I was late to the memoir party with Subway to California, but then again, the better parties always start late and then hold out the promise or threat never to stop. My poet friends blanched. “How’s your Me Moir going?” they’d ask, nyuck nyuck elbow to the ribs, implying I should be doing something more worthwhile, like writing poems. As if poets weren’t as self-involved as anybody, come on, as if. My novelist friends pitied me; I was pathetic, talking about myself, advertising myself and my precious little sensibilities. My female book-loving friends totally in jest wanted to know what possessed me to dare encroaching onto their territory.
My son weighed in indirectly, as is his style. Well, he did explicitly say two things. First, he didn’t figure me for a chemical dependency. (That made two of us.) Second, for him, in the book I was kinder on the subject of his mother than he expected. But he is not always the forthcoming type, and he is extremely diplomatic, which is to be expected of the only child of an unstable couple such as his mom and I were. I am used to reading between his lines, and sometimes I get it right, and besides, I emotionally leak enough for any room full of people.
I also overheard, at my mother’s funeral, an exchange between him and a cousin, when she asked him if he was worried his dad was writing a memoir. “Worried?” Mario said. “I don’t know, but it seems like there are two kinds of memoirs. One where you land a plane on the Hudson. And the other, which involves hookers and blow in Las Vegas. As far as I know, my dad never landed a plane on the Hudson.”
I dedicated the book to him anyway.
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I traveled deep into the farthest hinterlands of Memoiristan, and I read around as I typically do, promiscuously, randomly, idiosyncratically. In my uninformed opinion, which I would defend to the death, there exists roughly about the same percentage of great memoirs as the percentage of great books period—that is, not high. There are obviously first-rate autobiographical reads out there: accounts of religious conversion, of drug and alcohol dependency, of combat, of teaching, of sex, of dying, of childhood trauma, of entrepreneurial vision, of leadership, of crime, of the life of a writer, of cultural crossing, of insane family, family, and more family still—lots of books about the family, which probably makes sense, given that our first conception of ourselves begins in that hurly-burly, knockdown drag-out melee called home. First conception of ourselves? Maybe I mean instead that’s when we begin to mythologize ourselves, or resist the temptation to do so and tell the truth about the messy lives we actually led and lead. As a very devout little Catholic boy I had a beautiful stained-glass window onto the mythologization of my soul, my passage through this temporal vale of tears on the way to eternal life. Amen. To be candid, I still like that view, though the scenery has radically altered since childhood.
One objective of Subway was to gain a handle on the story of my father’s life, not easy to do when Sphinxes are more forthcoming than the old man, and I know that sounds suspect if not bizarre given his apparent and strategic forthcomingness in court. It was not so long ago that I had less information then than I have now, and if I sometimes wonder what it would be like to present some of my findings to him, now that he’s gone, I realize probably that wouldn’t have gotten me too far. As a young boy I always wanted more of him, and never got it, though my mother always insisted I was “the apple of his eye,” something I by and large missed during his lifetime.
Now that he’s dead, my father seems more alive than ever; he seems immortal.