Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [194]
In the end I drove to Pop’s house for that interview. My resistance had begun to feel too self-serving, and I was glad I went. The editor was my age, an affable and intelligent guy, and the three of us sat in Pop’s narrow living room for six hours and talked and talked and laughed and talked some more. Around the fourth hour, we switched from tea and coffee to Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. Then we were talking trash the way men drinking often do. Pop brought up my fighting, and again, I could hear the pride in his voice, and I fell into telling a few stories like some drunk asshole telling shopworn jokes, but even as we all got louder, the testosterone rising in the air, my eyes caught Pop’s above his beard and that small voice we all seem to have inside us like some eternal flame, said, You need to tell him how it was. He still thinks this was just a sport for you. He’ll listen now. Tell him how it was.
But sitting there alone with him in front of the De La Hoya fight, to tell him how my boyhood really was was to tell him how it was not, and I did not want to hurt this man who’d been run over and crippled for stopping on the highway to help someone. I did not want to hurt this man in black sitting in his wheelchair. But this seemed to be the moment given us, didn’t it? How could all eight or nine men who would usually be here not be here now? Wasn’t this the time to tell my father that since that night train in England, a story I’d told no one, I’d been on a new road, and one I preferred? With physical violence there was always the wreckage after, not just the bruises and lacerations, the chipped teeth or fractured bones, there was a hangover of the spirit, as if all those punches and kicks had pushed you into a gray and treeless landscape where love and forgiveness were hard to find.
I was a father now. All day and all night of every week of every month of every year since becoming one, I’d felt surrounded by love, responsible to it, careful not to hurt it, and so grateful to get it. To punch another man in the face was to punch another father, was to punch some father’s son.
As much as I admired the heart and the skills of the two fighters we were watching, for me it was like a recovering alcoholic sitting at a bar with a glass of soda water while his friends drink tequila shots. I wanted to tell Pop this. My crippled father, the new one, the one who looked at me and listened more fully now, he would hear all this if I told him. And maybe he wouldn’t feel blamed. Maybe the younger father in him, the one who had had so much work to get done and so little time in which to do it, maybe he would listen too.
Soon the fight was over, and De La Hoya lost. Pop and I sat there surprised. He muted the TV’s volume and in its pale glow we talked awhile about the judges’ decision. We talked about how hard both fighters had fought, how really, it could have gone to either one of them. Halfway through the fight Pop had poured us each a cognac and I sipped from my glass and felt myself lean forward. It was close to two in the morning. My clothes had dried and felt stiff against my skin. I could feel the word Pop rising up my throat. There was that itch in my chest that I needed to set the record straight. I needed to tell him about the lives his children had really led on the other side of that river. I needed to tell him about the boy in the mirror.
Was I being greedy? What I had with my father was already so much more than he’d ever had with his. We sat before the muted blinking shine of the TV, and my father started talking about his boyhood. He was with friends in a car sitting outside a whorehouse. It was a summer night outside Lafayette, the vanilla scent of camellias in the air. His friends had French and Irish names, and they got their nerve up and left the