Fun home

This is not a review, just some rambling. I liked this book, a lot.

At one point in Fun Home, Bechdel wonders what a father is. She ventures into the dictionary and finds a tautology. I think about what it is to be a father a lot, and what it is to have a father. I haven't spoken to mine in a long time.

Later, Bechdel recounts a period of life where she and her father have a currency, a common language. I put the book down there and wondered if my father and I ever had one. It's probably been close to ten years since I spoke to him; certainly, since I meaningfully spoke with him. More? Even so far removed in time, it's hard to get through my immediate simmering rage or cold disdain to think about positive traits that he had. I have spent my life doing all that I can to not be him, searching for similarities and erasing them if any sprout. Positive traits. He must have had some, sometime. What drew my mom to him? It surely wasn't the 9-year age difference.

I know that he was charismatic. Perhaps he still is? Sometimes I'll describe him as a master manipulator, though I suspect that's a bit grand. Perhaps I pump it up because, in some small way, I want to feel that I won something. I'm not sure master manipulators flame out in St. Louis or central Illinois and have their lives collapse in on themselves. At least, not before the age of 50.

I know that we have the same name. Nearly. He is a Junior, I'm a Third. Rich man's title, poor man's bank account.

I know that he worked on cars. He had a 1967 Mustang, a glistening blue bolt. He worked on it in his blue Morton building. Raspberries grew on the north side of it. I remember being in the side seat with him going from — to — on the highway. I remember him asking me something, my enthusiasm. The engine. The thunderous horses as the fields ripped away. Smiling and laughing.

I remember driving from St. Louis to —. I remember sitting next to him in the 1966 Impala. Screeching doors and mumbling engine. A color theoretically white, once. I remember seeing a Lamborghini in the contraflow and turning my head to follow as he tearfully explained the newest collapse of life. Always the crying.

I lived with him in —, a suburb of St. Louis. Not enrolled in school, but variously wondering alone around town or sitting in the bodyshop's office. Snooping around and finding an ancient green-on-black computer terminal, or a closetful of porno discs in a black trash bag at the bottom of a closet. Or burnt spoons. The smell. Always the smell.

We came home to the little green house his sponsor rented to him. Locks changed. I'd moved most everything I owned into the house. I never saw it again. The little maroon King James Bible my great-grandparents bought me.

How long before that — I remember thinking that I could end it if I went outside and got a shovel and hurled it into his head. ‘It' being his beating down a door that my mom was behind. Who remembers what the fight was about? He wasn't a hitter, though.

I remember him picking up a little, thick, white-covered copy of Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I think it was the Signet Edition, though my memory has it about twice as thick. Perhaps it seemed bigger because I was nine or ten years old. It certainly seemed thicker when it smacked into me. Punishment for taking books out of the library, unchecked. Returning them without alerting the librarian was a logistical affair, but what stands out is his condemnation between blows, “I won't have a thief living in my house!”

I remember at most two years later his firing and conviction for embezzlement. When I looked later, did that court website say more than or less than one-hundred thousand dollars? Certainly, enough to buy all kinds of photographic equipment to take nude pictures of prostitutes. Not to mention a lot of crack cocaine.

Goodbye bungalow, someday to be pushed in. Hello, little factory-adjacent apartment. Do you remember the way the air smelled at the top of your closet, where you'd hide and write on the topmost shelf? Yes. A green stain on pink, plush carpet. Silly putty. Bright side: no more mowing.

I remember after that drive living with his father. Grandpa Tom, rather than Dad. Grandpa Tom was nice, as was Grandma Debbie. They still are. I remember getting angrier and angrier, having been snapped out of my brainwashing by the loss of my material possessions, and whatever shattered illusions I had. Very capitalist. What had possessed me to think so fondly about that one night spent alone in a roach-filled motel in East St. Louis? Was it its freely available, grainy, porn channel that my little eleven-year-old self found so novel? Maybe it was the interesting way that the police cruiser circled the parking lot once an hour. I only know because I kept looking out the window, wondering why going to grab some Marlboro's was taking so long.

Some time later, after his release from prison, I had a confrontation with him. I'd envisioned a fight. Anticipated. Craved? Relished? Intended to relish. How best to take all of the anger out but to tell him I was gay. I'd hoped to wait until my great-grandma was dead, but she was still inside the doublewide in her slow death. Destined for a hospital and for that black bile to be pulled from her in a tube. Compassionate healthcare at the age of 92. He was sitting on her patio, in her glider. The glider is a double seater with a little table-like space built in. It has two hearts in the center. It is still there today, unmoved.

Of course, I did not get the fight that I wanted. He pivoted so easily to whatever was said, some variant of everlasting love. Unconditional Who knows its depth? I didn't believe it for a moment, and I can't remember anything more of the conversation, not even anything worth lying about. I just remember spoiling for a fight. You can never tell the truth when you always lie.

———

I had that reaction a lot, coming out. I remember standing in the UIC Forum when the gay marriage bill was signed in Illinois. I was standing at the very back of the room, so terrified that my mere presence would say something I'd said to so few people. I had no reaction at all to the bill signing other than to think, “I'm too late, the fight is over.” What fight did I think I had in me? Imagine being in 2013 and thinking the fight is over. I'd just turned 19 a few weeks before, what did I know? I didn't even know myself.

The fight I was spoiling for probably wasn't about being gay. Twelve years after that moment, it isn't being gay that I have rageful dreams about. At most, my dreams about being gay are vaguely frustrated at not being both pretty and gay.

———

This to say, I do not know what common language I have with my father. Unlike him, I am not currently in the Midwest dying of lymphoma, or some such cancer. Dying awfully slowly, as far as it seems. I know that when I started watching Top Gear, I was afraid to enjoy it, because cars were my dad's domain. While I could be in that Morton building, I couldn't touch anything, and I wasn't taught anything. The progeny of a long line of mechanics that doesn't know how to change a tire and refuses now to learn.

When I started taking pictures I had a nagging somewhere in the brain matter, too. Just like pops, hm? What lovely local prostitute will you be photographing? Will you seek one out with the same name as your mother, like he did? Thankfully, I don't know any male sex workers. Let alone any called Jennifer.

———

There must be good things about this person. They're for other people. They are, I hope, for the little blond-haired and blue-eyed boy that his partner seems to have in the pictures. It is impossible to see pictures of that child on his lap and not recall the picture of me in my little white button-up shirt and suspenders, blond-hair and blue-eyes, looking so happy in whatever local JC Penny the picture was probably taken in.

———

All this wallowing to say that the book made me tearful. Bechdel's life and my life are not similar. Other than, perhaps, the fleeing to the library stacks and trying to understand just what the fuck is going on by reading books. That, I understand. It is beautiful, and honest, and searching. I loved it.

Pretty weird that it made me want to read Joyce's Ulysses, though.