I've been thinking about how I finally learned to love my father.
My mother and father in the mid-forties.
In the 1940s and ’50s, my father barely supported my mother, my four siblings and me by selling newspapers, magazines, comic books, and race-track tip sheets at a newsstand on the corner where Whitley Avenue dead-ends into the center of Hollywood Boulevard’s most famous mile. To supplement this legitimate income, he took bets on horse races from his cronies and the petty gamblers and grifters who hung around his corner stand.
I spent hundreds of childhood weekends helping my father on this corner, which was like growing up in a scene from Guys and Dolls. In an early scene, a group of forever-hopeful gamblers are about to place bets with their own newsstand’s bookie proprietor, when they break into song:
I got a horse right here/The name is Paul Revere,
And here’s a guy that says/ If the weather’s clear,
Can do, Can do. /The guy says the horse can do.
My dad’s corner, it turns out, had its own all-star cast of Guys and Dolls characters.
Guys and Dolls at the Majestic Theater
I was helping my father one Saturday morning when a long red Cadillac convertible with tucked white leather upholstery pulled up against the curb. The driver asked for the morning’s Los Angeles Times, so I took his dime and handed the paper to John Wayne.
When she was a young girl living with her mother two blocks from the newsstand, Carol Burnett would sit on the milk crate my father provided as a reading stool for kids, and thumb through comic books while her mother shopped in the nearby Hollywood Market.
In December 1953, I sat on the same milk crate with the inaugural issue of Playboy tucked between the pages of a sports magazine, saw those iconic photos of Marilyn Monroe nude on red velvet and, awash in fresh hormones, wondered what I’d have to do to become a playboy myself.
One year, during the annual Santa Claus Lane parade down Hollywood Boulevard, the man playing Santa cheerfully greeted everyone from his elevated sleigh with a cheerful Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas everyone, then waved at my father and nodded, And Merry Christmas to you, Pat! I learned later that he booked his bets with my dad; having wagered on a string of nags like Paul Revere, it turned out that Santa owed my father money.
It was a fairy-tale experience to grow up among these characters. And like with all fairy tales, something much darker was lurking just beneath the fantasy’s surface.
My father drank, often and a lot. My earliest memory of my mother and father together is from when I was about four years old. I came out of my bedroom because I heard them fighting in the living room after a night of partying with my aunts and uncles. I hid behind a wing chair and watched them in front of the smoldering fireplace, arms locked, face to face, grappling and yelling until my father freed his right hand and slapped my mother hard across the face.
He also hit me, starting when I was a very little boy. The last time I remember being hit, I was sixteen years old. On that particular Saturday night, I had been out with my friends until a little after midnight. When they dropped me at home, the porch light was off and there was no lamplight shining from the living room. So I crept up the creaking wooden front-porch stairs and quietly pushed open the front door. He was waiting in the dark. His fist slammed against my jaw, knocking me to the porch as he slurred over me, I said “Be home by twelve, not twelve fifteen.”
I never had a curfew because I didn’t need one; since I was usually out with the church youth group, my parents knew I wasn’t getting into trouble. The only real trouble I had was with my father. When he drank, it didn’t matter what time it was or what he had or hadn’t said or what I had or hadn’t done. When he drank, all that mattered was the way the alcohol fueled the rage that ate at his soul.
After he died, I was trying to understand why he behaved like this. I put together bits and pieces of stories I’d heard about him and created a sketchy narrative of his life. His parents, who died before I was born, were impoverished Irish immigrants who settled in the early 1900s in working-class towns around Boston. His mother, who adored him, died when he was a little boy. Her death left his father with four young children and in desperate need of a new wife to care for his brood. My grandfather quickly remarried a woman whose immediate disdain for my father was exceeded only by his for her.
My father left home as soon as he could, dropped out of high school, and scrambled to find work until he was old enough to enlist in the Navy. He lasted only a year as a sailor, just long enough to get a tattoo of a seaman on his left bicep which he’d flex for us and, decades later, for our children. In a pattern that would come to define the rest of his life, he was "honorably" discharged - for drunken and disorderly conduct.
He never had enough money. While still in his twenties, he got swallowed up by the Great Depression. When he fled Boston for Los Angeles in his thirties and without an education, he got stuck on that corner selling newspapers and magazines. He tried for years to hit it big on a race that would change his fortune. But like Santa Claus, his gambler’s luck never materialized; his betting record was a string of Paul Reveres. A lifetime of pints or fifths of vodka (often poorly hidden under his mattress) and two packs a day of unfiltered Lucky Strikes rotted his liver and his lungs, both of which plagued his health until he died at sixty-nine.
I was thirty-five when he died. The truth I finally admitted to myself is that I hated him – hated him for hitting my mother, hated him for hitting me, hated him for not being the nurturing father to me that I was trying so hard to be to our three young kids. I just flat out hated him.
The conventional wisdom would tell me (and have me tell you) that given his harsh background, he did the best that he could.
No, he didn’t. He didn’t have to hit my mother or me. He didn’t have to drink. He didn’t have to turn his lungs to charcoal. He could have -- he should have – done better.
This hate lived in me from my mid-thirties until I was well into my fifties. Then two things happened. First, I got tired of hating him. I had used up so much energy and so many emotional resources on hate that the feeling now seemed petty and boring. I was just wasting time on him that he didn't deserve. Then, once I stopped hating him, I got more curious. I thought more intently about how my father got to be who he was.
I do not excuse his violence nor its lingering effects on me. But I now remember moments of gratitude and joy that mingle with the pain.
My father, mother, and sister in the mid-fifties.
My father taught me to work hard. He was at the newsstand at seven every morning, seven days a week. He came home in the afternoon to manage the morning’s bets on the phone, then returned to work until dinnertime. He so implanted this virtue in me that, late in her life, long after my father died, my mother told me that whenever she thought about me, the first thing to cross her mind was, He’s working. My father’s son.
He taught me to love sports. When I was a little boy, he bought me an expensive baseball glove he could ill afford and played catch with me in the front yard of whichever house we lived in. He regularly took me to games at Gilmore Field in West Hollywood to watch the Hollywood Stars, a Pittsburgh Pirates’ farm team. And of course he took me to the races, at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park. When I was four or five, he asked me what horse I liked and I picked number four, a horse named On Trust who (unlike all those other Paul Reveres) actually won. Evidently my betting instinct was exceptional: years later when I took my own kids to the track, the featured race at Santa Anita that afternoon was the On Trust Handicap to honor a horse who had gone on to become a racing great.
My father loved Becky from the first time I brought her home when we were dating as teenagers. Hers was a name he’d never heard, so for all the years he knew her, he called her Betsy. And he loved our children. I often wondered, as he bought them excessive gifts and played with them easily and doted on them, why it was only late in life that he showed such paternal tenderness.
I don’t remember my father ever telling me that he loved me. I certainly never wrapped my arms around him, as my grown son now does with me, and said, I love you, Pop. But now I often smile at the photo of him I keep on my dresser. As I approach eighty-one I realize that what I’m left with is a bruised love for him, but love nonetheless.
My mom and dad with the five of us, from the mid-fifties.
So since this piece is being posted on Father’s Day, later this afternoon I’ll make my way to the Irish pub next to our gym (note the convenient location for after a workout!), order a tall Guinness, hoist the frosted glass and finally say, I love you, Dad, and Happy Father’s Day.
Blessings,
Rick
Dear Friends,
First and foremost, thank you for finding your way to I’VE BEEN THINKING during the nineteen months I’ve been posting it. The fact that you read it and that many of you write responses is very gratifying and inspires me to go on. You can find all the posts at rickthyne.com.
Second, despite my gratitude and fortitude, my brain needs a rest. So today’s post is my final one until the fall. Then I’ll again publish a post every two weeks, beginning on SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2022. Mark your Sunday-morning calendar!
Finally, I’ve been trying to write about issues that are personally important to me and, at the same time, personally important to you. I would love to hear from you about issues that I’ve missed, problems in your life I haven’t addressed, and public issues that we should not shy away from. I promise to make your thoughts a regular part of my summer reading in preparation for the fall. You can write to me at rickeythyne@gmail.com.
Have a restful, thoughtful summer filled with life’s essentials: love and fun. And now, on to this week's column, in honor of my father.