Becoming Dad

There isn’t a photo for this entry because I don’t have a single image of my father with me here in Vietnam. Not sure I could put my hands on one even if I were in the States. He died in 1994, and today I find myself thinking about him. I just saw “The Good Shepherd” with my Pre-intermediate class at Vincom Tower (I hope they forgive me, as they probably found it incomprehensible, even with the Vietnamese subtitles which were as accurately done as possible). The father-son relationship in that film might be what got me thinking about Dad, or it might be what’s going on these days.
I shouldn’t have written ‘today I find myself thinking about him’, as not a day goes by that I don’t think about him. In fact, I talk to him. I’ve developed kind of a complex, this notion that he’s in heaven watching everything I do, coaching me even though I can’t hear him, cheering my successes (few they may be), and shouting at me for my failures (piling up daily) – just the way he used to shout at the New York Giants or the New York Rangers every time they blew a game. This week, I imagine my father experienced something akin to watching the NY Giants make it all the way to the Superbowl, only to lose in the last few minutes of the game. If they have beer in heaven, he’s probably drunk. If angels can cry, then he’s probably weeping.
My father died because his second wife left him. I have no doubt in my mind about this. He was taken by throat cancer, of a hereditary variety unrelated to cigarette smoking. I know it’s unrelated to cigarette smoking, because in 1994 I went to a doctor to ask for the patch, and this overly curious physician asked me why I wanted to quit. I told him about my father’s cancer, and this genius of a doctor said, “Oh, well, that’s a lousy reason to quit. That kind of cancer isn’t smoking related.” So, yes, it was the cancer, but it was the divorce that gave him the cancer.
My father loved his second wife more than he loved his first wife, my mother. As I recall it, that relationship was the great love of my father’s life. Although I was his first born son, and his only son for sixteen years, my brother Jesse was the child he loved most. By the time Jesse was born, I was a teenage punk who had no time for his father. By then, his bitter quarrels over money with my mother had all but petered out, and my father was living far from where we were in Brooklyn, and he and his second wife and perfect little baby were the ideal family.
I don’t know how he showed it to me, and I do remember that they fought often, but I know my father loved his second wife deeply. My father and stepmother had plenty of bitter quarrels when I was around. My father had a bad temper. I think he was the jealous type, too. But despite all this fighting, it never looked to me like the kind of fighting he used to do with my mother. Somehow, I knew my father loved his second wife more than anyone or anything in the world.
My father was a road salesman, which doesn’t mean he sold roads, but means instead that he had to travel to do his work. He sold bridal gowns and bridesmaid dresses, and his territory was the Southwest of the United States. For three months at a time, his work called him away, and then he’d have three months at home to do nothing but play tennis, watch football on TV, and love his little son. But for three months at a time, he left his beautiful wife at home alone to fend for herself, while he went off to make money. I remember him telling me that in the good years he was making about 100,000 USD a year. But he had to travel and work hard to make that money, and I know he missed his wife. She was a nurse, and tall, and thin, and beautiful. Maybe I was in love with her too, in the way little boys have.
I have no insight into what their relationship was like. When they got divorced, I remember my stepmother telling me it was because my father wasn’t romantic and, of course, she mentioned the long periods away from home. Now, everything she had – her beautiful house, her car, her jewelry, her clothes, all came from those road trips. But that didn’t seem to matter. If someone who knew told me my father was a bad lover, I’d have no trouble believing it. The non-romantic thing I don’t doubt for a second. That he was gone for long stretches of time is a matter of record. That he might not have shown his wife the love I know he felt for her would not surprise me. But I know he did everything he possibly could for her. He did his best.

My stepmother was a nurse, working in a hospital. I suppose I’ve grown up with the notion that while nurses do critically important work for the sick and they dying and the injured, their secondary function is to provide targets for the flirtations and romantic advances of doctors. I would not fall in love with a nurse for all the money in the world, no doubt because both of the women who married my father – my mother and stepmother – were nurses. Both of those women are now married to doctors.
I remember getting a phone call from my father. It was late at night. My father had just returned from a road trip. He wasn’t supposed to get into contact with me until the next day. He was weeping, and he told me that my stepmother had been seeing a doctor from her hospital behind his back. Cheating on him. In fact, my father’s neighbor had said that this doctor had pretty much been living in my father’s house. Maybe he even said something about my baby brother Jesse referring to this doctor guy as “Dad.” I had never heard my father cry before.
Because I write so damn much, most of my memories are more like stories nowadays, but as I recall this story, I immediately started begging and pleading with my father to pick me up and let me go with him to fight this guy. To kill him. I was crying too, by then, and the only thing I could imagine that might possibly fix this in some way, would be to kill that guy. I don’t remember how the story ended, but we never went to kill that guy. There was a lot of useless rage on our parts, but in the end, there was no action we could have taken that would have changed things.
After the divorce, my father was never the same. He never talked about it, but he also never dated another woman. And he changed. He was angry all the time, except when he was sad. He began going to the racetrack to bet on horse races. All the time. He spent all his time, and all his money, betting on horse racing. He smoked more. Ate less. He wasn’t much fun to be around.
My father, for whatever reasons, had chosen to marry this woman. He’d given her everything he possibly could, taken care of her as best as he was able, and I know he would have done so forever. My father’s mission in life at that point was to be the best father he possibly could to his second son, and I’m sure he was trying to be a good husband at the same time.
When he got the cancer, I don’t think he much bothered to do anything about it until it was way too late. He died, bitter and angry, without forgiving anyone. Towards the end of his life, he’d made friends with some rich guy – he owned a chain of bagel stores – and whatever money my father hadn’t gambled away, he spent trying to hang out with this rich guy. In the end, when my father was dying in the hospital, he never wanted to speak to me. He always asked for this guy. I left the two of them to whatever they had together.
I remember that at the funeral, this guy said some stupid things to me. I wanted to kill him. But I didn’t. I just walked away.
A short time later, I got it in my head that I would try to visit my brother on occassion. But everytime I got near him, all I could think about was punching my brother’s stepfather in the face, so eventually I gave up the notion of going to my brother’s house. Funny, the last time I went to visit him, my brother was pretty close to graduating from High School. He’s gotten so tall, and so big, and so strong, that if I had punched my brother’s step-father in the face, my own brother probably would have kicked my ass. Ironic, that.
The last time I saw her, my stepmother had all but lost her mind. She’d become one of those freaky weird people who believe in all kinds of supernatural things, always talking about ghosts and spirits and Jesus Christ, and just completely off her rocker. She told me that she received frequent visits from my father’s ghost. I tried to make a joke. I recall, and hope it’s true, that I said, “Funny, he never visits me, and I didn’t divorce him to marry some fucking doctor.” She said that not only did he visit her all the time, but that he gave her advice. Most importantly, he told her that he’d forgiven her. When she said that, I wanted to punch her in the face. I didn’t, of course, because I don’t hit women, certainly don’t hit either of my mothers, and, in point of fact, never hit anyone. I just spend a lot of time wanting to hit certain people at certain times, and never doing it. I don’t know if that makes me a good man with a lot of self-control, or if it just makes me a coward.
Reationships end exactly like lives – in one of two ways. The first way is suddenly, furiously. Like a car accident, or a horrific act that cannot be forgiven. The second way is slowly, cancerously, as things just deteriorate and get worse and worse over time until the love is gone and pain, despair, and mutal dislike finally convince one or the other of the people involved to just end it. In general, people believe quick deaths are the best. Lingering, dying slowly with cancer, is terrible. And many people will tell you that nothing is worse than living through a relationship that has become, or is slowly becoming, loveless.
I used to agree. But now I’m not so sure anymore. My father’s drawn out death from cancer gave me a long time to get used to the idea that soon he would be gone. I recall that I was at the hospital, and the doctor said that on that day they would take my father off his morphine, and he would die, from the pain as much as anything else. But because he would be off the morphine, he and I could have a final, sane conversation, the next morning. Instead, my father died at 4 a.m. They called me at home. “Hello, Mr. Soffer,” they said. “Yes,” I said. “Your father died a few minutes ago.” I think I said, “Thank you for letting me know.” I hung up the phone and, I imagine, went back to sleep eventually.
And as far as relationships go, I’m sure I don’t agree. Sure, it’s terrible to be next to someone you don’t really love anymore for a long time but, at least when the end comes, you’re happy it’s over. You feel this tremendous relief and sense of freedom.
On the other hand, sometimes the end of the relationship comes suddenly, in the midst of still being in love. Like it happened to my father, that second time. Someone tells you your wife or girlfriend is seeing someone else, and everything you had that mattered to you a second before, is gone in an instant. Gravity suddenly starts emanating from your chest instead of from the Earth, and you feel this tremendous pressure, this grinding sense that everything is collapsing on top of you. And when the pressure eases, there’s nothing left. All that gravity has sucked up everything, and when you look around you, the world is a wasteland. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, and every action seems without purpose. How do you go on the road for three months to sell wedding dresses, when there’s no one going to be there when you get home? How do you cook breakfast, if there’s no one else to eat it? Why watch a TV show, if there’s no one to talk to about it with after it ends? Maybe you realize that there is one thing left to do – you can kill that guy. That doctor who just had to flirt with that nurse. Or whoever he is. But then you realize you can’t do that. You can’t do it because you’re still bound by the chains of civilization. You can’t do it because the repercussions of committing murder are pretty serious. Or maybe you can’t do it, just because you’re a coward.
My father was a warrior. He played high school and University football (I’m talking about American football here, where you have to be 200+ pounds to play, and your job is to smash other people who are likewise 200+ pounds). He would have been a professional football player after University, if not for bad luck in the form of a broken leg received in a game late in his last season of University ball. That my father could have killed this doctor guy had they fought is not in question. But he didn’t. I recall he said, “What’s the point, son?” So maybe it wasn’t just the divorce but rather the way a man feels when he feels like a coward, that gave my father that cancer.
When a relationship ends slowly through a long series of arguments as the love dies, it doesn’t leave any pain in its wake. All the pain is spent during the arguing in the weeks, months, or even years leading up to the break-up. But when someone you love says, “Sorry, your love isn’t worth anything,” they’re basically saying that you aren’t worth anything. They render the verdict that you’re utterly worthless, and you can’t prove them wrong. The whole world looks at you thinking, “Hmmm, wonder why his wife did that to him? Must be something wrong with him.”
In the end, it’s clear my father died because his second wife left him. This doesn’t mean she killed him though. Ultimately, we can’t really ask a second person to be responsible for us. My father could have chosen to be strong, to find someone else, to move on. He could have let the feelings of loss, and the feelings of cowardice go. But he didn’t. Because he loved this woman, because everyting he did in every waking moment of his life was ultimately for her, there was just nothing left to live for after she gave her heart, and his son, to another man. My father died, ultimately, of a broken heart.
Now, I imagine, he’s up in heaven with nothing better to do than to watch and see how my life turns out. I like to think that at least over the last few years I’ve put on a few interesting shows for him, and have given him a few things to be pretty proud of. At any rate, I hope he knows how much I miss him.
And I hope he takes some pleasure from knowing that I grew up to be just like him.

Love

Young people often ask me questions about love.  Apparently, being a fairly old guy who has lived on both sides of the planet gives me some expertise on the subject.  Or maybe people just ask everyone and anyone about love, letting all the opinions they get bubble around in their brain with all the quixotic unfinality of a sunspot.  I don’t know.  They ask though, and so I have to give them answers.

The most important thing, of course, is to separate love from physical attraction.  Thinking someone is hot is not love.  I wouldn’t call it ‘lust’ as that word has such a negative connotation, and being attracted to hot looking people is hardly negative; in fact, it’s quite natural.  But thinking someone is hot is definitely not love, even if you hook up with this hot person and start taking them out for ice cream.

Some people think that love means wanting to be beside someone forever.  Not being able to imagine being without them, let’s say.  This isn’t love either.  This is the state of affairs that arises when the feeling that person B is hot combines with person A’s own insecurities and fear of being alone.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that all the romantic notions of what love might be – the sense of wanting to be with someone forever, the sense that someone is more important to us than we are to ourselves, the belief that we would readily sacrifice our lives for this other person – all of these romantic notions are born of passion, not love.

At this stage of my life, I’ve come to believe that Love is a decidedly unromantic emotion, one that most closely resembles committment.  Love means saying that this one other human being will be important to me, and will continue to be important to me, regardless of circumstances both external to the relationship and internal to it.  It is a decision to place upon another person an importance that we will not allow to change regardless of their behavior or actions.  In other words, we say, “This is My partner” and we leave it at that.  Through an act of will, we don’t allow ourselves to have or desire other partners and we don’t change our way of viewing this other person, regardless of the circumstances that arise, either through third-party forces, or through this person’s own actions.

Now, you may be thinking that I’m crazy.  I mean, if you love someone and they start treating you like garbage, obviously the logical thing to do is to stop loving them.  But in my opinion, you can’t do that.  If you’re able to stop loving them, then it wasn’t love.  It was that business from a few paragraphs above, where you think this person is really hot.  If you’re just attracted to someone – physically or emotionally – then it’s reasonably easy to stop.  Love, though, comes from you.  It’s your permanent committment to this person.

My definition of love explains a lot of strange cases that don’t stand up when only the “he/she’s really hot” factor is at work.  For example, we see many couples where there is a radical age difference, or one of the parties in the couple is quite unattractive by even the most forgiving of standards.  Yet somehow, they appear to love each other.  More telling, however, is the case where a love continues regardless of circumstances that would clearly put an end to any affection born of lesser emotions.  For example, the case where a man goes to prison and his wife remains faithful and devoted to him through all the years they are apart, and regardless of the crime of which he was accused.  And most telling of all is the case where one of the parties to a couple decides to leave the other, to break-up, to end the relationship, and the other party in the couple just goes on loving that person, waiting for them to come back, wishing nothing but the best for the person.

This kind of love is very hard for those who have never experienced it to understand.  We meet someone who is in love with someone who doesn’t care about him/her, has already abandoned him/her, has already gotten involved with someone else, and yet our friend continues to love that person.  Our friend has flipped some kind of mental switch, pushed some kind of mental button, and made the irreversible and unchanging decision that they love that person.  Circumstances notwithstanding.

When time apart, when distance apart, when the actions and behaviors of the other party have no affect whatsoever on our feelings, that, perhaps, is love.  It’s extremely rare, as people will tell anyone in this state or condition that they are crazy.  “Get over it,” they’ll say.  “She’s gone.”  “Move on, man.”  Stuff like that.

What they don’t understand is that this kind of love is not connected in any way to the actuality of the person.  It’s connected to their potentiality – to what they could have been, to what the relationship could have been like, if things had gone better.

We do terrible things to the people we love.  We disappoint them, we abandon them, we hurt them through our actions, and often we effect their psychology without even knowing we’re doing it.  We plant little seeds in their minds through the things we say and through our actions, and when those seeds take route and sprout into nasty weeds, we blame everyone but ourselves.

Love requires a gentle hand, a steadiness of purpose, a conviction of its justifications, and, most of all, a committment to its permanency.  Fireworks are just passion.  Tear-filled lonely nights are just insecurity.  True love, if it exists, is rock steady, unchanging, and unassailable.

True love then is also, perhaps, sometimes a very, very lonely thing.

Life used to be incredibly boring.  Get up, go to work, come home, hit the internet, watch some TV, moan and groan about how I should do some writing, or do some exercise, and then go to sleep.  Boring.  Chan wa.  To spice it up, I did what everybody does these days: I played video games!  I had an X-Box and a Playstation 2 and a computer.  I loved Soul Calibur for the Playstation, Halo for the X-Box, and Diablo for my computer.  Hacking, slashing, fighting, shooting, killing, spinning, flipping, diving.  I was a lord of pixelized blood-shedding, a master of carnage, a crier of havoc who would let slip the digital dogs of war at the drop of a hat.

When I didn’t feel like wasting any electricity, I played pencil and paper role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.  For years, from the comfort of some friend’s or other’s dining room table, I travelled the myriad planes of existence, slid along sidereal timelines, teleported into foreboding castles, and put coutnless – and I mean countless – servants of evil to the sword.

As I look back on things, I realize that given the number of times I was personally involved with saving the universe, it’s amazing I ever had time to go to University or become a teacher.

However, even with all of those entertainment outlets, it somehow wasn’t enough to fill the mammoth vats of full time I seemed to have, so I also read comic books.  By the hundreds.  Every month.  Spiderman.  X-Men.  Avengers.  Thor.  Iron Man.  Captain America.  Dozens of others.  When I wasn’t saving the Universe myself, I saved it vicariously through some superhero or other.  Very little of my free time was spent doing anything other than saving the Universe, which is ok since, obviously, saving the Universe is important.

Then I came to Vietnam.  I haven’t played a video game, or a role-playing game, or read a comic book since.  And yet, I feel my life is filled with more adventure than it ever was before.  Somehow, when you live all your life in one place, it tends to become extra-ordinarily mundane and sedate.  My life was completely lacking in adventure, so I had to russle up imaginary adventure whenever I could and however I could.  Here in Vietnam, though, it’s completely different.  Once I hop on my motorbike, the adventure begins.  Everywhere I go is filled with excitement, every street I drive down filled with the immediate peril of annihilation in a head-on collision.

As everyone knows, no one saves the Universe out of altruism.  Heroes save the Universe for the chicks.  For the imperlied princesses, imprisoned goddesses, unfairly treated fairies, and fallen angels.  And Hanoi is filled with these.  A princess on every Piaggio as it were.

The thought this leaves me with is that everyone who spends huge amounts of time playing games should make certain to take a step back long enough to do a quick check and make sure that they haven’t stopped living their real lives.  If Hanoi has taught me one thing it’s that you can miss a lot of adventure and excitement sitting on your living room couch.

I love my life in Hanoi, because it’s like something you might read about in a book.  It’s a pretty cool thing when you do a little self-analysis and realize that you’ve become … almost anyway … an action hero!  And if not an action hero, then at least an explorer or adventurer.

Now, where’d I leave that sword…?

The Best People – the big D-Fatty

I want to talk about the Big D-Fatty.  When it comes to D-Fatty, I have a lot to say.  D-Fatty is not only the nicest but also the sweetest person I know (well, one of them anyway).  She’s also brilliant.  A gifted English student with a real knack for business.  She’s also not fat, so I have no idea how she got the name D-Fatty.  She’s actually an aerobics teacher so she could kick your butt.

I cant’say enough about the big D-Fatty.  I like her so much I wasn’t even upset when she decided to moonlight – which means go to work for another company while she’s still on my payroll.  Here’s an exciting photo of her working her side gig.

I hope she doesn’t leave my company permanently.  Maybe I will have to buy her a uniform as cool as this one.   D-Fatty, please don’t leave us and take a new job!!!!

Housekeeper Woes

Hanoi is a very romantic city.  I have some vague recollection that back in NY, no one ever fell in love with anyone.  I heard about new relationships very infrequently.  In my hazy recollections of times past, NY seems a particularly unromantic place.  Of course, I could be wrong.  Maybe people were falling in love with each other all the time in the city that never sleeps, and I just wasn’t paying attention.  At any rate, Hanoi is the opposite.

 Hanoi is a very romantic city.  As near as I can tell, everybody is falling in or out of love with somebody, and this brings me to my housekeeper.  We’ll call her K.  Since January, K has been doing a reasonably good job keeping my room clean.  Certainly cleaner than it would have been if I’d been left to clean it on my own.  I like K.  She’s pretty cool.  She can’t speak English, but I can speak pretty passable Vietnamese, so we get along OK.  Anyway, I enjoyed believing that cleaning my room was the central focus of K’s existence, and so I was shocked, really shocked, to learn that K had gotten herself a new boyfriend.  And not just any boyfriend … I hear her boyfriend might be a foreigner! 

Is everyone dating a foreigner?

I’m happy for K, and I hope her relationship works out well.  I am, however, terrorized by the prospect that K will be so lost in romance and passion that she’ll forget to do my laundry.  I trust K, so I’m farily confident that her new boyfriend won’t end up wearing my best shirts or anything.  My only real concern is that my room will go from mostly clean to not really very clean at all. 

Well, I wish K the best.  I hope she has lots of fun.  After she does the laundry, that is.