Dirty Work

Ever question your motivations?

I decided that I might be able to write an interesting family memoir about my father, a bipolar man who worked in jail rehabilitation. When I went to a writing workshop in August, I asked a literary agent if she thought such a book would have a market. She said yes. Since then, I’ve been talking to people my dad worked with and trying to learn more about corrections in general. I’ve also learned more about bipolar disorder and my dad’s experience with it.

Bipolar is common, so there’s lots to read. Whenever I do this, though, I feel waves of shame, guilt, and anger. I’m ashamed and guilty that I didn’t do this research while my dad was alive, and I’m mad that neither he nor my mother disclosed to me the full extent of his condition. They didn’t know how to talk to me about it, I guess.

It’s alarming, however, to open books and read lists of typical bipolar behaviors and see my dad staring back at me. His disease might account for almost every twisted game, every irrational act, every abusive remark and ridiculous judgement he ever subjected me to. All the things that caused me to hate and fear him probably stemmed directly from his unhealthy brain chemistry. This discovery brings me pain as well as relief.

My parents and the people closest to them seemed to have wanted to minimize his disease. But now that Mom and Dad are gone, I’m free to pry as much as I like, and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. I took a closer look at some of my mother’s diaries, and I’m fairly sure I found the reason behind an old restraining order she filed. One night, my dad put his hand through the glass pane of a door, trying to get at my mother. She recounts staying up late cleaning up glass and blood. “He’s a maniac,” she writes. I don’t know where I was that night—I was nine.

My dad’s last severe episode happened in 1999. He drove himself to the hospital because he felt nauseous and cold (in the back of my mind, I wonder if he knew he was slipping mentally but found it easier to talk about other things instead). The staff discovered he was dehydrated and at high risk for lithium toxicity. They took him off the lithium altogether and then reintroduced it. This disruption triggered a nasty mania which led to his commitment. Medical reports state that he tried to hit a nurse and that he exhibited signs of acute delirium and paranoia. He believed that the Yellow Cab Company was plotting against him, and that assassins were trying to shoot him. During one psychiatric evaluation, he refused to answer all questions about family. He was never left by himself in the hospital room.

Reading this material makes me sad. It exhausts me. Why do I do it, then? Why am I so compelled? I can’t seem to let this water go under the bridge.

The lit agent told me that a book about growing up with a mentally ill parent could help a lot of people, especially given my dad’s unusual career and the secrecy surrounding his diagnosis. But is this the kind of help I can really afford to give? Do I want to give it?

Surely there are other ways for me to make my writing useful to others. This project could turn out like too much of an exercise in scab picking.

Riding with the Fat Man, Part I

***Hey all:
Since I'm at a writers' conference this week, I thought I'd share some nonblog writing.

This is part of a (believe it or not) short piece related to a larger memoir project I'm interested in. My thanks again to the members of The Typing Class for their feedback!

***

The form the funeral home gave me for my father’s death notice listed three publications: The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Camden Courier Post, and The Gloucester County Times. No one read The Courier Post. Their telemarketers used to call doggedly at every dinner hour at both my parents’ houses. We generally offered a terse “we-get-the-inquirer” before hanging up.

I chose the Gloucester paper. My dad had worked for the Gloucester County Jail as the director of rehabilitation services. He taught convicts how to read, do basic math, and prepare for the GED. I hoped some of his “boys from the jail” would see the write-up.

As a child, I learned how to read and write from the partially used workbooks Dad brought home from the jail. My shaky letters sat on the same pages as his students’.

Although my father grew up in Philadelphia, his parents moved their family to the South Jersey suburbs when he was in his 20s. They chased a better life “across the river,” as we say. Sometimes people don’t realize that until only recently the segment of New Jersey between Philly and the Atlantic Ocean was mostly farmland. The folks who live there are modest, countrified. They like bacon and eggs for breakfast. They hunt and canoe in the Pine Barrens. They cheer for the Eagles (pronounced Iggles) and the Phillies although they’re never surprised when the Phillies don’t make the World Series. The women like when truckers beep their horns at them as they walk along Mantua Avenue. The kids belong to 4H, and the prom is a bigger deal for its attendees than the dead-end jobs that await them afterwards. This is the landscape of my father and his inmates.

There was never any question that I would plan the funeral. I was an only child, and my parents had been divorced for many years. My aunt had washed her hands of my father long ago. She’d done enough for him in life, she seemed to feel. And he was never grateful—he had acted as if her scrupulous attention was entirely his due.

I arranged a priest strictly for her sake. Dad had no use for religion; blind faith was alien and silly to him. The perfunctory service was modestly attended, and a group went to Charlie Brown’s Restaurant afterwards. People that I hadn’t seen in years surrounded me; I used to hug some of their knees. These former childhood giants, their faces grayish-white with age, told me what a wonderful and intelligent man Rick had been. The whole dining room looked golden and sepia to me, the same hues as my seventies toddlerhood, the same as when I had last encountered these faces. The dry white wine in my glass glowed in the table’s lantern light.

The previous year, I had spent a strained Thanksgiving with Dad at Charlie Brown’s. He doesn’t have anyone else, I had decided sheepishly, turning down my mother’s dinner invitation. We said little as we ate lukewarm turkey. Dad was strangely placid. It was the new medication he was taking for his bi-polar disorder, which was severe enough to put him in a hospital every couple of decades. Did I prefer him docile? Was this better?

David, my father’s best friend and a Christian missionary, waited until most of the plates were cleared and then took the empty chair to my left. He had a good anecdote about Rick that he wanted so share with me, he said. He’d already made me laugh that day when he told me how my father used to telephone him and pretend to be Billy Graham looking for a donation.

I had highlighted my father’s humor in my eulogy, along with his prodigious intellect. I wasn’t sure what else to say. Who wanted to hear about lithium? Slammed car doors? The surveillance and chronic mistrust of his daughter, whom he hadn’t wanted to begin with? Instead, I simply told the small crowd that Richard was a man more comfortable with the ideas of the world than the world itself.

David told me that he and my father had taken the Speedline into Philadelphia one evening for a concert. Two drug addicts boarded the train at one of the Camden stops. They were out of control, David said. I wasn’t sure what "out of control" really meant, but I didn’t ask. My father recognized one of them as someone from the jail. He began talking to him in a calm, friendly voice. In five minutes, he took what could have been a dangerous situation and defused it.

As I listened to David, I pushed wet lettuce around the bowl of my Caesar salad and wondered what my father had said. The inmates had called him the Fat Man--there was a gleam in my father's eye when he told me this one day when I was in high school. He seemed not to mind the name; he almost looked amused.

Your dad was a man of many gifts, David said. I sipped my wine and said, yes he was. The knowledge that I had not been privy to more of those gifts pricked me.

What had my dad said? He likely did not pretend not to know the kid—anonymity wasn’t a part of jailhouse life. But he probably didn’t go out of his way to bring up the circumstances of their relationship, either. No need to remind the spiller of the milk.

I suspected he wouldn’t have preached. There would have been no “You don’t have to do this to yourself…your parents must be so sad…you’re going to hurt yourself or someone else.” Dad was not a man for platitudes.

What if I had grown up to be one of those junkies? Dad had routinely dumped the contents of my 8th grade book bag onto the cushions of the couch in the den. He examined the bag's seams closely. He looked for drugs he never found.

What would I have wanted him to say if he stumbled upon an alternative version of me in a train car, a druggie sweating through a rough patch? I imagined feeling engulfed in a red-pink electric cloud, seeing funhouse faces, and worrying that at any second the whole car would explode into flames. My hands would have shaken, and the pores of my face would have seemed to expand. I would have asked myself why this was supposed to be fun. My teeming brain would have quickly abandoned that line of questioning and tried to retreat into itself, like a turtle.

But then I would have seen the Fat Man sitting nearby, his big belly hanging over his pants—the khaki pair he endlessly tried to hitch up. His blue eyes, the ones that always reminded me of a gas stove flame, would have kindled benignly. I might have temporarily confused him with Santa Claus and decided that the train was his sleigh. How cool that Santa wore glasses, like me.

A Life in Cars

A Duster was the first car I can remember our family owning. How brown and homely it was. My favorite part was the decal near the tail lights: a little dirt tornado with happy eyes. It reminded me of Pig Pen from the Peanuts cartoons.

The Duster belonged to my dad; my mom drove a red Volkswagen Beetle. My parents were devoted to Beetles and had owned a green one before I was born. I used to look at its picture in an old photo album, this prehistoric car that I had never met.

When I was six, Mom left Dad and drove us away in the red Beetle. The engine made a funny sound—almost like a cowbell. I strained my ears to hear it on Sunday afternoons. “Visitation” had become a new organizing principle; my mother had custody, but my father insisted on seeing me as often as possible. I would watch TV downstairs, and he would stay in his bedroom, reading.

I knew that if I made it inside the red Beetle and had time to fasten my seatbelt, we had escaped the house without a scene. (I remember a particularly nasty argument when my mother started arriving at 5:45 instead of 6:00. My father wouldn’t have it.) Next, my mom would make the quick left on to Queen Street, never failing to signal. To this day, when I sit at a light or at a stop sign, and I listen to the click of my own turn signal, I feel a tiny bit of mother-calm.

We first lived in various apartments around Woodbury. Eventually, we moved into a townhouse in Marlton, and riding in cars developed deeper significance. Woodbury and Marlton were only about twenty-five minutes apart, but kids' time moves at a glacial pace. I memorized all the signs along the tight bead of road that connected my new existence: I-295 North, Exit 1B/Trenton, 34A, Route 70 East. My dad complained about the traffic. I liked it best when we sat quietly and listened to Fresh Air.

One weekend night, he nearly ran a woman off the road when I was in the car with him. We pulled into a parking lot, and the two of them got out and yelled at each other for ten minutes. I remained in the passenger’s seat, with the window rolled up and my stomach contracting.

A few years later, my mother had a boyfriend who drove an attractive hunter green MG. He had carefully restored it, and he and my mom loved to take it to the beach or to New Hope. She asked him, though, to park it across the street from the townhouse on the days that my father would be around. He agreed to this request initially but concluded that doing so was unfair to him and unhealthy for us, so he stopped. When he asked, I told my dad that the MG belonged to one of my mother’s coworkers.

When I was 14, I told my father I didn’t want to talk to him any more, but I didn’t stick to that resolution. The first visit after our rapprochement, we stopped at an Encore bookstore, and he drove over a curb as he parked. He hastily backed up. The Duster was long gone by then; he currently leased a gray Nissan Sentra. It needed a wash, and the door locks stuck.

Driving itself didn’t interest me. I rode a commuter train to high school in Philadelphia, and I took the subway everywhere in college. I got my first car the summer after sophomore year, a used burgundy Honda Accord. My mother didn’t feel like driving me everyplace, and she wanted me to get a job. I complied, and on my days off I used the car mainly to get to the Speedline station; I wanted to see friends in the city. I would only drive to the one who lived in Society Hill, just on the other side of the bridge.

I met a hunky fling in a downtown café that summer. He was from Syracuse, but he had recently joined the Navy in order to “straighten himself out.” His aqua Chevy Vega needed constant service, so we spent a number of muggy nights in the parking lot of the Sears Auto Center, drinking ICEEs from the little cafeteria housed in the main Sears. I liked the cherry ones.

He tried to show me how to change a tire once. You might be out with your girlfriends one night, he told me. What would happen if I got a flat, and he wasn’t around? While I thought he was sweet to offer, inwardly I judged. His gesture seemed quaint, provincial. On what possible occasion would I have a tire to change? I couldn’t imagine living in a place where I couldn’t take a train anywhere I wanted to go. I felt beyond suburbia and wrenches and jacks.

I still have yet to change a tire, but in my late twenties, I did move to a place where it was necessary to drive each day. This was new for me, and I definitely felt more at home in the passenger's seat. I discovered that I couldn’t handle driving’s constant stimuli and its sudden, unpredictable threats. As I squeezed the brakes, my breathing turned rapid, and it came in great gulps. An intersection in a busy area could cause me to palpitate.

My dad’s manic depression may explain it; I had gotten in the habit of thinking I could be attacked at any time. Another driver cutting me off or not letting me on a highway ramp summons the old fear, the old vigilance. I liked trains because they were more predictable, and most of the time, someone fairly trustworthy is in charge.

I painstakingly rehearsed the new route to work, gradually introducing myself to each half-mile. Repeated exposure helped, and I slowly adjusted to the randomness of the wheeled world.

My driving is mildly enjoyable these days. My current car is a cobalt blue Acura. I like the satellite radio and the hidden compartment for change. It has some scratches on the front bumper—I have inherited my father’s knack for parking, apparently. Whenever I slip into the driver’s seat, I involuntarily toss my purse lightly into the back, exactly the way my mother used to do it.