Stories for Boys: A Memoir (13 page)

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Authors: Gregory Martin

BOOK: Stories for Boys: A Memoir
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Whitman printed 795 copies of
Leaves of Grass
, but he didn’t sell thirty. That first year, Whitman gave away more copies than he sold. One reviewer recommended that Whitman be “whipped in the streets”; another recommended that he “commit suicide.”
Humility
 
I WANTED MY FATHER TO KEEP HIS PROMISE TO ME THAT he would never again try to kill himself. I did not want another phone call from – who? Who would call 911 this time? Who would save him? But how could I be sure that my father was keeping his promise if I refused to speak with him? How did I even know he was alive?
I hadn’t talked to or emailed with my father in more than four months. I’d gone months without talking to him before, but never out of spite. Thanksgiving had come and gone. Christmas had come and gone, and we did not talk or send each other cards or presents. He did not send the boys presents, either. I added these presents my children did not receive to my litany of grievances. My father didn’t have to call or email me, but he could at least send his grandsons presents. In early February, my birthday came and went, and he did not call or write or send anything. He had said that he wanted me out of his life, and I was determined to hold him to it. I am a talented grudge-holder. Except that I wanted him to call and apologize, so that I could then apologize to him. I sometimes went back to those emails he and I had sent in September, about whether or not he was a thief. I could see my own self-righteousness. I had claimed, for example, that I did not shout at him on the phone, that he was the one who was shouting. When I read this again, I laughed. Had I said anything, at any volume, below a shout? I saw also, in my father’s emails, his desperation. He was in crisis. I saw my utter lack of sympathy. I saw that not even once did I attempt to ask him, sincerely, why he acted so rashly. He’d always been so incredibly considerate. Had it finally hit him that his life with my mother was over? Was he lashing out against the punishment she had given him. Banishment. A life sentence, without parole. No opportunity for restitution, for redemption. All he could do was pay the penalty. There was nothing he could do to make things right again, not with her. But he could still make things wrong. He could make her acknowledge him, make her feel something for him, even if it was only the pain that came after a lifetime of trust and love, the pain of the love she surely must still have for him.
Maybe that was why. Maybe that had something to do with his motivations, however conscious.
There’s a difference between saying,
Why do you think you did that?
And saying,
How could you do that?
Which is not a question but an accusation. Which is another way of saying,
You have forfeited your right to be understood. Shame on you.
I wanted my father to be the first one to apologize, the humble one.
Man’s Best Friend
 
MY MOTHER’S DOG LUCKY IS NOT A GOOD DOG, THOUGH my mother would tell you otherwise. Lucky is part Australian Shepherd, part barking dog. After my father attempted suicide and moved into a cheap apartment across town, my mother had sole custody of Lucky and decided to take her, once a week for eight weeks, to obedience school. Lucky had perfect attendance but did not earn a certificate. She barked. I visited my mother not long after this, and I could not perceive a difference in Lucky’s behavior. She was not, and is not, reformed. Lucky’s bark is high and sharp and grating, like claws on a blackboard. She barks to be let outside. She barks when she is outside. She barks to be let back inside. She barks when she is inside and hears something outside. She barks on walks around the block. She barks at the kids on the playground. She barks. I do not like Lucky and I have a hard time keeping this to myself. I am not alone.
My mother’s three older sisters are her best friends. After my father attempted suicide and my mother exiled him for life, my mother’s sisters began a regular rotation of visiting her. Every other week, one of them was staying at her house, in the guest bedroom, for several days. More than once, they all came together. They are, each of them, in their seventies, and they are still, after all these years, fiercely protective of her. My mother is, and will always be, their baby sister.
When my Aunt Di (on the left in the photo) heard about my father’s suicide attempt and the reasons behind it, she questioned my mother’s decision to call 911. She told me that she wished my mother would not have picked up the phone but instead had gone for a long walk. I don’t hold this against my Aunt Di. She said this from a place of terrible hurt and terrible empathy. She hasn’t changed her mind. I don’t hold that against her, either.
Back to Lucky. The winter after my father attempted suicide, my mother drove to Nevada to celebrate both Thanksgiving and then Christmas with her sisters. They would not allow my mother to bring Lucky to their houses. They do not love their baby sister that unconditionally. They made my mother put Lucky in a kennel and come alone.
LUCKY HAS ONLY one eye. The other eye is a gristly socket. In the land of the blind dogs, Lucky would not be queen because of her barking.
My mother hired a local Spokane dog whisperer to come to her home and help her train Lucky. After four or five visits, the dog whisperer diagnosed the problem. My mother was not enforcing her commands. She was not consistent. She forgave Lucky all too easily. She let Lucky bark. The dog whisperer put a shock collar on Lucky, which reduced her to a quivering, whimpering mass of fur. My mother started shouting at the dog whisperer to take the collar off. The dog whisperer shouted back. He could work with Lucky. Lucky was not the problem. The dog was never the problem. It was always the owner. My mother told the dog whisperer to leave this minute and never come back.
My mother said to the dog whisperer, “Get out.”
My mother read a dog training book written collectively by an order of monks from outside Saratoga Springs, New York. The Monks of New Skete were semi-famous for raising and training pedigreed German shepherds. My mother loved their book. She recommended it to me. But there was no point in my reading
How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend
, because I knew Rocky would always like Christine more than me, and because Rocky had aced obedience school eight years earlier. He was far better behaved than Oliver and Evan, who chewed with their mouths open and farted during dinner without consequence. I went to the library and checked out the monks’
I & Dog
instead. The book is coffee-table-shaped and juxtaposes fine art photographs of monks and dogs amidst pastoral monastery grounds with a series of soulful, dog-based meditations inspired by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. Here are some excerpts:
Dogs are guileless and filled with spontaneity: unlike people, they don’t deceive. When we take seriously the words they speak to us about ourselves, we stand face to face with the truth of the matter…
 
 
Dogs can spot phoniness a mile away.
 
Ultimately, dogs enchant us with their honesty, a trait increasingly rare in the nexus of relationships that make up our lives.
My mom took Lucky to the dog park every afternoon. She let Lucky off her leash and then walked the perimeter of the fence enclosure and got some exercise. A couple times a week at this time, she called me on her cellphone. It was a good time to talk because Lucky was too distracted sniffing the other dogs’ asses to interrupt our conversation with her barking.
Talking with my mom has always been easy, effortless – even about the hardest of things. A few weeks after my father’s suicide attempt, she told me, “Every morning your father put out my vitamins. For years and years. This morning I went down to the kitchen and put my water on for tea, and I said, ‘He must have forgot to put out my vitamins.’ Then I said, ‘
You
have to do that now.’ Then I realized I was talking to myself.”
In telling me this, my mother’s tone was animated not by self-pity, but by introspective curiosity. I could almost see this realization added to her mental to-do list: must put out vitamins myself.
We are both quick to laugh, especially about Lucky, who is not smart enough to know her role as my mother’s comic foil. My mother insists that Lucky is good-looking. She’s always passing on to me other dog owners’ compliments on Lucky’s good looks. She does this knowing full well that I am unpersuadable. She refuses to acknowledge that these people feel hard pressed to say
something
nice, and they can’t just say that Lucky is one of the better -looking one-eyed dogs they’ve seen.
I did not tell my mother how long it had been since I’d spoken to my father. I did not tell her that he wanted me completely out of his life, that he never wanted to speak to me again. I did not tell her that the game plan was to make him suffer for those words. I didn’t like to admit this to myself, and I didn’t want to make her feel responsible. Because she would have felt responsible – she would have regretted telling me what he had done, and I didn’t want that.
My mother and I talked about the classes we were teaching. Then we talked about whether or not she should retire. She was sixty-eight. I worried about the time, all those hours, my mother would spend alone if she retired. Sometimes I permitted my mother to admit that she was tired. Sometimes I said the right thing. “That’s okay, mom. You’ve been a good soldier for a long time.” And she said, “Yes I have.” Other times I said the right thing, but my tone indicated otherwise. I was remembering that week after my father’s suicide attempt, when I taught her how to run the lawnmower and edger and weed whacker, and I was thinking that these new activities would not take up enough time, and so I was really saying, No. No. No. Chin up. Carry on.
 
WHEN I TALKED with my mother, I encouraged her to make an appointment and see a counselor. I nagged her relentlessly. Then I suggested that maybe she could take Lucky with her. Lucky might have unresolved trauma from childhood that we didn’t know about. Maybe that was what all this barking was about. She wanted to tell us. She was trying to tell us. We just couldn’t understand.
“Hate the bark, love the barker,” my mother said.
I laughed. I could still count on my mother’s black humor. I said, “How about, ‘Hate the bark, take the barker to the pound, and get a new dog that doesn’t bark except when she’s supposed to, like when strange men come to the door’?”
“Or your father,” my mother said.
“Sure,” I said.
“I think I can train Lucky,” my mother said.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
 
Subject: I’m way overdue
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2008
 
 
I cannot understand why this has been so hard for me to initiate this message. I think I’ve been trying to make it too hard. Only a guess, the first statement stands. I am well, mostly healthy and still working. But I have realized a steady sinking into kind of a depression that is new to me. I’ve been giving a little thought into how much better it would have been to just not be in this world anymore. I remember promising you that I would not go that route again and I intend to honor that promise. I really believe honoring that promise has prevented me from doing something senseless again. On reflection, there are really more good days than bad days, but those bad days can be really difficult.
 
On the good side, I recently re-met someone I met several months ago, more in passing than anything else. We are very much alike, having been sexually abused in our youth, but he knew about himself very early and was able to be very open with his family who were very supportive. As a result, I believe he was able to assert himself in the outside world as himself while I never was. As you may remember, I was still in denial for many years after being married. He never married. There is much more I could go on about, but will hold off until I am sure we will really connect for the long term. I kind of hope we do. I am far too cognizant of the troubles that appear to be rampant among gay couples. However, we are neither in our younger years and have a lot of life’s experiences behind us, so there is a fair chance for success. We’ll see.
 
I’ll close for now. Please give my sincere love to Christine, Oliver, and Evan. I love you very much.
 
Dad
 

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