The Message

My father sent me secret messages. That’s how we communicated. I don't know if I was born with it or if he implanted it while I was in the crib, but there was a magnet in my psyche, and his shadow, the metal it attracted. Whatever darkness he had repressed, whatever he was too scared or timid to live out, all his rage and unexpressed creativity, his rebellious horny-hungers, whatever instinctual cards he had left on the table, I would play them, and win back his losses.

My brother had a magnet for a different kind of iron. He was tuned to our father’s middle-class, make a success, family man do-rightness, but for me, my dad had other uses, and number one on the list was to take on his wife, a woman who just happened to be my mother. I thought I was waging my own war with her, but I was wrong, it was our war, and his signal never beamed brighter than when she and I did battle. Yes, they were partners in marriage, but his real alliance was with me. We’d go at it like gladiators, she and I, and though he never said a word, I could feel him screaming, “Fight, fight, fight for your life!” Was he a coward, asking a boy to do his bidding or was he a mentor, training me for survival; teaching me to defend the jewel within. A jewel I would need to make art and trouble, and do what he never could; give voice to the wildman inside.

Our deepest communication is never done with language. It is far more direct. The people we get closest to are the people who ignore our ears and go right to the unconscious, as do the people we must protect ourselves from. My father knew this intrinsically. Knew that language would squander the power of his message. That words were small coins that could not hold the huge sums he had in mind. It was his silence I responded to. The room he left, not the room he took up. It was all about negative space; about what he hadn’t done, who he hadn’t been. From the age of three I knew my job was to put his appetites into action. To steal the pie off the window sill and shove it in my mouth, my face sticky with the blueberry smear of life.

They say the son must “kill” the father if he is ever to truly become a man, but mine came to me self-slayed. He did not loom over me in any way, nor teach me life-lessons nor give advice. He was not a role model. He was a co-conspirator. A subversive disc jockey, he broadcast at a frequency not even dogs could hear; only me. I was never conscious of his incredible Svengali powers, and if he was, he never let on. In fact, I would not have put any of this together if it had not been for a short-story he wrote in 1949, at the age of thirty. A story I did not read until years after his death.

It’s a tale about two siblings; a timid, well-behaved teenage boy named Ovaris and his defiant bad girl sister, Genetelia, who Ovaris in awe of. Genetelia sneers at authority, but it is her untamed sexuality Ovaris finds most thrilling.

The story blew my mind. It was like he had laid his psyche bare; Ovaris and Genetelia, the yin and yang of him. In the end, he is unable to integrate his two halves, Genetelia (his erotic, creative and non-compliant side) fleeing home, never to return. The story even predicts his Parkinson’s disease, Ovaris’ unwillingness to accept his shadow leaving him bedridden at the story’s end.

I remember when my mother handed me a faded Manila envelope and said “Here’s a story of your father’s. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time and told him not to show it to anyone ‘cause it was so weird and incestuous.” It pissed me off that her big concern was what people might think of her husband, who had a brother and sister play naked ping pong, i.e what people might think of her. But what really made me angry (and even more than angry, sad) was that my father had listened to her and put the story and his writing away. If she, or anyone had said that to me, I would have gone crazy and done whatever was needed to prove them wrong. I’m not Ovaris, I’m Genetelia, my father making sure that what he had let happen to him would never happen to me.