The Guardian of the Moonshot
In 1967, I'd come home from kindergarten and eat my peanut butter sandwich while my mother and I watched Let's Make a Deal. I watched as the nervous contestant bit her nails in anticipation: One curtain might open to show a brand-new car, but another curtain might open to reveal a cow chewing its cud. Little did I know my mom was teaching me the principles of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. The contestants were puppets being manipulated by invisible strings. Then it was The Dating Game, in which men tried to outwit and outmuscle their competitors as an introduction to the "Darwinian struggle for existence." The Newlywed Game was a retelling of Oedipus and appeared to be responsible for accelerating the divorce rate. In short, 60s television was my introduction to the Classics.
My father, too, imparted unto me the wisdom of the Ancients. For example, when I was five in 1967, my father took me to the grand opening of a Taco Bell in San Jose, California, where for the first time I saw teenagers working behind the registers with unsightly spots all over their faces. I asked my dad about the spots and he explained that they were called pimples. I asked why these teens had pimples and my father said, "According to Aristotle, God gives pimples to teenagers to teach them humility." I wondered if I could preemptively repel the pimples by becoming humble, and if my humility could please the Divine sufficiently, I might be spared the plague of facial eruptions and thereby preserve my Alpha Male status.
One thing I did not wonder about was my father's definitive grasp of the teenager's problem. I was at the age when I believed everything my father told me to be gospel truth. For example, during that same year, my father took me to a Greek deli, bought us baklava, and told me that baklava is the best dessert in the world. When I sat down with him and at the flaky pastry, it was quite clear that my father was correct on this point.
My confidence in my father's infallible expertise in all matters was largely due to his executive position at IBM where his colleagues referred to him as "The Big Cheese." His brown leather briefcase had the pleasing smell of pipe tobacco and was full of mechanical pencils, slide rules, drafting rulers, and protractors, all of which were signs of his important engineering work. At one of the IBM science exhibits, there was a robot that shook people's hands. This was more evidence that my father, like astronaut Anthony Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie, was a pioneer of science and on the cutting edge of technology.
On the day we drove home from the Greek deli in my father's British sports car, a 1965 red MGB, I asked my father how far the sun is from Planet Earth.
"Ninety million miles."
"How did you know that?"
"I'm your father, son. Fathers know everything."
To believe that my father was a sort of infallible god had its benefits. For example, one day after playing outside and climbing over a wooden fence, I came home with a splinter embedded in my index finger. When my father could not remove the splinter with tweezers, he said he was going to have to get it out with a needle. I told him, no thanks, I'll just live with the splinter inside my finger for the rest of my life, upon which he said he had to remove the splinter. Failure to do so would result in an infection that would kill me. Believing my life was at stake, I gritted my teeth and allowed him to remove the splinter with a needle.
It was around this time that I started boasting to the other kids at the Royal Lanai apartments playground that my father was an IBM engineer who could do anything, and to support my claim, I pointed at the giant spaceship and told my friends that when my father got home from work, he would attach rocket launchers on it and we would all fly to Mars. Believing me, we all ran to the carport where there was a space reserved for my father's red MGB. Like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin, we waited for several hours for him to arrive. When the bright red MGB with its growling engine drove over the speed bumps and into the carport, we all erupted with cheers. Finally, we were going to fly to Mars. But upon hearing my request, my father said that the project couldn't get off the ground, so to speak, because flying the playground rocketship to Mars would be a violation of United States airspace.
"Without FAA clearance," he said, standing over us in his dark grey suit, "I could get arrested and go to prison."
Our jaws dropped at the idea that my father could fly the playground rocket ship into outer space, but could not do so because he had to comply with United States government airspace laws. Realizing we were obeying the law by not flying to Mars made us feel important. We could have flown to Mars if we wanted to, but we were good citizens who obeyed the law, so we decided not to do it. Our decision to not fly to Mars was almost as exciting as being able to fly to Mars.
What disavowed me from notions of my father's omnipotence wasn't his refusal to fly my friends and me to Mars. It was his red MGB. It didn't like warm weather and the engine was always overheating. Growing tired of the mechanical problems, my father gave up on the sexy red convertible and traded it in for a more practical turquoise Chrysler Newport. That the red MGB's mechanical unreliability had frustrated my father was a sign that there were engineering problems too great for him to handle and his relinquishing himself of the MGB made me doubtful of his supreme powers.
Once I no longer believed my father to be a demigod, I began to see his weaknesses more clearly. For example, one morning while attempting to spread the butter on his toast, he tore a hole in it and said, "The three things I hate in life are death, taxes, and hard butter."
On another occasion, he attempted to make chicken cacciatore and there was so much smoke in the kitchen that the fire department paid us a visit. That my father could not manage the kitchen fire was another sign that he was a mere mortal.
My father's fallibility also showed up in the disruption he caused me and my family. One thing I learned from watching television is that fathers should bring harmony, not disruption, to the domestic unit. Hazel, Leave It to Beaver, Dennis the Menace, Lassie, Family Affair, My Three Sons, The Brady Bunch, and The Partridge Family dramatized the manner in which the forces of chaos wage war against domestic serenity. I knew that harmony would always win and that in that regard these shows were a form of comfort food. The orderlies of domestic harmony were sure to triumph and prove that America was an exceptional country worthy of its infatuation with its own myth of innocence and natural order.
This myth of innocence was prevalent in the suburbs where I lived. We all curated houses with well-manicured lawns, flowers, and oversized mailboxes. Between 1968 and 1971, I lived on Venado Court in San Jose, California. In our cul-de-sac, we had Avon Ladies, Tupperware parties, communal gatherings for the Fourth of July, and making fruit preserves from the bounty of peach and apricot trees that grew in our backyards.
I wanted nothing more than for my family to fit in with this ideal image. But my father would have no part in this. He was a corporate IBM executive on the outside but a country boy on the inside. Born on a farm in Michigan, my father moved to Hollywood, Florida, when he was in the third grade. He said everyone who attended the school in Hollywood, including himself, was so poor that they didn't wear shirts or shoes. This was just the way he liked it. In his teens, he joined the Boy Scouts, collected venomous snakes, which he delivered to a herpetology research center, and was featured in the local newspaper for catching the world's largest water moccasin. Wading through the mud in the Florida alligator swamps was his Happy Place. In spite of growing up to be an army infantryman and then an engineering executive, he had a lifelong love of informality, irreverence, and hilarity. Mixing with the rich was never his cup of tea. Once he was attending a buffet at an old-school country club, and after getting up for a second helping, he gave a stranger a friendly slap on the back and said, "We need to get some more grub in here, pronto." The stranger looked at my father in shock, but my father was already on the move, piling food on his plate, and joking with yet another country club member.
My father was true to his inner farm boy, and this created tension between him and me. For example, at home my father preferred informal attire more suitable for the alligator swamps. In the summers he would do yard work without a shirt and wear a pair of faded green jeans. You could see his Army tattoo, scribbled on his formidable upper arm when he was nineteen and in a state of drunk oblivion. The shoddy tattoo didn't bother me much. What did bother me, though, was that my father would squat in the front yard while picking weeds from the rows of juniper bushes. Squatting in his low-rise jeans, he exposed his butt crack to every pedestrian passing by and they were afforded a glimpse of my father's bare ass. I would tell him repeatedly that his butt crack was showing, but he dismissed my warnings with a low mumble as if my concern were of no consequence and was surely the misguided anxiety of a confused youth.
Having failed to persuade him that his public moonshot was a scandal threatening the dignity of our family, I tried a different tact. I stood behind him and blocked anyone's view of my father's buttocks. I feared my father would tell me to stop standing uselessly nearby and help him pick weeds, but he allowed me to stand over him. I assume my shadow afforded him shade and relief from the hot California sun.
Over time, it became clear to me that my dominant role in life was to be the Guardian of the Butt Crack.
It was tedious tracking my father's movements and making sure I had positioned myself to provide maximum blockage from the trajectory of anyone's line of vision, but I performed my task with urgency as if to fail would cause us to foreclose our home and force us into a state of homeless destitution.
I found myself both exhausted and sunburned from my efforts, and eventually, I realized my father was a grown man set in his ways. The sooner I let go and stopped trying to control him the sooner I would find peace.
Tony Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie follows a similar character arc. For the first four seasons, Tony does all he can to suppress Jeannie's untamed love by squashing it down the genie bottle as he navigates his career at NASA. It's not until season five that Tony is broken down to the point that he can let go and marry his genie in a bottle. Tony and I had to learn that it is impossible to control others and that it is far better to focus on covering our own butt cracks instead of wasting our time trying to cover the asses of others.
My acceptance of my father's impropriety was accompanied by the recognition that he was not a god but an imperfect human being, and this recognition was part of my ongoing struggle to leave my childhood and my innocence behind me.
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