I’m Actually in This One

“Do you know what your son is spending money on? COCAINE!”

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Sunday is Father’s Day. There are as many kinds of dads as there are dads; as many kinds of relationships between children and their fathers as there are children, and fathers, and relationships between them. You know better than anyone else how to care for yourself and your particular dad or dads this weekend. Go forth. The Small Bow trusts you.

For the time between now and then: a rebooted essay from A.J. to give you strength. There are dads of course, but also and perhaps less expectedly: a menacing old-timey statute of a golfer! Do yourself a favor: Scroll down and give it a read.

FYI: Our newsletter mostly runs on paid subscriptions. If you can upgrade to paid, that would be great. But if the cost of a subscription is prohibitive, or if you wish to send TSB to someone you love, contact us. We’ll happily pass along a free annual subscription to those who need it most.

We can offer free subscriptions as long as we continue to grow. Grab a paid subscription today if you’d like to be a part of that growth — spiritually and otherwise. —TSB Editor

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Chicken Soup for the Holes

Originally published June 23, 2020

California summer mornings feel like East Coast autumn ones to me, but even so this time of the year reminds me of how my father and I used to play golf together. Even though we were both terrible, a couple times a year I’d take the New Jersey Transit down from New York to the Hamilton station and he’d pick me up and take me back to their condo in Ambler, Pa. to hang out, have some dinner, watch the Phillies — nothing rowdy — the night before we golfed. We’d usually have a ridiculously early tee time and he always wanted to hit balls first beforehand so sometimes it’d still be dark, even in early summer.

I’d wake up and he’d have donuts for us and in his well-pressed khaki shorts, he’d hand me a double-XL Polo shirt that had shrunk in the dryer to wear because I usually didn’t bring one, let alone own one. He’d have my golf shoes all cleaned in the garage, sometimes with a new sleeve of balls tucked in them like the goddamn Easter Bunny would do. We’d head over to the course, hot coffee in portable mugs, full of the promise of possibly once and for all having both of us both break 100 on the same day.

But it never happened.

The lightness of the conversation on the way home would be dictated by how well we both played that day but, again, we were both terrible golfers so there were minimal highlights. As much as we loved each other when we didn’t hate each other, our conflict resolution was infantile, so the more complicated car-ride conversations got ugly quick. For most of the 2000’s I’d have another agenda to come home to, usually because I’d always struggled to pay my bills while I was trying to make a living as a writer in a city I could not afford.

One early summer afternoon in 2006, while driving back from his shitty country club in Northeast Philadelphia, quiet and demoralized after another triple digit round, I decided to tell my father about my cocaine problem. I don’t remember how I jumped into it — we weren’t big on discussing my substance misadventures even when it was obvious I was getting fucked up a lot — and there was an awkward silence, though not an angry one, which was a relief because my father could radiate contempt and disappointment without moving any of his facial muscles.

I don’t think he said anything reassuring or expressed concern, but I do remember that he said “I think my brother had a problem with cocaine,” which is to say my father was at a loss for words.

Even when we pulled up to the driveway and went inside the condo, I still couldn’t get a beat on how we’d proceed. I was vulnerable and a little antsy about what was to come, but also relieved because it’s hard to be honest about drugs.

I sat downstairs in their finished basement with my mother to have our own brief catch up (but not about the drugs) as we waited for my father to finish undressing out of his golf attire. The basement was tricked out with golf-themed knick-knacks from HomeGoods and TJ Maxx, the kind you’d probably find in a knockoff Irish Pub, like little plaques behind the bar that welcomed visitors to the 19th Hole and coasters from country clubs he’d either played or wanted to play.

Most of the photos on my father’s downstairs computer desk were pictures of him in different foursomes, smiling like he never smiled at home. There was also a three-and-half-foot tall ceramic golfer that kind of looked like the Monopoly man but dressed like a golfer from the 1920’s which sat at the foot of the stairs that startled me on more than one occasion because I’d forget it was there. All this stuff would make anyone think that my father was a great golfer but, again, he stunk.

Soon after my mother and I settled into our own conversation, my father decided to destroy the almost-pleasantness to share the breaking cocaine-problem news with her.

“Do you know what your son is spending money on? COCAINE!”

He’d become completely unhinged. I’d seen him yell this way before, mostly at her, sometimes at me, but this was uniquely, operatically, volcanic.

Once my mother heard “cocaine” she doubled-down on the shame and said “Nuh-uh, no druggies in this house,” but my father wasn’t finished.

“No one will ever hire you in New York because you now have a reputation. You can’t afford — you’ve never been able to afford it. You’re a LOSER.”

This wasn’t the first time my father had called me a loser, but it was the loudest, most shocking instance. I felt a little sorry for him because the velocity with which it left his mouth came from a very terrified and ancient place, like someone had whacked him in the back with a broomstick to dislodge the “LOSER!” stuck in his windpipe.

We all got quiet, even the old-timey golfer statue seemed shook.

I took the hint. I called a friend to pick me up from their house and waited on the curb about 50 feet in front of their condo, still in my golf shoes, with a sloppily packed overnight bag slung over my shoulder like a suburban hobo. The bag was still stuffed with the magazines and giant water bottle I spent $30 on at Hudson Booksellers which was a blessing because I couldn’t afford to buy anything else for the ride back.

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Growing up, I thought my father was part action-figure, part movie star, but surely an important businessman bursting with confidence and know-how, a man who’d easily figured it all out and whose footsteps were worth following if capital-S Success was the goal. Yet, my dad considered his father, my grandfather, meek and indecisive, too hen-pecked to ever light out on his own.

I thought this, too, up until I got old enough to see them both as humans. It turned out to be the opposite. My father was hobbled by fear and insecurity, but my grandfather held a gentleness on the verge of grace. He also had integrity; my father had avarice.

Still when my grandfather came down with Alzheimer’s, I could tell my Dad knew he’d gone about their relationship all wrong. My grandfather’s final pitiful days were spent in a hospice care facility. By that point, he was just ribs and soft pajamas; his mouth was frozen in that deathly O-shape big enough to stick an olive into it.

Even though my grandfather’s memory was erased, I witnessed my father’s useless attempt to get through one last time. His leg bounced up and down from nerves and the quietude as he sat next to his hospital bed, desperate for some reconciliation and love.

“I’m here. I’m right here. You’re having a good day.” Things of that nature.

They used to golf together all the time and my grandfather was terrible, too. One of the last rounds they played when the Alzheimer’s loomed was a uniquely arduous one, although that ended on a memorable high note because my grandfather tried to use a butterscotch candy as a ball marker which cracked my dad up.

I memory-banked that moment then, and almost a decade later when I was 23, I decided to write about it — from my father's perspective — and submit it as an essay to Chicken Soup for the Golfer’s Soul.

According to the acceptance letter I received about nine months later, the essay was one of the top 101 out of thousands of submissions. When the book finally came out, just in time for Father’s Day 1998, it was widely considered in my family to be one of the greatest literary achievements in history. I signed many books for friends, relatives, and even my mother’s hairdresser, with the same insignia each time — storyteller, pg. 206.

My father was elated. I could tell the moment swelled in him an almost incomprehensible joy and pride.

I drove over to our local Barnes and Noble, the one located in those suburban shopping centers that are the same everywhere in America with the bagel shops and the Dick’s Sporting Goods and the Ross Dress for Lesses, to go look at the kiosk where they had the books prominently displayed in the “Great Gifts for Dad” section. It was number one on the New York Times bestseller list at that moment in time, along with like four other Chicken Soup for the Souls.

They had already sent me three copies in addition to $200 for publishing it, but I wanted to purchase one as a regular, everyday customer. I also hoped the cashier would talk with me about it so that I could say “I’m in this one” as I point to the page number with my byline in a fancy Chicken Soup font. Maybe the cashier would ask me to sign some copies or do a live reading event. I calculated this was a real possibility because how many authors who appeared in best-selling books lived only a mile away?

Instead, the bookstore rang me up for one book and informed me that my credit card was declined. For a brief moment, I contemplated clearing my throat so I could indignantly point to the page number just as I’d initially planned to — Um, I’m actually in this one??!! — but I thought better of it and walked out with nothing.

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I try to write the story of my father and my grandfather, Alzheimer’s, fatherhood, and Chicken Soup for the Golfer’s Soul every year, even though I’ve written about it many times already. I will probably write about it again because it still hasn’t landed.

One of the first paying assignments I got when I was allowed to start writing things for money again was a Father’s Day essay for MEL magazine back in 2017. The editor was a guy I’d worked with when he was at Playboy and he was one of the only editors still willing to pay me to write, despite all that happened with the Hogan trial which rendered me shipwrecked and basically unemployable. It was a long-ish essay so they paid me $1,000. I thought it was too much money at the time. I was so paranoid about having more than three figures in my banking account because I thought a court would ransack it again for unpaid financial (and spiritual) debts, but everything was fine.

After a couple of false starts, it was finished. It was a syrupy, mawkishly worked-over essay, but I was still proud it existed in the world. This was about three years ago, when my father just started to have noticeable short-term memory loss. He said he read it, but I could tell he didn’t or had simply forgotten about it, like many other things he was forgetting by then.

My major problem with the finished product was the headline they used — “Chicken Soup for the Son’s Soul” — which made it sound even more syrupy and mawkish. In my original draft, the title was “Chicken Soup for the Holes,” meant to represent the emptiness in both my father’s and my heart. Plus I thought it was a clever play on the holes in a golf course. It was also a metaphor for wholeness and recovery — the kind we aspire to but can never achieve. I was even a little offended they didn’t use it. I concluded their headline writers were just lazy.

When I told my wife, Julieanne, about how meaningful this original headline was and how excited I was to use it for this newsletter. I expected her to be as loving and supportive as she usually is about my writing and recovery. Instead, she laughed in my face because she said that they didn't use it because that title was pornographic. Her full comment was that the headline sounded like “soup was being poured into someone’s butt.” Fair enough.

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My father Facetimed me once last week, and I could tell he was having a rough day, which is a delicate way of saying that the phantom brain illness that is now slowly smothering him the way it did my grandfather was in full force.

“Did you try to call us? The phone is screwed up,” he said.

Half of his face was shaved, and the other half was dotted with patches of uneven gray stubble. There was a blankness there, a pinched frustration, because he knew that something was wrong, but the problem escaped him, so it might as well be the phone because what else could it be?

I asked him what was wrong with the phone, even though I knew nothing was wrong.

He shook his head, as if he didn’t want to waste my time going into the elaborate, infuriating details, but he wanted to convey that whatever this problem was, it was serious and would take up most of his day to resolve.

He shifted quickly to pleasantries and asked if I needed anything, and then informed me that my mother was in the bathroom again, but there was no other news to report since they were on lockdown at their assisted living facility in Florida.

He always offers to send me money now for his three grandchildren, which I agree to take sometimes because I know it makes him feel good, even though he’ll forget the conversation the next day.

We never actually got a chance to play golf together when I was completely sober. I don’t know how much of an impact that would have on my golf game, but I’d be much less distracted and scared of him. I never thought I’d say this because it was usually such a frustrating day: I’m sad we won’t play golf together again.

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MORE DADS:

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This is The Small Bow newsletter. It is mainly written and edited by A.J. Daulerio. And Edith Zimmerman always illustrates it. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday.

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

My Fancy

by César Vallejo

translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert

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My father is sleeping. His noble features
reflect a gentle heart.
How sweet he is;
if anything in him is bitter, it must be me.

There is solitude at home, and prayer,
and there isn’t any news of the children today.
My father wakes up. He considers
the flight into Egypt, the bitter goodbye.
How near he is;
if anything in him is distant, it must be me.

And my mother, who moves through
the orchard, tasting a taste grown tasteless:
how soft she is,
how very wing, how departure, how love.

There is solitude at home, no sound,
no news, no green, no childhood.
And if anything this afternoon is broken,
and is going down and creaking,
it’s two old lanes white and curving,
and my heart is walking along them now.

—via Poets.org

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