Dad had pretty eclectic taste for a film studies professor. He could talk about the Czech New Wave in the same sentence as The Fast and the Furious. And sometimes, I suspected he actually preferred watching terrible action movies on cable to anything else. I never saw Dad happier than stretched out on our old green velour sofa, grinning while Chuck Norris jump kicked somebody off a dusty cliff. But the movies he liked best of all were the ones he’d studied with his mentor in graduate school, the films of the late sixties to the very beginning of the eighties. His first book was about this period, and it was the book I held in my hands now.
He was writing it when I was born. Literally. Mom said he brought a notebook into the delivery room and scrawled like a madman while she labored for ten hours. He felt the impending doom of his free time, and he knew he needed to finish it if he wanted a teaching job to support his new family. It sold the most copies of anything he ever wrote, and every once in a while the publisher would reprint it with a new cover.
But I liked this one.
Just a boxer in the fog, fighting himself while the whole world watches.
“It’s violent, but it’s also balletic!”
I could hear Dad’s voice in my head like it was playing from a recording.
He showed me the movie when I was way too young, of course. He did this with everything. I saw Easy Rider when I was eight and confounded my second-grade friends by talking about bad acid trips on the playground. Last Tango in Paris scarred me when I was a lad of only twelve. I think I was ten when I first watched Raging Bull.
“His whole character is revealed in the opening titles!” Dad said, pacing around the living room like he was in a lecture hall.
He was incapable of watching an entire movie sitting down.
“He’s in the ring, the center of everyone’s attention, but he’s also anonymous. And the ropes cage him like an animal. Like the bull of the title.”
At that time, Dad had been trying to tame his curls with short haircuts, but on Saturday mornings, when he waited until noon to shower, it frizzed out like he’d been electrocuted. His uniform on those days was an old T-shirt from his pickup basketball team (called the Culture Warriors), and a pair of jeans older than me. He had a bright blue coffee thermos that he used even at home, so the ink-black brew he sipped stayed warm. Dad mimicked De Niro’s moves on the screen, the coffee sloshing in the thermos.
“Scorsese said he was inspired to make the film because in life, ‘the hardest opponent you face is yourself.’ We’re all just jabbing and sticking ourselves, Ethan! Boom! Boom!”
He feigned punching himself in the jaw and staggered back onto the couch.
“Oh no. He decided to be an academic! Why did he do that?”
He collapsed backward and the old sofa strained under his weight.
“Now he has a mortgage! The humanity!”
I watched as he closed his eyes. The university was always cutting things in the humanities, and I knew Dad was worried he’d be on the chopping block someday. He was tight with money, always afraid the end was coming. But, it was okay. I usually knew which buttons to push to get him to splurge. And despite his eccentricities, I was glad I’d been born in this messy house with this particular father. You couldn’t choose your parents, but I’d been given this one. He was so much older than everyone else’s dad, but he also seemed happier. He railed against all the bad music on the radio and the “oligarchs” in power, but I still caught him smiling more often than not.
“I’m thinking of teaching a class in the fall that’s all credit sequences. Do you think that would be too frustrating?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe not. They’re like little movies, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “Exactly, Ethan! They are little movies. You should teach the class. You can just wear my tie and glasses. Nobody would know the difference.”
He was still lying on the couch, staring up at our hideous popcorn ceiling. I walked over and looked down at him. His stubble was dark, and it reached from the bottom of his neck halfway up his cheeks. I ran my palm against the grain.
“Saturdays,” I said, “are the best.”
He met my eyes, and made a claw with his hand. He had done this to me when I was a toddler, reaching out with his hands spread wide, saying “THE CLAW!!!!” as I ran from him screaming and laughing at the same time.
“Agreed,” he said, and his hand stopped just shy of my forehead. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad one.”
I had already closed my eyes, though, waiting for his thick fingers to clamp down over my head. As a kid, I had actually loved this inevitable part of the game. It felt safe to have his hand there, like he was holding me steady.
“What’s that bad cinnamon roll place in the mall?” he asked. “I have a craving.”
I was still waiting for the claw. But a few more seconds passed and it never came. Eventually, I opened my eyes, but all I saw was the couch.
He was gone.