the mirror. I wiped the mirror over and over with my
towel. I thought it was coated with something. It wasn’t. As I shaved, I kept hoping it would get better. It didn’t. I have
a Neanderthal brow. My eyes are hard and mean-looking. My nose has been broken. Somebody or something bit a piece off one
of my ears. I seem to have most of my teeth, but when I smile, it’s like a shark biting on an oil drum. From the neck down
I’m quite impressive. My thing caused quite a bit of comment in the shower room, but the face is what the world looks at.
I don’t want the world staring at my face. What woman would let me come near her?”

This is—except for the thing part—roughly how I feel
about how I look. At a boys’ school, it hasn’t mattered much to me. Suddenly it does. I don’t want to be Henry Nemo at Oxford.

I have a plan for survival among those Amazons. My plan is to be smart and possibly also funny. I am afraid of women. In my
life thus far I have dated one girl, briefly and uneventfully. She ended things, hoping (in vain) to trade up to my friend
Mark Fisher, who had spent the entire decade, ever since we met in first grade, being more handsome and popular than me.

No more heartbreak. These Oxford girls might not like me much, I reason, but I will see to it that they respect me.

I am a peculiar boy.

So I study. For my French course, taught by a Miss French, I simply do my homework, pause, and do it all over again. I am
flawless every day.

American history is more problematic. The teacher, Miss Hall, is in her final year before retirement. She regards my arrival
in the last gasp of her 137-year boy-free teaching career as some kind of cruel joke. The girls are seniors, a year older
than me. It will be necessary, I reason, to read two texts: the one that is assigned and another, more detailed and challenging
book I find in my father’s detailed and challenging library. The result is that I am always grotesquely over-prepared for
class and eager to undertake issues that do not at all conform to Miss Hall’s understanding of American history.

To worsen matters, I am shipwrecked at Oxford for most of the day with nothing to do and no mates around. So I re-read everything.

I am afraid to go to lunch because I think no one will want to eat with me. So I don’t eat lunch. I lose exorbitant amounts
of weight.

In time, I become the world’s foremost six-foot-tall, 128-pound French-speaking American-history expert.

My aspect is that of a sullen, distempered caged animal. Much later, Oxford girls will tell me they were troubled in those
days by the way I kept my head down and never smiled. They wondered why I didn’t eat.