FATHER’S DAY

Today is Father’s Day! Let us sing their praises and wish them a most excellent day. Sing it Eartha! From all the little girls that just adore their daddies.

You know, I was almost a dad.  I know, I know, a frightening thought.  A little Alki, or maybe even a few little Alkis, running around might’ve been more than the world could handle.  An Alki Apocalypse might have finally accomplished what climate change or an asteroid strike couldn’t.

This is one of the most profound experiences I have ever, will ever, have in this life.  It is as heartfelt a piece as I will ever write.  And having recently celebrated our 36th Anniversary of being with Shan, I’d like to publicly thank her for allowing me to share this deeply personal piece with you.  We give you…

THE VISITOR 

“I’m pregnant,” my partner of nineteen years said, simply and calmly, cool as you please, with an even, understated flatness that carried the wallop of a feathered sledgehammer. 

I stopped mid-scratch, forcing one eye to open against its gate of resistant sleep crust. 

“What?”

“I’m pregnant,” she repeated, this time with a little smile of mischief and “oh-oh”.  I needed coffee.

What came out was this.  Shan was late for her period, not the first time that ever happened, and no real cause for alarm in itself.  But, she’d been feeling a little “different” lately, like something had shifted, some sea change had occurred in her body, and being a dancer, Shan knows her body. 

“Asha had a home pregnancy test in the bathroom so I took it and it says I’m pregnant.” 

“Uh-huh. Well, there’s a margin of error in those things.”

“It says 99% accurate.”

“Well, maybe you oughtta do a second one and see if you get the same result?” I suggested hopefully.  The old double-blind test.  “I did.” 

Her silent response told me the result. Now, I really needed coffee. 

The full weight of being just shy of completing fifty-three trips around the sun sat on my chest, unbidden.  Across the room, every pimply-faced teenager that had ever knocked up a girl in the backseat of a car snickered.  Suddenly, we were what my generation used to euphemistically refer to as “in trouble.   Suddenly, we were young again. 

How could this be?  In our nearly two decades together, using no formal system of birth control beyond watching the calendar, it had never happened.  We thought it couldn’t happen.  Some mixed blessing of a tipped cervix prevented it. 

Till now.  Till today. 

Counting backwards placed the little miracle in one of four places.  While driving cross-country chasing a dream in the form of a dangling golden carrot in California, we’d stopped in Chicago and stayed with my niece.  Was it a gust off Lake Michigan in the fabled Windy City that blew in our surprise?  There’d been a romantic episode propelled by tiredness and the slightly seedy, (no pun intended,) setting of a Motel 6 in Lexington, Nebraska, a place that sits “right smack dab in the middle of the lower contiguous forty- eight United States of America,” according to the young man at check-in.  I’ve not checked an atlas for verification of this geographical tidbit.  But a fellow with multiple piercings in the heartland of America wouldn’t lie to me, would he?  Or was it in the town of La Veta, a place I like to refer to as Love-ita, sitting high in the front range of the Colorado Rockies, that our visitor dropped in?  This is a town surrounded by great mountains called Huajatollas, “breasts of the world” to local Native Americans, and a place with abundant fecund female energy.  Close on its heels came the Grand Canyon.

A couple nights spent sleeping next to the rim of such a gigantic hole in Mother Earth might have been asking too much for a passing fertility goddess to ignore. 

No matter.  Lest you think we spent our entire time bunny-hopping our way across this great country, let me assure you, it hadn’t been all fun and games.  It had been mostly driving. 

I wish I could say my reaction to the news was heroic and joyous.  But I can’t.  Terror is the word.  Sheer and utter terror. My life was flashing before my eyes.  Freedom was gone.  Our days of gypsy wandering were over.  I began to rehearse the line, “You want fries with that?” picturing all the jaunty ways I might wear my little paper hat at the drive through window, watching my life as an artist withdraw to a null point like a penis folding in on itself after a plunge in cold water.  Maybe I could rise to a managerial position at WalMart. 

Shitty cloth diapers stretched to my horizon.  The recycler in me couldn’t allow for the possibility of adding Pampers to the landfills of the world.  I thought of my friend Janice, who asked for, and got, three kids, who told me one day in an exhausted phone conversation, “Alki, I’m not even looking for a vacation anymore. All I’m looking for is to be able to sit on the toilet from beginning to end without one of my kids crashing through the bathroom door crying or bleeding, screaming ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ before I can even finish wiping.”  The single unifying experience of almost every couple with children I’d ever spoken to, (all of them younger than us incidentally, usually, by far), was an overwhelming sense of being bone-tired and weary for the first two years of their child’s life.  This did not bode well for Shannon.  Shannon’s a sleeper.  Shannon likes to sleep.

Then there were the facts.  Shannon’s impending birthday, two days after mine, would see her filing forty-two years away, rolling up her sleeves to tuck into the start of round forty-three. We were unemployed bohemians.  Shan dances and paints, practices yoga and reads esoteric new-age books with some occasional computer work finding her.  I make music and put words down on paper.  We cook.  We travel, usually with whatever fits in the car.  And it’s a small car.  It’s a good life, but not for the faint of heart.  We get by.  Shan plays the lottery, beautifully convinced that each week she’s holding the winning ticket.  Together, we make calls, write e-mails, bang on the doors of publishers, and producers, and music “industry” types, with the constant hope that something will find the light of day and bring home a paycheck before I die.  Health insurance, and social security, and retirement plans are abstract concepts, something people talk about on the news.  My taxman back in New York City days once told me that we’re so far off the norm that for us, it doesn’t really matter who sits in the White House. I’d argue the point, but his was well taken.  All of which means this.  While this event-to-event existence carries obvious rewards with an obvious price, it’s okay for us, two people at- play-in-the-fields-of-the-Lord, (to borrow a title from a novel by the brilliant writer, Peter Mathiesson).  But for a baby?  I don’t think so. 

Now we were getting into darker territory.  The subject of my childhood carried heavy baggage, stuff I’d forgave and turned loose long ago, grateful for the lessons, but with no intent of repeating them.  The trials of my tribe and the similar labors of biblical proportion that Shannon’s clan carries are not to be believed in their number and severity.  We weather them, and soldier on, but till this moment, I’d dodged the bullet of contributing to the thread of blood through line, seeing no ego necessity, nor curiosity of what I might make with my own and Shannon’s combined twist of DNA helix, content to have a life this time around that left no footprints after me.  Would we really contribute our two cents to the billions of desperate souls of the world, clamoring for their piece of pie, as we all happily held hands and whistled our way to hell in a proverbial handbasket?  How was it, a friend once asked, that the two heaviest responsibilities a person might undertake, voting and raising children, require no license or special training? 

But here we were.  We needed a plan and Planned Parenthood seemed a good place to start.  I was the only guy in a sea of despondent, mostly young female faces when we walked into the reception room.  Let’s keep it light, I thought. “Hi, I’m pregnant!” I said to the nice girl in the window, patting my own ample gut.  “Como?” my Latina sister answered.  Shannon wore an invisible sign that said, “I’m with asshole,” with an arrow pointing at me.  Okay, it was gonna be a tough crowd.  I decided to wait outside in the sun, watching the steady stream of women go in and out, whether for birth control or abortion appointments, who knew?  I smiled to let them know I was cool; I was in on their secret.  I was there, too.  They probably thought I was a middle-aged perv that liked pregnant chicks.  They were right about half of that.

After a short while, Shannon emerged.  “Gimme fifty-four bucks.”  My eyes asked the silent question.  “Sonogram,” she answered.  The kid had drawn first blood.  She popped back in to square up. 

I waited in the car and a rough lookin’ couple pulled up in an old Chevy Nova with rumbling glasspack mufflers and hell flames painted on the sides.  They looked like the kind of folks who might bash each other with beer bottles.  As foreplay.

A woman, probably younger than the story her face told got out of the car, slamming the door a little harder than necessary. “You’re gonna be here when I come out, right?”  It was an order, not a question. 

“Well, why do I gotta wait?  How long you gonna be?” her faithful boy answered. 

“I don’t know how long I’m gonna be.  You just wait here ‘cuz we’re gonna have to go to social services.” 

“Well, why we gotta go there?” 

“So you don’t have to pay two hunnerd god-damn dollars for the abortion, you stupid sonofabitch.  You wanna pay two hunnerd dollars?” 

“Well, no,” he drawled.  “Okay, I’ll wait.  But hurry up,” he added sheepishly when she was out of earshot, re-asserting his manhood and control of the situation.  He turned on some headbanger heavy metal, loud, to help us all relax while he lit his cigarette and waited.  I wanted to ask him to smile so I could see the tattoos on his teeth. 

Shan got in the car. “We gotta go to social services.” 

“Okay,” I said, hoping my friend would follow shortly.  I wanted to hear the rest of the music.  I think it was called, “music to slash your wrists by.” 

California takes care of its uninsured mothers with a thing called MediCal that provides financial aid for ending a pregnancy or seeing it to term.  It was too early to say which way we were going for certain, but it was a good idea to get our ducks in a row.  So far, this baby business was a lot of waiting.  I read Paulo Coelho’s THE PILGRIMAGE and wondered what my friend in the road warrior Nova might be reading to pass his time.  As I sat waiting, my pride tried not to think about how I’d steadfastly avoided the public dole system for my entire adult life.  I remembered my embarrassment as a kid at the blocks of cheese and dehydrated milk my mother was obliged to take raising us on her own. 

“Nice lady,” Shan said when she got in the car.  “Gave me all the info and paper work.  I need to get a social security card and a few other things and I know what I have to do to get aid.”  It’d been a long productive day. 

Over the next several days we were going to learn a lot about ourselves.  Motherhood was riding Shan hard and there was no question that she wanted this baby, with or without my consent. I continued to be the voice of reason but it looked like I was going to have to step up.  I found myself reluctant to tell anyone what was going on.  It was too new for one thing and there was still a little denial lingering about, a “head in the sand” attitude that maybe it was all a dream, a big mistake, and I’d wake up soon and say, ”Hey, honey, you’re not gonna believe this, but I just had this crazy dream. You were pregnant and we...”  The Mediterranean in me, the part that believes in spooks and evil eyes and naming the devil so he can’t touch you was a little superstitious as well.  Something was warning me to wait and see, make sure it was a go, and science, in this instance, seemed to concur.  The first trimester in a first pregnancy, especially one with older parents often ends in miscarriage.  I needed to speak with someone, mano a mano, express my fears, ask advice.  I turned to a few folks, trusted friends who’d had babies late in life, in one instance, a man with grandchildren when he started his “second” family.  Every “Be Here Now” line that we’d ever regurgitated was coming up to test our resolve.   Shan was certain from the start that this was a good thing, a blessing, and that this baby would bring luck with it.  “Things are going to begin to happen for you, Alk, you’ll see.  You just have to trust, same as we always do.”  Trust was one thing when it was two adults maybe going without a meal or roughing it on a friend’s floor.  But, again, a baby?  That was still a whole ‘nuther perambulator.  The visitor was holding up a mirror to me and I didn’t like the person looking back. 

“Mazl Tov!” said Ross, the first person who chanced to call, and with Shan exhorting me to “Tell him! Tell him!” I did.  “That’s great news!” he said, “you guys are gonna be wonderful parents.”  When I pointed out my predictable concerns, Ross answered with assurance.  “This child is coming in with full knowledge of who you are.  That’s why it’s selected you.  Look at all the things you can teach this kid, with your experiences. How lucky it is.  And you’ll provide things for it no one else could just by being who you are.”  Ross is our yoga teacher and a brother from many lives.  He’s a steady man in a storm and his confidence was heartening. 

Aadil weighed in with joy and assurance, too.  This is the man I knew I would ask to stand as godparent, in the truest sense, as close to a guru as I have, by definition of the word, one who “leads to the light,” the person that I would entrust with guiding my child to a real sense of God consciousness and whose values in all things I would most wish to see embodied in the new citizen.  Happily, Aadil accepted, but with the caveat that it was a conversation we needed to have down the road.  And there was still much road to travel.  Then he dropped a bomb.  “Alki,” he said, in his beautiful Indian sonority, “whatever the two of you decide to do, you have my whole hearted love and support.  But right now, you have one job, and one job only.  That is to provide Shannon with a safe, supportive environment.  It is the mother that must carry this baby and it is the mother that must decide what she wants to do.”  Yes, but after that, I fretted? When it’s actually out in the world, and for the rest of its life, whose responsibility would it be to carry it then?  My body began to ache with the responsibility.  I bit my nails to the spiritual quick.  My guru had spoken.  I would do my best. 

From this rocky start borne of fear and doubt, I moved to a reluctant acceptance.  I wanted to believe my own beliefs, to trust that God would provide, to surrender to Its will.  Every thought I had, had its opposite, a very democratic tug of war, classically Greek in its ability to argue all sides.  I’d be seventy when this child was graduating high school.  A surly teenager was not how I imagined my twilight years.  One wag I spoke to said, “Don’t worry about it.  You’ll be dead before the kid can become too much of a pain-in-the-ass.”  I guess he meant to cheer me up.  College?  Well, I’d not finished college, though I’d wished I had.  But bring a child into this world?  Shan and I had given up t.v. and newspapers years ago, and with good reason. Global warming, resistant strains of killer viruses, vanishing breathable air and drinkable water, never mind wars and misery. The list of reasons why not, went on and on.  Shan’s family likes to game, but I‘d missed the gambler’s gene and this was a crapshoot that continued to terrify me. 

But was there ever a “perfect” time to toss the dice, I wondered? Where would we all be if our parents had let World Wars and the Great Depression make their decisions for them?  If not us, then who?  I was doing my best to provide the safe space for my woman to make her decision, but in the dark of night, I cringed like a baby myself, waiting for the light of day to dispel my worries.  I was failing her and myself and the visitor miserably.  I was ashamed. 

We did our dance, Shan and I, back and forth, talking too much, until finally, after a few particularly rough days, Shan had had enough. “I can’t take this anymore,” she announced, “I want this baby out of me and I want it out of me now.”  An appointment was made with a clinic in Beverly Hills for the next day.  We were insane with doubt, anxious and fractured.  If this was relief, why did it not feel good? 

The next morning found me back pedaling.  Maybe we should wait?  Time was on our side, and medical abortion, the easy way out, was still an option for another week or two.  Procrastination urged us to think again.  We hadn’t driven half a mile without turning back twice into the driveway.  But Shan pressed on, let’s go, let’s do it, let’s release it now.  I knew it wasn’t a heart choice.  Continuing there, I tempted my luck with the LAPD by pulling several dramatic U-turns in traffic, but Shan remained adamant, as determined to be done with it as she had been to have it. 

“My love, I’m not saying we might not ultimately come to this same place, but maybe we should wait for more information, see how things develop, get the tests.  If we abort today, it’s forever, and I don’t want you making this call out of desperation and blaming me, regretting it for the rest of our days.” 

“You don’t understand, Alk.  I just can’t live with your worries and doubts.  If I don’t do it today, I won’t.”  I glanced in the rear-view mirror.  My fear and selfishness drove while Shan’s trust and surrender were relegated to the backseat.  It smiled at me and waved.  I kept my eyes on the road. 

There’s an interesting sidebar to this story, a déjà vu that might seem a stretch if it weren’t true.  I’d lived this situation only once before, twenty some years earlier, and by a strange coincidence, LA had been the stage for that drama, as well, but in that instance, the carrying mother was decidedly clear about not having the child.  In my youth, I’d begged and pleaded with her to reconsider.  In hindsight, that child might also have been a blessing, but the union with its mother most certainly was not. That day, too, the decision was out of my hands, yet here I was again, my cowardice allowing me to drive my life’s soul mate to do something that we were both clearly un-clear about.  Could this be the same determined spirit trying again to come through to me, a karmic second chance?  I don’t know if things work that way, but I couldn’t help but wonder. 

An abortion clinic is not a happy place.  Charnel houses, that Brecht makes reference to in a song lyric I don’t want to remember, something about babies being washed down the gutter with last night’s leftovers.  This one was professional, a waiting room like any other with the usual out-of-date magazines on a coffee table, wood paneling and fluorescent lighting.  There was a small staff doing their best to answer hard questions.  Another couple waited with us, smiling wanly and looking down at their hands.  I introduced small talk to try to add some air to the tight, closed room.  Abortion clinics fall into the same category as butchers and undertakers, jobs most of us wouldn’t want to do, but are happy to let others do for us, to take on the heavy karma associated with the tasks we find distasteful. At the very least, these are people that deserve our compassion, yet more often receive our scorn and derision, another mirror held up to our needs.  This clinic had an unusual twist, a combination of services that perhaps only Beverly Hills would support.  Dr. B. had been an Ob/Gyn his entire career, before deciding to specialize in abortions, and more specifically, medical abortions, designed for termination of early pregnancies, a fussless alternative to the more invasive “suction” procedure.  One little pill, and poof!  All gone!  Added to the shopping cart of available services Dr. B. provided was tattoo and hair removal.  Dr. B. knew his target clientele.  If he threw in a nail salon and video rental he’d have it all covered. 

Shan went in for her consultation and examination.  I would’ve liked to have gone with her, but once again, it was the province of the woman.  While I waited, I prayed that I might be involved in the decision process still, sitting on my hands to keep from bursting through the door and shouting, “Wait!  Don’t do it! Let’s talk about this some more.”  When finally, I was beckoned into the office, I found Shan in conversation with Dr. B., a bit of an eccentric fellow with a touch of the “nutty professor” about him.  Amiable, non-descript, a guy you’d pass on the street with a nod and a smile, “Good- morning,” before continuing along on your separate journeys.  Dr. B. told Shan that she had the insides of a healthy twenty-year old, and that he saw no reason why she couldn’t carry the baby to term or take the pill today.   And he told us of how his father had sired him and his twin at sixty, with a wife decades his junior, their first, and only children.  Dr. B. could tell our commitment to aborting was half-hearted, and in a way you might not expect from a man who by his own estimate, had facilitated forty-five hundred medical abortions, invited us to take a walk to a park a few blocks away, talk about things, and come back.  Then, if we wanted, we could take the magic pill that day, (Poof! All gone!) or come back in a week, or come back not at all.  We walked.  We talked.  We came back, thanked him, and left.  God bless Dr. B.  A perceptive man.  A discriminating man. 

We went home with the surety of purpose of growing our garden. 

Shan was marvelous in the mantle of motherhood.  A calm I’d never seen in her settled in like a sky blue blanket resting light on her shoulders.  She slowed and glowed.  And I moved out of fear and begrudging acceptance into imagining.  Imagining that instead of giving up the idea of walking the Santiago de Campostela, I’d plop the pup into a backpack and we’d whistle along the road together.  Imagining that I might regain something akin to the shape I’d been in, in the days of yore, when I ran, and climbed, and pulled my weight over the lip of a doorjamb by my fingertips alone.  Several times.  There was added incentive to work harder at finding work now, a call to arms.  Calls and e-mails and submissions of my work production picked up a pace. 

We discussed names.  I thought it to be a girl, though Shan was feeling the opposite.  I had one all picked out, a singular and poetic name that shall remain a secret.  Shan thought it “inappropriate,” lovely as it was, and believed it might cause undue stress or perhaps send the wrong message in her adolescent years.  Lucia was floated, as was Bettie.  Anjillee was another strong contender.  But for a boy we could agree readily. Years ago, Shannon had visited a psychic who told her she would have a child when she was about forty and he’d be called something that began with a Z.  Well, why stop there?  Why not begin with Z and end with Z?  He would be called Z, just Z, sans middle initial and last name, unless forced to come into line by government big-brother, in which case we were prepared to formalize it to Z Z Z.  Kind of like the genus name for that greatest of apes, Gorilla G Gorilla.  “What’s the Z stand for, kid?”  “Z,” he’d answer.  Easy to remember.  Cool and enigmatic.  A name to live to.  Sonorous with manly consonant, yet softened by the kiss of a long vowel.  Z. 

Religion wasn’t a problem.  He’d have them all.  Jesus, Buddha, and Zoroaster!  Hindu, Jew, and Taoist!  Jainist and Confucianism, Animist and Humanism!  On Dasher, and Donner, and Shinto, and Blitzen!  Baptism would follow in its own time, no need to rush such an important decision.  After all, who were we to presume to make that call for such a distinguished visitor from such a faraway place?  They’d know what God is.  They were closer to the source. 

On the eve before Shan was to fly home to Philly for the battery of smart tests that would give us the necessary green or red lights, Z decided to take an early flight.  A “red- eye” back to God. 

One can torture oneself and conjecture about what went wrong. But the correct answer is nothing.  Nothing went wrong.  He came, he saw, he conquered.  He did what he had to do, leaving me solidly in his pocket to balance a karmic ledger.  I thank God and the visitor that he stuck around long enough for me to travel the whole arc, three weeks of knowing that became three weeks of growing, three “trimesters” in miniature.  As Zorba the Greek says in the book that bears his name, I got the “full catastrophe.” Michael Jackson sings a song called, “The Man In the Mirror,” (and no, Michael, we won’t be calling you to baby-sit, and definitely, no sleepovers.)  I did not like the man I first saw in the mirror the visitor held up to me.  I liked the end guy a lot better. 

Shannon is slowly returning, cheating the experience not at all. Her body snaps back in the manner of pliant taffy rather than with the harsh recoil of a stretched rubber band.  Women endure. The hormones adjust, the body expands and contracts, the emotions level out.  She is a magnificent mother, possessed of a strength that humbles me.  I aspire to her model. 

There are two more gifts that came of this, mystical, yet real and concrete at the same time.  And I swear before the court of God that both are true. 

In the twilight of the visitor’s last evening, I was startled from my reading as I sat on the patio in the fading light of dusk.  An aggressive buzz near my head made me juke, and discovering the source of it, I was amazed.  A hummingbird hovered, inches from my face, but a hummingbird such as I’d never seen.  It was huge, an avian linebacker, as big as a sparrow or finch, three times the normal size of its usual delicate cousins.  It caught and held my gaze for a solid half minute, and I will admit to some nervousness at the proximity of its long surgical needle-nose proboscis so near to my eyes.  Its message was insistent, if I could just read it.  Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it shot off like a UFO, to the top of a tall tree nearby.  Its size kept it visible at a distance, silhouetted against the darkening sky, where it hung helicoptering again for a moment, before taking a ninety-degree cut that would have been the envy of an NFL running-back. 

Late that night, as I sat at the table writing, I heard an owl, close by, just outside the window.  Clear, and beautifully searching, it sent its voice into the night.  Its call ran up my skin leaving goose bumps in its wake.  I knew who it was seeking.  Native American tribes of the Pacific coast say the owl is a harbinger of death, there to mercifully lend wing to its passenger.  That night, Shan miscarried.  In the morning, she asked if I’d heard it, too. The neighbors I spoke to had no experience of owls in the area. It hasn’t been heard since. 

For my beloved Shannon, and our visitor.

A song, HUSH, MY BABY, came from this experience of almost becoming parents. Eventually, it found a home in my musical, “21”.  Here, Elizabeth Urbanczyk, in the role of Vera Clemente, sings it so beautifully to her son, Roberto Jr.  

From my vantage point decades later, I cannot help but wonder.  How different life would’ve been.  I also cannot imagine a better person than the one I’ve shared my life with.  Thank you Shan.  For loving me through it all.  36 years and counting.

To all of you fathers who made it happen, who fail miserably and triumph gloriously, every day, in ways great and small.  We know you do the best you can.  What more can one ask for.