Real Dad sits on a pastel loveseat, which came with his room, resting one foot on a plastic Lego-filled storage bin that he’s using as a coffee table. His Stray Cats leather jacket straddles the loveseat’s right armrest, sleeves dangling, and the sun in the window turns his stray balding-ponytail hair into lightbulb filament. The rip in his jeans is big enough for his entire knee to fit through.
“Squeezebeagler, at the Bug Jar tonight,” he says, rubbing his chin. “Sonic cocktail of Muler and Nod, a jigger of Hilkka, stirred with Lethargy breakdowns.”
“Nice!” I say, and bounce in the pastel blue chair that also came with his room.
“It is not nice, Nate. You cannot handle that combination. You bring your Rock Condom. Because in rock and roll, you only get one condom. It’s a rule.”
“But it’d be awesome if there was a guy named Jigger,” I say, even though I’m too jolted up to Bring the Funny. “Or a dog, or a bird you could name Jigger. I don’t know.”
He smirks and recrosses his legs, tasting the joke like wine. “Or name it like My Dad?” he says. “’I’d like to schedule an anal-sacs examination for My Dad at 2 p.m.? My Dad has chunks of Frisbee in his fecal samples?”
I crack up and sit on my hands. “Yeah,” I say.
Real Dad leans back, ankle on knee. “Just plug it into the formula. Comedians, certainly, have tackled this: ‘My Dad’s been chewing on his elbow, I think he might have roundworm. I’d like to make an appointment.’ Actually,” he says, “speaking of appointments, did Mom take me off her insurance?”
Which, I don’t know about you? But I tune the fuck out whenever I hear words like premium or HMO. Because, Real Dad is saying something about catastrophic coverage, and clobetasol propionate. And I’m more just listening to his tone when he says, sounding like he’s taking a stand: “—because, if all I can get is one of these plans online with a $2,500 deductible then I am going to send photographs of myself to her every day so she can chart how I deteriorate.”
So I say, just to say something: “Guess you have to let her know who’s boss.”
Real Dad convulses laughing suddenly, leaning over to one side, crossing his legs—this focused, aggressive-sounding cackling. When I was barely even trying to Bring the Funny, and my Joke Rolodex hasn’t been stocked, technically, for days.
Which makes me feel great! Because Real Dad’s joke-to-actually-laughing-at-other-people’s-jokes ratio is The-Universe-to-One. Which makes me feel like I can relax, maybe even go four or five turns in conversation without having to Bring the Funny again.
“Wow. Show them who’s boss,” he says, still shaking off rounds of cracking up. He wipes his forehead with his palm.
Since Real Dad isn’t a hug or handshake man, I open the mini fridge in his kitchenette and get the larger bottle of De Ranke Kriek. The price tag says $18.00, which he can apparently afford, and I get a tulip glass that’s standing top-down and stuck to a paper towel laid on the counter next to the sink.
I pour him a glass, and he raises it, as in cheers, not looking up. “To who’s boss.” He raises his eyebrows and shakes his head.
So, you smell the cigarette smoke that’s been left over from the practically 1700s. And you see Real Dad’s Blockbuster khakis shoved into the corner; the issues of NME and Magnet in the empty fish tank, the container of pomade; the Ranger Bob WUHF lunchbox he paid eighty dollars for and the Pez dispensers—of Donald Duck, Darth Vader, etc.—arranged on his bookshelf like they’re mantel ornaments. You see Real Dad’s twitching eyelid, and his hands scratched red from eczema, and the picture of the guy who invented the theremin in his bedroom. But that’s also kind of why I love my dad: He’s forty-seven but he Brings the Funny way better than I do. He has all these VHS tapes of Robert Forster movies, and performances of Steve Gadd and Tony Levin in various bands, and some mugshot of David Bowie when he got arrested for marijuana after a War Memorial show (“The newspaper reported that also arrested was a James Osterberg, Jr., 28, of Ypsilanti, Michigan,” Real Dad said, really excited about it), and he has all these weird records about Halloween and makes hilarious jokes about them, and he makes me wish I knew those things, too, so that I could rip on people as well as he does. You think I talk fast, listen to Real Dad:
“Carl, this guy who buys vinyl at the Bop Shop, used to be a record producer in the 1970s,” he says. “Carl, he’ll be there tonight. He and Squeezebeagler’s guitar player used to be in Paul Mitchell? Before that in The Tinklemen? My previous boss at Blockhustler played lacrosse with Tam, Squeezebeagler’s singer, Rocker of a Million Faces. He held cockroach-smashing parties with Tam. Take your shoe in your hand, turn off the lights, turn them back on, watch the cockroaches trickle out, and swing for the floor.”
See what I mean? Real Dad and the people he knows.
“They had to give Tam a rhythm guitar to keep him from sticking his hands down his pants while he was singing.”
“They’re that good, he has to Touch his Puppy to it,” I go.
He punches his right arm up into the sleeve of his Stray Cats jacket and slaps his pants pocket to check his keys: “A masturbation joke? No, man! That’s novice! Please don’t say that around anyone tonight. Please don’t. Please.”
He takes his tube of hand cream from his pocket and rubs the stuff over his fingers and slips it back into his pocket. He pours some De Ranke into a plastic cup for me so I can be buzzed on the ride there. Since I’m twenty, Real Dad says we need to get to the Bug Jar early, before the bouncer starts watching the door.
“There are stories about the people you’ll meet tonight, stories,” he says. “Sverg, one of the music writers for City, he’ll be there—stellar guy, says some really poignant, subversive things. Sverg was telling me Squeezebeagler’s guitarist, drunk one night, tried to go home and pass out in his apartment, but he woke up, and instead he was just in some lady’s house!”
His forehead is getting a little sweaty, the way it does when he gets excited, like when he’s talking about Dexter’s Laboratory or Cookie Puss. So now, I’m thinking this concert is totally going to be Holy Grail Point-worthy!
Because: Necro? Really bumming me out. Really riding the tip with me. I blew through a whole tank of gas driving past Applebee’s to try to find him last night, past Gitsi’s, Media Play, the Wegmans parking lot, past Chad Rector’s house on the off chance, the Spice Man Tower, and even the corner on Monroe where two guys, about to fight, kept yelling to each other: “This ain’t no pickupsticks!”
But as soon as me and Real Dad walk into the Bug Jar, which is my first time ever to the Bug Jar, my shoulder nerves hum. Look, already, at the dim lighting and the giant papier-mâché fly, about the size of a tote bag, attached to a blade of the ceiling fan—with that alone, you and your flame-paintings can suck it, Necro. And even better, in the room next to the bar, Necro? A whole upside-down living room set, bolted to the ceiling. Recliner; books glued to the coffee table.
We take a seat in the one large booth in the corner. Real Dad’s picking the label off his beer bottle, looking at the door, one-wording it whenever I ask him something. He rubs some rash cream on his hands and puts the tube back in his pocket. People trickle in. This boulder-shaped guy with a white buzz cut and maroon boots walks in.
“That’s Sverg,” Real Dad says. “He’s crazy, that guy, crazy like wild boars. The stories—he fell out the back of the stage door into a snow bank one time, crazy.”
Real Dad gives me the One-Minute index finger and walks over to the guy.
“Sverg!” Real Dad goes. “Svergie!” squeezing Sverg’s shoulder. Then he says, in this hairy, over-tanned Long Island accent: “How you doing today can I take ya aside for a drink and a hardcore mastibation session? Mastibation, mastibation, mastibation.”
Which I, at least, think is funny—Real Dad’s accent. But look at how Sverg looks at Real Dad, eyelids getting heavier.
“Remember? Last month?” Real Dad says, eyes open wide, doglike and gentle. “That guy, with the accent? Standing right behind you, talking through Arab on Radar? Some Twelfth Man in a Giants jacket?”
Sverg’s chin drifts upward, voice reclined and half-asleep on the couch. “Standing—”
“Forget it, forget it,” Real Dad says, waving his hands in front of his chest.
Sverg suddenly deadlocks eyes with Real Dad. “Are you accusing me of something?”
“Not at all, my friend,” Real Dad says, jamming his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth. “Just looking forward to some live music.”
“Well, good to see you, okay?” Sverg says slowly, looking past Real Dad toward the room where the stage is.
Since I already hate this Sverg guy, I go and stand in the bathroom. It’s dark but with high ceilings, overlapping band stickers of The Priests and Nerve Circus and Pengo crowding the sink mirror. When I walk out, I feel a hand on my shoulder, a hand that immediately feels like more success and heated driveways than I’ll ever have.
“Nate?” the hand says.
I turn around. And, sweep the floors, change your shirt: It’s Garrett Alfieri.
“Nathan Gray,” he says. “Your mom took us to Chuck E. Cheese. In Gauntlet you were always the elf—Questor Nate.”
Garrett Alfieri. The one friend Mom liked, the one who escaped, who stopped calling us after his mom found out he got a B. The one who volunteered at the SSJ nursing home during his lunch breaks junior year and wouldn’t let us copy his homework. Look at him now—actually shaving, wearing khakis, a shiny blue shirt. His hair is bright-blond enough to almost produce a halo-like glow cloud. When here I am, flannel shirt, nylon running pants, and the world’s itchiest five-day beard.
“Garrett. Wow,” I say. “It has been long.”
So, we stand there, nodding, praying that one of us will think of a subject. Because, when you run into someone you know but haven’t seen in five years, you feel like you have to give them more than a typical Small-Talk Life Story. But if I do more than give him the Small-Talk Life Story, it will become clear I have nothing to say, have been up to nothing, and it’ll end up being the Taco Bell of Conversations.
“I finished up at Alfred in six semesters,” he says, shifting his weight from foot to foot when he talks. “I did this internship in Bausch & Lomb. They had an open, full-time financial analyst gig. So I took it.”
“Jesus loves somebody,” I say.
“There you go!” he says. “Speaking of Jesus, I run a youth group downtown—all low-income. I tell everyone at Group: four-year private universities only exist to allow time for the partiers to get their homework done. I tell them: Load up on AP credits. Know what you want to do by age eighteen. Pick something. Two years in at MCC, follow that up with a SUNY, six semesters later, it’s: What’s up,” he points to the ceiling, “Throw down,” he points downward, “Closing time.” He waves his hand sideways, slamming an imaginary door.
“Holy Grail Points to you, then.”
“Holy Grail Points,” he holds the steadiest eye contact when he talks, which makes me realize how fidgety I’ve become. “Man, we said some stupid things. Uncle Frankstache!, right?”
“Colonel Hellstache,” I say.
“Say again?”
“Nothing.”
“Anyway, my fiancée and I just moved into an apartment in the horseshoe on Griffith Street, by the highway.”
“Your own place!”
“It’s pretty solid. Nice demographic mix, helps with outreach. The city shut off streetlights to save money, and we still draw our shades and remove our window-sill decorations at night, but, otherwise.”
The crowd gets loud enough to have to yell over, and thick enough so I have to stand on my toes to see Real Dad gesturing wildly—like he’s twirling circus streamers—to Sverg. Garrett Alfieri turns around once, and puts his hand on my shoulder and leans toward me. His deodorant smells like a ballroom.
“Sometimes, I peek out my window at night anyway,” he says into my ear. “Do you still keep in touch with Andrea—or, Necro? Does he live in the city somewhere?”
Which I ignore, for obvious reasons, before the anger can pop out of one of my back teeth. An opening band plays a song with boogery garage-rock chords and a drum part that sounds like a man falling down the stairs. I let a few seconds pass to let the subject change.
“How’s your mom?” Garrett Alfieri yells over the band. “Is that your dad over there?”
Since Garrett Alfieri is someone who’ll want to talk about family and your family’s history—when everyone in Rochester is Italians—I lead him through the crowd of sideburn kids and Fonzies to Real Dad. Who, still, is with his Colonel Hellstache friends Sverg, and, now, Carl from the Bop Shop, who has hockey hair and wears an untucked T-shirt under an open, short-sleeve dress-shirt.
So, I try to ninja in a word, to say Dad! Look! Garrett Alfieri!
But, here Real Dad is, holding open his wallet, nudging his elbow toward the bar counter, eyebrows raised with kindness. “Pints, guys? Refills?” he says.
Sverg and Bop-Shop Carl, these two mung-huts, squint and shrug at each other.
“What? Like I’d rape-drug your drinks?” Real Dad goes. “Am I that much of a dog, gentlemen? Like I’m going to come up to you and comb my mustache and ask you, ‘Have our paths intertwined previously, perhaps, in cyberspace, in the bestiality newsgroups?’”
Me, I want to crack up at that completely: Real Dad’s had that joke for years. But the look on Bop-Shop Carl? Pissing his pants slowly with his face.
“Sorry my dad’s not paying attention,” I actually say to Garrett Alfieri.
Garrett Alfieri nods, but he smirks like he knows something.
Which makes me know something for sure: I am a terrible middleman. My neck is sweating. My back is, too: the Melting Backsickle. Garrett Alfieri: throwing me off. Necro: throwing me off. Sverg, Bop Shop Carl: throwing me off.
I’m still thrown off when we all follow Sverg and Bop-Shop Carl down into the Bug Jar basement to hang out with Squeezebeagler. Bop-Shop Carl looks at Sverg and narrows his eyebrows hard at the back of Real Dad’s head. The basement walls, gangrene-colored, have stickers and logos everywhere. There are also slit-up leather recliners with upholstery pushing out, and a lamp with no lampshade. For whatever reason, on the TV sitting on a turned-over garbage can, Dances with Wolves is playing. My first thought is: this place? File Under Scabies. It smells sharp as gourmet trash, like Poached Death murdered a creature made of garbage.
But I stop myself from officially thinking that, because Real Dad doesn’t just like things for no reason. After all, I was completely wrong about not liking that Schizopolis movie Real Dad took me to at the Little, and Real Dad totally called me out for dieting only on ninety-minute microwavable Hollywood bullshit, so I thought about it, and I guess I like Schizopolis now.
Except Squeezebeagler isn’t even down here. Just me, Real Dad, Sverg, Bop-Shop Carl, Garrett—who’s keeping his hands in his pockets, dying for some hand sanitizer—and some guy sleeping in one of the chairs.
“It’ll be great to see Tam again,” Real Dad says. “You’re lucky to be friends with him—he’s a really great guy. I played lacrosse with Tam in high school, killed cockroaches with him.”
When, wait. Wasn’t it Real Dad’s Blockhustler boss that played lacrosse with Tam?
“Didn’t think I’d be learning this much about you tonight, Dale,” Bop Shop Carl says.
“We’ve hung out, a few times,” Real Dad says. “I mean, I, I, I’ve been down here in the basement before, before he’s performed—”
“Interesting!” Sverg says, in this cocktail-party way. “We’ve never seen you down here. We must have missed you in this”—he bends his knees a little and makes a slow, broad, backhand gesture—“confined space.”
And then, slow motion, I hear footfalls down the basement steps; the staircase cracking its knuckles. It’s Squeezebeagler Tam, Rocker of a Million Faces.
Tam has dark, well-parted hair, workboots and wool socks, shorts with a belt, and a button-down short-sleeve shirt, as if he’s there to deliver a package. Even though he hasn’t played, there’s a sweat-darkened area on his shorts above his crotch, like he wet his pants with his navel. He makes a devil sign and finds the cooler.
“Tam,” Sverg says. “Listen, do you know Dale? He’s an old friend of yours.”
You look at Real Dad, and the room’s getting dizzy with him. His lower lip moves. He makes a gun out of his fingers and presses the imaginary barrel into his chinfat.
“He knows you, Tam, knows you real well,” Bop-Shop Carl says. “You guys used to play lacrosse, or kill cockroaches. This guy hung out with you all the time.”
Expression flinches out of Squeezebeagler Tam’s face. “Which one are you?” he says.
You can feel stadiums in Real Dad’s brain collapsing, his eyes getting shinier, like there’s an Oh Shit coming big enough to explode the Bible. But listen to what Real Dad says, only this once, because no way am I ever bringing this up again:
“Listen, guys, Tam, Sverg, Carl, it’s. What I meant was, sometimes, your voice; you just end up saying ‘I,’ and what you mean is, it was your boss, or whoever it may be, in a given situation, and, and, and, but you just start saying ‘I,’ instead of whoever’s actually—and it’s just—and I’m only being honest, here, because at this point what can you even expect to—there’s no point in, you know—you cut out the middleman! I believe: I am a person who believes: that the world should be entertaining, that regardless of, you know, you look at, I knew a guy at Griffiss; he’s doing flyovers in Iraq—and, and, the world, the dreamscape; the alchemy—it, it’s all, just—life! Storytelling!”
Sverg and Bop-Shop Carl look at each other, almost concerned now.
“I’m gonna take off,” Garrett Alfieri says.
“It was good to see you, though,” Garrett Alfieri says. “Colonel Hellstache? ‘Never change.’ I wrote that in your yearbook, man. You kept your word. We need more of that out there in the big world. Throw-down-closing-time; that’s what it’s all about.”
I shake his hand out of reflex.
If that weren’t enough to morph you to your bed permanently and turn you into a Bed Centaur, here, still, is Real Dad:
“Dale,” Bop-Shop Carl says, standing chest to chest with Real Dad now, pupils narrowing. “How about I ask you something?”
Real Dad pretends to laugh, still friends. “Okay, what’s that.”
“How about, we don’t know you,” Bop-Shop Carl says. “How about, a guy came to see a show last week at a place down the street. Nobody knew him, and he was, like you, following everybody the fuck around. That guy stabbed a friend of ours in the bathroom,” he slashes his leg with his index finger. “Femoral artery. All next morning: mopping up the stall.”
Real Dad raises his palms, padding the air. “Look: on a better day, friend, I swear: You and I would be toasting to live music and friendship.”
“On a better day, we wouldn’t,” Bop-Shop Carl says.
“Dale,” Sverg unwedges his wallet out of his jeans and hands Real Dad a twenty. “Get yourself a cab. Not your night, okay?”
Once, in kindergarten, Real Dad and I were playing Frisbee in our backyard. Several people, wearing bright orange vests, wandered onto our lawn from the woods nearby. I figured out, a few years later, they were hunters. “Get the hell out of here,” I am very sure Real Dad said. I’m hoping for Part II: The Proto-Stachening of that to happen, say, right now.
But the doorman’s already leading me and Real Dad out, and we’re already walking out into the bar crowds on Monroe Avenue. Steam from the late-night sausage cart in front of the bank is extra visible, with a line of dudes wearing those zip-up sweater turtlenecks I could never pull off wearing. The bruise-colored light from the street lamps makes all the closed novelty shops seem foggier or grainier, like when you see dark, synthesizer-y MTV videos from 1983.
“They’re just joking—they’re stressed out,” Real Dad tells me, hands in pockets, looking at the sidewalk. “They’re musicians, journalists—deadlines.”
I shoulder around a group of college women who are carrying their shoes.
“It actually looks bad on the whole club, that we’re leaving first,” Real Dad goes on. “We’re customers. Those guys never pay a dime in there; they do nothing to support the Bug Jar economy. The irony lays claim to them, in actuality.”
We stop at the corner of the side street where Real Dad’s car is parked. His face is knotted up.
“Well what?” he says.
“What do you mean what.”
“What are you thinking about, right there.”
I tell him I’m not thinking about anything. But I’m really thinking: Had God sent Garrett Alfieri from the Biblecopter tonight to make me ask if I should still be making jokes about Holy Grail Points, about Colonel Hellstache, to lock me in the Sad Archives Basement with regards to Necro Maverick Jetpantsing?
But here’s what Real Dad is thinking I’m thinking: “Why are you looking at me like I’m some guy who has to retreat into my Tweed Panic Room, with my Pet Sounds outtakes?”
“Why would I look at you like you have a Tweed Panic Room?”
Except then, the Dam Breaking Loose. Because, out of complete nowhere, Real Dad goes: “You want to see something? You want to see Rock and Roll? Here. Watch.”
“Okay, Dad, what are you going …”
“You don’t think I can do it, do you?” he says. “You’ve been looking at me the whole night like I’m stand-up-comedy material, like Hi, I’m Nate, you know, The Pop Culture Essayist; the Deferential, you know, Normal-Guy Writer—let me just sit back in my flannel shirt and fold my arms and let the dramatic irony play out among the earnest. What if I told you I’ve thought about starting my own music magazine, sort of building on what Suck is doing? With raw, balls-out-of-fly commentary?” He pulls his fly zipper outward, toward me. “I talked with Carl about it tonight, talked about it with him two months ago.”
He exhales toward the sky and quiets his voice: “Just—let me show you what I am going to need to do.”
And suddenly I really start to really worry. As in, is he going to say: “Sometimes I think I might not make it through this life,” and am I going to have to tell him: “Well, hang in there!” Because, the last time he was back at Mom’s house was to do laundry, four trash bags of it. And, what if, is he going to kill himself? Is he going to hold his hand out to me, and say, padded-cell-gently: Son, watch your father, and then pull a gun from his pocket and brain-spray his head all over the storefront behind him?
So, within seconds, I have my First-Aid Rays fully charged. I care about my parents. Real Dad’s not a Tweed Panic Room Hashbrown Gargoyle. We have fun together. I’m ready to Go Off the Top Ropes, ready to do a diving save if Real Dad reaches for a gun in his sock, ready to Drop an Elbow for Life.
Instead, he goes: “I’ll bet you I can kick the receiver hook off that payphone at the corner.”
He points to the payphone half a block down. At that point, all you can think is: Fuck.
“One clean kick, clean break. Hook: off.” He smacks the heel of his right hand into his left palm. “Clean break. Twenty dollars. You’re taking the bet.”
He stands over me. “Can’t we …”
“I am your father and we are not going to discuss it!”
I sit on the curb. A few blocks up, a man with longish hair—lacrosse-long—bends over and vomits into a storm drain. I’m not even looking when Real Dad takes the phone off the hook, looks both ways, gives a running start from around the corner, jumps, and jams his boot into the payphone. He does it silently, clean break, like he’s been practicing all his life. The hook plinks on the ground. He drops it in my lap.
“That’s great Dad, thanks,” I say.
“Oh no thank you, Nate. Because I wouldn’t be a man unless I changed your goddamn diapers. Have to let them know who’s boss.”
Back in Penfield, the house with Real Dad’s room is this large, peeling, cotton-gin-era thing with a single broad, white wall as a front. The sign above the maroon front door, which is slanted in its frame, says PENFIELD MANSE.
The stairs are maroon-carpeted and squishy going up to the second floor, and the maroon changes the light to a color that, if it were a Crayola, would be called Dying Cantaloupe. Real Dad nods as he passes maybe a priest, or any one of the alone-a-thon of divorced husbands that might occasionally open their doors and lean out, in their bathrobes and flip-flops. He opens his room’s sliding wooden door, where there is no lock. The showers, I remember, are communal and down the hall.
Real Dad brushes his teeth while he sits on the sofa and flips on the TV. Some old movie comes on, with Groucho Marx in it. He starts laughing, really hard, through the toothpaste, at the punchlines. Which means he’s done talking for the night, and I’m leaving. “Have fun,” he says, and spits into his kitchen sink.
Back home, Mom is postured like geometry on the Woolly Mammoth. Her one glass of Sam Adams, foam drying to the sides. “How was he?” she says.
“We tried to see this band Squeezebeagler and got kicked out,” I say. “Then he bet me he could kick the receiver hook off a payphone.”
She puts a hand to her mouth, crossing her leg, a spring echoing through the couch’s hollows. “He’s funny,” she says. But then she narrows her eyebrows, angering down a smile.
And then, according to the God Hates Nate Act of 1931, I change into my Bills pajama pants, go to the den, and look at NecronicA.
Mom’s bedroom door closes. When I hit refresh, I flinch: The word SOLD appears in red across the thumbnail of a painting of a naked woman with a legion of army soldiers on fire behind her, faces peeling off, tongues broiling.
Which makes me think, really, the whole time so far, maybe I was lying to you about Bringing the Funny and Holy Grail Points. Maybe I’d rather not joke around with Real Dad, and maybe sometimes I’d really like to talk to Real Dad about what Garrett Alfieri told me, about how I’m still the same and I talk the same, and how I’m not good at anything, and how Necro has NecronicA and Weapons of Mankind and all this money, and Lip Cheese has a Home and a Cash and they’re all happier than me.
Back when I was happier, even an hour ago, at the end of my night with Real Dad, he went to bed, and I went home. When I got in the car to drive back to Gates, from outside the Penfield Manse, Real Dad’s window was the only one with a light on. Through his window, I saw him take off his shirt, posture frumped up. There was no expression on his face, no Wall of Comedy. He folded some piece of clothing, downed a glass of water in one gulp, and turned off the light.