The Weekly Screed (#682)

Big Bill Benjamin — not to
be mistaken for Ward Cleaver
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — My father was largely absent from my life for more than 20 years — during which, presumably, my character was being (mal)formed. As I commiserated at Dad’s funeral among my second family of stepbrothers and stepsisters, I was aware that they had shared more “quality-time” fatherhood with Dad than I ever could.

My mother, who walked out on Dad — for good reason — when I was about eight, became a reluctant pioneer, among the German Catholics of Tomah, in single parenthood. After the rupture, four of us, Mom, sister Peg, brother Bill and I, bounced around town quite a bit, all of us bearing the alien stigma of divorce, ‘til Mom pulled her big escape — to Madison, 100 miles from Dad.

The social science consensus is that I was warped for life by a dad shortage and a concomitant denial of the “nuclear family” experience. I’m not sure.

For one thing, I knew all about nuclear families. Television was crawling with the species — the Andersons on Father Knows Best, the Williamses (including the insufferable Angela Cartwright) on Make Room for Daddy,  Rob, Laura and Richie on Dick Van Dyke, and, of course, the Cleavers. There were, for variety’s sake, a few single-parent TV shows in that era, notably The Andy Griffith Show. But in that one, Andy filled Opie’s maternal gap with a mother figure — Aunt Bee — of archetypal proportions. For good measure, Andy also spent most of the series sexlessly courting Elinor Donahue, a refugee from Father Knows Best.

By the time I was nine or ten, I’d noticed a gap between my problems and the ones that stymied kids like Bud Anderson, Ricky Nelson and the Beav. These kids’ issues didn’t come near the intractable strife that plagued Peg, Bill and me on a daily basis. Our TV-kid role models got into the sort of cute trouble that could be easily dispelled in 30 minutes minus commercials. The dispeller was, inevitably, the dad (Jim, Danny, Rob, Ozzie, Andy or Ward Cleaver), who wrestled these comic crises into submission after working all day, in a suit, at a mystery job. The all-knowing father’s manner was so cool and bemused that Mister Rogers, by comparison, would have seemed panic-stricken. Except for Sheriff Andy, they all handled these dilemmas without even loosening their conservative neckties.

The TV dads who represented an ideal I rarely witnessed in real life — even among the two-parent families all around me — provided kids in those days with a paragon of middle-class heroism. They were erudite professional men of gray-flannel grooming, effortless competence, unflappable disposition and homespun wisdom. And they were all dull.

That wasn’t my Dad.

For the first hormone-driven 30 years of his life, Dad was a cauldron of emotions with a hair-trigger temper. He was a slave to his impulses, a Falstaffian drinker, a flagrant wolf and a death-wish driver. He was also the funniest, most charming young man in town, and one guy to whom — when he talked — I always paid heed. There was an edge in his attitude and a drop of acid on the tip of his tongue, both of which I envied and emulated. His mind possessed a memory, an acuity and a curiosity that I hoped I had inherited. In his occasional but tremendous rage, there was a pathos that bewildered me until I was old enough to feel it myself.

Because I got so little of Dad, after Mom rescued me from the worst of him, I spent my every opportunity seeking out the best of him. There were weekends I returned to Tomah to visit Annie and Swede, my grandparents, when my highlight was Saturday morning at the TeePee Supper Club.

In those days, the TeePee was a class joint with a serious chef and a bar that rivaled any pub in downtown Chicago. Dad was the head bartender. On Saturday morning, he stocked the bar, meticulously. I hurried over to the TeePee and helped him haul up cases of High Life, Pabst and Blatz, but also a bounty of exotic spirits that carried me on a tour of the world — crème de menthe, crème de  cacao, Courvoisier, Sambuca, schnapps and grappa, Bombay and Tanqueray, Smirnoff and Stolichnaya, jagermeister, kirsch and genievre, Southern Comfort, Wild Turkey, Four Roses, single-malts, Bushmill’s and Chivas, Drambuie, Amaretto, Bailey’s, Frangelico, and every week or so, a nice bottle of Gewurtztraminer. And every time I wondered, why is some gin “slow?” Is it like syrup? Of course, I didn’t ask. You bent your back and moved the boxes. Dad would arrange the bottles in dizzying ranks in a hundred colors of glass and alcohol behind the bar, each one spotless and sparkling with reflected light, each with its silver spout, some so rich and pungent that I felt a little tipsy just from breathing the air behind the bar at the TeePee, where Dad ruled supreme, where no man was his equal, where he was more hero than Ward, Ozzie and all the other fictional fathers rolled together.

Except for the pleasure he took from running a really good bar, Dad knew — but didn’t say — that most of the work he had to do, all his life, was beneath him. This made him — and me, by imitation — an ironist. Long before he died last week (he was 87, beating most predictions by at least 40 years), Dad had bequeathed to me a sense of the absurd that I’ve applied to my almost every endeavor. It has polluted my writing, governed my tastes in literature, music and women, and muted the anger that I also inherited from Dad. It got me into trouble in school just about once a year and got me fired from at least two jobs.

But the wry laughter with which my Dad infected me has allowed me to forgive his every unintended trespass against me. It has kept me marginally sane, carried me through the travails I’ve visited on myself and kept me married, for 25 years now, to one of the few women who gets — well, tolerates — my “wit.”

When I saw Dad for the last time, I turned away after barely a glance, wishing the undertaker had known him better. If he’d known Dad half as well as all his kids and stepchildren did, he would have figured out some way — Super Glue, or maybe a safety pin — to send Dad to Jesus with that enigmatic half-smile that came without words and always left you wondering whether he loved you with unspoken affection or simply regarded you as a goddamn fool not worth talking to.