Independence Day Read online

  The matter of greater magnitude and utmost importance, though, involves my son, Paul Bascombe, who is fifteen. Two and a half months ago, just after tax time and six weeks before his school year ended in Deep River, he was arrested for shoplifting three boxes of 4X condoms (“Magnums”) from a display-dispenser in the Finast down in Essex. His acts were surveilled by an “eye in the sky” camera hidden above the male hygiene products. And when a tiny though uniformed Vietnamese security person (a female) approached him just beyond the checkout, where as a diversionary tactic he’d bought a bottle of Grecian Formula, he bolted but was wrestled to the ground, whereupon he screamed that the woman was “a goddamned spick asshole,” kicked her in the thigh, hit her in the mouth (conceivably by accident) and pulled out a fair amount of hair before she could apply a police stranglehold and with the help of a pharmacist and another customer get the cuffs on him. (His mother had him out in an hour.)

  The security guard naturally enough has pressed criminal charges of assault and battery, as well as for the violation of some of her civil rights, and there have even been “hate crime” and “making an example” rumblings out of the Essex juvenile authorities. (I consider this only as election-year bluster plus community rivalry.)

  Meanwhile, Paul has been through myriad pretrial interviews, plus hours of tangled psychological evaluations of his personality, attitudes and mental state—two of which sessions I attended, found unremarkable but fair, though I have not yet seen the results. For these proceedings he has had not a lawyer but an “ombudsman,” who’s a social worker trained in legal matters, and who his mother has talked to but I haven’t. His first actual court date is to be this Tuesday morning, the day after the 4th of July.

  Paul for his part has admitted everything yet has told me he feels not very guilty, that the woman rushed him from behind and scared the shit out of him so that he thought he might be being murdered and needed to defend himself; that he shouldn’t have said what he said, that it was a mistake, but he’s promised he has nothing against any other races or genders and in fact feels “betrayed” himself—by what, he hasn’t said. He’s claimed to have had no specific use in mind for the condoms (a relief if true) and probably would’ve used them only in a practical joke against Charley O’Dell, his mother’s husband, whom he, along with his father, dislikes.

  For a brief time I thought of taking a leave from the realty office, sub-letting a condo somewhere down the road from Deep River and keeping in touch with Paul on a daily basis. But his mother disapproved. She didn’t want me around, and said so. She also believed that unless things got worse, life should remain as “normal” as possible until his hearing. She and I have continued to talk it over every bit—Haddam to Deep River—and she is of the belief that all this will pass, that he is simply going through a phase and doesn’t, in fact, have a syndrome or a mania, as someone might think. (It is her Michigan stoicism that allows her to equate endurance with progress.) But as a result, I’ve seen less of him than I’d like in the last two months, though I have now proposed bringing him down to Haddam to live with me in the fall, which Ann has so far been leery of.

  She has, however—because she isn’t crazy—hauled him to New Haven to be “privately evaluated” by a fancy shrink, an experience Paul claims he enjoyed and lied through like a pirate. Ann even went so far as to send him for twelve days in mid-May to an expensive health camp in the Berkshires, Camp Wanapi (called “Camp Unhappy” by the inmates), where he was judged to be “too inactive” and therefore encouraged to wear mime makeup and spend part of every day sitting in an invisible chair with an invisible pane of glass in front of him, smiling and looking surprised and grimacing at passersby. (This was, of course, also videotaped.) The camp counselors, who were all secretly “milieu therapists” in mufti—loose white tee-shirts, baggy khaki shorts, muscle-bound calves, dog whistles, lanyards, clipboards, preternaturally geared up for unstructured heart-to-hearts—expressed the opinion that Paul was intellectually beyond his years (language and reasoning skills off the Stanford charts) but was emotionally underdeveloped (closer to age twelve), which in their view posed “a problem.” So that even though he acts and talks like a shrewd sophomore in the honors program at Beloit, full of sly jokes and double entendres (he has also recently shot up to 5’ 8,” with a new layer of quaky pudge all over), his feelings still get hurt in the manner of a child who knows much less about the world than a Girl Scout.

  Since Camp Unhappy, he has also begun exhibiting an unusual number of unusual symptoms: he has complained about an inability to yawn and sneeze properly; he has remarked about a mysterious “tingling” at the end of his penis; he has complained about not liking how his teeth “line up.” And he has from time to time made unexpected barking noises—leering like a Cheshire, afterwards—and for several days made soft but audible eeeck-eeecking sounds by drawing breath back down his throat with his mouth closed, usually with a look of dismay on his face. His mother has tried to talk to him about this, has re-consulted the shrink (who’s advised many more sessions), and has even gotten Charley to “step in.” Paul at first claimed he couldn’t imagine what anybody was talking about, that all seemed normal to him, then later he said that making noises satisfied a legitimate inner urge and didn’t bother others, and that they should get over their problems with it, and him.

  In these charged months I have tried, in essence, to increase my own ombudsman’s involvement, conducting early-morning phone conversations with him (one of which I’m awaiting hopefully this morning) and taking him and now and then his sister, Clarissa, on fishing trips to the Red Man Club, an exclusive anglers’ hideaway I joined for this very purpose. I have also taken him once to Atlantic City on a boys-only junket to see Mel Tormé at TropWorld, and twice to Sally’s seashore house, there to be idle-hours bums, swimming in the ocean when syringes and solid human waste weren’t competing for room, walking the beach and talking over affairs of the world and himself in a nondirected way until way after dark.

  In these talks, Paul has revealed much: most notably, that he’s waging a complex but losing struggle to forget certain things. He remembers, for instance, a dog we had years ago when we were all a nuclear family together in Haddam, a sweet, wiggly, old basset hound named Mr. Toby, who none of us could love enough and all doted on like candy, but who got flattened late one summer afternoon right in front of our house during a family cookout. Poor Mr. Toby actually clambered up off the Hoving Road pavement and in a dying dash galumphed straight to Paul and leaped into his arms before shuddering, wailing once and croaking. Paul has told me in these last weeks that even then (at only age six) he was afraid the incident would stay in his mind, possibly even for the rest of his life, and ruin it. For weeks and weeks, he said, he lay awake in his room thinking about Mr. Toby and worrying about the fact that he was thinking about it. Though eventually the memory had gone away, until just after the Finast rubber incident, when it came back, and now he thinks about Mr. Toby “a lot” (possibly constantly), thinks that Mr. Toby should be alive still and we should have him—and by extension, of course, that his poor brother, Ralph, who died of Reye’s, should also be alive (as he surely should) and we should all still be we. There are even ways, he’s said, in which all this is not that unpleasant to think about, since he remembers much of that early time, before bad things happened, as having been “fun.” And in that sense, his is a rare species of nostalgia.

  He has also told me that as of recently he has begun to picture the thinking process, and that his seems to be made of “concentric rings,” bright like hula hoops, one of which is memory, and that he tries but can’t make them all “fit down flush on top of each other” in the congruent way he thinks they should—except sometimes just before the precise moment of sleep, when he can briefly forget about everything and feel happy. He has likewise told me about what he refers to as “thinking he’s thinking,” by which he tries to maintain continuous monitorship of all his thoughts as a way of “underst
anding” himself and being under control and therefore making life better (though by doing so, of course, he threatens to drive himself nuts). In a way his “problem” is simple: he has become compelled to figure out life and how to live it far too early, long before he’s seen a sufficient number of unfixable crises cruise past him like damaged boats and realized that fixing one in six is a damn good average and the rest you have to let go—a useful coping skill of the Existence Period.

  All this is not a good recipe, I know. In fact, it’s a bad recipe: a formula for a life stifled by ironies and disappointments, as one little outer character tries to make friends with or exert control over another, submerged, one, but can’t. (He could end up as an academic, or a U.N. translator.) Plus, he’s left-handed and so is already threatened by earlier-than-usual loss of life, by greater chances of being blinded by flying objects, scalded by pans of hot grease, bitten by rabid dogs, hit by cars piloted by other lefthanders, of deciding to live in the Third World, of not getting the ball over the plate consistently and of being divorced like his Dad and Mom.

  My fatherly job, needless to say, is not at all easy at this enforced distance of miles: to coax by some middleman’s charm his two foreign selves, his present and his childish past, into a better, more robust and outward-tending relationship—like separate, angry nations seeking one government—and to sponsor self-tolerance as a theme for the future. This, of course, is what any father should do in any life, and I have tried, despite the impediments of divorce and time and not always knowing my adversary. Only it seems plain to me now, and as Ann believes, I have not been completely successful.

  But bright and early tomorrow I am picking him up all the way in Connecticut and staging for both our benefits a split-the-breeze father-and-son driving campaign in which we will visit as many sports halls of fame as humanly possible in one forty-eight-hour period (this being only two), winding up in storied Cooperstown, where we’ll stay in the venerable Deerslayer Inn, fish on scenic Lake Otsego, shoot off safe and ethical fireworks, eat like castaways, and somehow along the way I’ll work (I hope) the miracle only a father can work. Which is to say: if your son begins suddenly to fall at a headlong rate, you must through the agency of love and greater age throw him a line and haul him back. (All this somehow before delivering him to his mother in NYC and getting myself back here to Haddam, where I myself, for reasons of familiarity, am best off on the 4th of July.)

  And yet, and yet. Even a good idea can be misguided if embarked on in ignorance. And who could help wondering: is my surviving son already out of reach and crazy as a betsy bug, or headed fast in that dire direction? Are his problems the product of haywire neurotransmitters, only solvable by preemptive chemicals? (This was the New Haven guy’s, Dr. Stopler’s, initial view.) Will he turn gradually into a sly recluse with a bad complexion, rotten teeth, bitten nails, yellow eyes, who abandons school early, hits the road, falls in with the wrong bunch, tries drugs, and finally becomes convinced trouble is his only dependable friend, until one sunny Saturday it, too, betrays him in some unthought-of and unbearable way, after which he stops off at a suburban gun store, then spirits on to some quilty mayhem in a public place? (This I frankly don’t expect, since he has yet to exhibit any of the “big three” of childhood homicidal dementia: attraction to fire, the need to torture helpless animals, or bed-wetting; and because he is in fact quite softhearted and mirthful, and always has been.) Or, and in the best-case scenario, is he—as happens to us all and as his mother hopes—merely going through a phase, so that in eight weeks he’ll be trying out for lonely end on the Deep River JV?

  God only knows, right? Really knows?

  For me, alone without him most of the time, truly the worst part is that I believe he should now be at an age when he cannot imagine one bad thing happening to him, ever. And yet he can. And sometimes at the Shore or standing streamside at the Red Man Club as the sun dies and leaves the water black and bottomless, I have looked into his sweet, pale, impermanent boy’s face and known that he squints out at a future he’s unsure of, from a vantage point he already knows he doesn’t like, but toward which he soldiers on because he thinks he should and because even though in his heart of hearts he knows we’re not alike, he wishes we were and for that likeness to give him assurance.

  Naturally enough, I can explain almost nothing to him. Fatherhood by itself doesn’t provide wisdom worth imparting. Though in preparation for our trip, I’ve sent him copies of Self-Reliance and the Declaration, and suggested he take a browse. These are not your ordinary fatherly offerings, I admit; yet I believe his instincts are sound and he will help himself if he can, and that independence is, in fact, what he lacks—independence from whatever holds him captive: memory, history, bad events he struggles with, can’t control, but feels he should.

  A parent’s view of what’s wrong or right with his kid is probably less accurate than even the next-door neighbor’s, who sees the child’s life perfectly through a gap in the curtain. I, of course, would like to tell him how to live life and do better in a hundred engaging ways, just as I tell myself: that nothing ever neatly “fits,” that mistakes must be made, bad things forgotten. But in our short exposures I seem only able to talk glancingly, skittishly before shying away, cautious not to be wrong, not to quiz or fight him, not to be his therapist but his Dad. So that in all likelihood I will never provide good cure for his disease, will never even imagine correctly what his disease is, but will only suffer it with him for a time and then depart.

  The worst of being a parent is my fate, then: being an adult. Not owning the right language; not dreading the same dreads and contingencies and missed chances; the fate of knowing much yet having to stand like a lamppost with its lamp lit, hoping my child will see the glow and venture closer for the illumination and warmth it mutely offers.

  Outside in the still, quiet morning, I hear a car door close, then the muffled voice (softened to the early hour) of Skip McPherson, my neighbor across the street. He is returning from his summer hockey league in East Brunswick (ice time available only before daylight). Many mornings I’ve seen him and his bachelor CPA chums lounging on his front steps drinking a quiet beer, still in their pads and jerseys, their skates and sticks piled on the sidewalk. Skip’s team has adopted the ruddy Indian-warrior insignia and hard-check skating style of the ’70 Chicago Blackhawks (Skip hails from Aurora), and Skip himself has taken the number 21 in honor of his hero, Stan Mikita. Sometimes when I’m up early and out picking up the Trenton Times, we’ll talk sports curb to curb. He frequently has a butterfly bandage over his eye, or a gummy fat lip, or a complicated knee brace that stiffens his leg, but he’s always high-spirited and acts as if I’m the best neighbor in the world, though he has little notion of me other than that I’m a realtor—some older guy. He is typical of the young professionals who bought into the Presidents Streets in the middle Eighties and paid a big price, and who are sticking it out now, gradually fixing up their houses, sitting on their equity and waiting for the market to fire up.

  In my “Buyer vs. Seller” editorial I’ve noted that even though most people won’t be happy with whoever wins the election, 54 percent of them still expect to be better off this time next year. (I’ve omitted the companion statistic, cribbed from the New York Times, that only 24 percent feel the country will be better off. Why these numbers shouldn’t be the same, is anybody’s guess.)

  And then suddenly, it is seven-thirty. My phone comes alive. It is my son.

  “Hi,” Paul says lamely.

  “Hi, son,” I say, the model of upbeat father-at-a-remove. Music is playing somewhere, and I think for a moment it’s outside my window—the streets crew, possibly, or Skip—then I recognize the heavy, fuzzed-out thunga-thyunga-thunga-thyunga and realize Paul has his headphones on and is listening to Mammoth Deth or some such group he likes while he’s also listening to me. “What’s going on up there, son? Everything okay?”

  “Yeah.” Thunga-thyunga. “Everything’s oka
y.”

  “Are we all set? Canton, Ohio, tomorrow, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame by Sunday?” We have compiled a list of all the halls of fame there are, including the Anthracite Hall of Fame in Scranton, the Clown Hall of Fame in Delavan, Wisconsin, the Cotton Hall of Fame in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the Cowgirl in Beaton, Texas. We’ve vowed to visit them all in two days, though of course we can’t and will have to satisfy ourselves with basketball, in Springfield (it’s close to his house), and Cooperstown—which I’m counting on to be the ur-father-son meeting ground, offering the assurances of a spiritually neutral spectator sport made seemingly meaningful by its context in idealized male history. (I have never been there, but the brochures suggest I’m right.)

  “Yeah. We’re all set.” Thunga-thyunga-thunga-thyunga. Paul has turned it up.

  “Are you still pretty keen to be going?” Two days are paltry, we both recognize but pretend we don’t.

  “Yeah,” Paul says noncommittally.

  “Are you still in bed, son?”

  “Yeah. I am. Still in bed.” This doesn’t seem like a great sign, though of course it’s only seven-thirty.

  There is really nothing for us to talk about every morning. In any normal life, we would pass each other going this way and that, to and fro, exchange pleasantries or casual bits of wry or impertinent information, feel varyingly in touch with each other or out in harmless ways. But under the terms of our un-normal life we have to make extra efforts, even if they’re wastes of time.