Mean Dads for a Better America Read online

  Really? I showed her my book.

  “How do we know what he is doing?” she asked me as we looked at my workbook together. “He may be thinking of a cure for a disease. He may be about to discover something as important as gravity, like Sir Isaac Newton . . . but even if he isn’t, who are we to say what he is doing is a sin? He may be reflecting on the Holy Spirit! Or he may be doing nothing at all. Regardless, daydreaming is not a sin and to call it such is to diminish the whole idea of sin.”

  When my dad got home from work, my mother showed him the workbook and explained to him the lesson to which I had been subjected. My dad looked it over and then looked at me.

  “That . . .” he said, “is a load of bunk.”

  Dad’s lessons were always more condensed than Mom’s, but I knew they were both on the same page about things like this. I probably wouldn’t have given much thought to this workbook lesson, but their decisive take on the issue and their unequivocal rejection of it stuck with me. Not the lesson itself, but the clarity with which they approached their beliefs. They didn’t just go to church on Sunday; they liked to think about the doctrine and discuss it, and if they read or heard something they disagreed with, they’d challenge it. In this way, they were very devout but they were also rebels—they were ready to challenge anyone in the church, whether a nun, a priest, a bishop, or a pope, if they disagreed with them. While they never questioned their faith, they were more than willing to question the hierarchy of the Church if it went against their beliefs. So as a kid, the Church to me was mostly about doing what you were told and following the Ten Commandments, but as I got older it became more about understanding the ideas behind faith, and my parents encouraged that.

  My mother would take me to church in these early adolescent years but she’d let me wander off. Teens liked to gather in the back. At the crowded Masses people young and old would stand in the back vestibule and peer through the stained-glass windows. As a little kid I always thought the people in the back were a little guilty of something, like they didn’t want to go all the way into the church because they had done something wrong that week. In some instances that may have been true. I thought I’d never be a back-of-the-church person.

  But as a teen, some of the other kids would gather in the back—then sneak up the staircase leading to the organ loft. The curved staircase had a triangular landing halfway up that functioned as a sort of meeting place for teenagers. We’d sit and talk the whole time but were still able to feel like we attended Mass. We’d barely hear the priest but we could hear the choir and feel the pipe organ as it vibrated the carpeted staircase under us. I’d look forward to these Masses because we had our own private space to talk, which is all we wanted to do in those days, talk with other people our own age.

  Later on, in high school, my friends and I would skip Mass altogether and just meet at the Apollo Restaurant, which shared its parking lot with St. Catherine’s parish. We’d spend our “Mass” time eating eggs and drinking coffee and getting philosophical. We called it the Apolostic Church and justified our skipping church by allowing only theological or philosophical discussion at the table. The Apolostic Church was for discussion of deep thoughts—it wasn’t merely to justify our transgressions; we were on a spiritual quest. We’d bring our dog-eared copies of New Age bestsellers by Richard Bach and Robert Pirsig to our church breakfast and discuss great ideas. Jacked up on caffeine and metaphysics, one discussion would flow into the next without pause. We were so impressed with ourselves and our expanding minds, we thought we were the only teens to ever do such a thing. No one bothered to tell us “thinking you’re the smartest person that ever lived” is a phase every adolescent goes through.

  But my routine was still the same: I’d arrive at St. Catherine’s with my mother, and when she walked inside the church, I’d just turn around, walk down the stairs, and head over to the Apolostic for breakfast and heresy with my friends. Then I’d meet her outside the church after Mass thinking she was the most naïve person in the world. More likely she was using the same technique that she used when I was using stolen money to gorge on candy at Dacey’s variety store in the first grade—laissez faire parenting. She knew I was skipping church! But what good would it be to drag me into the pews at that age when I’d already been to Mass more than eight hundred times, and had countless theological discussions with her in the car. At that point, it had either sunk in or it hadn’t. If it had, she knew I’d eventually find my way back.

  Well, guess what, her master plan worked. My wife and I take the kids to church faithfully every Sunday morning. Chalk another one up for their parenting style. How many is that now?

  *

  Despite what I thought when I was in grade school, there weren’t just Catholics in Norwood; there were families of other religions, too. Those families mostly lived far away from the area where we lived, though, as our little corner was most definitely the Irish Catholic part of town. This meant that I wasn’t really exposed to anybody who wasn’t Irish Catholic until junior high school, when students from all different grammar schools came together. Now we had Greeks, Protestants, Jews, Catholics, and one black kid. It was like the United Nations!

  I was immediately attracted to the Jewish girls. They were mysterious to me. I remember looking over at their lunch table that first day in junior high. There wasn’t a Jewish table—we weren’t ethnically separated or anything, but a group of them all sat together. The first thing I noticed was their dark hair, my weakness. And they also dressed well, and knew how to wear makeup. Junior high, at least in those days, was when girls first started experimenting with makeup, and let’s just say the Irish Catholic girls weren’t so skilled in that department. They kind of slapped it on. It looked as if they applied it hastily on the way to school, while they were trying to hold on to a little mirror and smoke a cigarette with the other hand. (OK, not many of the girls in junior high smoked but I’m trying to paint a picture—some of those Irish girls were tough.) The Jewish girls seemed to know how to wear their makeup tastefully—they were able to blend their foundation down through the neck area, so they didn’t have that harsh makeup line at the jaw. Irish Catholic girls just stopped at the edge of the face, and said, “I’m done . . . whatevah!”

  And around the eyes, Jewish girls were of course very subtle—maybe just a touch of mascara. Those Irish girls would draw a black line around the eye. A nice, thick black line inside the eyelashes. It made them look like they’d been in a fight or wanted to fight me.

  I’m drawing a bit of a contrast here, because that’s what my young mind was drawing. I was attracted to something different. This was a new era, and I wanted to branch out.

  I remember one day in junior high, sitting at the lunch table, looking over at those Jewish girls. I told my friend Mitiguy that I liked the way the Jewish girls looked, and he just shook his head slowly as he drank his carton of milk. “Don’t even bother,” he said, with the straw sticking out of the side of his mouth. “They only date other Jews.”

  Well, I was certainly up for making gross generalizations about an entire people, but Mitiguy took it to extremes. I’ll never forget him sucking on his milk telling me I couldn’t date Jewish girls. Where did he get his information? He was pretty savvy on matters such as this. His parents were divorced and the single-parent kids always had access to information nobody else had. I guess it’s because parents spend a lot of energy trying to keep their kids from learning about certain things, and if there’s only one of them instead of two, a lot of that stuff is bound to slip through—kind of like a power play in hockey. So Mitiguy was always the most “worldly” among us.

  And he says I can’t date Jewish girls? Bring it on, I thought. I was in eighth grade and there wasn’t a tradition I wasn’t willing to tackle head-on. I was ready to stretch the confines of my Catholic youth at that point. It wasn’t a religious thing as much as cultural. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.

  So, I went after the Jewish girls. I went rig
ht up to that lunch table and tried out my dad’s #1 move: I smiled at ’em. And they kind of liked me. Or at least they appreciated that I liked them. And that’s all I was looking for. At this stage, there wasn’t any real “dating” anyway. The basic routine was: you’d hang around them in the lunch room, then find out if they were going to be at the library after school so you could accidentally run into them, then one day maybe follow them home without their permission, then sit on their porch and have an uncomfortable conversation. I know these days that’s called “stalking” but this was a more innocent time.

  But the important thing was, I was stretching my horizons, unafraid to venture beyond my comfort zone. I would not be restrained by the Mitiguys of the world—there were new lands to explore, and like Magellan I was ready to discover the unknown.

  I WENT HAPPILY ALONG IN MY 1950S-LIKE CHILDHOOD, right up to the dawn of the 1980s, quite literally actually. John Mitiguy and I took the train into Boston for the “First Night” celebration on December 31, 1979. We walked through the streets at Downtown Crossing, past the Old Statehouse and the sight of the Boston Massacre, surrounded by jugglers, stilt-walkers, mimes, ice sculptures, and street musicians. I’d been there so many times before with my dad, but this was the first time I’d been in the city on my own. As kids he would take us not just to the Freedom Trail but also to the Museum of Science and sailing at the Community Boating dock on the Charles River. If we came in on a Sunday, my dad would take us to church downtown. One time after Mass we were walking through the downtown area and I asked my father, “Does anyone live here?”

  “Yeah, people live here, all right. Half these buildings have apartments in them.”

  “I could never live here,” I said.

  “Oh, you say that now, but in ten years you’re not going to want to live anywhere else.”

  My dad was usually pretty smart, but I remember thinking this seemed way off base. I couldn’t imagine I would ever want to live in the city. It was so noisy and you couldn’t see the sun. I loved the suburbs with its trees and grass and ball fields and pools. But walking around Boston with my friend that New Year’s Eve, I started to get a glimpse of it—I could picture myself living in the city as a young man. Maybe my dad had been right.

  Down a side street along Fanueil Hall there was someone performing on a small stage beneath a banner that read “One Man Band”; to my surprise, he was not a man with a big bass drum contraption with symbols, hi-hats, and xylophones attached to it playing Bavarian-style oompah music as you’d imagine when you hear the phrase “one-man band,” but a lone performer standing behind a stack of synthesizers. He had a pale face and wore thick black eyeliner like an Irish Catholic schoolgirl, and he was playing a song that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. It was, indeed, the music of an entire band coming from one man. The pulsing, bass-heavy electronic music was accompanied by a drum machine and sounded like outer space music to me. More than in my ears, I could feel the sound in my chest as it vibrated my lungs. The wan, androgynous man was surrounded by laser lights as he played, and I found the performance totally off-putting yet strangely exciting. I stood with other gawkers and watched the whole song. I vividly recall the lyrics: “Here in my car, I feel safest of all.”

  The street musician known as the One Man Band was playing a cover of the song “Cars” by Gary Numan. The song was currently climbing the charts in the UK, but was unknown to U.S. audiences. A few months later, Gary Numan would play the song on Saturday Night Live and it would become a top ten hit in the United States, too. I remember feeling that since I’d seen the song performed before everyone else in the suburbs, I was ahead of the crowd, and on the cutting edge.

  In Boston that New Year’s Eve, I imagined that the car that the One Man Band was singing about was some futuristic bubble car that glided along an elevated highway above the ground into a new decade. Being in the city at night, with the music, and the lights, and fireworks, I already felt like I was in a dream. I felt a little stoned even though all I’d had was ginger ale and caramel popcorn. I was thinking, This is it. I’m almost grown up, it’s the future, and I’m here to see it arrive.

  Most people don’t get to realize they are part of an era until it has passed. No one knew the Great Depression would come upon them suddenly on Black Tuesday in 1929. Similarly, people didn’t wake up in the 1950s with the idea that they were living in Happy Days. But as I stood there taking in the weirdness of this performance, it seemed like the ’80s was being given a ribbon-cutting ceremony right there for me that night. I had grown up in small-town America, and I loved it. But I was ready to take on this new world in this new decade. I didn’t have the nostalgia for my childhood that I have now, so I was more than willing to leave it behind. That prospect was exciting but also a little scary, only not in the way that I was used to. As I have said, I spent a lot of my childhood in fear, but it was fear in the context of a world that was small, contained, and safe. Whatever the future was about to bring, it seemed, like the eerie street performer with the synthesizers, both thrilling and slightly disquieting.

  IN THE SPRING OF MY SOPHOMORE YEAR OF HIGH school I bought an unlined, blank, hardcover book so I could begin keeping a diary, although I called it a journal because I found the word diary vaguely feminine. I even wrote “Tom Shillue—A Journal” on the inside cover to make it absolutely clear. In any case I wanted to get my thoughts and feelings down on paper.

  When I read my diary now, I see that it is the story of a young man trying his hardest to be angry and complicated. I don’t think I was really very angry, and I don’t think I had any reason to be, but I sure wanted to be. I remember putting the words to the paper with the purpose of shocking my future self with my rebelliousness.

  This is an excerpt from my diary:

  Today, I’m being dragged off to a wake with my family. I hate wakes, and there is no reason for me to go except for the fact that my father wants to show everyone that his son has respect for the dead. By the way, the deceased is Aunt Norah. I don’t even know her last name, or know what she looks like. They’ll be relatives who are coming from all around just to see her who don’t know what she looks like either. It’s funny how people don’t bother coming to visit you until you’re already in a pine box. Nobody likes wakes. Everybody just goes to them because everybody else is going to be there. Habits like that start early in life. In high school, half the kids at the football games hate football. Most everybody else couldn’t care less. And at the weekend parties, “aren’t you going? Everybody else is going to be there.” I could talk about the wrongs of high school parties forever, but I’ll save that for another time.

  But perhaps what I should find more embarrassing than my misplaced, overblown anger is the fact that the early pages of “Tom Shillue—A Journal” have to do exclusively with my chief passion of the time, Dungeons and Dragons.

  I was running with a new crowd—I never really broke with Heyn and Mitiguy, but as we entered high school we slowly began to go our separate ways. My new friend Bob, who I’d met through our “Apolostic Church” of Sunday-morning philosophy, and I wanted to play D&D, shorthand for Dungeons and Dragons for you non-nerds. We had heard of this mysterious game through word of mouth but we didn’t know where to go to learn about it, because it was the 1980s and there were no Facebook pages or Reddit groups to consult; you had to learn things from actual people. But, one name came to mind: Rob Morrissey. He used to sit all by himself at the Apollo restaurant with his sketchpad. He was an artist, a loner, and a brooding cynic who read comic books. He was surely into that kind of thing.

  Bob and I approached Rob in the art room and asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t know how to do it. I’m not a dungeon master.”

  “What’s a dungeon master?”

  “You need a dungeon master to play. They know how everything is done with that game. I think I might know somebody, though—Greg Heckmann. He’s
in my social studies class. He’s a little weird, but I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.”

  “Can you talk to him?”

  “I know where his locker is.”

  So, Bob, Rob, and I walked up to Greg’s locker between classes. We found him just standing there, staring into his open locker. He was about six feet tall and very pale with blond hair. It seemed like he knew we were there, but didn’t turn to acknowledge us when we got up next to him.

  “We heard you might be a dungeon master,” I said, nervously. This guy radiated creepy.

  He kept staring straight ahead into his locker. “I might be,” he said.

  “Do you think we could get you to . . . referee for us?”

  “You mean D.M.?” He turned his head and stared at me blankly, like Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. “You need to create characters first. You have to be serious. Are you guys serious about this?”

  All three of us nodded. “Yes. We’re very serious.”

  Greg looked around at all three of us, summing us up. Then he looked beyond us, as if to make sure no one else was listening. “Be at my house at ten in the morning on Saturday,” he said, slamming his locker shut. As he brushed past us and headed down the hallway, he added, “I’m the white house at the end of Bond Street. Come to the back and knock on the basement door.”