FOLLOWING THE LEADER

POSTED ON JULY 18, 2012 

FOLLOWING THE LEADER

An Andrew Ramble

 “In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man,

Now I’ve reached that age, I’ve tried to do all those things the best I can.”

Led Zeppelin, Good Times Bad Times

Someday when my sons are grown men I am going to ask them “Have you ever had any doubt or confusion about who your father figure was?”  Beyond all prayers, I truly hope they shake their heads, laugh at my old man’s sensitivity, and say “Are you kidding?”  Quickly followed by “You’re the only one we had to follow, so it had to be you!”  Maybe they will follow up this statement with a brief hug around my then narrowing shoulders and slightly compressed spine.  This would fill me with the gratification of accomplishing the primary goal of my existence.  Old men are such a sentimental lot.

 From 1970 to 1990 I was really looking for a candidate to fill the roll of Alpha Male, Roll Model or even Father for my childhood/adolescent self.  I was presented with several candidates, whom were either not interested in the position, interested but only available part time, or available but under qualified and far too young to even recognize that the opening even existed.  Being that I was still in diapers in 1970, I have no recollection of the earliest parts of this endeavor.  I do know that it was an essential position that I truly needed to fill.  The method by which I went about filling it became a principle factor in the formation of the sensitive old man I am yet to become.

Having three sons has revealed a valuable truth.  When a baby boy has an older brother, the older brother is essentially the first father figure that child has.  (This may happen with girls too, but I can only speak to my own experience.)  So it is really no surprise that my big brother was the first person I was to follow and try to emulate in innumerable ways.  From the hours we spent playing on our Coleco Telstar Arcade video game, to the days spent setting up and crashing AFX slot cars, to scary movies we watched, if my older brother endorsed it then it was sacrosanct to me.  Again, there is nothing unusual in this behavior; in fact it is the norm.  Up to a certain point.

70's Tech at it's best

Eeek!

The true father I was bestowed with had all of the capabilities of fatherhood at his disposal.  He truly loved his children.  He was a small business owner, third-time father, highly intelligent, and moderately motivated.  Unfortunately, he was also self indulgent to the point of being egomaniacal, prone to violence, prone to infidelity, and virtually without scruples.  Mixing these factors into a marriage which was on life support from it’s inception, lead to a outcome where this man was only able to play his natural roll of father from 5:30 pm on Fridays to 8:00 pm on Sundays.  Even during this modest commitment, his new young wife, along with a host of personal endeavors, put fatherhood rather low on his priority list, despite his flair for over dramatized behavior that would lead the uninitiated to believe otherwise. As I said, he did love me.

Then there was the man my mother married.  I never accepted the term stepfather for him, because to me this implies an acceptance of responsibility and a commitment to the child on the part of the step.  (Oddly enough I felt this way even before it was possible for me to think this way.  There must be a psychological term for this.)  He was a blue-collar union man with a decent steady income.  He already had 5 children with his first wife, who he had little interest in, and now he had 3 new children living with him who he had even less concern for.  He accepted that we were part of the package that came with my mother and grudgingly did what had to be done to make her happy.  He was tall and loud.  He was sometimes moody and sometimes boisterous.  He was an unrepentant drunk.  He was anti-intellectual in every way.  He was tough and stoic.  And he had a much influence as anyone in shaping me into a person, a man, and a father.

Sure the trinity of men I looked to in my life had their shortcoming when it came to being the father that I needed.  None of them was Mike Brady or Tom Bradford.  Hell, even those guys weren’t those guys.  One died of AIDS and one drove Adam Rich to a life of drugs and crime, so much for the idealized 1970’s TV dads.  The men I followed were not introspective about their role, and for the most part did not even realize they had a role to play.  I simply watched, followed, and took what I thought were essential ingredients for the makeup of manhood.  Looking back I also tried to take as much as I could from Steve Austin, George Taylor, Han Solo, Batman, Indiana Jones, James T. Kirk, and Godzilla.  For good or for bad, not much stuck.

A GAY DAD FOR A STRAIGHT TIME

My mother did not have her kids in rapid succession.  Essentially when one went off to kindergarten, she had another baby.  This resulted in a tidy 4 to 6 year spread between us siblings.  While this is a parent friendly approach, it more or less resulted in three only children for the duration of our childhoods.  However, instead of growing up with my next oldest sibling, I looked to him as a man and a role model.  To a first grader, an 11 year old is almost a grownup.  To an 11 year old, a 17 year old is a man.  And to a 17 year old, a 23 year old is a mentor.  I never realized that he needed a childhood as well, just as children typically don’t believe that their parents have their own human foibles.

Through the years I watched and followed, but I never copied.  I followed in tastes, in humor, in style and in personality.  I was always elated at any show of attention I could gain.  For him to share some playtime with me was a dream come true.  Sitting and watching a movie or Spiderman cartoon together on the old black & white Zenith I had in my little bedroom, was the epitome of an entertainment experience.

We never bickered.  We seldom fought and I always knew whatever he did was right.  I did have to learn through frustration and tears that we were far apart in age.  He was distant to me and through his teen years he had little desire to be a surrogate papa to his lonely little brother.  He was just a kid himself.  In fact, along with my big sister (who truly was a surrogate parent in so many ways) he truly was dealt a shitty hand when my parents marriage went bust.  So let me say it here once and for all.  Thanks for the music; it’s all still great.  I also love that we both laugh at the things that some find disturbing or inappropriate. (e.g. an Upper Decker)  Thanks for showing me that “putting your nose to the grindstone” almost always pays off.  (Sorry but yours is still pretty big!)  Most of all, thanks for a hell of a lot of criticism and ball breaking.  I didn’t always like it, and I definitely didn’t always deserve it, but without it, I probably would be a door greeter at Wal-Mart today.

I think in the early 1970’s many of the boundaries of modern divorce were still unknown to most.  This was a justification I gave myself for my fathers behaviors for many years.  Then again, maybe he acted purely out of selfish emotion and desire preceding and following his divorce from my mother.  Maybe he just didn’t give much reasonable thought to the role he had to play in my development.   This is where I really start ripping into my father’s flawed character.  This is where I attack every aspect of his judgment and recant ad-nauseam his lack of commitment to his family.  The thing is, I’m not going in that direction.  What purpose does it serve?

My dad was the source of all knowledge to me, my own Great and Powerful Oz.  For all of the contrived games of catch that we never had and for all of the cutesy father/son rivalries that never evolved between us, he was a better father to me and I was a better son to him, than either one of us deserved.  He taught me that life is often better when you act first and think later.  This is a guy who purchased a squirrel monkey on the street in Greenwich Village once.  He bought a bunch of glue horses for us to ride and care for, despite the fact that he was a city boy from the Bronx.  He bought a rusting Dutch fishing boat and converted it into a cabin cruiser, despite the fact that he never helmed anything bigger than a canoe.  And through all of his impulse he taught me never to be afraid to aim high and land on my face.

MAKE NICE COCO

Dad was not happy with “a little” he was really a guy who wanted “it all” and he went about this by tackling every opportunity, running business deals into the ground as fast as they could arise.  Taking was all he ever knew.  Shirking his marriage and family for the pretty young blond.  True happiness was something that always eluded him. Fighting to bend the will and thought of everyone around him until he universally drove those away who would not immediately conform to his thinking and vision.  His lack of formal education always haunted him. 

Ultimately, he was left with nothing.  His family would become visitors in a house where he resided, but belonged to someone else.  His wives were enemies, despising him without remorse.  His friends became acquaintances at best, although even the acquaintances seemed to rotate into and out of his life fairly quickly.  I was there and I saw it all.  And again I learned.  I learned that “a little” was probably enough.  I learned to lay back and let things come to me.  I learned that family loyalty is preeminent before all concerns.  I learned that bending to the will of others, then setting off on your intended path, is often the best way to go.  I learned that ego and pride make you who you are but will destroy you when left unchecked.  But the main thing I learned from him was that he loved his children more than anything.  He was closest to true happiness when we were with him.  He taught me that he was an imperfect person and sometimes we love people for their imperfections.  I mean, come on!  Who buys a monkey on the street?

I didn’t truly know my mother’s husband, my otherwise known stepfather.  He wasn’t there for me to know.  Again, we never had any common bond beyond my mother.  Had I been a lion cub, he surely would have devoured me during his brief courtship with my mother.  A real-life battle hardened Marine; he was truly tough.  He worked with steel and showed no fear walking the I-beams over countless cities and towns.  Had another man tried to hug him, as is the practice these days, he would have put the motherfucker on his ass.  Drinking was not a shameful act to him.  In his world, men were measured by how much they could drink and how well they could “hold it.”  His hair was cut in a barbershop, not a salon.  He looked odd to me when he was dressed in anything other than a flannel shirt, Dickies work pants, and rigging boots.  And the smell…washing probably 3 times a week, and smoking several packs of Dutch Masters Panatela cigars daily, truly added to the already alcoholic tinted garlic aroma that his pores emitted constantly.  I never really knew if he was pissed or happy.  I just knew him to be drunk or sober.

REAL MEN DRANK THIS.....

......AND DID THIS

His emotions, dreams, loves, hates, passions, and pities were a mystery to me.  But again, I watched and learned and always followed him when I could.  Beyond all explanation he was a likable S.O.B. I wanted to hang out with him when he chomped his cigars and did some dirty job around the house. He paid me to unload scrap metal out of the back of his pickup when I was six and I loved it.  He let me climb a ladder and nail cedar shakes to the side of our house off of a scaffold.  I was ecstatic!  I eagerly ran for his cans of Schaefer Beer and I never handed him one before I ripped off the tab.  I never saw him go to the doctor.  I never saw him cry and he never complained about anything.  In fact he was probably the most optimistic man I’ve ever known.  And he taught me more than anyone about what it means to be a man.  It was the basic stuff, but as I said, nobody else was really there to teach me character, work ethic, toughness (still working on that one), patience, and discipline.  I prayed for his death on a regular basis.

Two of my three fathers are gone now.  These days the one that remains gets as much fathering from me as he gives.  Maybe that’s what brotherhood is?  They all truly made me the man I have always wanted to be.  Have I become that person?  Hell if I know, but that tale is still being written.  I am eternally thankful to them all for being there for me to follow behind, and pick up the pieces of manhood I needed to collect for latter days.