Nor would you find me in the back of Burger King holding sweaty hands with the Kid Whose Mouthful of Braces Made Him Look Simian, or at a sleepover with the Goody Two-Shoes Whose Uptight Parents, Ted and Sue, Wished to Prevent Her Ascent into Adulthood as if It Were the Mumps and certainly not with the Cools or the Trendies.
You’d find me with Dad. We’d be in a rented two-bedroom house on an unremarkable street lined with bird mailboxes and oak trees. We’d be eating overcooked spaghetti covered in the sawdust of parmesan cheese, either reading books, grading papers or watching such classics as North by Northwest or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, after which, when I was finished with the dishes (and only if he’d sunk into a Bourbon Mood), Dad could be entreated to perform his impression of Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone. Sometimes, if he was feeling especially inspired, he’d even stick a piece of paper towel into his gums to re-create Vito’s mature bulldog look. (Dad always pretended I was Michael.):
Barzini will move against you first. He’ll set up a meeting with someone you absolutely trust, guaranteeing your safety. And at that meeting you’ll be assassinated…it’s an old habit. I’ve spent my entire life trying not to be careless.
Dad said “careless” regretfully, and stared at his shoes.
Women and children can be careless, but not men…Now listen.
Dad raised his eyebrows and stared at me.
Whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting, he’s the traitor. Don’t ever forget that.
This was the moment for my only line in the scene.
Grazie, Pop.
Here Dad nodded and closed his eyes.
Prego.
On one particular occasion, however, when I was eleven in Futtoch, Nebraska, I remember quite distinctly I didn’t laugh at Dad doing Brando doing Vito. We were in the living room, and as he spoke, he happened to move directly over a desk lamp with a red lampshade; and suddenly, the crimson light Halloweened his face — ghosting his eyes, witching his mouth, beasting his jaw so his cheeks resembled a withered tree trunk into which some kid could crudely carve his initials. He was no longer my dad, but someone else, something else — a terrifying, red-faced stranger baring his dark, moldy soul in front of the worn velvet reading chair, the slanted bookshelf, the framed photograph of my mother with her bourgeois belongings.
“Sweet?”
Her eyes were alive. She stared at his back, her gaze mournful, as if she were an old woman in a nursing home who pondered and probably answered every one of Life’s Great Questions, but nobody took her seriously in those sticky rooms of Jeopardy!, pet therapy and Makeup Hour for Ladies. Dad, directly in front of her, stared at me, his shoulders seesawed. He looked uncertain, as if I’d just entered the room and he wasn’t sure if I’d seen him stealing.
“What is it?” He stepped toward me, his face again soaked in the harmless yellow light of the rest of the room.
“I have a stomachache,” I said abruptly, and then turned, ran upstairs to my room and pulled from the shelf an old paperback, Souls for Sale: Unveiling John Doe Sociopath (Burne, 1991). Dad himself had picked it up for me at some psychology professor’s pre-retirement garage sale. I actually flipped through all of Chapter 2, “Character Sketch: A Lack of Connection in Romantic Relationships,” and parts of Chapter 3, “Two Missing Pieces: Scruples and a Conscience,” before I realized how hysterical and foolish I was. While it was true that Dad displayed a “marked disregard for others’ feelings” (p. 24), could “charm the pants off people” (p. 29), and wasn’t “concerned with the moral codes of society” (p. 5), he did “love things other than himself” (p. 81) or the “splendid sage he saw whenever he regarded himself in the bathroom mirror” (p. 109): my mother and, of course, me.
Wuthering Heights
Princeton professor and leading sociologist Dr. Fellini Loggia made the somewhat gloomy statement in The Imminent Future (1978) that nothing in life is authentically astonishing, “not even being struck by lightning” (p. 12). “A person’s life,” he writes, “is nothing more than a series of tip-offs of what’s to come. If we had the brains to notice these clues, we might be able to change our futures.”
Well, if my life had a hint, a whisper, a cute, well-placed clue, it was when I was thirteen and Dad and I moved to Howard, Louisiana.
While my nomadic life with Dad might sound daring and revolutionary to the outside observer, the reality was different. There is a disturbing (and wholly undocumented) Law of Motion involving an object traveling across an American interstate, the sense that, even though one is careening madly forward, nothing is actually happening. To one’s infinite disappointment, one always arrives at Point B with energy and all physical characteristics wholly unchanged. Every now and then, at night, before I fell asleep, I found myself staring at the ceiling, praying for something real to happen, something that would transform me — and God always took on the personality of the ceiling at which I was staring. If the ceiling was imprinted with moonlight and leaves from the window, He was glamorous and poetic. If there was a slight tilt, He was inclined to listen. If there was a faint water stain in the corner, He’d weathered many a storm and would weather mine too. If there was a smear cutting through the center by the overhead lamp where something with six or eight legs had been exterminated via newspaper or shoe, He was vengeful.
When we moved to Howard, God answered my prayers. (He turned out to be smooth and white, otherwise, surprisingly unremarkable.) On the long, dry drive through Nevada’s Andamo Desert, listening to a book-on-tape, Dame Elizabeth Gliblett reading in her grand ballroom of a voice The Secret Garden (Burnett, 1909), I offhandedly mentioned to Dad that none of the houses we rented ever had a decent yard, and so, the following September when we arrived in Howard, Dad chose 120 Gildacre Street, a worried house of pale blue stranded in the middle of a tropical biosphere. While the rest of Gildacre Street cultivated prim peonies, dutiful roses, placid yards plagued only by the rare clump of crabgrass, Dad and I fought escalating plant life indigenous to the Amazon Basin.
Every Saturday and Sunday for three weeks, armed with nothing but pruning shears, leather gloves and Off, Dad and I rose early and trekked deep into our rain forest in a heroic attempt to scale back the growth. We’d rarely last two hours, sometimes less than twenty minutes if Dad happened to spot what was allegedly a Stag Beetle the size of his foot scuttling under the leaves of a talipot palm (men’s size 12).
Never one to admit defeat, Dad attempted to rally the troops with “Nothing defeats the Van Meers!” and “You think if Patton lived here, he’d throw in the towel?” until that fateful morning he was mysteriously bitten by something (“Ahhhhhhh!” I heard him cry from the front porch, where I was trying to curtail knotted liana.). His left arm inflated to the size of a football. That evening, Dad answered an advertisement of an experienced gardener in The Howard Sentinel.
“Yardwork,” it read. “Anyhow. Anywhere. I do.”
His name was Andreo Verduga, and he was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen (see “Panther,” Glorious Predators of the Natural World, Goodwin, 1987). He was tan, with black hair, gypsy eyes and, from what I could deduce from my upstairs bedroom window, a torso smooth as a river rock. He was from Peru. He wore heavy cologne and spoke in the language of an old-fashioned telegram.