I was haunted by the image of Bobby’s face, like my son’s face, receding into the past and merging in my mind’s eye.
Out on the Prado I walked by the reflecting pool, stopped to watch the gigantic koi swimming around lazily, and took a stroll through the botanical garden before heading over to the café by the art museum for a cup of coffee. As I sat down, I remembered that I should write Hank back before too long, so I tore a piece of paper out of my notebook and did my best job of playing a father. I encouraged Hank to stay in school while acknowledging his point about how uninspiring the classes could be. I joked, selfeffacingly and with sufficient irony, about him not following my example in terms of career. I tried to assure him that what seemed like an endless time at home was really not that long. How was his mother, really? Etc. Despite having been at it for over twenty years now, some part of me still felt as if I was putting on an act as a father. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Hank fiercely, but who was I to tell anybody anything about anything? It was funny, in my role as a reporter, I could hammer away at people with no hesitation and no regrets, but as a father I felt unqualified to give the simplest advice. I was utterly humbled by the nakedness of Hank’s need for my love and the possibility that withholding it, even unconsciously, could burden him forever.
I remember when, as a young boy, Hank would ask me an endless series of questions, from the mundane to the profound. It was everything from “Why do elephants have long noses?” and “Why are clouds big and small?” to “What is God?” and “Why do people die?” Sometimes I’d come up with crazy answers to make him laugh, but I knew when I was serious that Hank trusted me totally and that I couldn’t let him down. So while we had great fun with some of his queries, I’d sometimes be hit by a terror that my answers would harm him somehow. When he asked, “Why does grandma say bad things?” I knew those things were about me, and I fought a gut-wrenching mixture of rage and shame and helplessness, as I looked into his earnest little face, his big eyes watching my every move.
Other than our too-infrequent visits, I knew my son through letters, first in crayon, then pencil, then pen, then word-processed. I had them all in binders: colorful, primitive sketches of baseball players, guys playing guitar, animals at the zoo all with captions and short stories like “The Hippos eat lunch at the zoo and miss their families in Africa” or “Rock stars make people dance and sing.” Then, later on, I would get confessions about crushes or philosophical musings about something he’d read. That was one thing I’d credit Trish with, she always had him reading. In one letter he told me he’d read “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, back when he was in high school, and said he thought he understood what the jazz player meant by “the storm inside”:
The brothers are talking about suffering but I think it’s more than just Sonny’s heroin addiction. It’s about the fact that everybody suffers and there isn’t any way to escape it. The only thing that people can do is use their pain to create something beautiful—otherwise it will eat them up or kill them. That’s why Sonny’s brother finally comes to see him as royalty. His music is how he lives and connects with the world. Maybe it’s that way with your writing ? I don’t know yet what my thing is. Maybe I never will. Who knows? Anyway, it was a good story. Better than what I read in class.
Stuff like that always floored me. He was a remarkable kid, but how the hell could I respond to that? My son, musing on the meaning of suffering in his middle teens. Was I the source? I would always write back and treat him seriously, but I never knew if I was doing any good.
Perhaps I was so unsure of myself as a father because I didn’t really have one myself. My own father died of a heroin overdose in 1975 when I was just a kid. Mom, or Sandy as I more often called her, left him, with me in tow, sometime in the early seventies. So I only remember my father vaguely in flashes of memory—running with me on the beach with his long hair and shaggy beard, playing guitar for me in the basement of a large Victorian house in San Francisco, carrying me on his bare shoulders on a hike in Topanga Canyon. I had a picture of him that I kept in the drawer next to my bed while I was growing up. It was a shot of him standing beside a big psychedelic school bus wearing a plain gray t-shirt, smiling a beatific smile. On the back, my grandmother (on my dad’s side) had written, “Your Dad.”
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