Belated Father's Day meditations
My father's Five Rules:
- Never eat a seafood salad made with mayonnaise from a restaurant buffet.
- If you regularly carry paper bags full of money at night, always take a different route home.
- No matter what you do in life, no matter how rich or strong or powerful you become, you can never satisfy a woman.
- A cup of coffee is worth a dollar. Nostalgia and a cup of coffee is still only worth a dollar.
- There is always more money to be made.
I knew before anyone ever told me so that my father wasn't my real father, and that someday my people would come to rescue me from a household full of Greeks. The rest of my family would be downstairs eating live animals or giving each other new scars while I hid upstairs in my room reading Isaac Asimov. I was totally Greek except for the R. For most of my childhood my extremely Greek father terrified me, though now I believe that being afraid of him was my own narrative invention and not his purpose. My fear had exactly the same texture and pitch as my feelings when I see a cop in my rearview mirror. I avoided my father the way I avoid the police -- by removing myself from view quietly and without ostentation. I've never forgotten his Five Rules because they were perhaps the only complete sentences he spoke directly to me before I left home for college at seventeen.
My father is a Greek immigrant. In college I took a sociology class with a professor who was also a Greek. I told my professor the Grimm-like story of how my dad left his impoverished mountain village when he was fourteen because his father (a tailor) couldn't feed him; he spent ten years foraging for jobs in Athens and traveling with the Merchant Marines (where he ate larvae in India, adopted a dog in China, and saw Beirut, which he says was the most beautiful city in the world at that time). He came to live with his sister in Virginia at 23, met my mother -- a divorced American woman with a child (me) -- and married her in church a year later. My professor told me that this story was unique in his experience with Greeks. Greek men of my father's generation did not marry divorced American single mothers. Marrying foreigners was simply not done -- they rarely even wed outside their own villages. "Your dad is an iconoclast," he said. "Truly his own man. He must really love you and your mother."
That possibility had never occured to me.
My father bought his own business and worked every day of the year except Christmas Day, Superbowl Sunday, and the one week of our annual summer vacation, which we always spent at Disney World. He always carried a wad of cash the size of a small cabbage. He gambled whenever possible but I never saw him take a drink. He put all five of us through expensive private colleges. We each had our own cars, our own bedrooms, closets filled with silk and sports equipment. In photograps he is always surrounded by his children. We climb over him and walk on his bare back. He lies patiently on his back on the beach while we cover him from neck to toe with a mound of dark wet sand (he must have found a metaphor there). We walk arm-in-arm with him, or he carries us on his shoulders. We are all piled on the couch together.
Yet I remember how I looked forward to the day when he would be a lonely old man with no one to love him or take care of him. He would come to my house begging for affection and I would turn him away.
I pined for my real father, who I believed had been pushed out of my life by a monstrous imposter. When I walked down any street in Richmond I sought the male face that matched mine.
When my father comes to visit me now, he walks around the Strip District filling his arms with produce and all the different kinds of honey he can find and all the feta and bread he can carry. When I come home from work he has dinner ready. My apartment smells like olives, lemons, garlic and mint. After dinner we talk for hours. He complains that I don't have TV or air conditioning. I love him. I'm relieved when he goes back home to Richmond, where he spends most of his days taking care of his grandsons and talking about how rich he was in the 80's. My sisters, who have to deal with him every day, call him Captain Asshole. Tina says, "He would make a perfect has-been actor."
About four years ago, I had breakfast with my father at our family's restaurant in Richmond. Usually when we are in the restaurant no one in my family can sit down to enjoy a meal; my father rushes us through it so we can release the table to paying customers. This particular breakfast was different for two reasons: 1) he no longer owned the restaurant, having handed it over to my brother six months earlier; 2) he had just gotten out of jail.
He'd served four months of a six-month sentence for contempt of court. He was in contempt of court for fleeing the country to avoid paying alimony to my mother. He'd fled to Greece; he missed his hometown, a hick town in the mountains near the Meteoras, where he had often returned during his heyday, bearing color TVs and cases of Tylenol and AA batteries to distribute among the women who had raised him (his own mother had died when he was a toddler). For the alimony-flight, he had boarded the plane dressed in hiking clothes, with thirty thousand dollars taped to his midriff.
We're unclear about what happened to the money. We know he spent some of it on night vision goggles and equipment to detect buried metals. He had fallen in with an unfunded crowd of treasure-seekers who claimed that during WWII, the British RAF had dropped several cases of gold into the mountains around his hometown. These crates were intended for paratroopers, who would sail down out of the sky, locate the gold, and use it to transact various Allied missions. My father -- did I mention that he had suffered a brain tumor the previous year? -- was convinced, and remains convinced to this day, that the gold had been discovered by farmers and "poor Greek mountain bastards", and was hidden in hollows and dells all over the countryside. He and his pals -- one of whom was codenamed "The Information" -- had to find the gold before the Authorities found it. They had to seek it at night, under cover of darkness, so no one would know what they were doing, because if the Authorities knew that they'd found it they would confiscate the gold and put it in a museum.
So he sought buried gold in the dark with four or five other guys. He spent all his folding money. My brother refused to send him more. He took a break from treasure-hunting to replenish his savings by selling hot dogs on the beach in Rhodes. That was the summer of 2001. By mid-September, the tourists were all gone and he was shivering under a blanket in cut-rate hotel room. "It was too cold to even watch TV," he said.
All this time, my mother had been looking for him. My mother is as rich as Croesus; she was relentless in her pursuit of my father, an exercise that for her had little to do with getting her alimony and was entirely about bringing a wicked man to Justice. She finally tracked him down and lured him back to the states with Clytemnestra-like cunning. She spoke gently to him on the phone in his cold hotel room. She said they could work it out. She promised to send him a plane ticket home if he promised to use it, and soon afterwards a slim FedEx package arrived in Rhodes containing the slick airline envelope and two hundred dollars in fresh crisp bills. "The smell of American money," my father said, "is like nothing else in this world. As soon as I saw the money I knew I was doomed." He flew home; my mother met him at the airport and immediately bought him new clothes at the airport mall. She took him to her house on Sandbridge beach and fed him steak and wine. While he was digesting in front of the television, she slipped out onto the deck with a pack of Merits and her cell phone and cooly dialed the police. They took him away to jail in handcuffs, and that was that.
Even before he fled the country, he had handed away most of his fortune to my brother, to keep it safe from my mother and her lawyers. Now, out of jail, he had nothing to his name except a pair of carpet slippers and the clothes my mother had bought him before she had him arrested. He seemed unconcerned. He was starved for talk; he had talked to me for six hours straight the previous day, his first day out, stopping only because he was too hoarse to continue. I filled twenty pages of my journal with notes about the alleged location of the buried gold, drawings of the layout of the jail, character sketches of the prisoners he had befriended and the women who had written to him proposing marriage, and his detailed plans for revenge against my mother
When I met him for breakfast the next morning I thought he'd rush us through it as usual, but instead he lingered. He was concerned about my brother; he was worried that Michael wanted to be everyone's friend, and that the other Greeks would take advantage of him. I took more notes. Apropos of generalities about following in your father's footsteps, he said something that made me put down my pen.
"You need to meet your father," he said. "No one should go through life without meeting your father."
"I know, Dad. I think about it sometimes."
"You have to look that man in the face before he dies."
"Did you ever meet him?"
"Sure I met him. When you were a baby I met him once when he came to visit you."
"I didn't know he ever visited me."
"He only did the one time. He was smarter than everybody. He knew to get away from your mother and stay the hell away from her."
"It used to be that I was afraid to meet him because I thought I'd disappoint him. Now I think he'd disappoint me."
"Of course he'll disappoint you! He's a coward! I tell you what, I'll invite him here for lunch. I'll make the arrangements. I'll buy him lunch and I'll shake that sonofabitch's hand."
"I wonder if I can get some money out of him."
"You don't need his money. You are my daughter. You'll make your own money."
I never did meet my real father. Who needs a real father when you've got a perfectly good folkloric father?