My father, the smoker

To grow up with a self-destructive parent is a special kind of torture. The author of Blood Horses recalls an anxious childhood, and a life cut short.
It was in the month of May, by a hospital bed in Columbus, Ohio, where my father was recovering from what was supposed to have been a quintuple bypass operation but became, on the surgeon's actually seeing the heart, a sextuple. His face, my father's face, was pale. He was thinner than I had seen him in years. A stuffed bear that the nurses had loaned him lay crooked in his lap; they told him to hug it whenever he stood or sat down, to keep the stitches in his chest from tearing. I complimented him on the bear when I walked in and he gave me one of his looks, dropping his jaw and crossing his eyes as he rolled them back in their sockets. It was a look he assumed in all kinds of situations but that always meant the same thing: can you believe this?
Riverside Methodist hospital: my family had a tidy little history there, or at least my father and I had one. It was to Riverside that I had been rushed from a Little League football game when I was 12, both of my lower right leg bones broken at the shin in such a way that when the whistle was blown and I sat up on the field, I looked down to find my toes pointing a perfect 180 degrees from the direction they should have been pointing in, at which sight I went into mild shock on the grass at the 50-yard line and lay back to admire the clouds.
I seem to remember, or may have deduced, that my father walked in slowly from the sidelines then with the exceptionally calm demeanour he showed during emergencies, and put his hand on my arm, and said something encouraging, doubtless a little shocked himself at the disposition of my foot – a little regretful, too, it could be, since he, a professional sportswriter who had been a superb all-around athlete into his 20s and a Little League coach at various times, must have known that I should never have been on the field at all.
At Riverside they set my leg wrong. An x-ray taken two weeks later revealed that I would walk with a limp for the rest of my life if the leg were not rebroken and reset. Two years after the injury had healed, I was upstairs in my bedroom at our house on the north-west side of Columbus when I heard a single, fading "Oh!" from the first-floor hallway. My father and I were the only ones home, and I took the staircase in a bound, terrified. Turning the corner, I almost tripped over his head. He was on his back on the floor, unconscious, stretched out halfway into the hall, his feet and legs extending into the bathroom. Blood was everywhere, but although I felt all over his head, I couldn't find a source. I got him on to his feet and on to the couch, and called the paramedics, who poked at him and said his blood pressure was "all over the place". So they manhandled him on to a stretcher and took him to Riverside.
It turned out he had simply passed out while pissing, something, we were told, that happens to men in their 40s (he was at the time 45). The blood had all gushed from his nose, which he had smashed against the sink while falling. Still, the incident scared him enough to make him try again to quit smoking – to make him want to quit, anyway, one of countless doomed resolutions.
My father was desperately addicted to cigarettes. It is hard for me to think about him, to remember him, without a ghostly neural whiff of tobacco smoke registering in my nostrils, and when I have trouble seeing him clearly, I can bring him into focus by summoning the yellowed skin on the middle and index fingers of his left hand, or the way the hairs of his reddish brown moustache would brush the filter of the cigarette as he drew it in to inhale, or the way he pursed his lips and tucked in his chin when exhaling through his nose, which he made a point of doing in company.
About once a year he would decide to stop, but it was rare he could go a full day without a "puff" and as long as he was sneaking puffs, the abyss of total regression was only a black mood away. He tried to keep his failures a secret, even allowing us to congratulate him for having gone two days or a week without smoking, when in fact the campaign had ended within hours, as I realise now with adulthood's slightly less gullible eye: the long walks, "to relax", from which he would come back chewing gum, or the thing he would be stuffing into his pocket as he left the store. Sooner or later he would tire of the effort involved in these shams and simply pull out a pack while we sat in the living room, all of us, and there would be a moment, which grew familiar over time, when we would be watching him sidelong, looks of disappointment barely contained in our faces, and he would be staring ahead at the television, a look of shame barely contained in his, and then, just as the tension neared the point of someone speaking, he would light the cigarette and that would be it. We would go back to our books.
The trip to the hospital – or, rather, the vow he made when he got home, that enough was finally enough – seemed different. Before that afternoon his body had been weirdly impervious to insult. This was a man who never got a cold, and who was told by a radiologist, after 30 years of constant, heavy smoking, that his lungs were "pink", which almost made my mother cry with frustration. But now the whole neighbourhood had seen him being loaded into the ambulance, and the enforced silence surrounding the question of his health – which, if it could only be maintained, would keep consequence at bay – had been broken. He lasted four or five days.
The thing they say about a man like my father, and a great many sportswriters match the description, is that he "did not take care of himself". I cannot think of more than one or two conventionally healthy things that he did in my lifetime, unless I were to count prodigious napping and laughter. In addition to the chain-smoking, he drank a lot, rarely ordering beer except by the pitcher and keeping an oft-replaced bottle of whiskey on top of the fridge, though he showed its effects – when he showed them at all – in only the most good-natured way. He also ate badly and was heavy, at times very heavy, though strangely, especially taking into consideration a total lack of exercise, he retained all his life the thin legs and powerful calves of a runner. He was one of those people who are not meant to be fat, and I think it took him by surprise when his body at last began to give up: it had served him so well.
Anyone with a mother or father who possesses fatalistic habits knows that the children of such parents endure a special torture during their school years, when the teachers unspool those horror stories of what neglect of the body can do; it is a kind of child abuse, almost, this fear. I recall as a boy of five or six creeping into my parents' room on Sunday mornings, when he would sleep late, and standing by the bed, staring at his shape under the sheets for the longest time to be sure he was breathing; a few times, or more than a few times, I dreamed that he was dead and went running in, convinced it was true.
One night I lay in my own bed and concentrated as hard as I could, believing, under the influence of some forgotten work of popular pseudoscience, that if I did so, the age at which he would die would be revealed to me: six and three were the numerals that floated before my eyelids. That seemed far enough into the future and, strange to say, until the day he died, eight years short of the magic number, it held a certain comfort.
We pleaded with him, of course, to treat himself better – though always with trepidation, since the subject annoyed him and, if pressed, could send him into a rage. Most of the time we did not even get to the subject, he was so adept at heading it off with a joke: when a man who is quite visibly at risk of heart attack, stroke and cancer crushes out what is left of a six-inch mentholated cigarette before getting to work on a lethal fried meal ("a hearty repast" as he would have called it), clinks his knife and fork together, winks at you, and says, with a brogue, "Heart smart!" you are disarmed.
And still we would ask him to cut back, to come for a walk, to order the salad. I asked him, my brother and sisters asked him, my mother practically begged him until they divorced.
His own father had died young, of a heart attack; his mother had died of lung cancer when I was a child. But it was no use. He had his destiny. He had his habits, no matter how suicidal, and that he change them was not among the things we had a right to ask.
It hardly helped that his job kept him on the road for months out of the year, making any routine but the most compulsive almost impossible, or that the work was built around deadlines and nervous tension. Among my most vivid childhood memories are the nights I was allowed to sit up with my father in the press box after home games.
It had to have dismayed him somewhat that the games themselves were lost on me. As an athlete, too, I was a disappointment. The real joy for me came after the game; after I had followed my father into the locker room, where he would dutifully get his quotes while I stood behind him, horrified by all the giant exposed phalluses bobbing past me at eye level; after he had settled back into his seat and flipped open his notepad, the long, lined, narrow pages blue now with his swirly shorthand. That was when the stadium emptied out and, looking down at the stands, I marvelled that a place so recently full of bodies and noise could in such a short time empty out and take on this tremendous, cathedral-like silence.
I can still re-enter the feeling of those nights: they were happy. My father and I hardly spoke to each other, or I would ask him something and he would not hear me, or else he would answer only after the 20-second delay that was a private joke in our family, suddenly whipping his head around after I had forgotten the question, to say, "Um, no" or, "Sure, son." But for me this distance somehow increased the intimacy. This was no trip to the zoo. I was not being patronised or babysat. I was in his element, where he did his mysterious work, and this – being close like this – was better than being seen or heard.
The thing that killed my father, perversely, was something that could have killed a 30-year-old jogging enthusiast. While in recovery from a second hernia-repair operation (a procedure he never should have agreed to so soon after the heart bypass, given all that his body had been through), a blood clot that had formed in his leg came loose and went to his lungs. They fought to save him for 12 hours. The surgeon wept, I was told.
I was travelling on the day he had the operation, which went according to plan. I called him that night, from the road, but he could hardly understand me through the drugs. He was mumbling incoherently. I remember sitting in the kitchen of this bed-and-breakfast in east Tennessee with the phone in my hand, yelling, "I love you" into the receiver, not knowing whether he could hear me. Finally I heard the nurse reach over and hang up the phone. I will never know whether the last words I said to him were the last words he heard me say.
We were not estranged; in fact, we probably talked more often than most fathers and sons. It was just that I put him in the position of always being the one to make the effort. It was punishment – for his refusal to change his ways, for his fuck-ups, for the way he preferred being my friend to being my father, no matter how plainly I needed the latter, for the fact that you could never bring up his effect on the world around him, even on his own family, without driving him back into a hostile silence.
He was at his worst when faced with the awkwardness of another's disappointment or dissatisfaction. First he would blithely proceed as if it did not exist, and when this failed he would withdraw. I wanted to let him win this game, to be the son who told himself, and everyone else, that the old man was all right, that his angels outnumbered his demons. He had worked hard to provide for us – now it was our job to be there for him, not to scold him.
But I found it impossible, in part because I felt intensely that old cliche, "If you loved us, you'd want to live" (moral logic that is somehow too impeccable to work on Earth), and in part because so much of what I wanted, I thought I wanted for his sake. He was only 49 when he and my mother divorced, and after he moved out, he immediately began to let himself go. Even his smell changed. It had always been a mixture of tobacco and sweat and Old Spice, somehow pleasant and robust, but the longer he lived in his apartment, the staler it got, and when I hugged him, and breathed it in, it seemed unwell. The elephant in the room that was his health and his habits got uglier as it aged. It got bigger, too, and in the end it threatened to squeeze me out of the room altogether.
I could never compose my face carefully enough to hide the unhappiness I felt on seeing him, sitting there alone with the carton of cigarettes and the ice-cream and the television and the sense of humour still maddeningly intact. Gallows humour, it had become. Here was this extraordinary man who had stopped fighting it and chosen solitude – too soon. And who dismissed the idea of therapy on the tired grounds that he would never let "some new age flake-o tell me what I've done wrong with my life". And who saw the complicated pain in his children's faces when they were with him, since he was too smart to miss it, yet remained, at some essential level, unmoved. And I loved him. Nor did I doubt, for even as long as it takes a synapse to fire, that he loved us and would have done everything he could to make us happy if it had been within his power. It came down to weakness.
I always believed that I would one day get to tell him that what he was, even what he became, was enough for me. I wanted to say that it had been my mistake, the chill in our friendship, to tell him that if he was so intent on neglecting himself, I knew he had never neglected us, never hurt us, or had never meant to. But when the nurse hung up the phone that night in his hospital room and I heard the dialling tone, the conversation between us, which I had always assumed – so foolishly – would go on and on, and allow for retraction, got cut off for good.
Late one night, in the room where I slept whenever I stayed with him, I sat down at his old desk, his father's desk. In the drawer were his "quitting journals", as he called them, special notebooks, set apart from the others, filled with his rapid, loopy script. He would start a clean one with each new attempt to kick cigarettes. I had glanced at them once or twice when he was alive. Now they belonged to me, along with all of his "creative work", under the terms of the will. They were largely self-excoriations, full of black thoughts, efforts to locate and take hold of his own willpower. How badly he wanted to change. Worse than any of us could have wanted that for him. (There was a notecard on the table by the bed, written when he was going to a support group: "Reasons to quit: 1. It worries my children.") I flipped through one of the notebooks. He was writing about how embarrassed he was every morning when he would start to cough and could not stop, and he knew the neighbours could hear him through the thin walls. Turning the page, I found a one-sentence paragraph, set off by itself. When I read it, I knew that I would never look at the journals again. "If I should not wake up tomorrow," he had written, "know that my love is timeless and fond."