He Doesn't Deserve Her

He doesn’t deserve her. Benign is about the best thing I can think of to call Tim. He gets maybe a third of my jokes, those delivered with a wink to make clear they’re jokes. He drinks Bud Lite. He roots for the home team, and is rarely seen outside the house without his ball cap bearing its logo, though in fairness the first time we met he wore a white shirt and tie and no cap, presumably to convey respect. He’s an assistant produce manager at the big Stop-n-Save over on Highway 23, but Suz tells me it’s harder getting him than their two-year-old, the grandson I finally met five weeks ago, to eat anything green.

When we went out together for a man-to-man bonding session, he chose Round Robin, home of the million-calorie chilli cheeseburger, referred to on the menu as The Mighty CCB. When I took Suz to our local one when she was around 11, she called it their instant obesity special, and I shrieked with laughter, embarrassing her nearly as much as pleasing her. I always tried to instil in her a dry sense of humour based on irony and hyperbole, but it wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t had the gene for it, which I like to think she got from me. When Tim and I went, and I said, “So, having the instant obesity special?” he didn’t get it. “Oh,” he said, “you mean the CCB.” He doesn’t have the gene. I’d guess there’s a 20-point chasm between his and Suz’s IQs.

I couldn’t get him to talk about himself very much. He kept shrugging, and looking around. “They’ve sure got some cool signs in here,” he marvelled. Round Robins’ decoration style is faux nostalgia, heavy on reproductions of metal soft drink, motor oil, and other signs. I stopped asking him questions after a while to see what effect it would have. Crickets. We wound up talking about — you can guess! — sports.

He asked if I minded his having a Bud Lite with his CCB. He’d driven us over. I was more worried about his having exactly the same taste in beer (or, more accurately, beer-flavoured soda pop) that his ball cap would have suggested. I couldn’t keep from telling him, “Hey, knock yourself out.” I needn’t have worried. He took it at face value. And my little girl’s going to marry him.

He and Suz had been an item during my and Suz’s estrangement, but had broken up because of his apparently prodigious consumption of cannabis. He credited Jesus with having helped him beat it. I asked whose fault his “addiction” had been. He said his own. I wondered aloud why he blamed himself for the problem, but gave Jesus full credit for his having solved it. His face said he wanted to change the subject, fast.

You might have thought he’d ask me something about myself at that point. No such luck. If intellectual curiosity were water, Tim wouldn’t have enough to wash a grape in his little corner of the Shop-n-Save. I felt that my initial impression of him as a hopeless dullard was fully confirmed. But after six years of our not speaking, I don’t dare say so to S. Who was going to marry him.

No dad and his little girl could been closer than Suz and I were the first 13 years of her life. Then she hit adolescence and began comfort-eating herself into obesity at exactly the moment a kid most wants to be seen as hot by the opposite sex. (She wasn’t a lesbian, though I’d always told her I’d love her just the same if she were). I could barely stand to witness the pain she was causing herself, and invited her to start coming with me to the gym. What she heard, apparently, was, “You’re fat and disgusting, and I don’t love you.” She didn’t speak to me for 73 months, one week, and four days. It tore my heart out. And now she’s going to become a Bud Lite-drinking dullard’s wife. This time I’ve got to keep my mouth shut.

The white shirt he wore when we first met was short-sleeved, short-sleeved shirts being to supermarket chain assistant produce managers what corduroy sports coats with fake leather elbow patches are to academics, and hideous tattoos to National Basketball Association stars. He didn’t wear a real tie, but one of those clip-on jobs. He’d put mousse (he’d probably have called it styling gel) in his hair to make it spiky. Every stop, pulled out!

He’s waiting for us at the altar, fidgeting to beat the band. There’s gel in his hair again. I walk my beautiful, hilarious, smart, stylish daughter toward him, and feel myself about to burst into tears. Tim’s very dull parents, off whose block he’s a definite chip, and with whom I have found it nearly impossible to converse, beam at us as we pass, as too does a large contingent of Tim’s…buds, who probably feel naked without their own ball caps. My ex-wife, Suzs mom, is staring a death-ray at me. Do not fuck this up for her, you! I must pretend to be pleased by what’s about to happen.

I must somehow contain my tears.

In Such Ways Are My Days Brightened

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My zookeeper girlfriend, the one with whom I lived nine years in the bleakest part of San Francisco, said I was prone to perseveration, “a particular response (such as a word, phrase, or gesture) regardless of the absence or cessation of stimuli.” Maybe I am, and maybe I ain’t. What I definitely am, and always have been, with every life partner I’ve been privileged to love and reside with, is fond of little mini-scenarios that get re-enacted many times per week. When a package is delivered to our tiny home sort of near the Thames, and Dame Zelda answers the door, we have a little ritual. She calls upstairs, “A package! I wonder who it could be for.” When she announces that it’s for me, I pretend to become frenzied with excitement, and hurl myself down the stairs, gasping with excitement. She, in turn, holds the package out of my reach until I’ve Asked For It Nicely. I’ll say, “Please [pronounced pweez, for maximum adorableness], may I have my money?” two or three times, and she’ll say, “But it isn’t money, is it?” I’ll typically get it wrong two or three more times before I finally manage, “Please, may I have my package?”

Yes, it’s a little sickening, but that’s one of the things that makes it hilarious for me.

I find that not only in this, but in most of my and Dame Zelda’s little scenarios, I revert to around three and a half, the age at which it all began going wrong for me. Commonly when she’s hard at work at her little desk in our microscopic dining room, I’ll descend the stairs with my trousers around my ankles (spoiler alert: I wear briefs beneath ‘em). When she sees me, she’ll feign exasperation and say, “Pull them up! You’re very immature!” Whereupon, the 40-month-old version of myself will stagger over to our big front window and begin dancing defiantly while she points out, “Someone’s going to see you!” Her doing so, of course, inevitably inspires me to dance all the more lasciviously.

In such ways are my days brightened!

I’ve made up little song fragments and catchphrases, little theme songs, about all my life partners, and driven them crazy reprising ‘em implacably. (Often the relentless repetition of something that isn’t funny on its own terms strikes me as very funny.) I think Dame Zelda is reasonably fond of hers, a sort of Chubby Checker affair called “Claire and the Bear”. Everybody’s doing the Claire and the Bear. They’re doing it over here and they’re doing it over there.

Here I am at 40 months old,
give or take around 35.

That she has always gotten my jokes — however dry, however born of a pre-childish (that is, unashamedly infantile) sense of humour — almost instantly is one of my favourite things about Dame Zelda. About a month after moving to her country, I mused that maybe I should try to make friends (or, in the locals' colourful patois, become mates) with the Rayners Lane bank teller who’d helped me open my first UK account. I mused it might be fun to present him with a bouquet and chocolates when we met. Dame Zelda, not missing a beat, suggested I say something like, “I love you in that shirt. Is it new?” I must have rolled around on the living room floor shrieking with laughter for 10 minutes.

The same sort of thing happened the first time I went into 40-month-old mode and started stomping around the living room chanting, “We have a parade! We have a big parade! We have a big Thursday afternoon parade!” Many women would have been on the phone to the nearest mental health hotline, but Dame Zelda, again not missing a beat, joined right in. “We have a parade! We have a big parade! We have a big Thursday afternoon parade!”

She doesn’t always get it, of course. Given that I have (and am very proud to have!) the most off-the-wall sense of humour of any of her boyfriends, that’s probably inevitable. (I’m the sort who will laugh himself into near-hyperventilation at something by which no one else in the cinema is even faintly amused.) For the past several months, while watching a television programme about Pompeii, for instance, I’ll might turn to her and ask, “Do you like magma [a mixture of molten or semi-molten rock, volatiles and solids found beneath the surface of the Earth]?” Whatever her answer, my own response will be just to repeat it, as though filing it away in my own brain, and turn back to the TV.  I’ve also asked if she likes renewable energy and Keynesian economics. I don’t think she’s realised that, even with my trousers securely belted round my waist, I’m asking the questions a precocious 40-month-old might ask if he or she could pronounce big grownup words but not formulate more sophisticated enquiries.

No spoiler alert required. She doesn’t read my blog.

Shame On Me

This one isn’t going to be fun. This is about one of the great many memories almost too painful for me to endure. 

At 75, my dad had a stroke. My mother looked out the window of what had once been my bedroom, and saw him lying immobile on the sidewalk in front of their house. When it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to walk again, she checked him into the dreary, piss-reeking Santa Monica convalescent hospital in which my maternal grandmother had died not long before. He’d wanted to come home, but Mom, the queen of catastrophic expectations, was sure that if he did, the house would catch fire, she’d be unable to drag him to safety, and everyone would blame her for his death. He was dead about six months later.

There wasn’t a formal funeral. My parents, loving and thrifty as they were, had arranged for the Neptune Society to cremate them when they departed, sparing me and my sister great expense.

My mother did arrange a little Saturday afternoon farewell ceremony for my dad a couple of weeks after his death. A genial young rabbi came. Neither of my parents had been anywhere near a rabbi or synagogue since my bar mitzvah 32 years before. GYR, who of course had never laid eyes on my dad, intoned a few platitudes. My sister, who’d always been closer to my dad than I, spoke for a moment. I refused to follow suit because of the hopeful, conciliatory look on my mother’s face. She’d made a grand display of her contempt for by dad from the time I first remembered. He adored her, and she hated him for it. I’d never seen her be affectionate with him, I’d seen her recoil from him in disgust a million times. I’d heard her rake him over the coals for nothing at all 10 million. 

in fairness, I recognise in retrospect that my dad was perfectly content with their arrangement. My mother could be insightful, and speculated that any attention – even cruel derision — felt equally pleasurable to him. I didn’t believe it at the time, but have come to recognise that it was probably true. Maybe, I’ve been told by a succession of psychotherapists, I should stop being furious at myself for not protecting him from her when I got old enough to do so. 

No, that’s not telling the whole story. I not only didn’t protect him, but treated him pretty much as I’d always seen her treat him. Shame on me. 

In any event, her not expressing remorse at the little backyard ceremony infuriated me. I wasn’t going to be a party to her little charade. Which is to say that it was more important for me on that pretty Saturday afternoon to defy my mother than to honour my dad. 

Shame on me.

Shame that’s amplified by the little service my sister organised when my mother died. She and I and her third husband, the laconic Texan jock, went to the Kenosha synagogue at which the sister of the progressive former senator Russ Feingold presided. My sister and I were beside ourselves almost from the get-go. When it came time for me to speak, I was barely able to get a word out for crying. Such was my and my sister’s grief that her laconic Texan jock began to sniffle. 

I was livid with myself for having been so effusive for my mother and taciturn for my dad.

I went that night to a Milwaukee Brewers game for which he’d bought tickets some weeks before in hope of the two of us bonding. As if! On one level, letting $80 worth of tickets go to waste would have been anathema to both my parents. But I remember having gone to a ball game the night of my mother’s funeral with the almost overwhelming shame I feel about so many things.