The Build

On one of those bright cerulean popping mornings just at the beginning of summer break, when I was about 13, my dad took my two brothers and me to the lumber store downtown. We bought plywood, two by fours, four by eights, a shitload of nails, and sandpaper, all to build a quarter pipe skateboard ramp. Dad had drawn up the plans himself based on our descriptions and having seen a few minutes of one of the skate videos we rented from Mackie’s skate shop. He wrote it down in pencil in all caps on the same green graphing paper he bought in bulk from the dusty paper store in downtown Lowell that he used to write proposals, management plans, and whatever else he did in his role as a turnaround consultant. We’d been nagging about wanting a ramp of our own. We were tired of climbing barbed wire fences to skate the city pool only to run from the cops when they inevitably rolled up. And we’d get our asses kicked if we tried to skate that one half pipe we’d spied in the woods of South Lowell where a bunch of rough kids who ripped butts between launching big airs beat on anyone who crossed into their territory. 

Because of his work and the long travel involved, Dad was only home on the weekends, or most weekends. That was his only time to relax, maybe have a coffee and cigarette in bed while he watched reruns of Bonanza and Rawhide. He was not good at relaxing, though. He’d work through those days at his desk or put us to work as he started some cleaning or landscaping or painting project, sometimes working us ten-hour days, sometimes keeping us out of school on Mondays so we could finish up. There wasn’t a lot of playing catch in the yard after school. But we spent that weekend building the ramp at the end of the same driveway where he taught me to ride a bike after mom mentioned I was still on training wheels and right next to the basketball hoop where we spent a whole day teaching us to shoot free throws and do lay ups after he had seen me flailing around at my first rec league basketball game. 

My dad was one of those dads who excelled at big moments. After he watched pitches fly by me without me taking the bat off my shoulder in Little League, he asked me and my brothers if we wanted to learn to play better. He told us he’d take us to the park, if we wanted. He’d make us better, if we wanted. He also told us we would probably cry. We said yes anyway and the next Saturday we spent twelve hours in the dust and dirt of Shedd Park shagging balls and taking batting practice until we couldn’t lift our clay caked arms. And yes, everyone but Dad cried on the ballfield that day. But we got a lot better. We got good.

We followed Dad’s lead, and he told us or showed us where to cut and what to hammer and gave us turns at the table saw, which did not thrill my mom. By early Sunday evening, with the sun getting low over the pines, we were taking our first tentative turns on the oh-so-smooth plywood. My brothers and I spent the next few years skating it, figuring out how to ride up its face and kick turn back down, how to drop in from the deck, how to launch over the top and land on the worn grass behind it, how to do an air grab off the lip and make the landing, the wheels humming down the wood and onto the tar of our black hot top driveway. All our buddies would come by after school to skate it. We’d hoot when we nailed a trick, wail when we ate it. I remember my baby brother Paul hiding inside its hollow guts during games of kick the can. Jon, a year younger but a lot scrawnier than me, broke his arm on it trying to do an aerial twist. The ramp grew beyond just kids skating and became gools for neighborhood games of Relievio and really a kind of gools?, or homebase for just hanging out. Late summer weeknights I’d sit on it with my buddies and talk about school, movies, sex, what was coming next after we got out of middle school. A few years later I’ll have my first kiss sitting on that ramp, and years later I was standing by it when my then girlfriend introduced me to the girl who would become my wife. I would lay back on it late at night when I couldn’t sleep, sneaking out of the house to look up at the stars as they swam through the moonlit clouds. 

I don’t remember my dad ever watching us skate it. He worked in an office, but he had a love for building things with his hands. He was of the generation as adept with a hammer and slide rule as he was with a Windsor knot. His own dad had been a draftsman, a job he did just enough that he could play sax at night with his jazz band. 

We had done a few other building projects with my dad, like pine wood derby cars for Cub Scout competitions. I got a second-place trophy for that. Years later, I would help my son Joe build a pine wood derby car for Cub Scouts, just the way Dad had shown me. Joe would also bring home a second-place trophy. But I never made something as big as the ramp with my kids. And my brothers and I, maybe because we slid into the preoccupations of high school and football and girls and part time jobs, never built something together again with our father. Not like that, anyway, not of wood and nails and sweat. 

I can’t recall when we finally pulled the ramp down or who did it. Eventually weather and use warped and wore it down. The front lip curled up so if you tried to bomb down the driveway to get the speed to get vertical you were more likely catch your wheels at the bottom and crash face first into blacktop. I know it was gone the night I left for college. That was the night my mother screamed at us, my brothers and me and my dad, and kicked us all out of the house, the night that ended with me in the emergency room.   

Right before I threw a forearm shiver through the thick paned glass, after we had all burst into the hot breath of that August night, I stared into the dark maw of the garage window and glimpsed the wisps of cobwebs hanging in window panes, the wooden camping trailer my dad had designed and that we used maybe once a summer, the pile of skateboards we hadn’t ridden in way too long. But mostly I saw the old bikes leaning against each other, right there under that dusty pane of glass that shattered in with such dark and jagged grace. Despite the rage blistering in my cells, I felt sad in that my brothers and I no longer rode our bikes. They had once been so central to how we three experienced the world, whizzing across the streets and through the backyards of our part of town and venturing out to explore the kids and customs of other neighborhoods. I felt guilty for my neglect. I felt I’d hurt the bikes’ feelings by not riding them. I was about to leave for college, to leave home for the first time, and at what I had let go, what I was letting go of, fearful of being alone and yet desiring that more than anything.  

And I was mad at my father because we were supposed to have left hours ago. 

The glass burst across the bikes after my elbow went through the window. I felt the release and electric rub of my anger even as the shards sliced into me. I pulled my arm out, missing the glinting jack o’ lantern teeth still stuck in the sash. For a second there was just this dark line on my elbow. I had enough time to think it was just a scrape and then the red-black blood began to pulse over my arm. I stepped away from the garage holding my arm up to the glow of the garage light stained with the corpses of moths. I looked at the wound, thrilled and horrified to see the white of my own bone. My brother Jon ran up to me, his hazel eyes just catching the garage lights. 

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “What the fuck did you do?!”

This had been building all day. The anxiousness. The anger at my dad. Maybe it was the swampy heat and sweat building on the back of the neck. Maybe it was just I was 18 and it was time to leave home. If you widen the lens, step away from the moment, then heading off to college is maybe not such a big deal a rite of passage, one of the few demarcations of adulthood left. With hindsight, I now know that it pales when compared to the day you get married, the day your kids are born, the day your dad dies. But when you’re young, your face pressed up against fishbowl that has been your life so far you have no sense of scale and everything seems like the the most important thing ever, especially leaving home for the first time. It’s not unlike that first time dropping in on your board from the lip of a steep ramp. You got to fight the vertigo your and body’s instinct screaming at you to lean back. Instead, you lean in, commit to the drop and trust in gravity will take you to a smooth roll. 

I’d spent a good part of the day with my girlfriend Sarah messing round in my room one last time. She was going to Northwestern but would not leave for another couple of weeks. As the afternoon light began to slide behind the pines and maples, we sat outside on the back steps. I remember the heat and staring into the blood-red drops dotting the chokeberry trees that separated our yard from the Levine’s. We mooned about staying together while so many miles apart. We cried a bit, laughed a lot, kissed, and hugged. We performed all the drama we’d learned from sitcoms and romcoms. Then she left because I thought I was leaving soon. 

And I waited. The car was packed up. My mom was in the kitchen on the phone. But my dad was down at Cawley Stadium watching my brothers’ football workouts. It was preseason testing. Sprint times, shuttle runs, passing wheel, bench and squat tests. He didn’t need to be there. It was time to go. I drove down to the stadium in the Chevy pick-up my brother Jon and I used to get to school, practices, dates, and the parties at spots like the Long Meadow 9^th hole green or the train tracks behind the cement factory. 

I got down to the stadium and saw him in his usual khaki shorts and a white golf shirt, boat shoes and glasses, watching the drills. He’d helped raise money for new equipment and facilities and was seeing how it was all going. My dad hadn’t been this involved when I was playing. I had quit baseball in my eighth-grade spring to skate more and screw around at the park with friends. But it turned out I was good at football. By my junior spring I was fielding calls from schools all over the country recruiting me. Dad was here now, watching Paul, about to be a ninth grader, sweating through 100-yard gassers as Jon, the captain this year, pushed the team to work harder. In my memory, he is standing in the concrete stadium, looking over the field, an unfiltered Lucky Strike in his mouth, a pack in his shirt pocket. Maybe that image just hangs in that gauzy place between fact and truth. Because that’s so often my picture of him, a butt pursed in his lips, his chestnut brown eyes behind his glasses.

I got out of the truck and walked over to stand beside him. “When we headed out?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm. Why didn’t I just say that it was time to go? I wanted to be there by dinner and here it was, five already, and we were still revving in neutral. It was only a few hours’ drive, but still, we needed to go. 

Why couldn’t I just tell him what I needed, how I felt about leaving, how everything was piling up together inside me on an important day? Why didn’t he see what today meant to me? Why didn’t he ask me if I was excited to go, if I was ready to go? Even now I don’t know. 

He didn’t answer my question. He didn’t seem to sense my worry at what was about to happen to me, to us, to our family. He said he’d be home soon. He was nothing other than occupied with what he was doing right then. If he had thought about my leaving that day, he wasn’t thinking about it then. Right then he was probably thinking about how to help his son on the baseball team. It’s possible he was thinking about how he wasn’t ready for me to leave home. But I didn’t know. 

I went back to the house to wait. 

When he got home a couple of hours later with my brothers, I was steaming. My mom knew it. Because I told her. But I didn’t say squat to him, hoping that my seething would make it obvious. It was almost eight now and getting dark. And still, we didn’t leave. 

Sarah had left hours ago and when I called her to tell her I was still at home and she was sympathetic, but I also could tell there was an air of “we had our goodbye so let’s not drag it out.” 

I hung up, went downstairs, and sat down at the kitchen table, kind of hovering in his space. We wouldn’t get to the hotel until 11 at best. The hairy eyeball I was throwing at the back of my dad’s head as he walked by me in the kitchen was having no effect. 

Instead, he went to the phone and made a call. Work shit. What the fuck? He was deep in a conversation about some company stuff I didn’t care about or understand. And still, no sign of leaving.    

So now all of us were in the kitchen, waiting for the grand goodbye most of us had imagined to start. My brothers, my mom, me; Dad, still on the phone. My mom was piddling about, trying to stay busy, rarely relaxing into the moment. Jon and Paul were getting impatient for us to leave. They probably had plans of their own. They were sweaty and sticky from practice. And hungry. They dug around in the shelves and fridge while I sat on the corner bench of the kitchen table. I’m pretty sure I was watching the Real World on my mom’s little kitchen TV where I used to watch He-Man cartoons after school through UHF static. Dad was off in the little alcove where the phone was, behind a cabinet. He was smoking and talking on the phone. 

At this point he has had to have known the anger in the room was heavy as a drape. He had to have known. He had to have known. 

Then Paul started cracking a hard-boiled egg by the sink. 

My dad exploded. 

Dad had a lot of anger. It wasn’t always there but watch out when it kicked in, when the switch flipped. That anger rarely turned physical, more often coming out in quips and verbal cuts that made me long for a more literal and less lingering gut-punch. But when he did get physical it was scary. He was not a big man, but he had a wiry strength that came not from sports but from growing up poor and always a little hungry.

“Stop making all that fucking noise!” he yelled at Paul, who at 15 was still the baby, the gangly kid always smiling, who’s wispy hair was already starting to recede, who threw a tennis ball at the back steps every night playing full seasons of his own made-up baseball game. Dad ran over to Paul, shoved him hard, and smacked the egg from his hand. 

“What the fuck?” I said as I jumped up. 

“He’s cracking an egg!” Jon yelled.

“Fuck the egg! Fuck the phone! When are we getting out of here?” I yelled, getting in his face. “Let’s go!”

Here there is a blur, like the windshield smear of a crushed bug. I can’t recall everything that was yelled. Or who was pushing who. But it was quick and rooted somewhere deeper than this moment. Then suddenly my mom, who never swore, who always worked to placate, suddenly screamed, “All of you fucking shits get out of my house!! Now!”

We shrapnelled through the tin of the back screen door, me first, then Jon, then Paul. One of us knocked it off its hinge. That’s when I should have gone back in and faced him down. With words. Holy shit I wanted to hit him, but I knew I didn’t have the guts. He still had something over me, something that still bugbeared somewhere in my subconscious, that made me pocket my fists. Instead, I steamed down the back brick steps, past the oak on the little hill where he’d taught us to sled as little kids, taught us to chop woods as older kids, and down to the driveway to the garage. That’s when I looked inside the garage window and saw the bikes behind the glass, leaning in the dust, disuse, and neglect. That’s when I made a fist and brought my forearm up like the flipper blocking style of some 1950’s offensive lineman. And then I slammed it through the glass.

I felt nothing in my arm as I turned to gaze into the backyard, into the vacant darkness where the skate ramp used to be.

“What the fuck did you do?” Jon asked again, running over after he heard the smashing and now seeing the shattered glint on the blacktop, seeing the blood painting my arm and dripping off onto my legs and the pavement. I held up my arm and showed him. That’s when I saw the white of bone. Jon went bug-eyed. My dad had come out of the house like a bull on fire to lay into us. Jon ran up to him and said, “Look what you did!” and always braver than me, gave my father the shove I hadn’t had the balls to do. And then Dad hit him hard in the chest. Not closed fist hard but enough to knock him to the ground. Jon was still skinny then, not the linebacker he’d become. My mom was crying. I was fuming, and bleeding everywhere. Paul came out with a roll of paper towels for me to wrap around my arm. always a peacemaker, trying to smooth things over. 

Again, the white blur in the midst of the dark night. The scatter of porch lights. Crickets. The wail of a heat bug in the hemlock mulch. At some point, we got into the ‘88 Explorer where all my stuff has been packed most of the day. Then my father and mother took me to the hospital. In my memory, no one says a word during the ride.

Saint’s Memorial was not the best hospital in town, but it was closer than Lowell General, where my brothers and I had all been born, where my Aunt Betty was a nurse, where we’d watch our father die 16 years later. My folks must have been worried about how much I was bleeding. With my arm wrapped in reddening paper towels, we checked in and sat down in the hard plastic bench seats to wait. And wait. Seems like there were bigger tragedies ahead of us. Lowell did not lack for drug overdoses and gang violence. Someone’s mother ran in to learn from a nurse that her son had seriously hurt on a motorcycle accident although I couldn’t hear how bad. 

After a while of waiting in silence, I wandered away from my parents. I can’t remember what they were doing or if they tried to talk to me. I found a payphone and called Sarah to tell her what had happened. I was hoping she would race down to see me, to comfort me. I wanted to flex my anger. But she didn’t come down. She was already in bed, and we had already said goodbye. I felt terribly alone after I hung up, even though I doubted if I would have come down if it was her in the ER.   

By the time we left the emergency room it was about 2 AM. I had 47 stiches in my arm. The doctor had sewn in two levels, one top of the other, because the wound was so deep. My arm was bandaged and throbbing. I had to keep it above my head the whole ride to Yale. My dad was driving, and he must have been exhausted, spinning through some half-asleep fugue, driving sometimes barely 35 miles per hour, then sometimes revving it to 80, flicking his cigarette ashes through the highway-howling crack in the window. I have tried to imagine now what he was thinking as he drove: What was he feeling? Regret? Anger? Was he trying to logic some way that it was not his fault? Would he have been right? But the car was silent. 

We rolled into New Haven about 4.30, checked into whatever hotel they had reserved, and got about two hours of sleep before it was time to go over to registration. Then there was all the checking in, getting keys, IDs, lugging stuff up into the dorm room, meeting people and trying to not have to talk about why my arm was wrapped from forearm to shoulder in gauze and medical tape. 

Later I would tell people a version of the truth. “I got into a fight with my old man,” I would say, letting them infer some scene from The Great Santini or something. I was already building the tough guy narrative that would be so hard to escape later. Because that was not what happened, even if it felt like the truth. was already building a version of myself, the hard scrapping blue-collar image I could hide inside. 

The day before, when my dad was my father and not my monster, he had said we should try to get to the dorm first so I could claim the bottom bunk because the top bunked sucked, especially if you were 6’4” and 225 pounds. You never want to have the top bunk, he had said. And I think he was hinting something about girls too but would never actually say that out loud. Of course, we didn’t get their first. This little guy from New York who would be my roommate got the bottom bunk and for the next few weeks I would have to do a one-armed climb every night to get into a bed that was too short for me. I would put a pillow on my head to block the noise from the traffic of cars and the drunk undergrads outside my window. I draped my stitched-up arm across my face so it would stop throbbing so much. I still sleep like this, putting a pillow over my head and my arm across the pillow, and every night I remember why.  

That was all later. Right then, I just wanted my parents to leave. I was so mad at him, at myself. I told myself, over and over, if I had had any real courage, I would have taken a swung at him instead of the garage window. If I had any real courage I would have asked if we could get on the road instead of stewing and letting all the anger go to acid in my blood. If I had any real courage, I would have found a way to really talk to him long before any of this happened. I never thought about what he should do. I didn’t want to care. My arm hurt so much. How was I going to practice like this? Go to class like this? Explain to all these people I was meeting what happened. 

We got all my stuff into my tiny little room. It was hot. I felt the heavy pulse in my elbow. I’m sure I was being silent and just nodding my parents along. At some point one of them said, “We should let you get settled and get going.” I don’t recall speaking. Maybe I nodded. There was no asking about lunch or anything. My elbow was on fire. My head hurt. I was exhausted. We went outside and we were standing on the corner of High Street and Elm when my dad asked my mom if she would go get the car. He had never asked her to go get the car. I don’t think I ever saw her driving with him in the car, expect maybe when he handed her the keys after too many cans of Bud at the Meadow, when neither of them should have been driving. 

It’s fuzzy, this part, because I was probably looking at the sidewalk seething. But she left us, walked down the road to where we had parked that morning. And then it was my dad and me, as families moved boxes and bags along sidewalks and stairs. Just the two us, there in that heat, with the nest of bloody black stiches we had sewn between us. Then he raised his face to look at me. He was crying. 

This was the first time I saw my father cry. I saw him cry twice more. I mean sober cries. Beer tears don’t count. The next time was six months later. I met my family up in Pittsfield for my grandfather’s funeral. Cancer had taken him quickly. Or at least quickly after he finally told us about. If he was anything like my dad, he probably hadn’t done much about it when he started getting sick. My whole life, my dad hardly mentioned his mother, who had passed away when I was a baby. Our visits to our grandfather’s house felt obligatory and not because he and my dad had some deep relationship. Grunts, sighs, and clipped dialogue reminiscent of some 1930’s film noir flick. I didn’t know how my dad felt about his dad. He kept up his filial duty by paying off his house mortgage and bringing his grandsons a few times a year to landscape his yard. Or we’d go to watch the Celtics with him on Christmas Day, usually after my grandfather had opened a gift from his son and asked, “Why would I need this?” Seeing him cry for his father during the funeral was a shock because I realized he had this whole familial life beyond and before us. 

The last time I saw him cry was eight years later when he woke from a coma that had been induced by the surgeons to help him heal after a massive stomach ulcer had perforated and destroyed most of his insides. His jejunum, his colon, his liver, his pancreas, all of it had been flooded with stomach acid. The surgeon who put his guts back together said, “I have done all of these surgeries before, but I have ever done them all in one night and to one person. I gave him a 17% chance to make it through the surgery.” Such a horrifyingly specific number. He made it through. He was a tough son of a bitch after all. He spent the bulk of that summer in a medically induced coma in the ICU of Mass General. That night, I was up the road at Emerson taking a summer class on the Harlem Renaissance for grad school. When I got out, I saw that I had a voicemail on my Nokia. It was a message from my mom that my dad had woken up and they had talked to him and that I should try to get there. I headed over, bombing down Cambridge Street on my Sector 9. By the time I got there, my family had already left. I went in. He was awake. Shrunken, broken, maybe a bit trippy with pain killers, but he was conscious. I walked into his room. Before I could talk, he started crying.  

“I thought you died,” he said to me in a voice I didn’t recognize, in a voice that would never again be the deep oak barrel voice that had ruled any room anymore. I didn’t understand what he meant. 

“Your mom said you didn’t make it.” Tears leaked over lips that were so chapped they looked like they were strung with black stitches. He was so thin. Not the beer bellied force he’d been just a few weeks before. His false teeth weren’t in, which made him look even more jack o’ lanterned by what he’d gone through. When my family had visited earlier, and he had been revived, he must have thought he had been in some kind of car crash or something. He had no idea why he was in the hospital. Because I wasn’t there, he asked about me. My mom had said I couldn’t make it. But what he heard was “he didn’t make it,” out of whatever crash or accident he imagined we had been in together. 

“When you walked in, I thought you were a ghost,” he said. “I’m so happy you’re alive.” And he wept, like really wept, and he smiled, and he flailed a weak hand out to hold mine. We probably hadn’t held hands since I was a little kid. I don’t remember what I said to him that night.

“This is supposed to be the biggest day of your life,” my dad said as we stood on the corner of Elm and High Street, tears streaking his puffy tanned cheeks, my mother beyond earshot as she went to get the car. “I’m sorry I fucked this up.”

I could barely stand to listen. I wanted to be angry and stay angry. 

“I’m sorry I fucked this up,” he said again, on that sidewalk in Connecticut. I’d never seen this kind of crying. Real crying. 

The anger began to spin out of me, and I didn’t want it to. 

“I’m so sorry,” he said again. He eyes dropped to the sidewalk and I looked down into the deep brown hair on his head. I realized right then something I had not noticed before. I was taller than him. 

I have tried to be a tender father to my two children. I have tried to everyday be around their lives and in their lives, not just dipping in for intense weekends. I have taught them to read books, how to ride a bikes or surf, how to draw. Like most parents, most dads, I’ve had bad moments. I have yelled. At them or near them. I work to be tender but still I have this anger, this kind of ogre beating at the cage bars inside of me. Is this the curse of all fathers, or just the fathers in my family? Is calling it a curse just an excuse? And yet I have tried to build mostly good memories together. This is the build I have been working on ever since I became a dad. I wish I was better at making things with my hands or had more patience to do it or maybe spent less time caught up in paper grading or student conferences or heading off on three-hour bus trips with the sons of other men to coach football games, or hacking away at poetry for modest publications, or sneaking off to the Atlantic to surf. Sometimes I wish I had built something more tangible with my kids, more than some drawings or a pine wood derby car or a LEGO Death Star, something we could point to and take pride in its material existence. I wish there was a neglected tree house in our yard. I wish there was a ramp. Then I realize material things warp with use, with weather, with neglect. Maybe we have built something with her that will last longer than a skate ramp. 

And yet, as I look back to the night I left for school, the night of that fight, I keep seeing that ramp. Even though it was not there, it remains. I’m not sure that ramp connects to anything at all except how that day of building solidifies so much of my memory of my father. I am thinking about those days so long ago, of the building of the ramp, the breaking of the glass, trying to capture the intensity of my memory, of the glass slicing through me, of his tears slicing through me, trying to understand us as flawed men who did love each other in the best way we knew how, had been taught how. 

In a couple weeks, I will drop my daughter Delaney off at college. I’m so proud of the woman she has become. I’m trying not to put pressure on the moment we have to say goodbye. I don’t want to be haunted by the day I experienced.  I don’t want to mess it up by trying too hard not to mess it up, by being so stressed I set off my wife, my kids, and butcher the whole thing with nothing left but a bloody memory and a ragged scar where once there was a family. I want to be present, not so worried about breaking the moment that I miss it all together.Soon I will stand on some sidewalk in upstate New York with Delaney and Emily and Joe. I will say goodbye to my daughter, to her childhood that we shared together. I will cry. At least I hope I will. I hope I have it in me to let it all swallow me up, to let the flood of everything I am feeling wash through me. I am so scared of wrecking it, of the memory of my leaving home shattering hers. My wife and I have measured and made as much as we could. The cut will come and so must the tears. I hope it will not be for the hurt I might have caused, the hurt I too am so capable of causing. I hope the tears will be for what we have built, what we may yet build, for the love she will take with her into the life she is about to live. And I hope she sees in that moment that she is taller than me. But not for having seen me diminished by my actions. I want her to know she is taller because of what she has accomplished, because of who she is, and because she is gliding up something we have built together.