I drifted through high school like a rowboat on the tide. Pulled forward. Pulled back. Raised and lower. When the time for graduation finally arrived, I was completely unprepared. I was barely passing. I had no chance of getting into college. My one saving grace was a recruiter from a government agency who came to my high school one day that Spring. I filled out some forms and somehow lined up a clerical job. The day after high school graduation I left for the beach to stay for a month. It was one last fling of freedom before I started working. I had a red Volkswagen bug and left at around 2:00 in the morning, with a suitcase under the front hood, for my first time away from home on my own. I told my folks that I would call the next morning to let them know that I arrived safely.
I found a room at the beach for $3 a night. It was right on the boardwalk so I could hear the noise of the crowd and could see the neon lights from the amusement park. Colored lights flashed and calliopes tooted a taunting requiem for lives that might have been. The bed was lumpy and the room had that funny pungent odor of salt water dampness. The carpet was threadbare. It was one of those regal Victorian patterns that you find in your grandparent’s house. It lay there on the floor in humiliation like a once great king held over in the castle as a shoe shine boy. The wallpaper was pealing and so badly faded that the pealing was the pattern. Like the home of Miss Havesham it was frozen at a long past point in time when there was still hope. But time collected the rent anyway.
By the next morning, overwhelmed by the intense random impressions from the hotel and the boardwalk, I had completely forgotten about the promise to call. Instead, I walked the boardwalk and explored the many shops and restaurants. I sat on a wooden bench and watched people walk by. I made up stories about them to explain how life had brought them to that point. Here is a funny looking man. His skin is so white that is looks like he lives underground. There is a blush of pink sunburn. He is wearing a straw hat, sun glasses, shorts of an unknown plaid and leather shoes without socks. His stomach presents itself, unashamedly, through an unbuttoned short sleeve terry cloth shirt. He struts in obvious discomfort. His feet are probably blistered from wearing his shoes without socks. His thighs are probably chapped from the salt water. Who could he be ? Perhaps he works at a K-Mart. He is the guy who is responsible for the inventory of school supplies. Maybe he lies in bed at night worrying that the high school will assign a surprise project and he will run out of poster paper. Maybe he should have taken a risk and ordered more. He sleeps with his back to his wife and drives a ten year old Ford. Everyday he makes sure that the school children in his area will be able to buy all the pencils, erasers and school boxes they will ever need. His does this without complaining because once a year he gets to come to the beach for pizza, French fries, sunburn and chapping. By that evening the phone call had slipped my mind again.
This went on for a week. Every day I resolved to call that evening, but by the time evening came, I had forgotten. Finally, after a week, I remembered to call. I spoke to my mother. She said that my father had left to come to the beach to find me and would be there in an hour or so. He had decided that I had fallen under the control of dark forces.
My father grew up on a farm in Ohio. He was a trouble maker. He was American Gothic with a Supersoaker. At nineteen, he ran away from home. After a short stint of survival in California, he joined the Navy. Life had not been easy for him. But he had not been easy for life either. He drank and carried on and fought unseen ghosts from his past. He wanted things to be better for me, but worried that fate would get the final say and I would turn out just like him. He lived in constant fear that I would somehow become a victim of the 'dope ring'. The dope ring was some fantasy group of thugs and drug addicts who cleverly drew innocent young men and women into their ranks. Women would loose their virtue. Men would loose their livelihood. It was not clear which he viewed as worse. Women's virtue was a little hard to track. But a man without livelihood, well there's something everybody knows about.
I can imagine a group of relatives sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of one of their houses back in Ohio. Rocking slowly after a big meal of fresh fried chicken and roastin' ears, they might say:
"You hear about Mabel's boy ?"
"Yep, dope ring got him"
Everybody would nod in understanding, rock a time or two, and digest this weighty piece of information. Right into the mix with the chicken and roastin' ears. Of course, if it had been Mabel's daughter, the women would have shared the information in the kitchen and passed it on to their husbands during quality time, that cyclical, unspontaneous time of sharing whose coincidence ranged from every other Tuesday night to the appearance of Halley’s comet. They had their ways. And my father grew up in that fertile soil of Midwestern conformity like a thistle in the clover; and odd mixture of tradition and rebellion.
So my father lived in fear that the dope ring would get me. I was already pretty familiar with drugs and knew that there was no ring to be found, anywhere. The drug culture was just a loose anarchy of misguided misfits like myself. And, if there was any organization, anywhere, the last thing they cared about was me.
When I didn't call home and report my safety, that was all my dad needed to prove that the dope ring had indeed come to collect its due. He waited for several days. Each day that I didn't call, he reaffirmed his faith in the sinister motives of the dope ring. By the time a week had passed, he decided to take matters into his own hands. I can see him leaning back in his lazy boy recliner with a beer in his hand trying to watch the television but really watching the telephone. Every time my mother would walk by he would pester her again.
"What time is it now ?"
"Five minutes later that the last time you asked ?"
"Has he called ?"
"Did you hear the phone ring ?"
"What’s the matter with that boy ?"
"Why ask me ? He’s your son too !"
"Its been a week, already. If he doesn’t call by 8:00, I’m going after him."
When a man is on an individual crusade against the dope ring, it is understandable that he has to fortify himself. So he hopped into his truck with a pint of whiskey and a couple of six packs of beer and set off to take on the dope ring. When I finally called, he was two hours from home, one hour from the beach; and well fortified.
He had been stopping at various intervals in case there was any news from home. He fully expected that the coroner would be calling asking if he could come and identify the body. Or perhaps the dope ring itself would call and demand a ransom of some kind. Dad would hock the truck in a heartbeat to get his boy back from the dope ring. Or, better yet, the FBI would call asking for citizen assistance to crack this case that had been stumping their best agents for years. The possibilities were endless.
When I called, I gave my mother all the information Dad needed to find me. I'm sure he had mixed feelings of relief and disappoint. It wasn't the dope ring. It was just his absent minded son screwing up again.
He finally showed up at my hotel, drunk as a fiddler. We talked briefly but he wanted to crash. The combination of whiskey and emotional tension had taken its toll. I gave him the bed and I slept on the floor. All night he talked and sang in his sleep.
When my father joined the Navy, he was immediately assigned to a warship in the Pacific theater. It was World War II and there was no safe quarter for the enlisted men. His ship was sunk and he spent several days in the warm waters of the Pacific ocean trying to keep from drowning. Pacific means peaceful, and it was the last peace he would ever know. He and his fellow crew members were picked up by a Japanese destroyer and taken off to a POW camp in the Philippines where he would spend the next three years. He never spoke about his years as a POW so the entire episode meant only three things to me. First, in all the times that we went swimming, I never once saw him go in the water. Second, we were not allowed to mention Douglas MacArthur’s name because he said he would return and didn’t. Third, he drank and stumbled through life, weaving his way through the gauntlet lined on one side by responsibilities and the other side by the ghosts from the past.
Those ghosts decided to visit that night while I lay on the floor unable to sleep. I could feel the threadbare cords of the once regal carpet. I could smell the mixture of suntan lotion and sweat that draws us to the beach and then make us happy to go home. I could hear noises from the room below - a voice, a giggle, undistinguished rustling - doing what people do at the beach if they aren’t too chapped from the salt water. My father laid on the bed in a fitful sleep, tossing and turning, poked and prodded by a thousand little red devils with pitchforks, grinning and making him remember.
Our experiences pile one upon another like garbage on a compose heap. We mix and churn them with our memories until we cannot distinguish between the grapefruit rinds and the coffee grinds, the memories from the imaginings, the facts from the interpretations. They become vague discomforts like the hair under your collar after a haircut. The tension from the week before turned over the compost of his experiences bringing vague undifferentiated feelings to the surface of his dreams. In his sleep, he tossed like a ship on the waves. He wailed about sailors lost at sea like he was calling out to them to save him. Half singing and half murmuring he produced a few sea shanties. I was completely spooked but said nothing.
The next morning he rose from the bed very much the worse for the wear. He must have felt terrible. He was hung over and there was no dope ring. It must have been bittersweet. He got up said "Glad you're O.K., bud", patted me on the shoulder, had a beer for breakfast and headed home.
I was sitting on a bench on the boardwalk trying to sort it all out. There was a large smashed french fry that a small sparrow was pecking at, trying to dislogde it from the boardwalk. A large seagull flew down and chased the sparrow away. I shifted on the bench and began to watch with more interest. Another seagull swooped down and tried to take the french fry away from the first. The french fry was now loose from the boardwalk and broken into several pieces. While the two seagulls were facing off, the sparrow returned, grabbed a piece of the french fry and took off again. There seemed to be a message in there somewhere, but I couldn't tell what it was.
I spent the next three weeks playing beach bum. Shortly thereafter I began taking on the mantle of adult responsibility. I went back to college, and graduated with honors. I was as driven to succeed as my father was to thwart the dope ring. For every failure he had in his life, I had a success in mine. For every ghost that chased him, I chased one away. Between the two of us, we break even. Who knows what the next generation will bring.
It took me a long time to understand how much my father and I were alike. We were both impulsive and intense. I chased dreams. He ran from nightmares. Somehow my path went one way and his went another. I see my self as very successful and my father as a drunken misfit. But time and reflection often bring understanding. A wildflower growing on the side of the road is a weed. A wildflower growing in a garden is a thing of beauty. It is the same flower. Its circumstances are all the difference.