When I was a kid, my father had friends everywhere. No matter where we went–the mall, little league games, soccer tournaments–he was sure to run into someone he knew. They’d shake hands and trade energetic small talk I couldn’t understand. These friends covered a wide range of humanity, from well-dressed professionals to tattooed biker types.

This democratic taste in companions did not gel with his personality, as I knew it. To me, he was a master of sarcasm with snobbish pretensions. He did the New York Times Sunday crossword religiously, tracing block letters with a black pen, then filling in the interiors in red like panes of stained glass. He wouldn’t listen to any radio station but WQXR, the Times‘ classical music outpost. He owned one musical album, a doo-wop compilation. Everything else in his LP collection was comedy: George Carlin and Tom Lehrer, mostly.

He recoiled at his boys’ typically kid-like table manners. He’d storm away from the kitchen table muttering “Savages!” to himself when he could take it no more. (To this day, I find the word “savages” to be extremely funny.) If he came home from work and we were watching He-Man or G.I. Joe, he’d demand we “turn that drivel off”, in a silly voice that made it clear he was both joking and deadly serious. He preferred to watch PBS, which I found crushingly boring. I called every show he liked “Great Rocks of Our Time”.

And yet, in public I’d see him hanging out with total slobs, people I thought he wouldn’t be caught dead with. And not just talk with them, but joke and laugh like they were the best of buddies. My dad was a gifted storyteller, someone who could command a room with equal parts rhetorical skill and bullshit. But even so, it didn’t seem likely that he’d be swapping stories with many of the “friends” he ran into.

His friends had two things in common: (1) they were all men; (2) I had no idea who any of them were. They weren’t people he worked with, and he had no social life to speak of. If asked where he knew these people from, he’d say “around”. If pressed further, he’d change the subject.

My mother found this particularly infuriating. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out the identities of these mystery people. After all, the man barely left the house, except to go to AA meetings…
Continue reading The Other Family →