My Embarrassing Father

If there were a prototype, my father would’ve been the prototypical radio DJ/writer parent. A bohemian and anti-establishment renegade (in San Francisco — really?), he was a professional at both charming and pissing people off, especially his employers. Dad also felt it necessary to explode my pre-pubescent eardrums with blasting music. The house was a reverberating subwoofer, night and day.

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My parents separated when I was rather young, but, as a matter of record, they were never married, so when they had my younger brother and me, they just cemented the fact that we’re ghastly bastards.

Dad did his best to look after us, when he did. His birthday presents were generally odd or esoteric. Hostess donuts. A weird Chinese toy of unraveling paper. Chernobyl survivor-looking babushka stacking dolls. And, as my brother will also attest, every time my father looked after us while my mother was away on business, we reaped the benefit of a ton of future stories to draw upon.

One Spring day in Seventh Grade, I was waiting for him to pick me up on the curbside after school. He was late, as usual, and I waited for a good 30 minutes. I was preparing to do my two-mile walk home when there he appeared, putt-puttering up the school driveway in his old Volvo. I was relieved because the man, for all his finest points, was a ‘forgetter’, and today he had not forgotten if only by a hair. Or perhaps he did forget and then had an “ohshitimsupposedtopickupcharlie” moment. In either case, he made it, and that made me happy.

Dad was part of the clergy… of dudes in priest outfits trying to pick up women?

He parked midway in the school driveway, next to a median at a slight diagonal, not giving a flying funk how other traffic would get around him. As he began to get out of the car to call for me, I squinted my eyes to get a better look at him. Thank the Lord Jonathan Van Ness I was already heading over to the car because I noticed as he got out of the beat-up vehicle, which was between us, his hair sopping wet, and his wrinkled shirt drenched. I was 15 to 20 feet away as he rounded the front-end of his car.

He was wearing only a towel.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said with the verve and swagger of a person not quite in his right mind, which he usually wasn’t. Dad almost looked like he was enjoying how nonchalantly ridiculous he was being. “Dad, get in the car. Let’s GO. Now. Please!”

Just then, I saw some friends of mine exit the school building. I executed my best RIOT POLICE PUSH MOVE. If you don’t remember, Middle School is one of those horrible ages when parents embarrass you by simply talking or breathing. My dad had just won the Olympic Gold Medal of Dad Embarrassment. “Dad, let’s go. Come on. Let’s go. Let’s go. I’m serious. Come on.”

Maybe if I hold very still and smile, they’ll wander back into the forest and leave me alone…

Now, to know my father, you have to understand that he liked going slow when people wanted him to move fast. It was his trademark move. It probably had nothing to do with him being high 90% of his waking and sleeping life. He reveled in going slow and yelling at people to “cool (their) jets.” He was loud when the prim people around us were silent. He stuck out like one of the Blues Brothers in a fancy restaurant. He preferred the phrase “blow it out your ass” to modulate the actions of his fellow drivers.

“Oh right, like you’re embarrassed of meee?”

My father died almost 15 years ago, and I dwell on his choices, his lack of decision-making, his search for something he never could quite articulate. Being a father now, I have so many questions about his behavior, about mine, about how I was as a child from his vantage.

I cite that moment of terror now as one a very few that shaped my lack of shyness, my anti-sheepishness that catalyzed a desire to push myself as an artist and creative. Who could retain their modesty around constant experiences like that?

But we laughed and played and enjoyed each other so much. Our singular language of humor and inside jokes is now an endangered species. My brother and I try to keep it alive. But I can only hope to embarrass my kids, as my dad did for me. As a teaching tool, obviously.

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