My father died when I was 39. In those 39 years, we had very few arguments, very few fights of any sort. He was not the kind of person to yell and in those thirty-nine years, he probably yelled at me less than a dozen times…and not at all in the last fifteen or so.
I've probably said this before here about him but there were times when he almost seemed to wish I gave him more reasons to raise his voice or discipline me. I was just one of those kids who never got into trouble, never did anything really wrong, at least on purpose. He'd go to work and hear other men talking about how they had to smack their kids or ground them or otherwise punish a son in dire need of learning to behave. There was so little of that with me that he sometimes felt he wasn't being a proper father.
This is not to say he never got mad. He hated his job and worked in a bureaucracy that was sometimes very harsh or disrespectful of its employees so there was plenty there to holler about. He just couldn't find many reasons to get mad at me. Also, he had Joe Pyne.
Joe Pyne was a commentator-host on radio and TV at the time, and in some ways a role model for most folks who now do political-type radio shows. More than a decade ago on this site, I wrote…
Joe Pyne inspired a couple of generations of TV and especially radio personalities who learned that getting people pissed off was good for the ratings. I never met Mr. Pyne but the guy who used to cut my hair used to cut his, and you tend to trust your barber. He said that Pyne was, indeed, an angry, one-legged man who was always yelling about everything, but that the guy clearly laid it on thick and deliberately for his broadcasts. Like a lot of folks in radio, he found an act that worked for him and he worked that act for all it was worth.
Pyne was big on TV and radio in Los Angeles in the sixties, and I could never understand why some people went on his show or called in. He was generally Conservative but his overwhelming concern seemed to be contempt for his guests, no matter what they said. To the extent he had a political philosophy, it seemed to be mostly anti-freeloader. He was pro-police, pro-military, pro-gun ownership, etc., but he was also pro-union, at least when the union was actually representing the interests of working men and women. I don't think anything enraged him more than the concept of welfare…and not just for the poor or minorities. Unlike a lot of people who loathe welfare, he was also against various government subsidy programs that he thought functioned as welfare for the wealthy, and quite willing to rip even Republican leaders who were responsible for that kind of thing.
For a time when my father was dropping me off at school on his way to work, we used to listen to Pyne on the car radio. Even though I was pretty Conservative in those days, I thought Pyne was a jerk on many fronts, seeing Commies where they weren't any and presuming that if you were under the age of 21, you were almost certainly a worthless, dope-smoking hippie. It amused me that he was always railing against people (especially young people) who allegedly shunned honest work…this, while he was making a small fortune via what struck me as very easy, dishonest work. Pyne then did his A.M. radio show from a little studio in his bedroom at home. Often, he was lying in bed in his jammies, yammering insults and telling people to go out and get a real job. My father did not see the irony or amusement. Pyne simply enraged him…but he listened, and I guess that was the point.
I never understood why my father, who had stress enough at work, insisted each morning on turning on the Pyne program. Back then, there were plenty of channels on the radio that played music…lovely, non-controversial, non-inflammatory music. I think the appeal was that every so often, some caller would sneak in and give Pyne a real argument and point out the asininity of one of his positions — but that didn't happen often. In any debate, the host has a secret weapon which I suspect all hosts of such shows use at times. Many clearly use it a lot.
You can win any argument if you have a magic button that mutes your opponent, especially if you know how to use it so it doesn't sound like you cut him off. It's not hard to make him appear speechless because he couldn't find the words to reply to you. Pyne would sometimes delight in insulting a caller and hanging up on him but he'd also sometimes do the trick where he'd quietly cut the guy off, ask him to offer some proof of what he said or name an example…and then after a bit of silence, he'd say, "See? You can't come up with any, you jerk!"
My father really hated Joe Pyne. He didn't hate a lot. He hated Richard Nixon and most of the Republican leaders of that day, and he hated Joe Pyne. That was about it.
Oh — and Art Linkletter. Mr. Linkletter was a TV host who once on some show said something my father interpreted as "Really, all that matters in life is making as much money as you can, and there's nothing immoral about anything you do that makes you money, and if other people get hurt, that's too damn bad for them, and you shouldn't care about them because if they're not rich themselves, they aren't really human beings. They're more like dogs and, gosh, who wouldn't kill a dog if you could make money doing it?"
I am exaggerating…and my father didn't think Linkletter actually said those words or anything close but my father heard him say something — perhaps many somethings — that suggested that was the Linkletter credo in life. My father's awful job was that he dealt with tax evaders for the Internal Revenue Service so he encountered people who actually felt like that. He didn't make many jokes but one time, we were watching an adaptation of Mr. Dickens' A Christmas Carol and near the beginning when Scrooge was saying that the poor should just all die and decrease the surplus population, my father pointed at the screen and said, "I think I had a case on that guy."
What he hated about his job was that no one was ever glad to see him. If my father called on you, you were in trouble. You owed the government money, you had to pay and you had to work out a payment schedule. He was more-or-less Good Cop, warning you that if you didn't settle with him, he would have to turn the matter over to Bad Cop — another division which would seize your property and/or threaten jail time. Once in a while, he had to do the seizing himself.
Some people would cry and sob and tell him — and he often knew this to be absolutely true — that they were destitute, unable to even feed themselves or their families. And now, here was this man telling them that they had to come up with a couple thousand dollars for Uncle Sam. If you are a person of decency and compassion, as my father was, how would you like to be in his position a couple times a week?
In other instances, he dealt with people of fabulous wealth who could easily have bought one less Picasso that week and more than paid off their delinquent taxes, but who were like Leona Helmsley, the hotel heiress who supposedly told one of her many housekeepers, "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes." As often as not, those people would wind up paying very little or even zero. They all seemed to have a friend high in the government — sometimes, it was Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan themselves. They'd call the friend, the friend would call someone also high up in government and the tax bill would disappear or be settled for nickels. Once, my father was forced to write a written apology to say he'd made a mistake to think the person who actually owed millions owed anything.
Like I said: How would you like to be in that position a couple times a week? But having grown up in the Great Depression and having no particular marketable skills, he was afraid to look for anything else.
Some of our best father/son time came when he drove me to school in the morning, dropping me off and then heading off to work.
In his last years, and especially when he was hospitalized, we talked with absolute honesty…and it was father and son but it was also two adults. He was amazed and proud that his son had built a career doing something he loved…and in my particular profession. My father would have loved to have been a writer but probably didn't have the skill and he definitely didn't have the temperament to deal with two downsides. One is that a writer faces occasional (sometimes, frequent) rejection. As a young man, he'd tried out for one writing job and the turndown left him devastated and unwilling to try again.
The other downside is that for most writers, income can be highly unpredictable — how much you'll make and when they'll actually pay it to you. The upside of working for the Internal Revenue Service was that there was a guaranteed check every Friday for X dollars.
X wasn't a lot but it paid all the bills with a few bucks left over. He told me many times how he never understood how I could sleep at night, not knowing how much money — if any — I'd receive next week.
Not long before he had that last heart attack, he began telling me over and over how much he loved dropping me off at school — at high school and especially at U.C.L.A. He loved our conversations which often were about why Joe Pyne was full of shit this particular morning, as opposed to why he was full of shit on previous mornings. Then he loved watching me get out of the car with my notebook and scurry off to theoretically get a little bit smarter and more likely to make something of myself.
One time, he said, "I always loved that moment and I'd enjoy it as long as I could before my ulcer kicked in." Because once I was out of the car, he was no longer driving me to school. He was heading in to work…so his stomach would constrict and there'd be that little hurt in it, not knowing how he'd be kicked right there that day but feeling fairly certain there would be at least once kick.
I had not made the connection before. Seeing me going off to class, believing I'd do better than he had…that was one of his rewards for doing that terrible, terrible job each day.
We talked about that a couple times and one day when he was in the hospital, he surprised me by saying, "It always bothered me when you seemed ashamed to have people see your father dropping you off at school." My brain and voice responded in unison with a loud "Huh?" That thought never occurred to me. Not once…and I told him so. "When did I ever do that?"
He said, "When I dropped you off at U.C.L.A. I always offered to drive onto the campus and take you right up to your first class but you always insisted I let you off outside the campus."
Did you ever find yourself in a misunderstanding that could have been and should have been cleared up decades before? Let me explain this one…
The turf has changed a bit since 1970 when I went there but U.C.L.A. was and is a huge place with many entrances onto its grounds. There was one at the corner of Westholme and Hilgard and I always asked my father to let me off at that corner. From there, I could walk about ten steps onto the campus and turn right to go down a pedestrian walkway (i.e., a passageway on which cars could not drive) that took me straight to the building where my first class of the day was held. It was very easy and I liked the short walk, which also took me past some vending machines were I'd sometimes buy a bag of chips or pretzels to eat later in the day.
Had he driven onto the campus, the roadway immediately veered to the left — away from the walkway and the vending machines and the building I was trying to reach — and it went nowhere near my destination. Anywhere he'd let me off would have meant a much longer walk for me (and no pretzels) and then it would have been very confusing for him to find his way off the campus.
I thought I'd explained that to him several times back in '70…but now there we were in his hospital room nearly a quarter-century later and he was telling me, "I thought you were just saying that. I thought you were ashamed that your father was driving you to school."
I went over it with him one more time and he said he understood now…but some ideas, you just have to blast out of some minds. I went home and found an old map I had of the U.C.L.A. campus and a bit of the surrounding area. I drew up an enlargement a yard-wide of the relevant area and took it in to him the next day.
"Look," I said. "This big blue line shows how if you let me off outside the campus, I could walk down this little pathway, stop at the vending machines here and then go right to English 101. This red line shows you where we'd have wound up if I let you drive me onto the campus."
He stared at it and it was probably my tenacity more than my cartography that convinced him it was just as I said. "I guess I had it all wrong," he muttered.
I moved his I.V. stand over so I could get up real close to him and look him straight in the face. I said, "Is there anything else I ever did that still bothers you? Something we never discussed? I've apologized for a number of things and we buried those as issues between us. Think hard. Did I spit up on you when I was two? Did I forget to take the trash out once when I was fourteen? Is there anything else like this — anything! — that we need to talk about?"
He thought for a long minute or so then said, "You told me once you were up for a writing job on that TV show…that Maude thing. That was a good, successful show. Why didn't you take that job?" That was twenty years earlier.
I said, "They hired some other writer instead of me."
He smiled and said, "Oh. In that case, there's nothing else." Then he added, "Except you did spit up on me a lot when you were two. And three. And four. And five…"
Gee, I had a great father.
