Dad. William Wharton

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      There are other people walking along; a few joggers. Everybody smiles or says hello. An Irish setter is running and chasing with a young girl; she’s throwing sticks, stones or shells out over the breakers. It’s a magic moment; a chance to forget how hard life is sometimes.

      We don’t talk much. Stolen pleasure like this, undeserved, unplanned, you don’t talk about.

      It’s almost seven o’clock and we haven’t prepared anything for dinner. I suggest eating at a restaurant called Buffalo Chips next to the Oar House. It’s owned by the same people and has a similar general atmosphere. In fact, you can walk from one place into the other by a backstair passage.

      We head over and I find a parking place right in front. They’re already checking ID cards for the Oar House because it’s Saturday evening. These young guys must get a kick seeing a fifty-two-year-old dude riding a ten-year-old motorcycle with his seventy-three-year-old Dad hanging on back. A pair of them come over while I’m pulling the bike up on the kickstand.

      ‘I sure hope you two have your ID cards; nobody under twenty-one’s allowed in here.’

      Dad’s slowly taking off his helmet, his feet straddling the bike. He’s smiling.

      ‘Well, I’ll tell you something, sonny. I’ve been working on being twenty-one for years. This is the fourth time around but I just can’t get the knack of it.’

      We laugh and shake hands. They say they’ll keep an eye on the bike for us.

      The restaurant specializes in sandwiches, from pastrami to steak. The hot roast beef sandwiches are something special. We order two with a pitcher of beer. They serve the roast beef with a good dab of horseradish. Dad and I both love it. We talk about the Italian horseradish vendors in the streets back in Philadelphia.

      The crowd here is just as informal as the Oar House. There’s laughing and kidding around, flirting and counter-flirting. After we eat, we go through the backstairs into the Oar House. We luck out with two seats high on one wall where we can watch the dancing. I get another pitcher of beer and we sit there in the center of chaos.

      I see the ID checkers and bouncers drifting toward us. They’ve been picking on the younger-looking people and checking. They come up to us.

      ‘Ah, here they are.’

      It’s the taller one, a husky guy with a great bushy handle-bar mustache.

      ‘I knew you guys went in the restaurant just to sneak in here.’

      He smiles.

      ‘OK, let’s see your ID there, fella.’

      Dad looks up, smiles, laughs.

      ‘You’ll have to throw us in the clink, sonny; we don’t have IDs. I don’t drive anymore and my son here lives in Paris, France.’

      It’s good hearing Dad so proud and assertive.

      They laugh and move on. We finish our beer slowly. It’s getting close to eleven; I figure we’d better be on our way. We go toward the door. Some of the crowd’s been tipped off about the motorcycle and come to watch us take off. I help Dad strap his helmet because his hands are shaking. I strap on mine, kick the starter and she turns over first time.

      It’s a cool, relaxing trip home. Dad’s getting to be a good rider; leaning on the turns, not fighting me.

      Next morning when he comes to breakfast, I see he’s not shaving again. I don’t say anything. We’re going to see Mom at two and by then it’ll be really obvious. Dad does the dishes and I sweep. When we’re finished, we go out to straighten up his shop.

      He has some of the finest tools I know. They’re fitted to the walls with painted silhouettes in white to signal when they’re not there. The tools which aren’t on the walls are in metal toolboxes with rollered drawers. His old carpentry box is there too, everything in order, including a wood-handled Stanley hammer and three Deitzen saws, two crosscut, one rip. Dad’s always been a toolman and knows how to use them. Dad’s tools are a biography and description in themselves.

      Out there in the shop, I ask Dad what he’s going to do about Mother and his beard. He can’t pull the mask routine again. He says he’s going to tell her he’s growing a beard.

      ‘Gosh, John, she gets her hair cut and dyed without asking me; why shouldn’t I be able to grow a beard if I want?’

      ‘But, Dad, it’ll kill her for sure.’

      He looks up at me from his bench.

      ‘You really think so, Johnny? I don’t want to kill her.’

      The way he says it, it’s as if he’s thought it through and decided not to kill Mom after all.

      ‘OK, then, I’ll shave. I’ll wait till she’s in better shape before I tell her.’

      Afterward, we go inside and he shaves before we head for the hospital.

       7

      We’re still plodding along at a regular fifty-five. Dad seems to think he’s in France driving that tin-can Renault 4L of his.

      Actually, America’s too damned big. We should split into five or so countries. We could have an uptight country for Puritans and phony New England liberals in the Northeast. We could have a down-home farmers’ sort of country in the middle somewhere. The South could be an old-fashioned slave-based country for people who go for that kind of thing. Texas would be a militarist, Fascist country and California with parts of Oregon could be the swinging place.

      On our map, we’re hardly making any progress at all. Dad points his finger to a town called Glenwood Springs and decides this’ll be a good place for us to stay tonight. Tomorrow we’ll be going through Vail, a big ski resort where Ford used to hide when he was supposed to be President. It’s beautiful country around here: pinkish rock out-croppings with shades of purple; even some blue rock, almost black.

      We push hard the rest of the afternoon. Once, believe it or not, he actually cracks sixty.

      I get thinking about school again, maybe preparing myself for the big knock-down-drag-out discussion.

      UCSC; ‘UCK SUCK,’ we called it. All the students seemed so dull, placid, weirdly naïve. At the same time, I was continually running into karate black belts or champion archers or chess champions. I played tennis with some schmuck from my biology class and he pounded balls past me so hard I couldn’t touch them. It was enough to give anybody a permanent inferiority complex.

      In classes, though, I thought I was way beyond the rest. I’m asking the only intelligent questions and the professors are talking directly to me. But then, when we take exams, these freaks wipe me out. Those California robots are tough competition; I almost failed that first quarter. I’d no idea how hard I’d have to work. In their laid-back, casual, California way, they were learning like crazy.

      What they knew was how to take exams. They were expert learners for examinations. They didn’t bother shit learning anything not likely to be СКАЧАТЬ