Lessons from my father.
The lessons of a parent are curious things that have an endurance of their own. Some lessons are immediate and some take a lifetime to grasp. Some are physical and some profoundly emotional. The lessons of a father are different from the lessons a mother teaches. Sometimes they are in conflict.
My father’s lessons were blunt. He was a tough man when it came to his sons. “You better learn to work with your brain because you sure as shit ain’t good at working with your hands.” That seemed harsh to me. My dad always worked with his hands and I was hearing him say that I was not good enough to do that. So, I tried as hard as I could to learn to work with my hands. I took pride in the things I could do with my hands, and shrugged off the things that I could do with my head. It wasn’t until much later that I understood the wisdom in my father’s lesson.
My dad’s lessons came in luncheonettes, in the car and while watching TV. In the car, it was just the two of us. We spent many hours together in the car. It was there that we had intimate conversations. It was there that he told me that he had not done right by my mother but had tried to make up for it. “Sometimes you just can’t fix your mistakes. But inside you know when you are going too far. Stop before you go too far.”
It was in the car when I would brag about my boyish talents. He told me, “There is always going to be somebody better at anything than you are. Don’t set yourself up to be taken down.” I didn’t know what he meant. So, my dad took me to my pool hall and proceeded to whip me six games in a row, in front of my friends. I was almost in tears when we got back into the car and he said, “I guess you’re not as good as you thought you were.”
We related through sports. He was a natural athlete. Whether it was golf or softball, bowling or pool, my father was always good at it. Football was my sport because I was stocky and liked to throw my body around.
There was one day when my dad asked me to throw him a football and try to tackle him. I hit him with all that I had and knocked him down hard. I was only 14. I was proud to have tackled my father. Then I realized that I had hurt him and felt guilty. My father was not indestructible.
My dad understood street-code. He had grown up on the streets. He taught me to always consider the source of my information. If the source of the information wasn’t reliable, neither was the information. If you played a game without the necessary information, you were a sucker. You were meant to be taken advantage of.
One Saturday morning, at the local luncheonette, my dad talked me out of my allowance by allowing me to confuse the Celtics with the Knicks and make a bet with him. “While you were studying the newspaper and the statistics, I was watching you. I knew that you didn’t know what you were talking about. After that, it was easy.”
I got into trouble for gambling and beating another kid for so much money that he gave me his bankbook and then told his parents that I had hustled him. My dad told me that I was greedy and stupid. If I had only beaten him for a little money, I could have kept on beating him. “But you got greedy and wanted show off and now you are banned from the Boys Club. Not because you gambled, because you were stupid about it.”
My dad was a hustler and a gambler, but he was not compulsive. He cared more about winning than he did about betting. That was why he taught me to never give up control of my bets. “As soon as you spot points, you are not playing the same game as the team that you are betting on. You are a sucker. You may have to give odds, but never give up points.”
These were the ways that my dad taught me about life. His beliefs did not come from books but from life experiences. My dad fixed jukeboxes, pinball machines and pool tables in Newark, NJ. Because I did not live with him, most of our time together was on the one day a week that he picked me up and took me to work. As a kid, I was in some of the hardest bars in Newark on Saturdays. Often, people were still there drinking up their paychecks from the day before. These behaviors shaped his view of race relations. He did not care about social theories on the effects of poverty. He was rightly pretty sure that no one had grown up poorer than he had.
He had run away from an orphanage at an early age and lived on the road. He slept in back of billboards. He was befriended by a man who had been an escapee from an asylum for the criminally insane. That man was his father figure. His mom died shortly after giving him birth, and so he had no mother figure. When I would talk to him about Civil Rights, his heart was hardened. He had been attacked while making collections. He carried a gun with him into these bars. He was convinced from his experience that Black people were shiftless drunkards who squandered their pay instead using it to feed their families and make their lives better. There was no amount of convincing that his son or anyone else could muster that would change his mind. He did not think in the abstract. His beliefs were based solely on his experiences.
When I objected and interjected by book-based theories about civil rights, my dad ridiculed my lack of real-world experience, then he got angry, then he told me that I should stay away from his home and his second marriage children so that I did not infect them with my stupid ideas.
These were hard years. I stayed away and lost any chance of really having relationships with my half-sister and brother. They never knew why I went away. My beliefs were very strong and so were my dad’s convictions. Family was the victim.
My dad and I reconciled largely through the efforts of my sister Terry. She was old enough to remember having a big brother, in name anyway. She was my dad’s favorite and she pushed us to make up, which we did.
“He’s our dad, he’s allowed to be weird.” I remember her saying that and believing it too. She caused me to remember the years and years that my dad was my idol. Now that I had discovered his clay feet, I could not worship him anymore, but I could still love and respect him.
When I was ready to marry, I asked my dad’s opinion of my soon to be bride. His response was “You have to live with her, not me.” That was the sum total of his advice. It gave me insight about he felt about his marriages. He could not live with my mom but could live with his second wife, Dorothy. I knew that my mom was a hard person to live with. I wanted to ask my dad about love, but I never did. I knew that he loved my mom. I knew that he loved me. I am pretty sure that my dad never gave much thought as to why he loved those that he did. He would probably say that they were good to him.
My dad loved my mom. They had the strangest relationship I have ever seen. My dad was not capable of being faithful to one woman. He was not faithful to my mom and he was not after my mom and he had divorced and they had both remarried. They were friends. They had an unmistakable chemistry that caused both of my step-parents discomfort. Despite this, the two couples socialized for years after I was grown and moved away.
My step-father was a compulsive gambler and my dad would beat him at cards most every time the four got together. My step-father would get red in the face and shout and slam the table and my dad would quietly take his money and let him rant. In his own way, I think that he was showing off too.
When my dad first got sick, he was shocked by it. A neighbor sponsored him at The Deborah Heart and Lung Center. He remembered having Rheumatic fever when he was a child. He said that had been in the hospital for a long time. He did not know that it had ruined the lining of his heart and valves. He was not the same after the first bypass surgery. The second one nearly killed him and the doctor told him that he was now on borrowed time. His end could take years or weeks or days, but it was on the way. It was an odd way of his past catching up with him.
My dad told me that he did not want to keep living this way. He’d had a stroke and his left arm was not right, but the rest of him had recovered. I remember the last time I saw him alive. He told me with a great deal of pride that he had his golfing clubs modified and had shot an 80.
I don’t really know if that was the truth or the truth my father wanted it to be. My dad often told me the truths that he wanted to believe. He told me that he was a pre-med program at school, but he barely finished high school. There were other stories and lies too. Some were to cover his affairs. Some were the truths that he wanted to be but were not.
I realized later that by telling me, they were at least true for that moment. My dad did not live to see me earn the title of doctor, but I think he would have loved that.
The last lesson from my father came after his death. He specifically asked to have no service, no open coffin and to be cremated. Dorothy told me that he didn’t want people staring down at him in a coffin.
I felt the need to eulogize my dad. I wanted to make him appear elegant. He had supervised a story that I had written about his life. He was pleased with after I incorporated his corrections. I wonder if he would have been pleased with this?
He has been gone for thirty years. I think that he would be amazed that he was remembered.
He was a reserved man who took pride in the way that he dressed. When he wanted to be charming, he was. When he wished to be cold and distant, it was easy for him. I don’t know if I would have loved him if we lived together. I think that only seeing him once in a while helped me to think highly of him. He had done the best that he could.