Song For My Father

It’s been a difficult but rewarding week so far; TTAC’s coverage of the Detroit Show has been positively regarded and a throwaway piece I wrote about the new Z06 managed to get outlinked by a variety of sources including Reddit. I was at my laptop by 7am Monday and yesterday, editing source material and working with our contributors. Two good solid days that did the kind of traffic and earned the kind of goodwill we were afraid had been burned up by my predecessor.

I also was able to build some Legos and share a dinner with my son, who has a variety of the new high-power “N-Force” Nerf guns and is taking advantage of my Stegosaurus speed to headshot me with unerring accuracy from all sorts of places in the house. Once I opened my mouth to tell him to stop shooting me and he hit me in the epiglottis from maybe six or seven yards out, causing me to momentarily flop and shudder like a trout in a net as I tried to keep from falling forward over my walker and also tried not to projectile-vomit. I pity the fool who breaks into his house twenty-years from now. He’ll be able to pull that mouth-to-spine shot that the FBI HRT guys hold so dear, using a old $99 Hi-Point.

But I’ve spent so much of this time at my blog talking about my son, as you know. Today I thought I’d talk about my dad, particularly since he and I have been chatting a lot lately.

The old man’s resume is reasonably impressive, particularly compared to mine; he was born and raised in Brooklyn, played baseball and hockey for Chaminade, went to Notre Dame, played baseball for them.

He came out of college and volunteered for the Marine Corps in order to prevent his three younger brothers from being drafted. As a Marine officer, he received a Congressional Commendation for valor under fire and after leading unit-scale actions against the NVA volunteered for duty as a forward artillery observer, crawling alone in the jungle to find the enemy and direct fire to positions near his own. He then volunteered to be a medivac pilot, having been impressed by the work done by medivac pilots in his area, but it turned out he was just a little bit too color blind.

Because of his sterling combat record and general total fitness as a polished-up Marine who internalized every particular aspect of that institution, he was sent back to New York to convince people to volunteer for Vietnam. In 1970. This was not an easy job. However, he did meet a female Army captain, my combat-boot-wearing, slightly crazy, Florida-deb mother, and before you knew it there were two Captain Baruths running around New York recruiting people.

When I was born, Dad looked at the pay scale for the Marine Corps and he elected not to renew his commission. He sold his ’69 RS327 Camaro droptop out of consideration for my safety and then he went to work.

I cannot stress enough what an absolutely bloody tribulation it was to have me for a son. The old man was ready for anything; ready to coach me into excellence in any number of sports, (my younger brother would win a variety of sports championships with my dad coaching) ready to help me learn the basic details of a boy and man’s life — how to shave, how much to tip, how to choose shoes, how to look people in the eye. He was not ready for someone who was reading before he was two years old, whose questions even as a toddler were about orbital mechanics and macro-economics, somebody who would let the kids outside play baseball while he cut out paper ships and re-enacted the battle of Midway on his bedroom floor. I was an obsessive collector and sorter and possessor.

It must have been like having an alien in the house. I was in no way like the other children. He was generally good-natured about it; I remember him coming into my room once to find that I had managed to source approximately fifty examples of the Paper-Mate “Eighty-Eight” ballpoint and was busy sorting them by likely factory of origin.

“It’s good you’re here, Dad,” I said, “I need to look through some trash cans at your office.”

“John,” he breathed, “let’s have a moratorium on pens for a while.”

This is how far he was willing to go: When the K-Car came out, he ordered two for his entry-level employees. I got wind of this and demanded to see one. So in 1981 he brought me home a K-Car, having given some 23-year-old mook his LeSabre Custom for the night. He drove me around the neighborhood so I could observe its dynamic qualities. I requested to see the other K-Car, just in case it was different. He obliged the following night. Then I asked for the first one back.

“John,” he breathed, “I’d like to have my own car back now and stop driving these little pieces of shit.”

He owned a new 1979 Midget and I used to curl up and sleep in it, out in the garage. It never really ran, not even as a new car.

Years went by and I didn’t become less eccentric; I became more so. Plus, I kept getting in trouble in school. Each time I humiliated a teacher in front of his class or snap-kicked a fellow student in the chin, Dad would come out and rescue me. I started racing BMX, which he despised, but he didn’t prevent me from doing it, even when he could see that I spent most of my time bleeding through my clothes and struggling to win at the Novice-class level.

When I was grotesquely injured in 1988, he sat next to me during the long nights. I thought he was there to make sure I wasn’t enough of a coward to press the pain medication button, but I know now he was there to press it for me so I could keep sleeping. As the years went on, I kept getting in bigger and bigger trouble, even as an adult, but he never hesitated to bail me out — sometimes literally.

Oh the other hand, he never stood for any of this boomerang parent stuff and as a result I’ve been self-sufficient, more or less, for twenty years now. Even though I would like to come back home. (Dad, if you’re reading this, I am completely ready to sell the house and live over your garage in Hilton Head, just say the word, I won’t be much trouble.) Some years I’ve let him borrow my Porsches in an attempt to settle the books but nowadays he prefers less high-strung cars.

The older we get, the more similar we become. I’ll never be a great center fielder but like my father I have an entrepreneurial mindset and we rarely disagree on matters of policy, national or local. I enjoy his company and I think he’s come to tolerate my Asperger’s-cannon method of discourse.

If I had to describe my father to my son I think I’d describe him as a “by the book” kind of guy. You always know what you’re getting with him. Ten minutes after meeting him you know that he probably contributes to charity and returns lost wallets and alerts clients to errors in his favor on a contract. I’ve never seen him act in a querulous or indecisive manner. The few times I’ve seen him have personal confrontations with others he’s been the clear and forceful winner. I like to think of his mind as strongly magnetized by Catholic school and Notre Dame and the Marine Corps and the most well-accepted of American corporate ideas. When Clint Eastwood flmed Gran Torino I had to laugh at how close the main character was to my father — not in his views on race or neighborhood or Fords but just the whole carved-from-granite certainty of his behavior.

And so it came to pass that I was in this frightful accident and I had to call and give him the details. It was in the middle of the polar vortex or whatever but he called Delta and somehow managed to construct an improbable flight path to my door that might have included catching a ride on a luggage wagon between MD-88s or something like that. My immediate impulse was to say, “Absolutely, Dad, come take care of me.” But I came to my senses after a moment or two and convinced him to not risk his own life to come be of aid in mine.

Still, it’s nice to know that I could call the old man tomorrow and he’d manage to appear regardless of flight schedules or weather. It’s still comforting to have someone on whom I can depend, even at the age of forty-two. My father and I have disagreed, we have gone our own ways, but when I’ve really needed him he has always come through. If my own son can say the same thing thirty-seven years for now, I’ll consider this mission accomplished.