Dad’s back on his writing-trip harangue, a needle stuck in a scratch skip-skipping. Guess he’s never really been off it. The more I listen to him, the more I fear for his slip-slipping grasp on reality. Save for writing, the only other thing he talks about with any passion is that new country they’re starting up called The Principality of New Utopia. Don't ask me who they are. It’s supposedly going to out-Cayman the Cayman Islands. And for some reason this excites him. Something he found on one of his jaunts into the World Wide Web. Talks about the ‘Y2K’ bug a lot, too. I’m aware of the bug and the possible effects it could wreak (like, who isn’t?) but Dad seems to think it’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s already the end of the world as we know it, I think, but say nothing.
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Just tonight, as we watched Wheel of Fortune over dinners balanced precariously on laps, Dad grabbed the remote without warning, shut the set off and started in, sporting that obnoxious brogue of his.
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‘Sure, you could be the next Wilde, or Joyce!’
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‘Dad,’ I said slow and clear like, ‘I am not going to be a writer. And even if I was, I wouldn’t want to be another Wilde, or Joyce, or anybody for that matter. I’d want to be me.’ (I suppose, if I really had to be like someone else, like if a gun was held to my head or something, I wouldn’t mind if it was Salinger, or maybe even Vonnegut. Irving wouldn’t be too bad.) ‘But as I’m not going to be a writer anyway, it doesn’t matter.’ My voice was measured, sincere. He smiled and tried to fake me out with a you’ll-see-I’m-right-one-day expression. The very same expression that so often betrays a bad poker hand when he’s bluffing big time.
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‘You can’t say what you’re not going to be when you don’t even know what you are going to be.’ A belch escaped him, immediately followed by an ‘excuse me’. I laughed: he paid no attention, changed direction and asked about the journal. Wanted to know if I’d started writing in it yet. I nodded. He seemed pleased.
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‘How many pages?’
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‘I didn’t count them for shit-sake! Maybe 40 or 50. I don’t know.’
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‘Mmmm-hmm,’ he sighed, like a doctor all over you with a cold stethoscope.
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‘So, what are you writing – an essay? A short story maybe? A novel?’
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‘None of your business, actually. What a person writes in their journal is their own private business.’ My wink was intended to let him know that if he was trying to wind me up it wasn’t going to work.
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‘Mmmm,’ he hummed again thoughtfully. A hundred pages you say? Well, that’s a lot of pages, son. They say a writer writes, and that’s a lot of writing.’
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Amazing. His teasing would be infuriating if it weren’t so funny.
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‘No it isn’t,’ I protested. ‘And anyway, I said, like a 6-year old, ‘I have big writing,’ I lied. He had me feeling like a kid again.
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‘Still…’ he sighed patiently, as if big writing made no difference.
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‘Plus,’ I added, ‘I leave big gaps, too.’ Of course, that was also a lie. I hate wasting paper.
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‘Don’t say plus, it’s bad grammar. Now shut up and eat your dinner before it gets cold.’ He was obviously trying to be a wise-guy because we were eating salad drowned in Paul Newman’s dressing and gazpacho soup piled high with freshly grated parmesan. He’s changed a lot since The New Year. Not big changes or anything remarkable, but a whole bunch of small ones. Odd ones. One thing that hasn’t changed, though: he still has to get the last word in. The ‘don’t say plus, it’s bad grammar’ remark was his last word on the subject of writing for the night. And that would have been that, but, seeing a chance to steal it from him, to slip in a last word of my own, and feeling a tad adventurous, I went for it.
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‘See,’ I said, as if it were a foregone conclusion, ‘I can’t be a writer, Dad, my grammar sucks.’ Gotcha! I thought, pleased with myself. For once I'd gotten in the last word with the old man and it felt pretty good. He swigged from his beer bottle and shovelled a forkful of lettuce into his mouth.
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Could this be a new trend? It isn’t often I beat him at anything. Even poker. I’m thrilled with myself. For about a nano-second. Should have known better: Dad’s highly competitive.
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‘Well, now that I think about it, having good grammar isn’t necessarily what good writing is all about. Look at Brendan Behan, for instance…’
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‘Okay, you win, Dad. You win. Jeez Louise.’
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We finished dinner in silence.
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And all the things that we aren’t saying hang in the air like floating shadows and bad ideas.
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