I’ve been watching the Showtime show, Californication, on my iPhone lately—I started on my way out to LA a couple of weeks ago, and I’m making my way through its first season. It’s the story of a novelist, Hank Moody, from New York who moves to LA with his girlfriend, Karen, and their daughter, Becca. Once the trio are relocated, Hank’s best novel is turned into a hugely successful but crummy movie, and he and his girlfriend break up, and she gets engaged to a rich (and responsible, but also pompous and priggish) guy with a beautiful house.
Hank, who is roguish and irresponsible but basically a good person, desperately wants to win her back. But until he can, he sleeps with pretty much every woman who crosses his path. It’s an explicit show, with lots of explicit sex, and I love it, though not necessarily for that reason. Underneath its shocking elements, it’s actually very romantic. It advocates the old-fashioned notion that writing still matters. That’s romantic. Plus, Hank really does love Karen, though, as a novelist, he struggles to create the structure in his life to match that of Karen’s new partner. And he has a wonderful relationship with his daughter, Becca, who would very much like to see her parents reunite. Hank and Becca talk; they fight sometimes; when Becca cuts loose with the occasional swear word, Hank charges her a buck.
Yesterday evening I watched an episode called “California Son.” In the episode, Hank is devasted by the death of his father, Al Moody. Al wasn’t a perfect dad. He cheated on Hank’s mother. He aged into a dirty old man. He could be cruel, and knew just how to push his son’s buttons. He loved his son, but rarely showed it.
Yet when Al dies, Hank plunges into a depression. He finds himself snorting lines of coke off a hooker’s bare back in a cheap hotel room, and, when he doesn’t have the cash to pay her for services rendered, winds up beaten by her pimp. He is mad at his father, and doesn’t want to attend the funeral. But after he receives a letter from his father, postmarked before Al’s death, he changes his mind. Karen is present when Hank receives the letter, and she reads it to him.
It says,
To my son the writer,
Something I never said too much—I love you—my father never said it much either. I thought I’d be different, but I guess I’m not. I tried but somewhere along the line I guess you slip back into what you know, and I’m sorry about that. And I’m sorry we haven’t talked in a while because I miss you. You’re a good kid and a funny kid…. I said I never read you books but I lied, I read ’em all, I just didn’t know how to talk about them with you. I didn’t like the fathers in them. I know you writers take liberties, but I was afraid that maybe you didn’t take any at all. But that’s the thing. Boys become men and men become husbands and fathers and we do the best we can. You’re doing the best you can. You’ve done good, your books will be in libraries long after we’re both gone and this is important. More important is how you treat your family. I wasn’t a perfect husband but I loved your mother and I’m glad we spent our lives together. And I’m here if you need me. That’s all I wanted to say. Love, your old man.
As I watched the scene, I realized that I was having trouble breathing and tears were rolling down my face. Fathers, letters, love, death. These are powerful things.
My own father never said “I love you” to me. Didn’t mean that he didn’t, but that phrase wasn’t in his vocabulary, or at least not with me. He wasn’t much of a talker, and he preferred to communicate via typed letters, which he would sign with a crisp and elegant, “Aff., Dad.”
The hardest stretch in my relationship with my father came a few years back, when I decided to change my surname, “Blow,” to my mother’s maiden name, Bradley. It was, of course, my father’s name, the name of an old and proud family, but it had long been for me, a writer and, in a very small way, a public person, something of a burden. I don’t need to get into why, that’s a longer story, except to say that my decision was never meant as a commentary on my father.
For many years, I had put off making the change because I was afraid of his reaction. I knew he would take it personally. Though it had nothing to do with him, he would think it had everything to do with him. He was proud that his son was a writer; proud that I was carrying on his profession; came from a generation in which people didn’t do such things. I knew he would be hurt, and when my father felt hurt, his instinct was to inflict an equal or greater level of pain on the person who had hurt him. Obviously, it wasn’t his finest quality, but like all of us, he was human and imperfect.
I tried to communicate with my father in a way that he would understand. I sat—for weeks, a month—and wrote him a letter. It was about 40 pages long, and it was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever written. (Hard writing is not about technique; it’s about finding the strength to give voice to things that you are afraid to say.) It had two goals: to announce that I had reached a moment of psychological independence, and to assure that such independence did not mean rejection, but, in the best case scenario, might promote greater understanding, maybe even a stronger bond between father and son.
I called to tell my father that there was something I had to talk to him about and he’d be receiving a long letter in the mail. That’s fine, he said. Anything you want to talk about is fine. I think he thought that I was about to tell him that I was gay, and I thought, wow, if that were what I was disclosing, he sounds like he’d take it pretty well.
He didn’t take the actual news so well, though. He wrote back saying that I could not know how much pain I had caused him. He suggested, among other things, that it would be better had I never been born—better, in fact, if I had been aborted.
And the thing is, I was okay with that. Reading the worst is far less anxiety-inducing than fearing it. I’d spent years preparing for this moment, and I knew that my father would lash out because he did not know how else to express himself, and I knew that his lashing out would be proportional to his caring. And so I wrote back and I told him that I was not going to get angry at him. I told him that he was my father and I was his son and nothing would change that, whatever my name was. I tried to tell him that I loved him, and I tried to show that love through understanding.
Because part of growing up is working to understand your parents and forgive them the things that they did or do wrong, because it doesn’t mean that they don’t love you and sometimes it shows how much they do. And I hoped that my father could see that his son had grown up.
As my father grew sicker in recent years, I wondered if he would express himself more, if he would open up and share thoughts about his life, his feelings, about life itself. He did not, and there came a time when I realized that even if he had the desire to do so, he no longer had the motor skills with which to articulate such thoughts. How can you reflect on life when just to give breath to a sentence requires intense, exhausting concentration? And who knows how his Parkinson’s disease affected his ability to think?
In the numb hours after my father’s death, when random thoughts come into one’s head, one of my siblings wondered if my father had left any letters for us, his three children—thoughts that maybe he did not want to say while he was alive.I thought about the possibility and answered, “I doubt it.” It would be out of character for him to wax philosophical, and my father was nothing if not consistent. He had other ways to express his feelings. He brought his kids up in wonderful homes. He believed in education, and though not a wealthy man, sent three children to private schools and then Yale. He tried to teach us what he thought was important, and he lived a life that reflected the values that he thought mattered and endured. One could do far worse.
Sons learn from their fathers. They incorporate some teachings, and some they change.
A week ago, I had lunch with a reader of this blog, a man about 40 years older than I for whom I have immense respect. He said that he enjoyed the blog, but was sometimes surprised by how personal it is.
I had a long drive ahead of me, and my thoughts were on many things, and at the time, I could not entirely answer the question implicit in his remark. Probably I still haven’t. But this is an attempt: The truth is, I think, that as scary as it is to say personal things, the idea of not saying them scares me more. And I am a writer, as was my father, and so I write.
My dad died one month ago. This morning, the sun is shining, and the season is changing, and sometimes I worry that I am forgetting the sound of his voice.
