I am at a House of Pancakes, in downtown Los Angeles, long after dark. It is 1984. Crying into the pay phone, I reach only an answering machine, so I ramble. People stare.
I turn away to face the window and watch a policeman walk toward me in its reflection. He stands respectfully away and waits until his large presence forces me to turn toward him. “You OK?” he asks. I nod “yes” and try to pull myself together. He lingers.
Finally I hang up the phone and get in my car.
I don’t head to my studio apartment in the Fairfax district. Instead I wind and curve my way over the late night and empty freeways: one hour to home.
When I get there, my parents’ car is in the driveway.
The front door opens before I’m out of my Datsun. My father is home.
He walks me in and watches the meltdown.
“You were right — I need to work at Lockheed!” I said.
He had wanted me, with my English undergraduate degree tucked in the crook of my arm, to be an aerospace technical writer: great pay, respectable benefits, job security, the whole shebang. He had wanted me to talk with his friends — tech writers at Lockheed, Hughes Aircraft, Mac-Dac.
I was having none of it. “I’m going to graduate school to study writing,” I said and proceeded to jump every hurdle along the way starting with him.
“Who ever heard of that?” he said. I ignored him.
“How you going to pay for it? he said. “I’ll work 8 to 5 on campus.”
“The commute is too long,” he said. “I’ll move closer,” I said.
“Your car will still never make it,” he said, “I’ll change the oil more often.” I said. And around and around we went.
He thought I wasn’t experienced enough, or solvent enough, to “be a writer.”
In retrospect, I don’t blame him. At the time I didn’t blame him either; I just ignored him and bulldozed my way — one evening class a semester, paid for by working on campus in a full-time position.
My first class, Dramatic Structure, had already met, and I needed an idea for a one-act play. I was to spend the semester writing it, and then audition actors to perform it. The professor handed each student the authority of a writer — and demanded we rise with a voice.
I sunk. For a week, each time an idea took hold in my brain, I rejected it as not good enough. By the time I pulled into that House of Pancakes, all my compunction was gone. I was empty of chutzpah and go-get-’em. I was unraveling like a spool gone downhill. I was afraid and running home.
Once inside, my dad sat me down and listened. I said that he was right — I wasn’t smart enough to have anything to say, working all day left me too tired to write, I needed a better job and a reliable car. My mother poured him a glass of wine.
When I paused, he spoke. I expected rational plans, how he’d help me move out of the studio, how I would keep the day job until something in his aerospace world came open, how at-least-I-gave-it-a-shot.
Instead I got a surprising huff of derision at the suggestion that I had nothing to say. “We all have something to say.” He began to speak about our family, of generations, of small and large triumphs, troubles, turns of fate and twisted endings. He began to tell me stories to remind me they were my own.
I slept at home that night. Very early in the morning my dad changed the oil in my car and told me yet again about a Jiffy Lube on Sixth and La Brea. But, my brain was clicking with play possibilities. He replaced the cap, told me to watch the odometer, and sighed.
All good fathers are full of huff and puff and blow. It’s what they do — test the houses their children are attempting to build on thin air, urging them instead toward solid ground.
But when their advice isn’t heeded, and the gales hit, when flimsy structures lean and creak, fathers are there, breath held for the time being, to assure us we can do our own shoring up, to assure us our foundation is strong after all.
Happy Father’s Day.
