“Oh, Peter,” my friend Julie said casually, as if she’d just remembered something. “Morris died.”
I looked at her blankly. I felt nothing. My father? Such a thing was beyond comprehension. How could a man of such vitality and power pass through the veil without creating some celestial disturbance, some ripple? She must be mistaken. There would have to be a rent in the sky, a rush of wind—at least a tattered sheet flapping beside the road as a sign I might later recall and think, Ah, that was it.
I turned away and lit a cigarette. I saw her telling others. Berg came over and threw his arms around me. I felt nothing. I was in a motorcycle shop in a strange city, and a beautiful woman, a lover and friend, had just informed me that my father had died—and I felt nothing.
I found a phone and called my mother… Yes, she was all right. Yes, relatives were with her… I was spinning in place. I had no father. The ground had eaten him. I was 50 percent closer than a moment ago to being an orphan.
I hung up the phone and breathed in and out. For a long time afterward, my life felt as it did in that moment: detached and out of touch, just breathing in and breathing out. Perhaps it was the cocktail of drugs I was always imbibing, perhaps the defenses I’d erected as a boy, or the impossibility of feeling loved by him. Some chamber where clearly expressed feelings might live and flourish within me had been sealed tight as a bank vault. The combination to open the locks and spring those heavy doors was not to be commanded by anything as commonplace as a death.
It has been my experience as an actor that the more particularly and specifically a personal experience is relived, the more universally it may be appreciated. Individual events are hardly personal property; they participate in something larger and more profound that people share, understand, and can empathize with. Consequently, my behavior, while apparently bizarre, has antecedents and root causes that may be quite ordinary and not at all surprising to others.
Recurrent memories from childhood intrude into the present, overwhelming it. I am sitting at a desk puzzling over a series of incomprehensible high school math problems. A large, dangerous man, my father, is screaming, “You stupid, dumb son of a bitch!” at me. And then, again, I am being twisted, pummeled, bent, suffocated, and choked under the guise of instruction in self-defense.
Even though my body, as I experience these memories, is the storehouse of all that charged information, I cannot describe what the incidents felt like. I can describe the chalky green blotter on my desk, and its patterns of pressed concentric squares where I directed my attention during these homework diatribes. I can describe the gossamer curtains and cherry spool bed, the patterns and textures of my father’s clothing. I can recall the mélange of scents in the purple and beige patterned carpet my face was ground into when “wrestling.” But I cannot remember feeling anything other than numb—and perhaps an itch of anger, banked like hot coals deep in my muscles.
The nightly drama of homework, for instance, is indelibly imprinted but stripped of emotional content. It was as predictable as a dance. “Let’s see what you’re doing here,” Morris would mutter casually, walking into my room to check my progress. He would talk his way aloud through the problem I was daydreaming over. Since his calculations were impossibly fast, I was an audience, reduced to muttering “uh-huh” and nodding like a drinky-bird bowing over a cup of water. Inevitably he’d make a mistake, correct himself, then challenge me, “Why didn’t you see that? Are you paying attention, or what?”
Next, he’d offer some variant of “Okay, I’ve shown you one, you do the next.” I had no idea how to begin, or why if bus A headed north at fifty-two miles an hour and bus B headed south at forty-seven miles an hour anyone cared when they would meet. Inevitably, Morris would become impatient with my fumbling—and then abusive. His fervent, unanswerable questions—“How can you be so fucking stupid? How can anyone be so fucking stupid?”—paralyzed me, and my inability to respond in turn stimulated his fear that I might actually be stupid. Panic provoked threats to “snap your fucking thumbs” or “break your knees” or, most chilling of all, send me to reform school.
His yelling invariably attracted my mother, who entered the fray on my behalf, moved by maternal pity and also convinced by reading Freud that childhood traumas produce lasting emotional damage (and sometimes alcohol and drug abuse!). As she got older she was less intimidated by Morris and found the courage to intervene, however ineffectively. Grateful as I might have been for her intervention, there were now two of them, bookending me and screaming at one another like harpies.
“Morrie, you’re making him crazy!”
“Shut up, Ruthie, you’re using up the oxygen in the room.”
My role was reduced to sitting there, looking out the windows, studying the other homes lining our street, wondering if each had a similar quotient of domestic horrors—or was mine unique?
As I matured, I discovered that my childhood experiences were not all that different from many others, and far milder and less damaging than many. I offer no excuses for my personal faults and shortcomings, nor do I blame my parents, who did their best with what they had inherited from their own parents. During the time these stories took place, I was older than my mother had been when she bore me, and consequently fully responsible.
Fairness, however, demands that I point out that millions of young people did not accidentally or spontaneously express a decade of rage and disappointment like gas after a bad meal. My generation’s disillusion over social injustice and its fervent desire to make the world a more compassionate place must have had some antecedents. It does not seem foolish to search for that evidence inside the nation’s homes, where the young were bent, stretched, folded, stapled, and stressed by the social and political costs of the Cold War and the seductive, ridiculously inflated promises of Midas-like wealth. One way or another, such forces took their toll, and my household was no exception.
My father, for all his excesses and fulminations, was a decent, honest man. But after a lifetime of habitually closing myself down for fear of arousing his ire or violence, it’s not surprising to me that his death did not immediately release a flood of feelings. They appeared about eight years later, the first time I could bring myself to visit his grave, after I was forced to acknowledge that I had failed to save his beloved Turkey Ridge Farm from the debt to which he’d mortgaged and remortgaged it and failed, too, in my attempts to rebury him there, at his favorite place on earth.
One day in 1978, I drove to the cemetery in New Jersey where he was buried in a subsection of his brother-in-law’s plot. What an affront his fierce autonomy and pride would have experienced had he, the family patriarch, known that his presence was indicated by a shoe-box-sized granite plate in the lawn, shadowed by his brother-in-law’s far grander standing tombstone. Death does play tricks like that on self-importance.
When I finally located the site, I was stunned to find his grave bare—nothing on its surface but lumpy dirt. When I inquired, I was told that it had sunk several days before and the groundskeepers had stripped the sod and refilled it to ground level. The engraved letters on his stone—MORRIS COHON, 1904–1971—and the title of his favorite poem by Dylan Thomas—“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”—were clotted and obscured with dried clay from the groundsmen’s boots.
I dropped to my knees and began prying the dirt out of the letters with a twig. It was not until drops were muddying the granite beneath me that I realized I was crying and speaking aloud. I had not recognized my own voice: a high, keening, tiny sound, strangled in my throat. It was the voice of a frightened, disappointed child, nakedly entreating his father for affection and respect. I was telling him how much I loved and admired him and how much I needed him to love me the way I was, even though I might not be as smart as he was and didn’t enjoy hurting people. I cried and talked and chipped at the clay for over an hour. I didn’t think a body could warehouse such an inventory of tears.
Vivid memories flooded me. Occasionally at Turkey Ridge, when the sky was lowering gray as the afternoon rains of summer swept in, my father would summon me to one of our barns to nap with him. It was usually the bull barn that he had designed and built of pungent rough-milled beams sawn from our own native black and white oaks and covered with aluminum sheeting. We would climb into the haymow together, and he would wrap the two of us deliciously close in an old horse blanket. He would drink pear brandy, and I would rest against him, overjoyed to be tucked against his massive body, protected rather than assailed by the crook of his arm. He would sleep that way while I tried to stay awake, relishing the pattering of the rain on the metal roof. In those rare moments, I felt content and proud, the way I imagined other boys felt when I watched them playing with their fathers. My world was loving and, better still, safe.
The fact that so much of my childhood was wasted trying to make him notice me does not blind me to the fact that in his own way he treasured and appreciated me more than I realized at the time. Now, beside his grave, I could acknowledge that his spot in the universe was empty, and I was engulfed with a profound sense of loss and frailty, as if I were a helpless witness to the sight of a loved one slipping irretrievably into quicksand. The cause of both my joys and terrors was gone, sucked away with the pitiless neutrality of a Kansas tornado chewing through a trailer park.
Excerpted with permission from the book
sleeping where I fall: a chronicle. Copyright
© 1999 by Peter Coyote. Reprinted by
permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights
reserved. (800) 386-5656; Email:
westview. orders@perseusbooks. com