Sins of the father

by David Benjamin

 

“The stories of young men searching for their fathers are the stories of young men who through their adventures father themselves by doing for themselves what they hoped a father would do for them.” —William S. Wilson

“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for their father’s mistakes…” —Barack Obama

 

MADISON, Wis.—When my fictional memoir, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, was first published by Random House, the review in the Washington Post offered desultory praise but—most notably—disapproved of my attitude toward my father. Reading my prose, the reviewer perceived, accurately, that Dad was neglectful and distant, frustrated by life to the brink of violence, and a dubious role model. But what bothered the reviewer most was that I also cast a positive light on Dad, enjoying his idiosyncrasies while tolerating his flaws almost casually—even with a dash of humor—and failing to denounce with sufficient spleen the emotional debilitation imposed on me by my father’s iniquity.

The reviewer wasn’t really writing about me and my book. He was perpetuating one of the most belabored themes in American literature—fear and loathing of the father. There should be a word for this. Patriphobia? It’s difficult to delve far into the pantheon of American authors, to scroll the canon of cinema, or to watch a night of television without encountering this motif, which is, of course, rooted in reality and easily sold to an audience conditioned to it and receptive—‘cause who doesn’t have issues with their old man? 

John Steinbeck epitomized this theme in East of Eden, and James Dean brought the anguish of the paternally ravaged son to life in the movie version of Steinbeck’s novel. Dean then reprised the syndrome in Rebel Without a Cause, in which Jim Backus, as Jim Stark’s father, is the quintessence of parental incompetence—permissive to a fault, henpecked by his wife and pusillanimous at the moment of his son’s greatest of need. In the same movie, Natalie Wood gets bitch-slapped by her unfeeling dad and Sal Mineo has no father all, just a child support check to keep him warm (and a handgun in the bedside drawer).

Mark Twain might have established the American archetype for this theme with Pap Finn, the drunken and abusive father whom Huck escaped by launching his classic coming-of-age picaresque down the Mississippi, adopting his black sidekick Jim as a sort of surrogate dad.

It’s hard to imagine the canon of American literature and cinema without patriphobia as both inspiration and formula. Would Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini, be as sensitive and emotionally evocative had he not suffered constant humiliation under the thrall of a domineering dad? Would Chandler Bing be quite so funny were his estranged father not a gay female impersonator who starred in a drag show as Helena Handbasket?

Even Bob Dylan explored the theme in a blues riff that goes, in part, “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’/ … Abe said ‘Where you want this killin’ done?’/ God said, ‘Out on Highway 61 …”

I haven’t studied the issue, but my sense is that motherhood gets better treatment in fiction, film and memoir. When I looked back at my childhood and wrote The Last Kid Picked, I had the advantage of perspective, knowing that my parents were mutually inadequate to the task of governing their own lives, much less raising three independent, intractable and increasingly sarcastic kids.

Mom and Dad had been the hottest couple at Tomah High. Barely out of their teens, they were “married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout”—to echo Johnny Cash and June Carter—and had few resources with which to cope, not much later, when “the fire went out.” But by then they had three kids.

From his tone and outlook, I guessed that my Washington Post reviewer was a fairly affluent and thoroughly educated young guy who found catharsis in blaming his own deficiencies in life—like Biff and Hap Loman—on the sins of the father. I suspect that in the intervening years, this reviewer has had kids of his own, coped with their contempt and has come around to forgiving his old man. 

I never reached the forgiveness stage, because I never saw Dad as sinful, at least not against me. Sometime early on, I came to understand—at first intuitively and then reflectively—how little control Dad had, when he was young, over his circumstances and impulses. I saw him struggle.

One such struggle occurred when I was in twelfth grade. I had yet, by then, to experience the springtime rite of passage known as prom. As usual, I had no girlfriend and was pretty certain to end my high-school days without ever renting a dinner jacket and buying a corsage. But I had a brainstorm. One of my friends, a lovely, sensible girl named Judy (not her real name) was dateless for prom, because her boyfriend—let’s call him Rocky—had graduated the year before and joined the Marines. I knew Rocky. He was bigoted and toxically masculine, but we were friendly. So, I suggested to Judy that she and I, as platonic a pair as boy and girl could ever be, attend prom together. This would spare us both the misfortune of going promless in our senior year. Judy agreed, subject to informing Rocky about our plans.

Meanwhile, I faced the challenge of raising about a hundred dollars to cover the big night’s expenses. Lacking the funds, I appealed to Dad. As I asked, I looked into his eyes, felt the slackening of Dad’s whole body, and I knew I wouldn’t score my prom stake from him. He was tapped out. I felt bad for asking. I understood because I was tapped out, too. I was a teenager without a steady job, stealing a dollar—when I was penniless—from Mom’s secret stash of silver certificates so I could go out to McDonald’s after the basketball game. Dad worked two jobs, sometimes erratically and never lucratively, but he never made enough to pad a savings account and provide an emergency C-note to a son who’d never been to prom. But he didn’t and couldn’t. He’d been underwater all my life, and I knew why. But I couldn’t bring myself to blame him. He was broke. I was broke. Distant though we were in so many ways, we occupied the same sinking dinghy.

As things turned out, Rocky exercised his manly hegemony over his mate and told Judy she was forbidden to even think about going to prom with any guy other than him. If I had waited for word from Rocky, I could have spared Dad yet another moment of fatherly anguish.

I sent one of the first copies of The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked to Dad. I wasn’t sure how he would receive the book because, as my Post critic suggested, my portrayal of Dad—as rogue, charmer, smartass, smalltown skirt-chaser and child-support scofflaw—was far more complicated than the white-bread TV dads, like Ward Cleaver and Jim Anderson (“Father Knows Best”) who were unlike any adult male I’d ever encountered. 

Months later, visiting my father in Tomah, I was nervous. Dad stood up on his reconstructed hip and crackling knees—ravaged by forty years of climbing ladders and tending bar—and hugged me. Then, looking me straight in the eye the way he’d taught me to do, Dad said, “It’s a good book.”

As Hendrith Vanlon Smith has said, no matter what travails have gone before, “There’s something magical about a father’s affirmation.”