Don't Wake Daddy (to Reality)

Being back home gave me some time to think, observe, and react on my father’s general behaviors and dispositions. I’d only been back from Virginia for about four days before it hit me. I can honestly say without reservation that I think my father Nick (“Nicky” to his mother, and also to me, when his antics become too manic and incredible to bear) is going crazy. Like, flat-out, True Life “I-have-OCD”-mixed-with-Brando-on-the-set-of-Apocalypse-Now, batshit looney.

For instance . . . Here’s Dave (that’s me!) eating breakfast this morning. I glance across the table. My father’s cell phone is sitting there. I am unimpressed until I notice a pattern of bright yellow dots on the bottom right corner of his Motorola. There’s a glare from the window, and I can’t quite tell whether it’s some sort of design on the phone itself or merely the light playing tricks on my eyes (like a mirage, see?). As I lean in closer to inspect, I’m struck with a recollection that transports me back in time the better portion of a decade.

Circa 2000, Nick came into possession of a can of what most people would readily identify as house paint. Bright yellow house paint. I say “came into possession” because I still cling to the ever-dwindling hope that he didn’t actually pay for this stuff. When I remember the zeal with which he took to it, though, that possibility seems rather slim. Most of the population (English-speaking and otherwise—house paint is recognizable across linguistic and cultural barriers because there’s a picture of a fucking house on the label) would acknowledge the intended purpose of such a product and either paint a home with it or discard it. Majority thought, of course, has no bearing on the way Nick behaves; he’s a white man in America, but that’s precisely where his participation in majorities ceases.

In his hands, this paint became an act of self-definition, and in the ensuing years he began to show the world (read: northern New Jersey; house guests, business relations, et al) who he was. Our house became his canvas, and we ourselves became merely background noise as Nicky drafted his masterpiece. The broad strokes weren’t alarming in themselves: one day he came home from Lowe’s with a bagful of wooden shapes (crescent moons, teddy bears, this sort of thing; I’ll leave it up for you to discern why exactly such things are available for purchase anywhere), bustled down to his workbench in the basement, and painted them. Weird? Absolutely. Pathological? Not quite. Next, he painted various, randomly-selected working components of his bicycle. A pedal here, a brake lever there. Perhaps a spoke, if he was feeling particularly adept. Again, at the time, I didn’t see the writing (paint) on the wall and chalked this up to some sort of repressed artistic urge that just now managed to surface in the reservoir of doom that comprises my father’s brain (I like to envision something like the underground sea in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, but any gloomy chasm will do, really). Of course, as time passed, these opening moves became the foundation to a depraved endgame: Nick was painting his way to Crazytown.

Snap back to reality (there goes gravity). My dad’s phone is sitting across the table from me, covered with a veritable constellation of yellow dots. I ask the question. I already know the answer. “This way, when I get a phone call, I know immediately which side is the front, see?” He’s delighted with himself. I’m floored. “I did the same thing to my laptop.” Never mind the fact that his laptop doesn’t receive phone calls, or that it’s worth fifteen hundred dollars. I sit in silence contemplating the mental landscape of a man who uses house paint on his electronics and sees no reason why others might find that odd. Chuckling, Nick returns to “work,” which for him can mean anything from legitimate progress on his website to taking pictures off cnn.com and strategically adding what he deems to be humorous speech bubbles above people’s heads. Astonishing.

Actually, the laptop is probably worth quite a bit more than $1500 by this point because immediately after receiving it a few years ago for his birthday, my father embarked upon a swift, decisive, and baffling course of action to effectively transform it into a desktop computer. I know this sounds odd, and it is, but bear with me as I describe some of the modifications (also: “mods,” 2Fast2Furious) Nicky saw fit to make. The first move was deftly under the radar: a wireless mouse caught my father’s fancy in the local BestBuy. Satisfied that the Bluetooth signal from the mouse wouldn’t create interference for the Bluetooth headset connected to his star-burst Motorola (he posed this question to my brother; Mark barely had time to stammer out a flabbergasted “no” before his brain melted in wonder), he bustled over to his home office and spent the rest of the day setting the hardware up and then calling me over to witness him using his mouse on surfaces that were not mousepads. Passing through the office one afternoon, weeks later, I noticed that a wireless keyboard had magically appeared beside the laptop, but even then I lacked both the vision and the lunacy to see what lay at the bottom of this slippery slope Nicky had chosen.

As a point of order, my dad calls this home office “the Mothership,” in what I can only assume to be an attempt to realize a long-time childhood dream to be William Shatner. He calls it the Mothership in conversation, in business e-mails, and on the phone with my mother, who, to her credit, usually has enough self-control not to explode in fits of laughter (tears?)—most of the time, anyway. In the cockpit of this Mothership, flanked by a veritable purgatory of once-living potted plants and enough trinketry to make a living wage on Antique Roadshow, you can now find a highly-specialized grouping of technologies. Since the wireless mouse and keyboard, my father has added a flat panel monitor to the mix. This means, of course, that the inherent qualities that make a laptop what it is (mobility, simplicity, etc.) are no longer available to the Ahab of this juggernautic vessel. Fighting the times, the technologies, and the common sense of his friends and loved ones, Nicky had made a laptop into a desktop.

The punch-line to this little anecdote only recently made itself apparent to me when I discovered over Thanksgiving break that my father continues to use his decrepit desktop (a late-nineties Dell that makes noises one would expect from the tarmac at Dulles rather than a home computer) for most of his daily workload. He keeps the laptop on standby for more important and selective instances, like when my younger brother watches television. Nicky will snatch the laptop from its moorings and barrel over to his favorite couch (“The Mothership is on the move!”), set up shop, and stay there long after Matthew has quit the room in angst-ridden disgust. He’s also been known to enter the room as you’re putting a movie on, sit down, and voice vehement dismay when you attempt to dim the lights. Outlandish.

As noted earlier, my father has owned Bluetooth cellular earpieces. Note the plural: he’s gone through two of these products, neither of which has lived up to his rigorous cellular lifestyle. To set the scene once again: here’s Dave, with mother, brother, and father in the local VerizonWireless store. My father approaches the cashier with what appears to be an NFL coach’s headset and pays for the item. We leave. In the car, he takes the headset out and tries it on; he looks like an air traffic controller. Since this fateful day, Nicky has been running exercises with his new toy. Recently, he tested out the conference calling capabilities of his work phone, using the home line, work line, and cell phone (replete with its new headset, of course) to have a three-way call with himself. Calls from the car are generally dominated by such crucial conversation topics as how well you can hear him and how well he can hear you. His delight is evident.