“You want to travel with him”: Conversations with Dad, Nine Years Later
“I’ve been dreaming about my dad lately,” said Kat Moore. “He died at the end of 2003. In my dreams, he is trying to help me find mom and Lanie. Sometimes we find them. Sometimes we don’t.”
I think about Dad these days, almost every day, although he died some nine years ago, wishing I could tell him about my adventures, reading his old copy of Dr Faustus, from those college days in Tallahassee and Cambridge, the army and the road. I wonder what he’d say, where our dreams would take us, both of us talking on the road, driving from Houston to Louisiana and back, stopping for gumbo at a roadhouse, drinking beer in the parking lot, watching soccer games in Spanish in Mexico. Yet, its been nine years since we really talked, since Will and I said goodbye with mom.
All I have are the books and memories, the dreambooks at my house in Brooklyn that I can't access this year. So my imagination and our stories will have to do.
John and Jenn went to Vesuvio and talked about Dad.
Maybe you glimpsed in between the racks in the poetry room?
Will and I talked about Dad along the road through the Balkans.
I would love to have Dad know Bear and Dodi, ever growing and evolving, reading as much as possible, reading you Bear’s stories about no one hearing them, not the teachers or the junkies, not the crusty punks or the school kids, just Ray and Japhy hiking, Walt along the piers, and Emily in her old house in Amherst, Ma.
I think about you listening to the old Leonard Cohen records, talking about the theology of poetry, the beatitudes of the old testament.
“It sounds like the communist manifesto,” you say, looking at the whole world, a kid from Thomasville who ran through Troy.
“You want to travel with him,” sings Nina, from that old Leonard Cohen song.
I don’t really see Dad in my dreams, not as much.
It's more in my active imagination, daydreaming, talking, imagining you laughing, helping me draft eternal book chapters, stories about our dialogue on the road to Mexico, to New Orleans, back to Thomasville, and back to Dallas, for one more conversation.
And here in NYC, in the East Village, I think of you and the Chelsea Hotel and the books we’d be talking about if I was to swing up Sixth Ave, take a left at 23rd and greet you at El Quixote.
I tell you about Berlin and Goethe and Faustus.
You say you liked Marlow’s version the most and refer to Mankind to Marlowe by Bevington.
And then pull out your beaten up old copy of Goethe’s Faustus Part One and Two that I read all year in Berlin.
And I’d mention Thomas Mann’s version written after the war. “Genius is a form of the life force that is deeply versed in illness, that both draws creatively from it and creates through it,” says Mann.
“The bastards knew better,” you say, referring to your eternal lament about Germany and the war. “They knew better.”
Your eternal humanity always there, along with the crazy, the temper, the intelligence and the illness, the anger I live with, that I’ve internalized, that my kids live with, quite often recoiling. But there’s also the authenticity that lingers with you and me, the realities of the world and Faustus, the story you read over and over, exchanging copies with your best friend Fred, long gone, that you read after your father died, that the two of you talked about all night long. I can see it in the inscriptions to each other, wondering what you both said and thought.
You pulling the quotes, sharing stories about the sublime and street from your copy of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.
“If we say that we have no sin,
We deceive ourselves, and there's no truth in us.”
You laugh, the folly of the search, ever looking for the truth of it all, the reality of desire and hope, darkness and light moving through us.
“Ay, we must die an everlasting death,” you’d conclude. Back to Marlowe and the eternal, the theater, the conversation, the stars, the stories about the Globe, the lights and stars:
“The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike”...
The poems that echo through our minds:
“Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium--
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.--”
And we’d talk about Circe, the daughter of Helios.
“I will be Paris, and for love of thee,” you’d read to me.
And then we’d go to Troy.
And recall Menelaus and Achilles and Helena,
“Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;”
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear'd to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!”
The smoke from your cigar whirls through the room out into the evening air on 23rd Street.
Talk turns your father and Fred his, fathers and sons, abuses and repetition, neglect repeating.
And Marlowe reminds us of Faustus:
“I am Wrath. I had neither father nor mother: I leaped out of a lion's mouth when I was scarce half an hour old, and ever since I have run up and down the world, with this case of rapiers, wounding myself when I had nobody to fight withal. I was born in hell - and look to it, for some of you shall be my father.”
Rupert Everett, our favorite Marlowe, grins at us from the bar, laughing about Romeo and Juliet.
On we chat into the night, talking about the movies and wives, the plays and stories that keep us moving through this life, finding meaning in the wreckage, in between the shopping malls and parked cars. “The dude abides,” you say, your eyes twinkle. Late in the night, I say goodbye, walking back to the F train, strolling into the night. I think about Kat and Lanie and the theater on Bleecker Street, and her father, who died” in her dreams, “trying to help” her “find mom and Lanie. Sometimes we find them,” she told me. “Sometimes we don’t.” Sometimes I find Dad, sometimes I don’t. But for a second or two, in a dream or two, we meet again, upstairs at the Chelsea Hotel, off for a meal at El Quixote, recalling Marlowe and Faustus, and Leonard Cohen and Janis and all of our heroes, in the stars, outside the window on 23rd Street.
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