If you told my father you loved him to his face, you might detect a low growl coming in your direction, and notice the corner of his upper lip start to curl into a little sneer, before he let you know: “That’s a big word” and you might whisper back in your mind “not really” Go in for a hug at your peril and you would be met with a firm, outstretched hand. Dad didn’t give hugs, so you just had to take them, blowing by the handshake toll gate to just wrap him up for a few seconds, being careful not to linger too long for fear he would catch fire.
For a man who never said I love you…like never, like my whole life, you had to learn to look other places for where he was practically screaming it, but certainly not in a language that others might understand.
But if anyone came dangerously, precariously close to having my father tell them he loved them, to their face, using actual words spoken in the English language, it would have to be my tall, tan, handsome friend, Carl. I honestly don’t even remember when Carl and my father met for the first time, but I can tell you, from Day One…it was for REAL with those two! Carl was far and away, my dad’s favorite son. They just seemed to immediately understand each other’s rhythms and nuances and it didn’t hurt that at 6’4” and with the mitts of a wide receiver, Carl sure could shake a hand!
Disarmed, that’s what my heavily armed father was by Carl. When they were together, on more than one occasion, I thought to myself: “Is my father actually blushing right now?”
One year they got on the phone at Thanksgiving and my dad asked Carl what they were preparing that year, and Carl shot back: “Rat. We’re stuffing a rat this year instead of a turkey” What question do you think was asked at Thanksgiving every single year after that? “You think Carl’s got a RAT in the oven again this year?” he would ask. “I don’t know Dad…but I think that’s code for let’s call him and find out.”
My father had even placed Carl’s acting headshot centered on the wall behind his desk chair in his office. In the photograph, Carl displayed an expansive, balding forehead and it was across this ample piece of real estate that he scrawled a long, personal message to my father. My dad simply could not get over that. “Jesus Christ, who would think to do such a thing…to sign your own forehead like that? That’s going right behind my chair.” I think they must have bonded, at least partially, over their shared baldness, but I think mostly it was just crazy love at first sight.
My headshot, by the way, was further down the wall to the right, near the Mr. Coffee machine and the cylinder of Coffee Mate non-dairy creamer. Not that I didn’t deserve it, having signed it in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo…and I’m sure my uncompromised hairline didn’t win me any points either. See you at the coffee maker.
It took Dad a while to clock that Carl was what might commonly be described as “a fucking drug addict” when they first met. The extent of my father’s understanding of addiction was the following: “Just cut that shit out.” When he drove off the overpass at Woodman Avenue after getting a few hooks in him one night, Dad just “cut that shit out” and after he was released from the hospital, he got the help he needed by treating his drinking problem with 112-hour work weeks.
I believe we’re all addicts to some degree of one form or another, but in Carl’s case, his addiction was just more straightforward than most…what today might be labeled as “authentic” and over time, as it goes, it didn’t get better, it got worse and Carl started to disappear and reappear on a regular, if unpredictable, basis.
I played my part for a while, chasing him around, breaking needles, all caught up in the madness. Threatening to write his eulogy, until I did…twice.
During my campaign for Codependent of the Year, I once got roped into picking up some of his personal belongings that had been thrown into a box by his former roommate, after Carl was first locked out and then told, not asked, to leave. In the box were some mismatched clothes, books, scripts, cigarettes, half a carton of orange juice and a single high-topped sneaker. Nothing screams crackhead louder than orange juice carton and a single shoe in a box of belongings in someone’s garage. For the record, I thought including the orange juice and shoe was a nice touch by the former roommate and I’d wager that matching sneaker could probably be found on the roof of an abandoned paint factory downtown.
One night, Dad and my stepmother Helen attended a production I was performing in at a small theater in Hollywood.
After the show, we exited the lobby together out onto the street where we were greeted by a tall, bald, dancing ghoul on the sidewalk whose sunken eyes appeared to be dilating at different rates. It was Carl, down about 40 pounds from his fighting weight, throwing his long arms into the air as if to say: “Surprise! It’s me…Satan!” While I watched his temporomandibular joint click like a morse code machine, he came in for a round of crack hugs, and asked where we were going next? And before I could say “Rehab?” to my absolute horror and astonishment, Dad suggested: “Well, why don’t we all go over to Du-Pars and have some pie?” “You guys go have pie and I’m going to walk into traffic!” I wanted to say, but before I knew it…there we were, at Du-Pars having pie. Me, Dad, Helen and that first thing that came off the ship at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Dad asked Carl what he’d been up to lately, and I wanted to answer “Shooting heroin into his neck for one thing! More key lime anyone???”
Helen was quiet and was what could be described as “sternly polite” that evening. She could tell there was something quite wrong, and by the time we parted ways in the Du-Pars parking lot, even Dad could too, as we watched Carl slink back into the Underworld. Goodnight, Satan.
After a few more agonizing months of this, I went to visit my father and after dinner we walked outside and down the driveway. It was late Spring and the days were getting a little longer. Out of the blue, my dad asked: “How’s Carl?”
I didn’t know what to say to him. When Carl was out there using, our Kiwi friend once told me not to worry about him.
“When he comes back in…that’s when we worry.” He said.
“Right now, he’s happy as a dog with two dicks, Mate.” He told me. The day my dad asked about him, Carl was out…waaaay out. Like 3 dicks out.
“How’s Carl?” I shrugged and bluntly told my father the truth.
“I don’t know…” I said.
His jaw set and his face became flushed, and then he turned and looked across the street.
“The Hamptons are gettin’ solar this year” he half yelled.
“They got a good bid and they’re finally gonna do it.”
He pointed and said “That whole stretch of roof will have panels on it by summer.”
We just stood there together looking across the street at the roofline, having no fucking clue what else to say, and I for one silently thanked God in heaven that the Hamptons were finally getting solar.
Some time went by and things got worse, until by some Grace, they didn’t anymore and things got better and Carl got clean and my father got to see him coming back home, from a far distance, like the story goes.
And they picked up right where they left off, Headshots, Handshakes…Rats.
Carl was sober about two years when my dad got sick.
I remember walking into my father’s hospital room one day, and there was Carl, beaming, gently massaging my father’s hands…with lotion no less. As an Army Airborne combat veteran of two wars, Dad wasn’t what you would describe as a real hand massage guy, but there he was, smiling ear to ear as Carl double pumped some more moisturizer into his big palms, rubbed them together and got back to work. It was like one long handshake for them both...The Viking and The Leprechaun.
“How are you?” I asked Dad “I’m livin’ the life of Reilly” he told me. “I don’t know who Reilly is, but he’s got a damn good life!”
My father looked awfully small in that big hospital bed but he sure looked happy and even sitting down, Carl looked so tall, and tan and handsome and sober, clean and sober…always somehow smelling like he just stepped out of the shower, like soap and Speed Stick…as the saying goes: He cleans up well…or as Kiwi Pete says: “He bounced high, Mate”…as in off the bottom.
Consider this a love letter.
The Hamptons Are Getting Solar This Year