better knew my Mom needed me. And with my brother also having moved out years earlier, I wanted to make sure she was okay. It was the kind of challenge I had never experienced before, with no one there but myself to orchestrate how each moment of the day would go. And all the while the struggle with the eeriness of it provided me with just enough activity so as to prevent me from dwelling on the obvious; the apartment was silent, no music, no dad. The smell of dad’s old clothes mixed with the souring fragrances of all the flowers that had been sent during the Shiva. It was just on the verge of being too much.
That week you bring out all the photos of family life. My childhood was wedged into these plastic album pages and in shoeboxes filled with Kodak three-by-fives or older black-and-whites, the ancient-looking, sepia-colored kind with those wavy corrugated edges. But like all photos, there’s a long list of events and unbelievable coincidental situations that led up to the moment when you stood still and said, “cheese!”That’s what I was looking at—the unseen area and space that no photo can ever really capture. For me, it seemed like I was prematurely urged to start to piece together everything. I had to—my old man had just died, and I knew it was my duty to take the reins, like the heroes in the Westerns my dad and I loved to watch. I was gonna need every bit of the strength and manliness I saw in those movies we watched together, especially now that we lost our lead actor. I was gonna be the one who leapt onto the team of runaway horses to whoa them down in order to bring some stability to this rocking stagecoach of our family life.
We didn’t have hundreds of people show up that week. To the world, it wasn’t like losing a head of state, even if to me it was more paramount than that. It was a very small, intimate group, as I mentioned: family members, neighbors, my mom’s coworkers from the county clerk’s office, and my dad’s peers, who were then mostly TV repair guys and fellow teachers. By that time my dad had long hung up the dream of being a professional musician, and I had never met the people from that era. He had been a TV repairman ever since my brother and I were young kids. In the last days he taught television electronics in a vocational high school, the kind of school where they sent kids unable to make it anywhere else, already deemed longshots and marginalized, pigeonholed to either learning a trade or becoming career criminals. In those days those schools were one step away from being sent to a locked-down reform school. He used to tell his class straight up, “This is like the last-chance saloon, you know what I mean? You don’t make it here, you ain’t going to make it anywhere.”
The night before my old man’s first day as a substitute teacher at Chelsea Vocational he came to my bedroom when I was just about to sleep and asked to borrow my baseball bat—I had a prized Louisville Slugger that he had managed to get a couple of Yankees to sign.
I heard him opening the chest at the foot of my bed. “Can I take your bat with me to school?”
I said, “Sure, I guess. Why not?” I thought he was teaching electronics, but I knew my dad well enough that he must’ve had something up his sleeve.
When he came back that night we were having our regular family supper, which was always at six o’clock on the dot, when he talked about his first day as a teacher.
“I walked into class and said my name’s Mr. Perlman. Anybody comes within thirty feet of me I start swinging this fuckin’ thing. The whole class looks at me in shock, like I’m an escapee from the loony bin. But I’m keeping a straight face until they realize, ‘Holy shit, this dude’s fuckin’ with us.’”
From that point on my dad won those kids over, and he eventually became the most popular teacher at the school. I only wish he had found this calling earlier in life, because this was clearly what he was
That week you bring out all the photos of family life. My childhood was wedged into these plastic album pages and in shoeboxes filled with Kodak three-by-fives or older black-and-whites, the ancient-looking, sepia-colored kind with those wavy corrugated edges. But like all photos, there’s a long list of events and unbelievable coincidental situations that led up to the moment when you stood still and said, “cheese!”That’s what I was looking at—the unseen area and space that no photo can ever really capture. For me, it seemed like I was prematurely urged to start to piece together everything. I had to—my old man had just died, and I knew it was my duty to take the reins, like the heroes in the Westerns my dad and I loved to watch. I was gonna need every bit of the strength and manliness I saw in those movies we watched together, especially now that we lost our lead actor. I was gonna be the one who leapt onto the team of runaway horses to whoa them down in order to bring some stability to this rocking stagecoach of our family life.
We didn’t have hundreds of people show up that week. To the world, it wasn’t like losing a head of state, even if to me it was more paramount than that. It was a very small, intimate group, as I mentioned: family members, neighbors, my mom’s coworkers from the county clerk’s office, and my dad’s peers, who were then mostly TV repair guys and fellow teachers. By that time my dad had long hung up the dream of being a professional musician, and I had never met the people from that era. He had been a TV repairman ever since my brother and I were young kids. In the last days he taught television electronics in a vocational high school, the kind of school where they sent kids unable to make it anywhere else, already deemed longshots and marginalized, pigeonholed to either learning a trade or becoming career criminals. In those days those schools were one step away from being sent to a locked-down reform school. He used to tell his class straight up, “This is like the last-chance saloon, you know what I mean? You don’t make it here, you ain’t going to make it anywhere.”
The night before my old man’s first day as a substitute teacher at Chelsea Vocational he came to my bedroom when I was just about to sleep and asked to borrow my baseball bat—I had a prized Louisville Slugger that he had managed to get a couple of Yankees to sign.
I heard him opening the chest at the foot of my bed. “Can I take your bat with me to school?”
I said, “Sure, I guess. Why not?” I thought he was teaching electronics, but I knew my dad well enough that he must’ve had something up his sleeve.
When he came back that night we were having our regular family supper, which was always at six o’clock on the dot, when he talked about his first day as a teacher.
“I walked into class and said my name’s Mr. Perlman. Anybody comes within thirty feet of me I start swinging this fuckin’ thing. The whole class looks at me in shock, like I’m an escapee from the loony bin. But I’m keeping a straight face until they realize, ‘Holy shit, this dude’s fuckin’ with us.’”
From that point on my dad won those kids over, and he eventually became the most popular teacher at the school. I only wish he had found this calling earlier in life, because this was clearly what he was
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