The World of Men
This is an essay I wrote back in 2013. Father and son relations can be challenging.
The World of Men
My father did not prepare me for the world of men. He taught me how to manage my time, run a business, supervise people, and to be successful in a Main Street, American dream, business executive kind of way. He also taught me to how to drink and be a womanizer. He was Don Draper of Mad Men before they made the series. He was full of idiosyncrasies - a Casanova who was embarrassed by sex scenes on TV and an alcoholic who forbid cursing in his presence. But he did not prepare me for the world of men.
Growing up I occasionally had a glimpse of the world of men vis-à-vis my friends’ fathers. I’d see them in dirty “wife beater” tee shirts, arms covered in grease, and dirt up to their elbows, pulling spark plugs from engines suspended from tree limbs in the front yard. Their garages had outdated calendars of scantily clad women, lots of odd things in mason jars, and country and western radio stations with really bad reception. These enclaves reeked of stale Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Marlborough cigarettes. It was as if a space ship had dropped off its alien crew and they were waiting, holding on, and biding their time until they were rescued. But they realized they would never be rescued; so they had assimilated.
Sometimes I thought my dad had come from this world too. Like when he would go fishing, and sit in a lawn chair on the beach, sipping a beer, listening to some sports announcer on his pocket AM radio. He’d wear sunglasses that clipped over his regular glasses and kept an eye on the fishing pole he’d buried in the sand via a PVC pipe. Late in the evening he’d come home, a little drunk, and withdraw the still thrashing bodies from a Styrofoam cooler.
“Hold ‘em firm son or they’ll cut you,” he would warn me. And inevitably I’d still get cut from the back fins of the doomed and writhing fish and end up bleeding, my blood, my life essence, blending with the heads and guts that my father was leaving in the sink. My dad never got cut, he never bled, and he never felt my terror at trying to hold a stinking, gasping, thrashing, scaled aquatic creature in my hands. As I think back on these times I think my father was very close to entering the world of men; but something kept him back. Like a time traveler who drifted between dimensions and other worlds but could never enter them because he was anchored, stuck, held back by love, to a specific time and place. He wanted to go, he wanted to leave, he wanted to hide in a cave holding a saber toothed tiger at bay, see the pyramids being built, watch Christ being crucified, root for Napoleon at Waterloo, load a film plate for Ansel at the Monolith at Half Dome, and be on the grassy knoll in Dallas, but he was anchored to this time by a kid he didn’t understand.
You see, I was an artsy kid. Not the son he expected or knew how to relate to. He played softball; I was scared of the ball. He played the trumpet in a marching band; I wore that John Phillip Sousa jacket in high school, playing Led Zepplin, and pretending to be from the cover of the Sargent Pepper’s album. I was against the War; dad voted for Nixon. At times I bet he wondered, “Who the hell was this son that his wife brought home from the hospital?”
Maybe I kept him from the World of Men and, being unable to enter himself, with his son, his only son, he was incapable of preparing me for this alien world. Three times our worlds came close though; we stood on the precipice and looked at each other. The first time was when I was a teenager and was watching Richard Chamberlain’s Hallmark Hall of Fame Presentation of Hamlet. Dad came in and sat down beside me during Act V; that’s when the King, the Queen, Laertes, and Hamlet die. My mom came in and, surprised at seeing the two of us in a room together, and not arguing about Vietnam, civil rights, or if Steppenwolf is really music, asked what were we watching?
“I don’t know,” my dad answered, “but it must be good – everybody’s dying!” That moment was a rip in the fabric of time; by putting a foot in my world, my dad was trying to bring me into the world he lived in.
Our next moment was when he showed up, with his third wife, at my studio. I was in my forties and finally had done something he could understand and tell his peers about – I was a businessman. We had a photograph taken in front of my store – Wade Studios. This was evidence he could show his poker buddies, “Yeah, my son’s got his own business. Look at that big sign.” I had entered his world…but it wasn’t the world of men; not the world my friend’s dads had inhabited.
The last opportunity was before he died. We visited him at the hospital and he held my daughter Gabrielle. “I’ve done this before, you know.”
I never remember my dad holding me, or telling me he loved me.
Lately life has been cruel. I now work in a machine shop for less money in a week than I used to make in an hour. It’s a world of steel toed boots and tee-shirted men with pinup calendars, whose every other word is a curse, and where being able to drill two sheets of steel together is the measure of a man. It’s a world I’m unprepared for, a world my father couldn’t prepare me for. Maybe it’s a world that eluded him also, a world neither one of us was meant to inhabit.
The world of men.
