bones of the moon
black cocktail
a child across the sky
outside the dog museum
the panic hand
kissing the beehive
the land of laughs
from the teeth of angels
sleeping in flame
voice of our shadow
"Reading My Father's Story"
by Jonathan Carroll
(Cimarron Review,
October 1973)
My mother once told me that several of my
father's short stories had been anthologized many times
over. My father rarely commented on it.
Ever since my sophomore year in prep school, I have been telling my father that I want to be a writer, and although he is a man who keeps most of his feelings to himself, I am sure that he is proud that I wish the same life. I now tell him that I cannot make up my mind whether I should write a novel about college life because the experience is so close at hand, or continue writing short stories because they are easier for me and far less time consuming. He is affectionately noncommittal, telling me that it makes no difference what I write, just so long as I continue writing. The most Important thing is to develop an individual style, he says, and he thinks I may be on the brink now.
After four years of college, I have grown
into writers like Beckett and Wurlitzer, Pynchon and Barth.
Because I have inherited, as have my brother and sister, a
family love for disagreeing about anything, I continually
argue with my father over the merits of a Donald Barthelme
or a Robert Coover. He readily admits that he doesn't
understand anything that they are trying to do, although I
often try to convince him.
On the other hand, his favorite movie is 8 1/2.
In the nineteen-six ties, he was nominated for an Oscar. He had written the screenplay for The Hustler. I was in bed at twelve-thirty the night the Oscars were awarded, the night the writer of Judgment at Nuremberg won over my father.
I was with him, along
with the other members of my family, the night he won an
Emmy. He had written the narration for the documentary on
the Louvre, and all the people at our table were convinced
that he would win. I decided that when the camera picked up
my father walking to the stage from our table, I would be
smiling instead of looking serious for all the people I knew
who might be watching. Once at a glee club dance in prep
school, I impressed a girl when I told her that my father
had won an Emmy. She had actually seen the show and me that
night, although of course she didn't know me then, she said
excitedly.
I was in the college bookstore, looking through the short
story section, when I picked up the anthology. Looking at
the table of contents, I gasped when 1 saw his name and
story right there, underneath Shirley Jackson's "The
Lottery." It was a fiction about Beau Brummel in the days of
his self-exile in France. A half-mad old pauper, he still
retained the semblance of what he once was. The story was
titled "The Shining Thing."
After finishing the story, I called my father and told him that I had always wanted to call a writer after having finished his work to tell him how much I liked it. I told him that this was the first time I had been able to do it. He laughed and asked which of the stories I had read. Forgetting what my mother had said, he told me that several other stories of his had been anthologized, among them two in a collection edited by Ray Bradbury.
He took me to meet Bradbury when I was very young, and I remember him as having a big dog named Richard the Chicken Hearted and a garage full of masks. I also remember playing wiffle ball on our lawn with a guy named Alan who I know now as Alan Harrington, and talking briefly at one of my parents' dinner parties with S. J. Perelman whom I only discovered last year. I was in love with Shirley MacLaine as Princess Aouda then, but he had only written the movie.
Several months ago, I told my wife that I was afraid of the time when my father would die. When she asked me why, I told her that I felt for the first time in my life, we were trying to get to know each other, which made me very happy and excited. If he were to die in the near future, it would keep us from fulfilling the possibility, but friendship with him was something I wanted very much.
When he was younger, he had worked as an editor at Esquire Magazine. When I graduated from college, he got me an interview with the editor-in-chief of the magazine, and although there were no positions open at the time, we talked at length about my father and what a marvelous mind he had. The editor told me that he remembered one story in particular that my father had written.
When my father was very young, my grandfather took him to his first Broadway show. Excited as only a boy of seven can be excited, my father sat in the second row of the theatre, terribly proud of himself and terribly proud that he was sitting next to his father on this very special occasion. In the front row, there were two seats that were empty. As the lights went down and the curtain began to rise, Tom Mix, dressed in a beautiful white cowboy suit, wearing a white ten gallon hat, strode down the aisle and sat down in one of the two seats. Before the lights dimmed completely, he took off his hat and put it on the other seat. He then turned to my father and said, "Howdy, Partner."
