You Are a Complete Disappointment Read online

  I truly wanted to like my dad, and I desperately wanted him to like me. No matter what—for our entire lives together—that never stopped. When he finished his onslaught, I left that room a heartbroken mess.

  It was far too soon to see a bigger picture and try to find some compassion for him. That would come in time. For the moment, though, while he was being carted off to die, I was devastated. It had been a hell of a speech, with lots of points scored for style. And that comment about being smart and liking wrestling really rankled. It was as idiotically mundane and petulant as it was bizarre and existentially horrifying. What had happened to him that had made him so angry? I know he hated my lowbrow taste, but how did this disdain became so pathologically profound that he perceived my every small success as an insurgent uprising, and my fondness for spectacle as a personal threat. How had head-butts and spangly tights become the catalyst for a lifetime’s worth of filial contempt? Maybe he had a bad wrestling experience. Maybe André the Giant stole his girl? I have no idea. At least I was not going to be wondering anymore if I would ever hear him say, I am proud of you. That ship had sailed. Like the Titanic.

  Perhaps if he had allowed himself, just once, to stoop low enough to watch one of the crappy science-fiction movies I had loved so much as a kid, he would have learned that you cannot clone yourself—you cannot create a new world in your own image.

  It never works.

  Someone always gets hurt.

  2

  OF ATOMIC FIREBALLS AND TALKING COWS

  I was about seven years old the first time I tried Atomic FireBalls, the hard, super-spicy cinnamon candies that burn hot and sweet and make your mouth all red. I think I was just attracted to the packaging—there was a mushroom cloud on the box that spoke to their genuine atomic power—and decided to give them a go, rather than buy my usual ZotZ®.

  ZotZ, if you recall, were hard candies filled with a sour, fizzy powder. Bicarbonate of crap, I think it was called, and when you got to the center (meaning when you broke it in half with one good crunch), your entire mouth was filled with foamy white stuff, which (if you had some good technique) you could make trickle out over your lips as if you were having a seizure. It was kind of gross and kind of cool, and when we were just a little bit older we definitely realized that it had some odd sexual overtones, like the bubble gum filled with liquid that squirted into your mouth when you bit down on it.

  Atomic FireBalls were nothing short of a gut punch—the first “hot” food that I had ever tried—and they thrust the rest of my flavorless suburban life into the shadows. Everything else sucked. Atomic FireBalls ruled. They would be my new religion.

  “You’ve got to try one of these!” I insisted to my dad, evangelical in my exuberance that this was the single greatest thing that had ever happened to me. “They’re fantastic!”

  “No, I am not going to try one of those, whatever they are,” he told me, showing his disapproval with what I would come to know as a well-practiced look of utter disgust. Then he made a big show of offering me his candy of choice, Necco® wafers, which were quarter-sized disks that tasted like old waxed paper and grout that I pretended to like because I wanted to have something I could share with my father. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by spitting the foul thing out on the floor, which was my first instinct, and I later found out that tasting as if they had been left on the shelf since the Civil War was actually their biggest selling point—it took a special kind of rank, gastronomic nostalgia to eat them.

  The Atomic FireBall was ground zero for the Taste Wars, and from there a lifetime’s worth of absurd Father v. Son ad hominem challenges began. Pretty much right up until he died, every time I tried something new and liked it, whether it was a breakfast cereal or a new pizza topping—if I had the audacity to try and share it—I was rebuffed and told to “grow up.”

  It’s ridiculous, I know, but when I was a child, I was constantly told to “just grow up already.” Seven years old and already I was being indicted for the crime of “immaturity,” which Ambrose Bierce might have described as “the word old people use to put down younger people who have more fun than they do,” never mind the absurdity of measuring a second grader’s choices in candy, cartoons, and breakfast cereal against that of an Ivy-educated suburban father of three, or the insanity of pushing his Eisenhower-era tastes onto the palate of a kid who had just entered the Brave New World of Atomic FireBalls—which, I can tell you now, was most definitely a gateway to harder stuff (Tabasco® sauce, jalapeños, tequila, LSD, etc).

  Later, I came to realize that my dad’s childhood had been deflated by similarly unimaginative parents. He was born of adults who somehow skipped or just repressed the ecstasy and horrors and general confusion of being young, adults who were incapable of experiencing the travails—joyful, playful, sad, hurt, whatever—of their own children. His folks were society stiffs who would never get down on the floor and crawl around on the carpet with their toddlers. They weren’t huggers or listeners, and they certainly didn’t know how to be silly, or play games, or have any sort of fun that strayed from their uptight parochial formulary, and it stuck with him when he had kids of his own.

  Throughout my childhood he made fun of me all the time for what I watched on television: popular sitcoms like Happy Days and Good Times, which the kids in school liked to talk about at lunchtime, seeing who could do the best imitations of the Fonz or Jimmy “Dyn-O-Mite” Walker; Chiller Theatre, which showed mostly B horror films like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, Attack of the Crab Monsters, and Psychomania (a British biker-horror masterpiece about a motorcycle gang that came back from the dead—they were actually buried on their choppers and rode them straight out of the grave, which is every bit as awesome as it sounds); Creature Features, which favored old-school Universal Studios monster movies (The Mummy was my favorite) and Christopher Lee’s slightly risqué Dracula flicks; and, of course, Championship Wrestling, which came on at ten o’clock on Saturday mornings, followed by the roller derby that I loved but could not for the life of me ever figure out how they kept score.

  He took special glee in mocking me for watching the wrestling—It’s fake! It’s not real! Grow up! How dumb can you be? But truthfully, even at seven years old, I knew in my heart of hearts it wasn’t legit. How could it be? We all had heard the rumors that Chief Jay Strongbow was really an Italian guy from the Bronx, and even a blind man could see the pulled punches from a mile away. But then, like now, it didn’t matter. It was a world unconfined by the laws and rules the rest of us had to obey. In wrestling there was justice, and there was freedom. Wrestling was all about the power of imagination.

  Then, and as ever, I championed the bad guys, and especially their preposterous manager-cum-mouthpieces, for whom it was a Golden Era, led by a triumvirate of lunatics: “Captain Lou” Albano, who spat when he talked and inexplicably had rubber bands attached to his face, like some sort of escaped mental patient; the Grand Wizard of Wrestling, a shriveled Jewish man who wore hideous madras jackets, sparkly turbans, and wrap-around shades and who claimed to be the smartest man in the world; and “Classy” Freddie Blassie, the self-proclaimed “King of Men” who even had his own hilarious song, “Pencil Neck Geeks.” They were larger than life. They oozed a certain retarded charisma that I still find irresistible.

  Anyway, when my dad told me to “grow up” at age seven, I knew even then it was ridiculous. I probably rolled my eyes and went back to watching Kung Fu Theater and stuffing my mouth with ZotZ just to see how much foam I could spew. Even then I was never really one for “growing up,” such as it was. I was always more about evolving.

  ONCE THE WAR STARTED, it never relented. Penny candy was just the beginning. I remember vividly when I was ten years old and wanted to play Little League® baseball, and he told me, “No, you don’t. You’re not good at it. Do you really want to embarrass yourself?” While I probably wasn’t ever going to be the league’s all-star first baseman, I could certainly hit and run and catch enough not to emb
arrass myself, or him—which I now know was all he really cared about. My lack of perfection at the plate was more a liability to his perception of himself as a flawless human than it could ever be to a bunch of little kids, none of whom were future Hall of Famers.

  The fucked-up thing is that he was so deadly convincing in his scouting report that I actually believed him, and for a long time I had zero confidence whenever I played baseball or stickball—or even kickball, the most dumbed-down, skill-less variant of the lot. It took most of my adolescence to realize that I actually was coordinated enough to kick a big rubber ball across a playground, never mind smack the shit out of a baseball. Of course what I realize now is that this was just his way of saying, “Anything that involves wearing a T-shirt with the name of a pizzeria on the back can’t possibly be worthwhile.” Little League was vulgar in the truest sense.

  He was in perfect form when my first attempt at playing music netted me an alto saxophone in the fourth grade. From the very first day I brought that baby home and polished it up and put it on in front of the mirror to see how cool it looked, the old man told me to give it up. “You’re no good at it,” he barked. “You’re not musical.”

  At first it probably sounded like outtakes from an Ornette Coleman record. That’s what happens when you stick a saxophone in a ten-year-old’s mouth. It might have even been pretty good in its primitive, harmolodic innocence, but there was no way my father was ever going to be ready for that. A year later, when I had figured out how to play the first few bars to the solo on “Brown Sugar” and a little bit of “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” and was starting to get a firm handle on this whole saxophone thing, he was still ridiculing me, really making sure I got the message: You suck!

  After he was obligated to come hear me play in the school band at one of those springtime assemblies that are supposed to promote confidence in the kids, he let me know in no uncertain terms just how awful it was. On the spot he canceled our post-concert date to go to Carvel® for ice cream with all the other kids (“You don’t deserve it”), and told me again that it would be best if I gave it all up. The next day at school, I had to explain to everyone why I wasn’t at the ice cream parlor. My career as a sax player died soon after, even as my teacher encouraged me to stay at it.

  When I was eleven and had my next bright idea—to play the drums—he didn’t miss a beat. At first I thought he had come around to rewarding my enthusiasm by buying me the secondhand drum set I had found by scouring the local classifieds. I had begged for the set vociferously (it cost fifty bucks—which I was expected to pay back in full), but it turned out to have more pieces missing than were actually there, and this time he yelled at me because I didn’t play it right away.

  “But Dad, there’s no bass drum pedal, no cymbals, and no seat! Also I need some sticks!”

  “Good musicians don’t blame their instruments. You should probably quit now. Obviously you aren’t mature enough. You need to grow up.”

  My true dream when I was in sixth grade, however, was to work for MAD Magazine. I even sent them my own contributions: largely primitive interpretations of Don Martin’s crazy sound effects (Spwatch! Spwizzle! Glbble! Sprack! Foinsapp!) and the characters he drew, with their outsized chins and folded-over feet. Not surprisingly, I never heard back from them.

  Actually I wasn’t bad for a little kid. Every year I would have something that I drew chosen to represent my elementary school in some art fair and competition, and they’d put it up at the local shopping mall. One year I even won a blue ribbon—first prize! Surely I was going places! Maybe I could even have a strip in the newspaper, like the guy who did Peanuts, or Funky Winkerbean, which wasn’t even that good. I thought about it all the time.

  My mother always encouraged me, but she saw any artistic proclivity I may have had as not much more than a charming hobby. The very second I started making noise about actually becoming an artist, she stopped thinking it was so cute. And the only kudos I got from my father for being good with a pen or brush were when he demanded I make greeting cards for him whenever he needed one, in which case I would whip one up—usually a cow saying “Happy Birthday,” or whatever the occasion was. For some reason I thought drawing talking cows was hilarious, and this a good four years before I started smoking pot. I guess, no matter what age you are, there is something existentially subversive about a talking cow.

  I was always happy to whip up all manners of cards and greetings because I thought he was proud of me and wanted to show off my skills. Later I realized he just didn’t like to buy store-bought cards (he considered them not only a waste of money, but also the same sort of déclassé crap embraced by the peons who participated in things like Little League and bake sales). He had less-than-zero interest in my earnest attempts at breaking into MAD Magazine (“They don’t want you, stop wasting your time”). I started feeling more like a trained monkey than an admired or loved child, and I stopped doing tricks on demand. Somehow he had turned my chorus of bovine hilarity into a big mess of rotten burger meat, and I no longer wanted any part of it.

  IRONICALLY, IT WAS LARGELY THANKS to my dad that I got into photography, which eventually led me to the bright idea of going to film school—an experience I think we would both rate as a failure, although for different reasons. His own pictures were gorgeous. I am looking at one now: a beautiful black-and-white matte print of us in the park on an autumn day. The leaves are slightly out of focus, a deft use of depth of field, and us kids pop out in front of them, crisp and clear. The composition is rock-solid, the lighting, beyond criticism. My brothers, nine years old at the time, are wearing white cable-knit sweaters and have big smiles, while I—on the cusp of my turn as a teenage beatnik—am wearing a dark sweater and a coy half grin. It’s my favorite photograph of us, but in no way does it reflect the nightmare it was to actually have it taken.

  Those days in the park taking pictures were torture for everyone involved, but especially for my mom, who hated to see us being yelled at to stand or sit silently. My dad turned a family day in the park into an anal compulsive’s campaign to have perfect pictures of his perfect kids, shot in a style that demonstrated his own perfect taste and mastery of the photographic art. There was much yelling and, sometimes, crying. Great photos, though.

  He would send the negatives to a lab in New York City and get them back with contact sheets, which he would pore over with a plastic loupe and mark with a grease pencil, which I was never allowed to touch. These were tools, not toys, and first I would have to learn to take pictures—and then, maybe then, if I were ever mature enough, I would be allowed entry into the palace where one looked at contact sheets and made what seemed like cataclysmic decisions about what to have printed, and always in matte finish, he explained, because that showed he had good taste. Also, it cost more than the glossy finish. That was somehow important, too.

  At first he was excited when I bought a used single-lens reflex camera with paper-route money and listened ardently to his advice about f-stops and shutter speeds. I took a few shots of my younger brothers that met with his approval, and I aspired to have a Nikon® F camera, just like his. I was so happy that I had discovered something he liked and that I was actually good at. I was trying so hard to please him. Then something happened: I won a photo contest in the local paper, and suddenly the Nikon I had been saving up for, the one just like his, was “too much camera” for me. I didn’t need it. Also, I was warned, photography was a “very expensive hobby,” so maybe I ought to think about that a little, too, and maybe I should stop now. If he knew all of this was going to lead to film school, he probably would have carved out my eyes with his grease pencil.

  But an aunt thoughtfully gave me a lovely set of Time Life® books about photography, which I studied ardently and wanted to share with my dad. There was so much information about light and composition—why, you could do anything with a camera! It beat drawing pictures of cows hands-down. It was all so exciting. Look at this guy, Robert Frank—he drove a
round the country taking pictures, and now he’s famous! All I wanted to do was pore through this trove of knowledge and art with my dad, because, after all, he was the guy who got me into it in the first place. But it made him insane when I started playing with the camera’s settings to purposely blur photos or experiment with light or composition in any way at all. He was very clear: There is a right way, and a wrong way. He thought studio photography was fake. He was an enemy of the avant-garde. My next idea, to become a photojournalist, was shot down because very few people made it. I had seen a lot of war photos in Life, and dreamed about being on the front lines, being the one guy who could bring back that story. I read Rolling Stone and Creem and Circus, and I especially liked some pictures taken of Led Zeppelin on their tour plane. That seemed like a pretty good job to have, traveling with Led Zeppelin—at least as good as going to Vietnam. But I was told, “That isn’t really photography.” I am sure he didn’t think it was “really music,” either.

  Years later, someone suggested that he was just being a parent and trying to steer me toward more “realistic” career choices, but over the years I’ve come to understand that he was terrified of big dreams—especially anything that seemed capricious or difficult to control. Dreaming created instability. Eventually he stopped taking pictures altogether and sold me his Nikon at what he assured me was a fair price. Now I know that price-gouging me was another attempt at teaching me a lesson, that it was all out of my league, and that I needed to knock off all these silly ideas about being an artist or having any sort of glamorous career. But I was young then, and all I saw were possibilities.