The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (14 page)

But Dana’s influence was different. She would, on occasion, talk to women in bars and, having decided they weren’t gay (or “gay enough”), bring them to me, after talking me up to them. She would introduce me as “a writer.” She described my labors sitting on our fire escape going over my words again and again, stumbling in at dawn, exhausted and happy because I’d managed in those long hours to write a few lines that reached to the heart of what it felt like “to be a woman today,” she said to the unbelievable hottie with the rack that just would not quit. “He sees that more clearly than any man I’ve ever known.” Not true, obviously, not for a single instant, not in a single detail. I had written almost literally nothing, and certainly nothing of any value, just some feeble efforts at mildly erotic science fiction. I never went out on our fire escape—the window was painted shut.

But I liked me in her version, and I aspired to it. I could not remember the last time I’d wanted my mother to be proud of me, probably not since Little League. Sil’s approval had mattered, but only in more prosaic questions of masculinity: “That’s no way for a man to act” was very harsh when spoken softly by Sil. I madly pursued my father’s approval for many years, with no result. But Dana’s praise I wanted
and
I could win. That’s the person who will shape you permanently.

I did my hours at my job, hoping to make her (and Dad) smile with my work when I could. Our agency was famous for its print campaign for Absolut Vodka, with the distinctively shaped bottle laid into various disguises. I discovered and passed up through the art department
The Tempest
, I.ii.126: “Absolute Milan!” The
e
was dropped, the island was shaped like the Absolut bottle, and the tiny ship was smashed into its neck.

In a copywriter’s dream, I was also able to convince an account director and then the small client to use some of Sonnet 6 as the body copy for an ad. In the posters that went up in bus shelters and nightclub men’s rooms, a handsome man at the far end of “young” looks through a rainy window. His finger noticeably lacks a wedding ring, and the only photos on his desk are of him with his aged parents. His face, spotted by the shadows of raindrops, reflects the first melancholy realization of passing time’s acceleration. Below him are the lines

and the name and phone number of the sperm bank, as well as the going price for premium-quality, résumé-supported donations.

The references were lost on most vodka drinkers and lonely seed distributors; both ads quickly vanished. Perhaps
that
is why I became a novelist: I stunk at everything else. But no, there it is: the self-deprecating memoirist, mythmaking.

In Shakespeare’s case, the mythmaking began seven years after his death, on the dedication pages of his collected works, the First Folio, where my birthday buddy is lauded by his companions, competitors, admirers—“He is for all time!”—as if we are meant to forget that they all stand to make money by this idolizing ad copy. “Read him,” urge the collection’s editors, his old business partners, blurbing like maniacs. “Again, and again, and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him.” The first
stage of turning a writer into a god requires some intellectual bullying: if you don’t like him,
you might be slow
.

B
REAKING PAROLE
to come to Dana’s graduation led to another six months’ imprisonment for my father. I sometimes wonder if he knew this would happen and decided her college graduation justified the sacrifice. It’s pretty to think so, but then that means he chose to skip my graduation later that month in favor of returning to jail.

At any rate, when he came out in December of ’86 from his supplementary time, the tireless Ted Constantine had him arrested immediately. My father had cashed in an ex-cellmate’s secrets to win that parole in the first place, and the aggrieved man had in turn offered Constantine details of an old unnoticed performance of my father’s, news to the prosecutor. The county attorney had taken advantage of the six extra months to build his case on this new offense and was ready to go as soon as Dad set foot on the outside.

I flew to Minneapolis for his arraignment. Dana had won the role of the Wicked Witch of the West in an off-Broadway children’s theater production of
The Wizard of Oz
and didn’t dare give her understudy an opportunity to bump her off. My mother had not paid attention to Dad’s legal events for decades, since the last time she had believed in his innocence. My father had spoken of a younger brother from time to time, but the sibling’s shifting status—sick, abroad, alcoholic, sick, cruel, abroad, dead, sick—prevented any contact. So I was alone, playing the part of a grown-up coming to advise my father in his legal troubles.

He was broke and so had a public defender, a blond-ponytailed girl of about eight, whom he seemed to enjoy baffling. I joined them in their intense and highly professional planning session.

“Well, okay, so we’ve come to the plea phase? And it’s like they’re saying, ‘So what do you say for yourself, mister?’ I know, I mean, obviously, I know that you know all this, but just to square our T’s. Now,
I don’t want you to say anything to me yet. Let’s just lay out what they’re all lining up against you? Their side of the story? And then we can see what sort of answer is the best one for us? To make?”

“I never knew so young a body with so old a head,”
recited my father.

“Dad.”

“Is your father up for this?” she asked me and turned, with me, to him. “Mr. Phillips, are you up for this? I know this can feel kind of crazy pressurized? But still, Mr. Phillips? We have to do this pretty much now, because they really do load up my client list. A keep-it-moving sort of feeling is what we need.”

I had never seen him like this before, though I had never been present at this stage of any of his jurisprudential adventures. He was no fun, to say the least. He was nearly sixty and was angry, depressed, all the predictable responses at last. He had no interest in defending himself, but he’d lost that old humor about it, the feeling that he was above it all.

Okay, here’s the memoirist’s self-accusation: if only I had …

Told him I loved him? Told him I forgave him? Asked him to come live with me and Dana? Told him I thought he was a great artist? Asked him to go over the evidence slowly with me and the lawyer, to see just how strong the prosecution’s case was? I did try the last one.

He wasn’t answering her questions, except to mock her in a way he thought she didn’t notice. She noticed.

“Ms. Stark, can I get a minute alone with my father?” I had some notion—likely absorbed from movies—that I would talk sense into him.

In truth, I didn’t know him anymore. His life was now beyond my comprehension and much of my sympathy—even if I had been a devoted visitor, a loving son, a concerned participant in his life. I was none of those. I found him embarrassing, an obligation with strands of sticky guilt floating off him, trying to wrap themselves around my ankles and throat. Even so, if he’d shown any sign of interest in my being there, if he hadn’t resisted my efforts to help, I would have … He was only withholding, to use that memoir term of complaint. We spoke such different languages that I wouldn’t have recognized a plea for help, a call for attention, a whimper for love, if he ever made such a sound. But let the record show I tried.

“You can’t just quote Shakespeare to her. She doesn’t even know you’re doing it. She just thinks you’re odd.”

“I used to get lawyers who could quote it back to me. I can’t even afford Bert anymore.”

“Listen, Dad. Why aren’t—”

“Skip it. These jackals want me on this? On this, this offal? Fine. It’s five years old. I never finished my piece of it, but your pal’s dad has it all, so, I’m—”

“He’s not my pal. It was Dana! Dana snitched on that! Why do you harp on that, like you think—”

“I’m not going to waste my time arguing with these people. Hell, I can confess to stuff they don’t even know about.”

“What? What is that supposed to mean? What are you—Isn’t a jail sentence
more
of a waste of your time than defending yourself?”

“Doesn’t matter. I can still outlive him.”

“Outlive Ted Constantine? What’s the point of that?”

He just looked at me, then made aggressive small talk. “What are you doing with your life?”

“Are you insane? You have to focus, Dad. Don’t do this to Dana, at least,” I tried, playing my double-guilt card, implying that he was hurting her
and
that I was able to acknowledge his lifelong preference.

He was very bitter. Just that day? At that period of his life? It confirms some negligence as a son that I don’t know. There was no puckish joy. He was not extolling the creators and damning the gray men who raked the wonder out of life. He was broke, friendless, and humiliated, beaten, unable to pull off his odd crimes because of improvements in forensic detection. Prison and prosecutors had whipped out of him his charming and challenging arrogance. In another, more gullible era he would have presented the king with a taxi-dermied marvel from the New World, a beast with the head of a lion and the body of a trout, and he would have been loved for it. In our world, he forged, in this case, scratch-off tickets for the New York Lottery, which Chuck Glassow then sold to New York bodega owners for less than they paid the state for real tickets. Unwitting gamblers scratched off my dad’s metal paint and lost, just like with real
lottery tickets, never knowing they had paid someone other than the state of New York for the pleasure. “Victimless,” my father said again, as he said of all his crimes, but this time that wasn’t quite accurate. It was simply that he had stolen the state’s victims for himself. They didn’t know their victimization had been transferred, and if you look at New York’s lost revenue—ostensibly used for schools—the claim of innocent wonder-working seemed even further from the old ideals than usual. “Dad, you have to stop and you have to stay out of jail. So, please—”

He cursed Ted Constantine, old Sil, and then me. “What the hell are you doing writing ads?”

“I did one for you with
The Tempest
. Did you see it? I sent it to you.”

“I saw. You used him to sell liquor.”

“Don’t. Please. Please don’t talk to me like—”

“Like you’re selling out, playing along with this repellent system? Like you’re a huckster, pulling the wool over suckers’ eyes for nothing more than a paycheck, and you earn your money by convincing fools that one brand of vodka will get you laid? When any pygmy from the African bush knows that all vodka is exactly the same? Why aren’t you
making
anything? I confess! Guilty! I wasn’t the finest father, but I did teach you that, didn’t I? You could help Sil move AC units, couldn’t you?”

“Fake lottery tickets? Are you—”

“Go back to New York. Just go.”

I hadn’t prepared myself for this. He had never been aggressive like this before. Also, I was twenty-three. Those are my justifications, as far as I will go in claiming memoirist’s last-word privileges to minimize what I did next: I left.

I left, probably left him (after a few minutes of thinking) in a mood of self-loathing and with an urge to punish himself. I probably knew he would feel like that. I can’t say I knew what he would do next, what tool was readily at hand with which he could punish himself; that self-conviction is just beyond memory’s reasonable doubt.

I left and stepped into the hall and told Mindy Stark that my father
was in his right mind and ready to talk to her now. And I flew back to New York and got very, very drunk with Dana after I picked her up at the stage door.

He insisted on pleading nolo contendere and would not say another word on the matter to anyone. His public defender, with scant knowledge of my father’s criminal record and in plain malpractice, had not warned him, or had not even known, that mandatory sentencing, which had recently been introduced in Minnesota, would gravely affect Recidivist Dad unless he pleaded guilty and made a deal. He would do neither, nor trouble himself to plead not guilty and take his chances. According to the draconian tables of the law, the judge had no leeway. It was 1987. My father came out of prison for the last time in 2009.

But that sentence was still
days
in the future. Now I could get drunk with my best friend, and we could go try to score and forget about the whole business.

I was unwilling to talk much about what had happened. I wanted to be free of him entirely, just be a happy young man with money and a buzz and an erection. I also suspected I had done something wrong and, like a child, didn’t want to talk about it, because talking about it might make it real.

Dana, however, was eager to talk about it, out of guilt for putting
The Wizard of Oz
ahead of her father, out of dread that she had trusted me to represent sage advice. “He said that? That his goal was to outlive Constantine? What were his exact words?”

I couldn’t remember and didn’t care to try. I was straining hard for jollity, and Dana was being a sweet, needling drag, extracting detail after detail from me. We had to shout to make ourselves heard over the music. “Look: he wants to stay in prison. I think he’s more comfortable there now. He can’t get into any more trouble, and he doesn’t know how to live on the outside anymore. You see,” I added knowingly, having seen a movie or TV show once, “you develop an inferiority complex in there. They do it on purpose. They inculcate in prisoners the idea that they can’t make it outside.”

She nodded at my great expertise, and we drank. To be more accurate,
I drank and told her to drink. “Look: he’s done with us,” I insisted, mixing up subject and object. “He’s washed his hands of us. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

We were in some sort of lounge, and I was feeling nervous about how Dana was looking at me. “Drinks are on me, you know,” I said again.