Who’s Painting by Numbers
The following is a dialogue between myself and my son (who declined to participate), copied and pasted from Facebook Messenger over the course of about a week. Above is a painting I did for him as a Christmas present, depicting him at the helm of Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa.” (He works seasonally as a whitewater rafter.) At press time, the gift was still unclaimed.
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Guess what this is.
Jan 4, 2022, 12:32 PM
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It’s just dad being an annoying fuck, that’s what.
Ha, just kidding. It’s the only present my dad ever got me.
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He didn’t know who The Who was. I think I knew that at the time. Instead of just putting it in a pile and forgetting about it, I decided to play it and listened to it about three times a week for several months ‘til I had the whole thing memorized.
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I’m going to perform it for him when he’s on his death bed, hopefully soon.
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Jan 4, 2022, 4:30 PM
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The opening song, “Slip Kid,” contains these lyrics: “Keep away old man, you won’t fool me /You and your history won’t rule me/ You might have been a fighter, but admit you failed/ I’m not affected by your blackmail /You won’t blackmail me”
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Now, your grandfather had no idea what the song titles were, much less the lyrics, when he pantomimed his idea of a real dad by bringing this to me (unwrapped) one Friday, a few days after my birthday, about a year after he and your grandmother divorced.
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So, imagine his surprise when I sing those lyrics to his bloated, failing face.
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Jan 6, 2022, 12:25 AM
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Or, imagine me singing the final verse of “Imagine a Man,” the final song of side one: “Imagine a soul /So old it it is broken/ And you know your invention is you.” Could I, who sometimes feels broken myself, sing those words without having to fight tears? And then feel as though I’ve confirmed my father’s long suspicion that I’m not tough, that I am not a man, or even an imagination of a man?
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But then, of course, I’ll remember my father’s great talent: conjuring whatever emotion is appropriate for the current event — including tear-streaked devastation or remorse. I’ll simply be showing him something he’s passed on to me. When performing a song, I am almost always able to assume the emotion of the songwriter, like an actor summoning his greatest regret in order to conjure tears for a scene. This might defeat my purpose of defeating him, instead giving him reason to believe his lack of caring for his children bore fruit. I wouldn’t want that.
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The cover of the album is an actual connect-the-dots line drawing by The Who’s bassist, John Entwistle. Not seeing it as sacred, I almost immediately took a pen and connected the dots — like I’d done with the components of my parents’ marriage. I’d seen and heard my father demean, demoralize and demonize my mother. And, of course, hit her.
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If he remembered he’d given me the album, which he doesn’t, and if he knew I had connected the dots on the cover, he’d likely say, “Well damn. If you hadn’t, that album would be worth thousands of dollars.” A collector’s item. My father taught me that concept: something that’s kept pristine and then sold years later for many times the original value. Like the Lionel model train sets, still in their boxes, he stole from his own father very late in his own father’s life.
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And, of course, the unboxed one he stole from his own children.
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But that was okay; we were done with it. We’d already moved on to bikes and motorcycles and Who albums.
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I’ve sung enough in public now, even in front of people whom I knew in other facets of my life who I knew didn’t really want to hear my singing voice. So I know I wouldn’t hold back in front of my dying father. I’d let it out. I wouldn’t go nuts, or falsetto, of course. I’d stay within my range and let my father know there are many things I can do competently that have absolutely nothing to do with him or anything he imagines he imparted to me. He imparted pitching a baseball to me — he, the lefty, and I, also a lefty — and I did it as long as I could, and then, when my first son was five days old, even longer. In mid-pitch, my humerus snapped completely through. Right-handed for the next few months, I held my son, showed him around the house and changed his diapers.
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Needing a reminder seven years later, I did it again — this time when my second son was two. Two children, two snapped humeruses. It was time to quit. I had a vasectomy and gave away my baseball mitt.
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Jan 7, 2022, 12:18 AM
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“How Many Friends” is the second last track on “The Who by Numbers.” “How many friends have I really got,” goes the refrain, “that love me, that want me, that’ll take me as I am.” It made me ponder the same question. There was Jeff Holland, who was a tough guy, more popular than me, with a family far richer. Deep inside, I knew it couldn’t last. I had my leftover friends from Lower Milford Elementary School, but most of them were as shellshocked as I was, drifting about in this vast, uncharted middle school. Brian McManus, my first friend, had absorbed himself nicely into the new paradigm. He was cruel, cut out for the culture. There were my seasonal baseball friends, but the season was months away.
My answer to The Who’s question was 2 1/2.
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Of course, the song was a rock star’s lament, a millionaire suspicious of people approaching him. My approachers were clearer about what they wanted: dominance. Yet the refrain of the song resonated. It made me see friendship was something valuable, worth taking into adulthood.
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Jan 7, 2022, 11:21 PM
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When Dad walked into that record store on the way to Hosensack, undoubtedly in a mall — Hess’s South, if I had to guess — he immediately faced a rack holding the most popular albums of 1975. I wonder how long he pondered. He might have bought Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” but I doubt he wished I was there. I got in the way of his pursuit of young women. (Which, now that I think of it, may have been the reason he went into the store in the first place.) Besides, the album’s wordless cover photo — a man shaking hands with a man on fire — might have reminded him uncomfortably of the time my brother Mark set the discarded Christmas tree on fire as it lay perilously close to his old, newly-purchased Chrysler Imperial. Dad, in his underwear, had to connect the hose to the spigot, hose down the smoldering tree, and, still in his underwear, chase Mark into the cornfield across the road.
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He likely saw Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” but Dylan must have reminded him of that bitch Joan Baez whose records my mom would play to console herself in the early days of the marriage. Nor would he choose Heart’s “Magazine” album, though he wouldn’t have minded getting in either of the Wilson sisters’ pants. Steely Dan’s “Katy Lied?” Lying was best left to the experts, not women, who didn’t seem cut out for it. Aerosmith’s “Toys in the Attic” might have given him the idea to steal the vintage Lionel train set — so best not to tip his hand.
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Finally, his eyes rested on “The Who by Numbers.” A pale yellow album cover with a line drawing. Some band with a question for a name. For a man whose center was missing, it must have connected on some primal level. Did he pay the $4.99 — or did he just take it and walk away, as he did with the hammer at the hardware store he took me to the following year? (“But — ” I started.
“C’mon,” he said, grabbing my arm and walking briskly out of the store.)
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Jan 10, 2022, 11:15 PM
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When my dad committed that relatively small (for him) act of thievery, he was 35, five years older than Peter Townshend, The Who’s guitarist and primary songwriter. Yet the songs on “The Who by Numbers” struck me back then as the ruminations of a man reluctantly entering middle age. “Townshend’s 30th birthday occurred in May 1975; he was troubled with thoughts of being too old to play rock and roll and that the band was losing its relevance,” reads the Wikipedia entry. It seems laughable now; The Who today — 47 years later — still operates as a band, even without two of its original members.
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If my father was upset at the passing of Keith Moon, the band’s drummer, in 1979, it didn’t register on his face. He didn’t play their 1979 album, “Who Are You,” on his stereo in tribute to the drunken “bad boy” of the band found dead in a swimming pool the morning after a party. Instead, he played lots of Pink Floyd. (His new wife, just barely 20, was a big Floyd fan.)
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Perhaps he was troubled by the title. “Who are you” may have been a troubling question for a man with no center, a pathological liar with “a different story for every pair of eyes,” in the words (also written in 1975) of Neil Young. More likely, it wasn’t troubling at all; it just didn’t serve a purpose, like I did.
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Yes, I served a purpose to my father. But I will write about this tomorrow or soon thereafter.
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Jan 11, 2022, 9:43 PM
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Just as when I sit down to write I operate under the (probably sometimes naive) assumption there will be someone who might one day be interested in the product, I behaved for my first 22 years as if I were my father’s son. That is, I behaved as if it was a reciprocal relationship.
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One evening in the summer of ’83, my brother Rob and I were drinking many beers in a car parked in a field outside of Perry, Georgia. We were talking about childhood when he suddenly burst into tears. “What is it?” I implored. “What could it be,” I wondered, “that would make this stoic, cynical person cry in front of his little brother?”
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“I found out, several years ago, that you’re only my half-brother,” he sobbed, leaving me to wonder if I should ask what the hell he meant by that. But then, even in my drunken stupor, I knew it could mean only one thing. Someone had told him my mom had an affair that resulted in me.
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For years I protected everyone around me from this information, just putting it aside. But then Dad’s second wife wrote his first wife (your grandmother) to ask if this were true. My mom, tough and righteous as Joan of Arc, wrote a howler to my dad and demanded he come clean with the lie.
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In his own way, he did. “Son,” he emoted on the phone one afternoon around 1990. “I had told your brothers that your father was someone your mother had fooled around with. There was this photographer pilot. The one who took the photo of our house. Well….” Freaked out by the call, I didn’t put together the absurdity of the claim until we’d hung up.
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The photographer/pilot took the photo in 1968, when I was five years old. You can check the date on the back of the print hanging on Mark’s wall.
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So, rather than living with the shame of being a bastard child, I had to become acquainted with a different kind of shame: having a bona fide, biological father who used me, the extra child, as a device to garner sympathy from anyone who dared question why he wasn’t close with his children.
It wasn’t like anyone else was getting any use out of me anyway, he must have figured.
I sat in a dimly-lit living room, heart pounding, mind twisting. “Do I call him back?”
What would that have accomplished? More lies, my father cornered, teeth bared? He’d have taken it out on Donna.
My wife, your mother, had long since gone to bed. I pulled out my copy of “The Who by Numbers.” I listened to the whole thing and drank a bottle of wine. Finally, I could imagine sleep.
