My stepfather and I are talking again after more than three decades of silence. That seems ironic to write, not just because we are too old now to fit the titles of stepfather and stepson, but because we never talked when we did.
In the nearly 10 years, we lived together until I left when I was 19, and he and my mother divorced shortly afterward, Lon and I mostly communicated via index cards left on the dining room table that listed my chores for the day. We talked separately to my mother, but rarely to each other. It was absurd behavior, but we weren’t able to see it in that light at the time.
Lon was my grade school basketball coach and, at 21, had just returned to our hometown of Erie, Pa., from two combat tours in Vietnam. His war rage could explode on the basketball court, but otherwise he sustained a sullen silence. I was 9, and several months earlier my violent father had been shot dead by people he had attempted to kill. My father’s family had warned me not to forget him, to always remember that he was a good man. These were the circumstances that forged the estrangement between Lon and me.
I remember the first time I saw him, heard him scream.
My best friend Walt and I tried out for the junior varsity basketball team at St. John’s Elementary. We had been “practicing” at the YMCA by joining the full-court pick-up games that the adult “Y” members played. The teenagers and adults there always chose us last to be on their teams. We rewarded them with hot-dog, “Pistol” Pete Maravich dribbling and occasional one-handed, three-quarter-court shots. We wore our socks bunched down by our sneakers like Pistol Pete and attempted trick layups like our other hero, “Dr. J.,” aka Julius Erving. Anything to do with the American Basketball Association, or ABA, we coveted, including the red-white-and-blue ABA basketball and accompanying wrist and head bands.
At the first St. John’s team practice, however, our freewheeling, improvisational, early ‘70s, “P-Funk”-ified, ABA style hit a wall named Lon Bernhard. At 6’3” and 245 pounds, Lon would have been physically imposing if he had just graduated from pastry chef school instead of recently returned from combat in Vietnam. His thick brown hair and beard made his head seem mammoth.
“Pass the ball!” he screamed at me minutes after the practice began. “Don’t you know how to pass the damn ball!?”
I had never heard anyone scream that loud. Even the drill sergeants I had heard yelling in movies didn’t possess the fullness of volume Lon did. Their voices seemed to fill an immediate vicinity; Lon’s flooded a gymnasium wall to wall, corner to corner.
“Well? Answer the question!”
“Huh?” I mumbled.
“I asked if you knew how to pass the ball!”
“Yes.”
“Then PASS it!”
He screamed with such force that the plate of his front teeth kept coming loose, and once left his mouth altogether. We wondered if he lost the teeth in the war.
I unthinkingly threw the ball to Walt, who immediately jacked up a long shot.
“Wetzel!” Lon said, using Walt’s last name. “Same question.”
“What?” Walt said.
“Do you know how to pass the ball?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then PASS IT!”
Lon scooped a basketball from a rack and “passed” it at the green cinder-block wall with such force it resounded like an explosion. While the ball finished its ricochet off the bleachers and dribbled to a stop in a corner, none of us moved or made a sound beyond our shallow breathing.
Finally, he blew the whistle hanging from his neck for us to resume play again. Compared to his voice, the whistle sounded tiny. He used it sparingly, as if it voiced a context tied too closely to basketball, to sports, when he was immersed in something else, something we didn’t understand.
Shortly after he began coaching us, Lon chased down and apprehended a thief trying to rob a home a few blocks from the school early one morning, according to some of our teammates who lived where it happened.
This event, paired with Lon’s Army veteran status, seemed to affirm to the principal and school board that he could do no wrong. I never witnessed a parent or anyone from the school even stick their head into one of our practice sessions.
Another story about Lon claimed he worked nights for the city’s garbage department and never slept. The uniformed green Dickies pants and shirts he often wore matched those of city employees.
Walt and I liked to believe we had most adults sussed out. Though Lon looked in his 30s with his brown beard, to our surprise he was only 21—he had been 18 when he left for Vietnam. Lon carried himself older than his age, and we believed this was due to him being in the Army, but he was only 12 years older than we were.
We had never come across anyone who burned this intensely, young or old, except for maybe Yosemite Sam, the Tasmanian Devil, and a few other cartoon characters. Lon would have made hothead coach Bobby Knight piss his khaki pants.
I had never feared anyone this much before, not even my father. But my mother said Lon could not be around loud noises or violent films. I noted them quickly returning home from one of their movie dates to see “A Clockwork Orange.” Lon could not watch it after a few minutes, my mother said, and they left.
He felt safest laying on the floor with our dogs and watching TV, his special soft blankets wrapped around his neck for comfort. Because I liked to watch basketball and other sports, I often sat on the sofa watching game after game with Lon. But if he groaned at a bad call by the referee or yelled in excitement, it was always directed at the TV, not me.
Though he was silent toward me, Lon had no issue yelling at my mother, usually in an attempt to control her freedom to come and go as she pleased. I remember him locking her racket in a room to prevent her from playing tennis with her sister.
Lon had three younger sisters who always treated me nicely and, unlike their brother, were sweet to others, as well. The youngest had babysat me and I had a huge crush on her. Yet Lon yelled maniacally at his sisters and mother, too. The one person in the family he never raised his voice at was his father, who had beaten his son when Lon was a child.
I lived mostly in my bedroom with my books and music. It wasn’t until I left home as a teen that I discovered I did not have the social skills to functionally interact with others. I turned to alcohol and drugs to mitigate this absence, was arrested several times and had brushes with death. I always blamed Lon.
Lon played both my moody older stepbrother and disapproving stepfather, both roles outlining for me what it meant to be a man. The violence with my father happened quickly and was over, he was dead. Lon’s legacy lived inside me for years, much as his early years living with his father had for him.
It wasn’t until I crawled out from living under the rock of indigence and found a job with health insurance that I was finally able to get the cognitive behavioral therapy I needed to break from my depression. I spent several years building a path to health, and returned to therapy afterwards whenever I felt the need to reinforce my recovery.
In the decades that passed, I did not stay in touch with Lon. I didn’t know he spent time in a VA mental ward. That he married a woman with the same name as my mother, that they owned a bar together, and that she died painfully from cancer. When I remembered him, it was of an absence neither he nor I had been able to explain, and so there were no words to forward into the present for us. Just blankness.
After Lon’s wife died, he and my mother kept in touch and restarted a friendship. Lon began visiting her every Friday to play cards. Living 1,500 miles away in Denver, I only knew of his visits from my mother, who relayed that he was calmer and had become a good card player. After all the years that had passed, did this mean that, by proxy, Lon and I had entered each other’s lives again?
I went back to Pennsylvania this spring to spend a week with my mother. She is a very active 88 years old but we mostly stayed in her duplex on the outskirts of the city, talked and watched her favorite news shows. She mentioned Lon and said he might visit. In about two hours, he was at her front door.
What struck me first was the lack of grey in his still bushy brown hair and beard—I was envious. His Vietnam veteran baseball cap and sweatshirt, however, signaled a shift. When I knew him, he never displayed any evidence of his experiences in the war, and I never witnessed him speak about it besides the low mumbling of late night phone calls to his veteran friends that I occasionally overheard when I couldn’t sleep.
“How are you?” I asked and we shook hands.
“Not too bad,” he said. “How are things in Colorado, you still skiing?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t want to hurt myself.”
“Same with me giving up sweets for my diabetes, all the fun things go away.”
He handed me an envelope with NBA basketball teams written on it, some struck through with pen ink.
“I made a bet with your and my name on the playoffs,” he said. “And I won, so here’s your cut.”
“What, you bet with my name?”
“Yeah, I heard you were coming and you can bet more with the bookie using two names. But they need to see everyone who’s betting in person before they book the bet, so they can check that it’s not a police setup. I told him you were parking the car. When he asked again, I said you were having trouble finding a spot, and somehow he let me make the bet.”
Inside the envelope was $600. I told him I couldn’t take it.
“No, it’s yours,” he said. “I always donate half of what I make gambling to the church. This time, I’m only giving them a third. The other third is yours.”
I was between jobs at the time and actually needed the money. I thanked him but warned I was naming names if the bookie’s muscle tracked me down. He laughed.
We talked about the standard Erie, Pa., range of topics that I remembered from when I lived there — sports, work, unions, health, politics, usually in that order. His diabetes was better, he said. But he was waiting on an important test at the VA for the atrial fibrillation issues he was having.
I had never heard him mention that his exposure to Agent Orange in the war had robbed him of the chance to have his own children. This was another bit of information about Lon I had to find out from my mother.
But when he got up to leave, and we hugged for the first time, awkward as it was, I wanted to believe he would have been a good father. And that his children would have somehow turned out okay. I was not thinking about the evidence of our lives. Like most bets, it was only a feeling.
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