Proverbs 20, Verse 7
"It is a wonderful heritage to have an honest father."
---
CHIPPED WISDOM:
When I worked downstairs on the unit, I took care to warn my supervisor.
"I'm meeting my father for lunch today."
"Oh, shit," she'd say. "I guess I'll take you off the schedule for the afternoon. Just sit in here and update the treatment plans on the computer."
She knew. Well, she learned. After a while, it became clear that chances were better than good that I was going to come back into the chart-room at 1:00 ready to cut somebody's fucking head off. Best to keep me away from acutely and persistently ill psychiatric patients. Facilitating a group on Developing Patience probably wasn't such a hot choice for me to be doing after spending an unfortunate lunch hour inside my father's Buick, screaming at him and driving away from the park where we meet at top speed, thrashing the car into traffic, flogging the motor, crushing the accelerator under my foot as if it were an offensive cockroach.
Nowadays, for some reason, the lunches with my father have gotten better. Maybe because life is less volatile now. My brother-in-law has been dead for almost two years, just about as long as my children have been alive. Sure, there are money woes and assorted travails and troubles, but, by and large, the sea is calmer. There is less calamity. Less emergency. A dearth of drama.
Of course, he and I don't particularly need drama to go at it.
Last week, we met up at the park. He brings the main course ("You bring a drink and dessert," he must always instruct via text the night before, as if I don't know the routine by now), typically from "Red Lobster", which he pronounces "Red Lubster", because I guess they don't really have much use for or occasion to talk about lobsters in Israel. Anyway, we there we sit, an Israeli and his son, eating the most un-Kosher of bottom-feeding oceanic fare in his latest leased lux-o-ride. Things always start off innocuously. Some small talk. Bullshit. This, and that.
Then, a hot topic is explored. By him.
"So, how is your... therapy going?"
"Fine," I say. Truthfully, I don't know how my... therapy is going, but I don't know what else I'm supposed to say to him, so, that's what I say.
"And your medication?"
"Well, I'm on a new medication called Viibryd, and I guess it's working," I paused to consider a shrimp on my fork that appeared inordinately large for a joint like Red Lubster, but then I realized that it was two shrimp sixty-nining each other. I frowned. "Actually, I don't know if it's working."
"Well," my father, the girdle-manufacturer, said, "just don't let him increase your dose-- I talk to a lot of people and they all say that's the worst fuckin' thing they can do."
I closed my eyes. There is no way out of this: the car, the conversation, the family, the vortex, the galaxy. There is no way I can't challenge him. There is no way I can shut up. There is no way.
"Oh, you talk to a lot of people about psychiatric medication? Like who? The Syrian guy who cuts your fabric?"
And now, in case you missed it: it was on.
"Well, are you still depressed and anxious?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Listen, Mummy-- do you really think that you--" he stopped himself. Restraint is anathema to my father, so I cannot imagine what inappropriate thing he actually stopped himself from saying, only instead to say, "you know 90% of the people out there are depressed and anxious."
"Really? Wow. I don't recall reading that statistic from the National Institute of Mental Health. Does it hurt your hemorrhoids at all when you pull your stats out of your asshole?"
He laughed at that. It was a sign that I was winning the most absurd argument I've had so far in 2014.
He relented, but the damage was done. Him changing the subject at that point was about as effective as someone who has just hit your car massaging and kissing your smashed fender, but it's at least better than them backing up and ramming into you again.
Don't get me wrong: I love my father and, clearly, he loves me. He also loves to make up statistics, and he's been doing that for a long, long time (his favorite is that "80% of cops are corrupt", but I've also been treated to "80% of teachers are a fuckin' retard", "90% of people in this country don't know shit from NOTHING!" and "90% of priests will fuck up a little boy" (in my father's lingo "fuck up" means "molest", not "emotionally disturb", though I suppose the one inevitably leads to the other) and, believe me, I'd love to read a research paper written by my father in his younger academic days:
"Copernicus thought the earth revolved around the sun, but 90% of people thought he was fuckin' retard who didn't know SHIT FROM NOTHING!"
I don't know what it is about us that creates conflict and tension, though I'm sure some independent third party watching it from a location of relative safety could figure it out in approximately seven seconds. Feel free to clue me in yourself if you've got a handle on it.
Maybe it's because he is so firmly entrenched in his own reality-- where his statistics are viable and his memory is infallible. How he remembers it is law. I tried to explain to him, during this particular "mental health" lunch, about how I've been this way for a very long time.
"I never slept. I would stay awake in my bed, terrified, staring at the ceiling, until the sun would start to shine outside my window, and then I would let myself fall asleep for maybe two hours before I had to wake up for school. I'm talking about how I had black circles under my eyes in my second grade picture because I didn't sleep. I would call out for Mommy, just to hear her voice telling me she didn't want to hear my voice till morning, just so I knew she was still alive."
"Well, I never knew that."
"Of course you didn't. You were fucking asleep. Besides, I wasn't calling out for you anyway. And anyway, by the time you were ready to wake up, I was falling asleep." He stared at me. "This went on for years, Dad."
"I didn't know-- I mean, if you say it, I guess it's true." This is, of course, precisely the thing someone says when they think you're probably full of shit.
"It doesn't matter now," I said, "I'm thirty-three."
"How do you sleep now?" he asked.
"I have two-year-old twins," I said, "I don't sleep now."
"Well, you know," he said with a small smile, "neither do 90% of people."
No comments:
Post a Comment