Despite all this, I didn’t drink alcohol in high school, which, in Mattoon, marked me as an eccentric at best, a frightening zealot at worst, like one of those crazy Catholic guys who whip themselves so that they do not even think of sin. I’m not sure why I didn’t drink in high school: Everyone else on the baseball team did, and I certainly had lots of opportunities. Maybe it was as simple as: Mom and Dad told me not to. It is not in my nature to rebel against authority—at best, I’m an Authority, may I have a polite word, and if you hear me out, I will adhere to your judgment person. It’s probably a personality flaw.
Anyway, when I was 21, I travelled the forty-five miles home for Christmas break of my senior year at the University of Illinois with a specific purpose in mind: I was going to tell my parents that I planned on asking my girlfriend to marry me. They had met her and enjoyed her, and even though 21 is a stupidly young age to be engaged, well, my parents were even younger and stupider when they got engaged, so they were more supportive than they probably should have been.
I told my mom first, and she cried and gave me a family heirloom, the same ring Dad had given her, the same one his father, my grandfather, had given his mother, my grandmother. Dad called from work and asked if I wanted to meet him for lunch at Gunnar Buc’s, a greasy spoon watering hole with a robot bucking bronco and old video poker machines that didn’t give you money even if you won. I drove over. We sat at the bar, and my father ordered me a beer.
At this point, I’d drank many, many times—I am not so much a drip that I did not destroy myself as thoroughly as possible in college—but I’d never had a beer with Dad. I didn’t think much about it when he ordered me one, though. We’re all so stupid at 21.
We were halfway through the beer when I told Dad I was going to ask the girl to marry me. We’d never discussed women before—my sexual education consisted of my mother sitting me in front of a Nova episode about human reproduction and handing me a book while my father found a lawn, somewhere far, far away, to mow—and, all told, my father was still a parent to me, a distant figure I admired and feared, someone at the center of my life but ostensibly on the periphery, someone I tried not to disappoint with the chaotic, jumbled, collegiate issues I thought were important at the time.
I told Dad very little back then. It felt like a leap to even mention it, but telling your father you were asking someone to marry you seemed like something you were supposed to do. Which is how we’d ended up here. Not that either of us were doing backflips about it.
Dad looked down at his beer and reflexively went into Dad Mode. “You don’t even have a job! How you going to have a wife if you don’t have a job.” He drew out the syllable in “job,” so it sounded like “jaaaaaaaaaahhhhhbbbb,” as if the soft vowel sound underscored his imperative. “You’re a college kid. You don’t know shit. You better get yourself a job before you start thinking about getting married. Don’t you forget that. That’s what’s important: You have to support a family now.”
This went on for about ten minutes, some fatherly haranguing about responsibility, about what it meant to be a husband, a father, a man. It meant nothing to me. I was callow and omniscient. My dad didn’t understand me. He was a dad. If he understood me, and my desire to go to Los Angeles and just write, man, write, he wouldn’t be my dad. It wasn’t even upsetting. This was the way it was going to be. This was what we had both expected.
We finished our beers, and we each ordered another. He paid, because he’s the dad. He had talked himself out; I had no answers to the questions he was asking and could not pretend I did.
Then Dad paused. “You know, I think your grandpa would just about shit a brick if he knew I was sitting here having a beer with you.” My grandfather, named William Franklin Leitch, like me, worked on the railroad and at Howell Asphalt road paving, smoked three packs of unfiltered Pall Malls a day, and sired eight children. He was a quiet, taciturn military man who, when he came home from work, lacked the energy or the patience to deal with a massive brood of screaming, wild kids.
He would go into his “office”—really just a desk in his bedroom—drink whiskey, smoke, and read the paper. From all accounts, he was a kind man, but damned if he was gonna let you know it.
When he was dying, my mother, newly a nurse, took care of him. He showed his affection and appreciation for her care by twisting and yanking her arm hair. “It was the same as if he’d given me flowers,” my mom once told me. When my grandfather met my mother for the first time, he sat across the table at a Mexican restaurant drinking and smoking. Mom says she doesn’t remember him saying a word. She knew that meant he liked her. She didn’t know why she knew that, but she did.
“You never had a beer with Grandpa?” I asked, legitimately curious. What else was there to do with Grandpa?
“Drink in front of my dad?” he said. “Bill Leitch wouldn’t have stood for it.”
We finished that beer, and two others. My dad was never The Dad after that. He was my drinking buddy. I got myself a job before I graduated. (Don’t you forget it.) The marriage didn’t happen, though. For the best. The transaction was well worth it.
♦♦♦
In November of 2000, ten months after I’d moved to New York City flittering with dreams of media stardom, I moved back home. The move was to be temporary: I’d been laid off from my job, was running out of money, and needed to nurse my wounds. I was 25. I had no idea what I was doing.
I also owed about $5,000 in rent back in New York that I could not repay. I’d never borrowed money from my parents before, but I had no choice. There was no nest egg to fall back on. I had no magic benefactor. I had been living check-to-check for quite some time, which is fine when you’re sure each of those checks will come, but disastrous when they stop. Home was the only place I had to turn.
I’d been staying with a cousin, and I made the wretched, murderous drive to my parents’ place for the dreaded conversation. I was a grown man, without a “jaaaaaaaahhhhbbb,” and I had failed. This was my reckoning, and I deserved this.
They were not home. I waited, and waited, and waited, and they never showed. Tired, I left them a note, explaining what I needed, what I’d done, and how awful it had become, and returned the next morning. My mother was waiting: “We got your note.” She looked so sad.
My parents had always known I was flaky, and perhaps had my head in the clouds more than was good for me. But it had never come to this. For the first time, she was seriously questioning everything she thought she knew about her son. Oh my, her eyes said… he might really be a screwup. “Let me talk to your father.”
The next weekend, after they had given me the money, with no conversation whatsoever, just a check, I, feeling worthless, decided to visit old friends in St. Louis, where I’d lived three years before. I drove a beaten-up old 1986 Chevy Caprice, my deceased great uncle’s former car, the green mile. About an hour into the drive, I noticed more smoke than there should have been shooting out the exhaust pipe. I pulled into a gas station, lifted the hood, and realized that the car had overheated. It was fried. There was only one number to call. Again.
Dad arrived two hours later, having left work. We sat out in the cold for two hours, picking the car apart, putting this here, placing that there. At one point, the wrench Dad was using slipped out of his hand and cut his left thumb. The blood oozed out. The gash opened up further a few minutes later, and a large patch of skin was noticeably dangling. Dad didn’t pause in the slightest. He just kept working, as the oil and the grime and the soot mixed in, turning his thumb purple. He just kept working.
The car was continuing to leak, and it was obvious this problem would not be fixed tonight. Dad would have to take the next day off of work and drive all the way back, just to help his failure son fix a car he shouldn’t have taken off with in the first place. We had an hour to drive home in his truck, just the two of us. We had yet to discuss, one-on-one, the money I had borrowed just two days before.
Dad walked inside the gas station and bought a six-pack of Natural Light. We hopped in the truck and were silent, motionless, for about fifteen minutes. He then handed me a beer.
“So… did you hear about the Cardinals thinking about trading Tatis?” And so it was. He didn’t yell, he didn’t scold, he didn’t even grimace. We just talked about what we’d always talked about, until I was ready, no longer too ashamed, to discuss the matter at hand.
“Dad… I screwed up. I’m sorry.” I told him how I felt what had happened over the last few months was in fact some sort of karmic punishment, my proper comeuppance for a cocky kid the dot-com boom had fooled into thinking he was important. He didn’t say a word. He just handed me another beer and listened, or didn’t, I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. About five minutes in, I stopped. I didn’t need to say anything more, and he didn’t need to hear it. We’d already had our conversation. The beer was enough; it was his tacit acknowledgment: I don’t think you’re a fuckup. But don’t do this again. And I didn’t.
“We’ll get back to the car tomorrow,” he said as he dropped me off at my cousin’s place. “Bring your work gloves.”
This essay was excerpted from ARE WE WINNING? by Will Leitch. Copyright ©2010 Will Leitch. Published by Hyperion. Wherever books are sold.
Photo credits: Will and dad, beers, bar, lawn, sign