The Man in the Red Car
Many years ago, I applied to film school and was invited for an interview. The director of the program welcomed me into a conference room and introduced me to her colleagues before they took turns asking questions about the origin of my interest in film, the particular movies that most inspired me, my aesthetic priorities, and so on. They moved on to asking about my background, eventually getting around to my immediate family. I explained that I was raised as an only child by a single-parent mother, that we spent much of my upbringing living with her parents who were something more than grandparents to me, that my mom and her siblings were quintessential California hippies, that my grandmother lived through the Depression in Chicago, that my grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
“What about your father?” the director of the program asked.
“Oh. He’s never really been in the picture,” I said. “He left when I was three and I met him only once during my childhood.”
I could feel a new energy in the room. There was a pause like that tense moment right before the nurse inserts the needle.
“How would you frame your father in a scene in a film?” she asked.
With an encouraging smile, the director of the program waited for me to speak. She had neatly combed straight gray hair and glasses. She was about my mom’s age but stylishly dressed. Shortly after this meeting, she would produce a documentary television series on gay marriages, which was considered trailblazing for its time.
With this question, I was drawing dead. The few details I remembered from the one time meeting my father didn’t exactly rise to the level of the sled in Citizen Kane. My dad was simply a nonfactor in my life, and I had no sadness or resentment about this. But in that moment, in that room, I realized I needed to play ball. I improvised something about framing my father through a window, off in the distance in a yard, the camera positioned in a house creating a boundary that might represent both my dad’s emotional distance from me and his alienation from the domestic space of the family. This was desperate nonsense, but there was a palpable shift in the room at that point. I think I even heard an “mmm” from one of the committee members, and I knew right then that I was so in.
Later, my film school friends and I compared interview notes, and we all had versions of the same story: the director honing in on some nontraditional aspect of our upbringings or some unfortunate circumstances in our lives and then asking us to capture our pain cinematically. My friend Leo, who was raised in Mexico City, described to the committee an image of an exploding car, blown up by a drug cartel, with his uncle inside (it was his cousin’s uncle whom he had never met). We laughed together at our answers, laughed at her, but I think we would all agree now that she was ahead of her time.
Every era has its biographical templates. They help us make one another intelligible while also making an implicit argument about what is most notable in a life. The Odyssey beings with an appeal to the Muse, “Tell me about a complicated man,” and the Homeric epic goes on to present a life as a series of incidents that reflect the shape-shifting nature of one’s journey from birth to death. By contrast, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin offers the influential linear template of life as a series of notable occurrences leading to ultimate success. My film school director was asking applicants to conform their experiences to something now dominant in our culture, the trauma template — the notion that we each have in our past ordeals or losses that not only reveal or even constitute our most interesting and authentic selves, but demand an empathic response from those who hear or read our stories. These stories set out the terms of dramatic conflict in our lives — we’ll either overcome them or be defeated by them, but either way they define us. And these stories should be told.
But I keep going back to my film school interview and what I said about my dad. Personal interest poses a threat to personal truth in the stories we tell about ourselves, and the incentives these days points towards the trauma template. With the recent regrettable Supreme Court decision to gut affirmative action, the New York Times reported that many colleges will consider using Adversity Scores, by which students will be ranked by the disadvantages they have faced. In such an environment, it’s not hard to imagine what types of stories will find their way into personal statements, the template these essays will follow. Some will recount authentic stories of pain and disadvantage, others will talk about an exploding car or a father in a yard seen from inside a house. How will anyone know the difference?
My father is at best a minor character in my life story, and a comic one at that. So here now, as a way of correcting the public record, I want to offer this version of the father who abandoned me, the one who doesn’t make me sad, who didn’t shape the person I am today. I’ve faced some skepticism in the past when presenting this version of my father. “That must have been hard,” I’ve been told. “You must be angry.” What, I want to ask, should my dad have done instead? Everything I’ve learned about him tells me that he would have been a terrible father. The hard truth is that the mistake he made was becoming a father in the first place, and it would seem a bit self-undermining to criticize him for that. Perhaps I should be angry on behalf of my mother who received no child support, or my grandparents who were there to fill in for him. But whatever their motivations, they never spoke an angry word about my dad. My mother has a couple previous marriages hidden in her past that I suspect would fit the trauma template quite authentically, but with my dad, she seemed to enjoy recounting the old days with a wry smile on her face, whether it was time she left me in his care and he accidently set the house on fire, or the time she left me in his care and he accidently set himself on fire. “You really knew how to pick ‘em Jen,” my grandmother liked to say to her daughter.
In high school, my father was a promising football player in rural Arkansas. But he had a habit of no-showing at game time, claiming to have mixed up the days. Granted, Friday Night Lights the book, movie, and television show hadn’t been released when my dad played football, but one might have expected him to notice a certain pattern with respect to when the games were played. My parents met at a Mexican restaurant in Little Rock where he was a manager and my mother was a server. Most of my mother’s income came from her tips, while most of his came from the money he took from the register. This was found out, and after an unceremonious exit from the hospitality industry, my father tried his hand at building management. He saw it as a way of collecting salary without having to do much work. This was a bad fit both for him and the Arkansas renters he managed. Bad for him because there is much work involved with building management, and bad for the tenants because when there was a leaky roof or a broken toilet, he was nowhere to be found. “Your father was always looking for quick buck,” is how my mother would sum up these stories. My father’s father, a hardworking terse man of difficult upbringing, recalled to my mother a single instance when his eldest son applied himself. “It was one summer,” he told her. My dad, the story went, worked regular and overtime hours at a small grocery. His family and friends hardly saw him. At the end of the summer, he turned up at a weekend family dinner as a stop-off before a night on the town to celebrate quitting what he called his miserable job at the grocery. He was dressed in some kind of fancy 1970s button-up shirt with several buttons unbuttoned and, most memorably, a pair of bright white bell-bottoms. My dad’s father quickly did the mental calculations and surmised that his son had spent most of his summer wages on this get-up. Later that night, after who knows how many rounds, my dad threw a dart and missed the dartboard entirely – the projectile boomeranged off the wall and stuck him in the upper thigh. His mother tried, but there was no removing the stain, my grandfather told my mother. The story for him possessed the weight of a Biblical parable.
My mother convinced my father to move out to California with me and her to live near her parents – she told him there would be better job prospects for them there. She was right in her case. He lasted a few months and then moved back to Arkansas for good when I was three, before I could form any solid memories of him. After the divorce, the one time I saw him was during a trip with my mother and grandparents to see relatives in nearby Texas. My mother arranged, probably reluctantly, to drive me to Arkansas to meet my father. The plan was to drop me off in the morning and pick me up before nightfall. My parents exchanged an awkward greeting at the drop-off outside the mobile home that my mother had purchased for both of them a decade ago, where he now lived with his current girlfriend. She informed him that I would need lunch. Had she known that he would have only the dregs of a box of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch to offer, she probably would have fed me beforehand. I don’t remember much about the rest of that day with my dad except the way he drove as he toured me through the small town where he was born and raised — kicked back in the seat, one hand at six o’clock on the steering wheel. He seemed to drive faster on the Arkansas back roads than my mother drove on the 101 freeway.
It wasn’t until a couple of years after I graduated from film school that my father and I connected again. This was during a time when many people of my father’s generation were beginning to experiment with something called the Internet. While a visit or even a phone call to his son had proved too onerous over the years, an email was an easier climb. And his initial email contained surprising news — my father was planning to send me some money. My conjecture then was that he was going through some kind of late mid-life crisis and attempting to make amends. I now know better — I was being recruited. My father had gotten himself mixed up in something called Pure Investor dot com, which Internet historians now generally recognize as the first large-scale Internet pyramid scheme. The outfit was based in Malaysia, and today if you Google “pureinvestor.com” (acronym PIPS for reasons I could never decode), you’ll find an old Guardian article with a photograph of the British husband-and-wife masterminds in handcuffs. Best I can tell, my father was a high-ranking member of PIPS, and he was planning to front me the money so that I could become a member as well. He didn’t so much as ask me to join PIPS as send me a username and password. At the start of my first month as a member, I logged into my Pure Investor account and found that he had indeed deposited a few hundred dollars. He suggested that I leave most of it in the account where it would multiply each month. I was living in New York City at the time with a mattress-on-the-floor type of existence, so I withdrew most of the money immediately. The next month, I logged back into my account to discover that the black magic of the PIPS platform had replenished the money I withdrew and added another hundred. I withdrew it again. This went on for several months. If someone who lost money with Pure Investor dot com is reading this today, I hope it will provide some measure of comfort to know that a group of early twenty-something former humanities majors enjoyed some memorable nights in New York City bars thanks to your venturesome spirit.
One day, two federal agents in suits knocked on my door. I can’t recall if they said they were with the SEC or the FBI, or whether these were local agents who had been farmed out. They assured me my father wasn’t in trouble, they just wanted to ask him some questions about his business connections. I told them the truth, that I had no idea where he was. After the visit from law enforcement, my PIPS account stopped growing money, and I didn’t receive another email from my father for two years. At that time, I was back living in Los Angeles. He informed me that he had an upcoming layover of eight hours at LAX airport before he would board an international flight bound for … Malaysia. I agreed to pick him up and spend a few hours with him. Approaching his terminal, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to recognize him on the curbside, but the old photographs were a still a good guide – he hadn’t aged much. We ate a quick lunch, and he was as pleasant in person as over email, but after some small talk, conversation became difficult. Hearing during lunch that I liked movies, he suggested we go see one. I knew there was a new Clint Eastwood-directed movie playing nearby at the Howard Hughes Center. My idea was that a terse, emotionally flat shoot ‘em up was just the thing for an estranged father and son pretending to be buddies. If you have seen the movie Mystic River, you’ll know I made an unfortunate choice. This was not The Outlaw Josey Wales or Pale Rider. These were tense Bostonians in cold weather visiting their traumas and sins upon their sons and daughters with Clint’s plaintive piano score setting the tone. When the character played by Sean Penn kills his childhood friend because he thinks mistakenly that the friend killed his daughter, his wife, played by Laura Linney, attempts to absolve him of this sin because ultimately all that matters, she tells him, is that he is a protector and provider for his children. My dad and I left the theater without a word about the movie. On the way back to the airport, he told me this would be his first time ever leaving the country. I dropped him off at the Tom Bradley International terminal and never saw him again.
But he keeps popping up. It is said we become more like our parents as we age, and I fear this is true even of the parents we don’t know. When I consider my big hands, a certain jolly anti-social element to my disposition, or my tendency to have a couple too many beers on occasion, it’s discomfiting to think that my father might have given me some of my most notable qualities. I’m back living in the South now, and one recent evening I idly wondered aloud about whether my father was living in the region. My wife rightly pointed out that these questions can usually be answered on Facebook. She grabbed her phone and quickly discerned that he was back living in the old mobile home. But this wasn’t all. She discovered that my dad, native son of a deeply red Arkansas county, was using his Facebook account primarily to celebrate the rising career of one Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. My dad a political junkie? My dad a liberal? What kind of Homeric shapeshifting was this?
I’m a father of two now, and I am very much involved in my kids’ lives – they will not have me to lean on should they ever find themselves interviewing for a highly selective film school. One day not long ago, while on the swings, it dawned on my four-year old daughter that she was short a grandpa.
“Where’s your dada, dada?” she asked.
“I think he’s in Arkansas, honey.”
“Does he have a car?”
“I would imagine so.”
She thought about this and then said as a statement, not a question: “He has a red car.”
I have to give her credit — it was a nice image. My dad on his laptop, bowl of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch to his side, trolling the members of his community with his latest pro-AOC content, before hopping into his bright red automobile, one hand on the wheel at six o’clock as he tears up the back roads, all of this framed from inside the house of one of his neighbors, creating a boundary that might represent something or other. It almost, almost makes me wish I knew him.