Epitaphs

There is, I suppose, a good side and a bad side to suffering from insomnia. The good news is that it allows you to see more of the world than you normally would; the bad news is that it gives that many more hours in which to think. When you get tired enough, when you fall into that zone where your mind fogs with fatigue but the body just refuses to stop moving, those things that you keep so carefully boxed away have an annoying habit of breaking free of their hiding places, dreary ghosts rising from drearier graves.

Momentous events have a unique way of searing themselves into the brain in a way that the moment is forever preserved in amber in a startling clarity. An older generation than mine, for example, can vividly recall where they were and what they were doing when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. An even older generation can recall, in minute detail, the same thing about Pearl Harbour. For ourselves, we have 9/11. And I can recall the exact moment at which my life changed course, when the person I was meant to be quitely slipped off the stage to be replaced by the man I became.

But while that instant in time is preserved in my memory, unchangeable, other things, equally important to me, have perversely become faded with the passage of time, somehow unclear. Bits and pieces that lie just beyond touch, will'o'wisps that dart from your grasp even as you reach out for them, that lose their meaning the harder you try to make sense of them. I remember my father precisly because I can't remember him, at least not in the details rather than the kind of distant comfort he has become. It has been thirty-three years since he died and, the farther removed from that day I have become, the farther removed he has likewise become from me. His face, his voice, the man he was have all quietly faded from what was a living, breathing, feeling reality to a kind of warm, distant sense of ill-defined warmth, more of a gestalt than anything else. Perhaps that is just the way of these sorts of things, or perhaps it is more the result of some shortcoming of mine as a human being; after all, they say that Time wounds all heels.

Yet there are memories that remain, and that is perhaps the cruellest thing of all. My father may have been consigned to oblivion, but he has not quite crossed over, in my mind, to obscurity. Not yet, at least, not until I pass from this world myself into the darkness waiting beyond. That, I think, will be the day that my father truly dies indeed, and may he finally find peace at last.

My father was a large man, built like a Sherman tank, and he really did bear more than a passing resemblance to that venerable vehicle. He was a man of infinite patience and infinite kindness, perpetually surrounded by a cloud of sweet-smelling pipe smoke. I can remember how safe I felt when I was a toddler and he picked me up in his arms, knowing with the certainty of a child that as long as he was there, no harm could ever come to me. In the apartment we lived in then, there was a cartoon map of Paris hung on one wall of the kitchen, and every morning before he left for work my father would pick me up in front of that map, point out the landmarks, and have me repeat the names in French after him. At night, when he was home early enough, he would read Winnie the Pooh or The Wind in the Willows to me until I fell asleep.

Down the street from that apartment, right next to where The Water Tower Place now stands, there was a playground surrounded by a tall, cedar fence. I can remember warm, sunny Sunday afternoons running and skipping down the sidewalk to that playground as my father followed behind, whistling Lili Marlene as we walked, a haunting melody for what is now a haunted time.

My father was a psychologist, catering to both the rich and poitically powerful and to anyone else who walked through his door. Part of the week, he practiced his art in Indiana, and the rest of the week in his office on Michigan Avenue. It seems to me that the older I got, the less I actually saw of him, for a typical work day for him began at 9 AM and ended somewhere around 11 PM. When I was younger, before my parents started exiling me to summer camp in Michigan, there were times when I would accompany him to his office in Hammond, Indiana. Those were days where I would be ensconced in a back room of his suite, loaded down with plastic models and a TV to keep me busy, his secretary checking in on me every once in a while. He and I would have lunch at the local lunch counter, and there was a really good Chinese restaurant where we would have dinner. At night, after he'd seen the last patient of the day, we would return to the hotel where we would have late-night sandwiches and I would fall asleep, finally, to re-runs of old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials.

To say that I was spoiled as a child would be a vast understatement, but to truly describe it would make spoiled children everywhere green with envy. My father doted on his children and, I suppose, as a way of making up for all the hours he spent at work, he was always buying my brother and I toys. Every time he came back from his office in Indiana, he had gifts for us. Some of my earliest memories are of models that he somehow found the time to build and meticulously detail and paint, that I would find placed on my dresser when I woke up in the morning. Every birthday and Christmas, I could depend on getting, among all the other presents, an electric train set. Of course, I never got to play with those electric trains because my father was busy playing with them, always with the excuse that he and his architect friend were going to build a really neat layout for me to play with. Oh, well, it's the thought that counts, right?

Between about 1965 and 1972, we lived in a large house in the Lincoln Park area that had a coach house out back. When we moved out of that house, my parents had to hire a dump truck to haul away all the old toys my brother and I no longer played with and that had been stored there. Viewed in retrospect, Christmas for my brother and I was something of an obscenity. My parents would have us come up with a list of what we wanted, and then they would go out and buy those things. Then, usually on Christmas Eve, they would take us out to our favourite stores and turn us loose. When I think about that now, I am staggered.

My father had a love affair with cars. He was one of those people who traded in the "old" car and bought a new one every year. Cadillac made a mint off him, as did Mercedes, which was my mother's car of choice. He also had a 1933 and a 1936 Jaguar touring coupes, and Sunday afternoons he could be found tinkering with them, taking parts from the engine of one to get the other one running. Being a good city boy, I have memories of the family piling into one of those cars and taking long drives out into the counrtyside in the Fall, going apple-picking and antique hunting and just looking at the riot of colours as the trees changed.

At some point, I don't remember exactly when, we stopped taking vacations as a family, and Spring Break became the province of my mother, who would haul my brother and I off to West Palm Beach to rub shoulders with the likes of the Kennedys. But Christmas break belonged to my father. The day after Christmas, until my brother was old enough to go off to Aspen on his own, my father would take he and I and our best friends off to Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for an eight-day skiing trip. As his life ran swiftly on towards its end, those are the only vacations I can remember him taking.

My father was also something of a football fan. He had season tickets to both the Bears and to Northwestern, always enough for him and my brother and I and our best friends. In the Fall, when my brother was playing high school football, my father would take those Saturday mornings off from work to go and watch. I remember how pround he was of my brother, and I remember how proud he was of me when I started playing football, too. He always made it a point to take off from work to watch my football, basketball and baseball games. I wish he had been able to see more of them.

He may have worked six days a week, but Sundays always belonged to the family, as did Wednesday evenings and Friday nights. My father would cook a Sunday brunch fit to literally feed an army. I'd wake up in the mid-morning to the smells of bacon, eggs, pancakes, waffles and French toast, and there was always fresh-squeezed orange juice for us and coffee for them. Then he'd tinker with his cars for a bit and, in the afternoon, he'd gently call for me, and take me out to a hobby shop.

Wednesday nights, he would always come home for a sit-down family dinner. On Friday nights, he would take me and my best friend out to dinner, and then to a movie. He never missed one of those nights, ever. Something that I took for granted, never realizing how much it would hurt when it was lost.

By 1972, we lived about a block and a half from my school. Every morning, my father would wake me up, then cook breakfast and walk me to school. I remember one day, shortly before he died, when we stood in front of the school building and he looked at me and said, "I suppose you're getting too old to kiss your father goodbye." I remember being shocked by that, or, rather, that he might think that, because I couldn't ever imagine a time when I would be embarrassed to give my father a peck on the cheek. Sometimes, I think, he may have known something that I did not. Or, perhaps, he was just acknowledging the possible end of an era as I embarked on those truly awkward teenage years.

I spoke to my father every night on the phone, just before I went to bed. That last conversation I had with him haunts me to this day, the words as clear as the moment at which they were spoken. There was a heaviness in his voice that night, a weight that transcended fatigue and elevated itself to something else, and when I asked him what was wrong, the words sounded like they were coming from the grave. "I'm just tired, bone tired." Such an innocuous phrase, but when I hung up, I knew with a certainty I can't explain that I would never talk to him again.

The next morning, my life changed, unalterably and forever.

Thirty-three years, and the details fade and blur. If he were still alive today, he would be 90 years old and, while I'm certain he wouldn't possibly have been able to keep the same schedule, I also don't doubt for a moment that he would still be practicing. That was just the kind of man he was. Nor do I doubt for a moment that I would not be the same man I am now.

I sometimes wonder what my father would think of me, of what I have done. We were not a military clan but every male member of my family - with the exception of my brother - has served this country in uniform. From my nihilistic teenage years I grew to do the same thing, the first of my family to be an Officer and, like my father, I have seen the randomness of Fate claim life even as I hung my own in the balance. I have spent a lifetime wading through the blood and wreckage of others' lives, ignoring my own, because I saw broken people and knew that I could put them back together. I have tried to do the right things not because I expected any reward or gain from doing that, but simply because they were the right things to do. As one friend of mine once described me, "He's honest to a fault," and yet I fail to see how honesty can be a fault. Better by far a bad truth than a good lie.

And I wonder what he would say, were he able to see my life. Would he be proud of his youngest son, or bewildered by the sense of promise lost? Or, perhaps, it is just a vanity to believe that one generation actually learns from the mistakes of the previous one. I remember my father but, in some fundamental ways, I don't remember him, at least not as a person instead of a concept. He always used to say that the past should not dominate the present but that one day, out of so many days, has done exactly that. I don't know what he would say to that, but I do know I would be willing to pay any price to hear it.

Questions

The most irksome thing about unanswered questions is that they tend to remain unanswered, particularly when only one side who was party to the events that gave rise to the questions is still around. My father always said that you can not live in the past, that you can not let your present be dominated by the dead hand of what was, lest you wind up sacrificing your future over events that can't be changed. My greatest failing, perhaps, is that I never really took those words to heart, and perhaps I have mortgaged what future I had to things that are forever unalterable. But there are some things that also demand answers, though the time to obtain them is short and, once the window closes, lost.

I remember a conversation I once had with my mother, during the summer before my Senior year in high school. Not too surprisingly, we had once again been more-or-less at each other's throats, locked in a deadly embrace who's sole purpose, it seems, was to see who could do the most damage to the other. Call it the devolution of an American family, that kind of thing had been going on for years, ever since my father died, the kind of in-fighting that can only happen among families and that put the fun in dysfunction.

This particular time, however, there was a twist, for it was at least a refereed fight. One of my father's old patients and something of a family friend, an ex-Naval officer turned family therapist, was on hand to at least try and limit the amount of psychic blood spilled. Call that one a case of caveat emptor: at one point, I remember being encouraged to "focus" my "rage" by beating the snot out of a sofa cushion, which I thought was the stupidest damned thing I'd ever heard. Always beware of the former psych patient turned practitioner.

From my admittedly biased memory - and how could it be otherwise? - the whole point of that conversation was how I just didn't measure up to my mother's expectations, of what a great disappointment I was to her. Which, frankly, confused me, because I didn't know then and still to this day don't really know what else I could have done. I mean, I was a good student in school, my lowest grade being a B+. I had extra-curriculars out my ass, and I played every sport I could as well. I had an after-school job, the same one I'd had for several years, and while I'll be the first to admit that my friends and I drank too much and did drugs - this was the 1970s, remember - it was out of sight, out of mind. Hell, at least I didn't do it in my house, like my brother did, nor did I try to grow, shall we say, illicit plants in my bedroom, again like my brother did. But, apparently, none of that was good enough for my mother, nor was I. What, exactly, would have been good enough remained conveniently elusive, but I do clearly remember her answer to a rather pointed question our friend asked: "I love him, but I don't like him."

Sometimes, I wonder if, somehow, she didn't blame me for what happened to my father. I was, after all, the one who found his body. Perhaps, in her own grief and loss, she had concluded that if I hadn't done that, he wouldn't have died. Or, maybe, she believed that if only I had gotten up earlier that morning, he could have been saved. Either way, I'll never know, because I never asked those questions and now it's too late, though they're still there, half-remembered, nagging at the back of my mind.

Of course, it's more likely that I had become the convenient target for her own guilt over that day, and the days that came after. Yes, I found my father's body, but I was also the one who had to call the paramedics, who had to call the school and explain why I wasn't going to be there that day, who had to start calling my parents' friends to let them know. I remember waking my mother up and, after she saw the body, her going into a kind of psychic fugue, collapsing into the safety of an unresponsive numbness born of denial.

It took her years to come out of that, and in some ways I don't believe she ever did. I can understand that, but it doesn't erase the memories of all those nights when the screaming would stop and she would retreat into a catatonic shell, unaware of anything as she stared blindly at the ceiling. Yet how often can an adolescent be expected to pick up the pieces, put the psyche back together, at least for a little while, and then carry on as if everything were normal? No child should ever be asked to do that, should be forced to grow from boy to man in the space of an hour. In what world is it normal that a teenager should inherit the mantle of the parent? It wasn't surprising that I drank and took drugs in those days; what was surprising is that I just didn't crawl up into a bottle until it killed me.

In those days, I remember my mother telling me that it just wasn't fair that everyone expected her to be the strong one, to hold things together in the face of my father's loss. About how it just wasn't fair that her friends offered words of sympathy and support to her face while, as she put it, all the time thinking to themselves "Better her than me." Which, to me, was a shocking revelation; perhaps I should know better, but I always thought better of my friends than that. But she was right in that someone had to be strong, or at least strong enough to give the appearance of "holding things together." Yet in abdicating that to her own grief, by default that role fell onto me, putting my own grief into abeyance to haunt me later.

And still I don't know just what it was I could have done at that time to gain her approval. Maybe nothing, maybe something, again maybe I was just the convenient target for her own guilt. Just not being my brother, I thought, would have been a good start, but in that it seems I was mistaken. My mother had a marvellous ability to ignore things that happened within the family, just as long as those things didn't become "public." Something about not airing the dirty laundry, as I recall . . .

It really is amazing just how dysfunctional a family can be when both of the parents are psychologists. Exactly when my brother turned on me is somewhat fuzzy, but it seems to me that it was about when I was six, which would have made him twelve. By the accounts of my parents, when I was an infant, my brother was a devoted sibling. He would, it seems, always want to play with me, carry me around; somewhere, I have photos from an old photo booth of my brother holding me in his arms, a look of absolute pride on his face.

Which at some point turned into something else, something ugly, something that proper families just didn't talk about. Yet . . . I have memories, too many memories, of him sneaking into my room at night when my parents were out, of punches to the stomach and to the back of the head. Memories of being pinned to the floor with a pillow over my face or his hands locked around my throat, of not being able to breathe, as he whispered in my ear that he could kill me, should kill me, and that our parents would never notice I was gone, that they would thank him for doing it. Memories of my head being slammed into the wall over and over, until all I could see were flashes of electric-white light, and if I dared to tell, the next nocturnal visit would be the worse for it.

It's a terrible thing to live in fear, to dread the coming of the night while pretending by day that nothing is wrong, like having an itch that you just can't scratch. To know that when your parents are gone, you are at the whim of someone else's inadequacies, that the protection of your parents is nothing but a lie, dependent on their own blindness to what is happening in front of them.

Oh, they knew something was going on, though their appreciation of its extent remains, and will forever remain, open to question. "Sibling rivalry" is what they called it, if that term can truly be stretched to fit the horrors by brother chose to visit upon me. I was a chubby child - hell, I'm a chubby man, now - but I can remember many a night when my brother would come to choke me, to taunt me that I was so fat I was going to die of a heart attack. To the point that, one night when I was nine or ten, I was out having dinner with my father and I truly thought that I was having a heart attack. And when my father asked what was wrong, I had a fit of stupidity and told him, the result of which was a near-concussion a few nights later when my brother came to play handball with my head.

My father, I think, was just incapable of really understanding what was going on. He was the closest thing to a saint that I have ever encountered, and he was devoted to his sons. He could, in truth, just not conceive of the idea that his sons would act that way towards one another. In the end, my father believed in reason, and that he could in fact reason with the unreasonable. He may not have appreciated the extent, but I know he talked to my brother about his behaviour, and that he believed his explicit disapproval would succeed in changing my brother's behaviour. My father attempted to reason, and I suffered the consequences. I remember one day, when I was twelve, after one of their talks, my brother came into my room and, after throwing me into a wall, he destroyed every toy and plastic model I had, poured bleach into my fishtank and reduced my acoustic quitar to firewood, just because he could.

I'm not sure exactly what my father said to him, but it seems that it somehow became my responsibility to mend the proverbial fences. I do have memories of my father talking to me about what was going on, the words always tinged with a profound sadness and the weariness of the grave. "I won't be here forever" and "All I want is for my sons to get along," as if I could change things, as if I were somehow responsible for what my brother was doing to me. Which wasn't what my father meant to say, and I think he would have been appalled by that interpretation, but that message was there nonetheless. By uttering those words, he charged me with a duty, and I failed him in that. God forgives, I do not, and perhaps I am a lesser man because of that.

My mother, on the other hand . . . I've always wondered just how aware of what was going on she was. It goes back to that whole not airing dirty laundry in public thing. But then there came a day when my brother went just a bit too far, lost too much control, and I went to school with a black eye and a split, swollen lip. Oh, yes, the proverbial cat was well and truly out of the bag then, and something had to be done if only for appearance's sake.

Her answer was to throw my brother out of the house. I remember her words well: "I don't care if he winds up living at the YMCA, but he won't be living here." My father, of course, could not abide the thought of one of his sons, no matter what they had done, living as a vagabond, so his answer was to rent an apartment a few blocks from our house for my brother and him. My brother may have beaten me into a bloody pulp, but may father would not abandon him. Again, call it the devolution of an American family.

I remember the Sunday when my father and brother moved out of the house. I remember them loading the truck up with their possessions, and my father looking at me. "Last weekend, everything was normal," he said to me, a look of infinite sadness on his face and infinite weariness in his voice. And there I stood, unable to say anything in return, for his idea of normal had been my nightmare for years, culminating in that event. Words spoken in remorse and disbelief, and they struck me as an accusation, as if all of it were, indeed, my fault. Twelve years old going on eternity, I had destroyed my family and the only words of comfort anyone could come up with was my mother telling me "At least this way, your father will have to see you more."

And perhaps that was why, years later, she could say "I love him, but I don't like him." Our family life was far from Mayberry RFD, but appearances can be a fine substitute for ugly reality. Resentment is a funny thing, and it would seem I was the focal point for more than my fair share of that. If, perhaps, I could have only done things differently, been a better son . . . but what can a child do other than what a child does? I wish I could forgive my brother, as I wish I could have lived up to the expectations of my parents. But as much as I have tried to be a good man - and whether I have succeeded in that or not is not for me to judge - as uncertain as I remain of just how much my parents really knew of what was happening, I am just as certain that there are some lines that should not be crossed, that there are some things that just can not be forgiven. We remember Caesar crossing the Rubicon precisely because it was such an unforgiveable event.

So in the end, all that remains are the questions, unanswerable, lost to time and fate. And, really, who is to say that is truly a bad thing? Some answers come at too high a price, some questions just aren't worth the asking. Better the possibility than the reality, for in the absence of the definite all is possible, while reality merely is. Still, the voices of the past whisper in the darkness, asking that which can't be answered.

Ho Ho Ho de Har Har Har

Well, it seems like we are yet again are rapidly approaching that time of the year when, in a fit of self-judgemental pique, we make promises to ourselves for things to do in the new year that we have no intention of keeping. That is, of course, after we manage to survive the enforced happiness and cheer of Thanksgiving and Christmas, where your toleration for time spent with your relatives is determined by the amount of alcohol in the house. Yeah, family is a wonderful thing . . . and, generally, the farther away they live from you, the more wonderful they are.

Anyway, as I sit here, the lower half of my left hand completely numb from a cortisone injection - which, it turns out, wasn't all it was cracked up to be because, aside from being numb, the problem that provoked the injection still hurts like hell, and I'm sure that tonight I shall have disturbing dreams of the harpoon they used to stick me. No, really, I'm sure that Moby Dick would have fled in fright at the sight of that thing, but I digress. With yet one more chapter of this sad comic-opera I laughingly call me life drawing to a close, I find myself wondering what I can do to at least add a little variety to the coming year. So, a few resolutions I've been kicking around . . .

1) Resist the urge to resume smoking, because everyone has to have a smoking-related resolution, right? Okay, so I've been smoke-free for a while, and you'd think I'd be over it by now. But my friend's husband smokes, which is actually a poor way to describe it. There aren't, however, really any words that would accurately describe it. To say that he smokes in much the same way a US Steel plant smokes is merely a poor reflection of the reality of it. As he sits in the living room after coming home from work, I often wonder how it is that he sees the television through the blue fog of smoke, which also seems to be something of a waste of an HDTV set. The Allies didn't produce this much smoke when they were hiding their movements prior to crossing the Rhine River.

So, you can see the temptation for an ex-smoker, right? It's kind of like putting a recovering alcoholic in charge of quality control in a distillery. I mean, they're right there, beckoning seductively . . . c'mon, just one, for old time's sake . . . What's the worst that could possibly happen? Aside from another heart attack, I mean. Then again, that's what they make transplant lists for, right?

2) Stop obeying the dogs. All you pet owners out there, you know what I mean. Or, depending on your level of training and indoctrination, perhaps you don't. But let's just say that the dogs have me excpetionally well-trained. I mean, off-hand, I really can't think of any other canines I know who get pancakes every morning just because they like their light, fluffy taste. Mmm-mmm, buttery with a dab of mapleness.

Of course, the fuzzy little girl Westie-Boston mix is the ringleader in all of this. She just has this really unnerving way of making herself look completely broken-hearted and miserable when she gets disappointed. Now, some of you may just say that is anthropomorphism run wild, but I'm betting that's just because you've never met a Terrier with ambition. There's a reason why I call her the Anti-Christ - but not to her face, naturally - and she knows where I sleep. So it actually kind of pays off, in terms of self-survival, to keep her happy.

3) Stop losing my mind every time my friend stumbles across another get-rich-quick ponzi scheme. I mean, it's only money, right? They say that you can't take it with you but, having always belonged to the school of thought that holds he who dies with the most toys wins, I was looking forward to the chance of actually trying to take it with me. But, in the long run, stressing myself out over the issue just isn't good for what little health I have left.

Besides, what can you actually say when someone informs you that they just "bought" $25,000.00 in Iraqi dinar because "something big is going to happen"? Yes, I know, doing that is kind of like buying $25,000.00 worth of Reichsmarks in the Spring of 1945 because "something big" was going to happen with it, but why let logic enter into it? After all, I've been informed that you just have to have faith and believe it will happen. Of course, I'd be more tempted to believe if we were talking about a stable currency in a country that actually had a functioning economy, but that's just me . . .

4) Masturbate more. Or less. I haven't really decided on this one yet. Though I never developed the furry palms that I was promised - yes, I'm bisexual, I use both hands - my vision has definitely become fuzzier over the years. There is, of course, no luvin' like the luvin' you give yourself and, hey, a date with myself is always a sure thing. But will I still respect myself in the morning? Who the hell cares? Really, I am the best I've ever had . . .

5) Finally locate that horde of nymphomaniac 18-year-old cheerleaders. And while that may mean having to move to Utah, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make . . .

6) Go for at least one month without seeing a doctor of medical professional of any kind . . . Excuse me while I laugh myself silly, but a guy can dream, can't he?

And there you have it. Six resolutions for the new year that, much like the proverbial snowball in hell, have no chance. Now all I have to do is make it to 2011, so I can do this all over again . . .