Father Fiction: Chapters for a Fatherless Generation

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The Replacements

We’ve Got Men on the Ground

In the absence of a real father, I had a cast of characters that were at times hilarious, pitiful, perfect, kind, and wise.

Here they are….

My first father was a black man on television who wore bright argyle sweaters. He lived in New York or Chicago, I can’t remember which. He was incredibly intelligent and had a knockout wife. I’m talking about Bill Cosby. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Theo Huxtable. I liked the way Theo dressed. I liked that he was confident with women and even though he didn’t make good grades, he still felt good about himself. Plus, he had good-looking sisters—one older, two younger—who always gave him encouragement and advice about life, along with safe male–female tension. I liked that Bill Cosby had money, too, tons of cash and certain philosophies about saving and spending that gave the family a sense of security, that turned his knockout wife on and had her singing slow, sultry blues melodies to him from the bed while he brushed his teeth in the master bathroom. Bill Cosby never panicked about small things, he never got worked up about broken windows or cereal on the floor, and if he did get worked up, it was more like a comedy routine than a drunken rampage. He also laughed at himself, which was endearing, and I would sit in front of the little television in my room and live vicariously through the made-up life of the Huxtables, who had celebrity guests coming through the house every few episodes to play the trombone or tapdance.

My mom was great, don’t get me wrong, but the only guests we ever had at our house were from the singles group at church, and none of them ever whipped out a trombone to play “When the Saints Go Marching In” or tapdanced in the living room or recited a piece of epic prose about the underground railroad in which “our people” traversed from oppression and slavery to freedom. Our guests, rather, ate meatballs on paper plates and talked bitterly about their ex-husbands.

I also liked the fact that, on The Cosby Show, there was never any serious conflict. When Theo graduated from college, for example, the conflict simply involved the family only having ten tickets to the graduation ceremony. Bill wanted to invite the whole neighborhood. All the ladies kept looking at him and shaking their heads because Bill Cosby’s love for his family was always causing him to make a mess of things. They would shake their heads and laugh, and he would make a funny face, and Theo would throw his hands up, look at the ceiling, and roll his eyes while exclaiming, “Gosh, Dad!” and I would roll over backwards on the floor and look up at the ceiling, sigh, and say under my breath, Black people have it perfect.

White people had interesting fathers, too, but nothing to make a sitcom about. When I was growing up my friend Tom had a father, and I learned from him that a real father doesn’t have jazz singers over to perform in the living room before dinner, and that real families with fathers don’t lip-sync Motown tunes or give speeches at college graduations. Rather, real fathers, at least at Tom’s house, clean guns while watching television, weed-eat the lawn with one hand while holding a beer in the other, and squeeze their wife’s butt in the kitchen while she’s cooking dinner. And because of Tom’s father and because I watched The Cosby Show with the devotion of a Muslim, I came to believe a man was supposed to be around the house to arm and disarm weapons, make sexual advances on the matriarch, perform long and colorful ad-libs with children about why they should clean their room, and above all, always face the camera, even if the entire family has to sit on one side of the table during dinner.

MY MOTHER WAS the only female father in my Cub Scout troop, and God knows she tried. But the truth is she had no idea what she was doing. We had a pinewood derby car race where you had to carve a car out of a block of wood, then set it on a ramp and race some other guy with a pinewood car. I came in dead last. The night we made the cars my mom dropped me off at the den mother’s house and trusted the fathers who were in the garage making their sons’ cars to also help make mine. They didn’t. I didn’t care. I just wanted to drill holes in the cement driveway with a cordless drill. I don’t even think my car had wheels when it came time to race, just a lot of WD-40 on the bottom of a block of wood and a stripe down the side like that car in The Dukes of Hazzard.

On race night, with a hundred Boy Scouts standing around and two hundred moms and dads standing around with them, my block of wood slid down the ramp at quarter-speed and came to a sudden stop right about the time the ramp gave way to flatness. Everybody got quiet. I just stood there with my hands on my hips, shaking my head saying, “That General Lee, always breaking down!” My mom was terribly upset about the incident, but I didn’t realize it at the time. We picked up the General Lee and left early, right after my mother had sharp words for the men in our den group, who spoke sharply back to her about a driveway full of drill holes.

Mom kept trying. She asked our landlord’s son, who was a pothead, if he would take me to the Boy Scout father-and-son campout. His name was Matt, and he drove a yellow Volkswagen bug and listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes and ended every sentence with the phrase “Do you know what I mean, dude?” He was pretty cool, but I think he felt out of place around the other fathers, men who were approximately twenty years older than he was and drove trucks or minivans and were married and rarely, if ever, smoked pot, or, for that matter, listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd.

I think both of us felt out of place at the father-and-son campout. After all, we had only met once before, when Matt had come over to the house to change the lightbulbs on the front and back porch.

“Hey, little man,” he said to me, looking down from his ladder, “how can I put a bulb in this thing when there’s already a bulb in it? Do you know what I mean, dude?”

On the last night of the campout, we were sitting around a fire and the fathers were telling about their favorite memory with their sons, and when it came time for Matt to talk about me, he sat silent for a minute. As I said, Matt and I had spent little time together before the campout. I was searching my mind for any kind of memory, and considered talking about that great time he changed the light bulbs, how he had to move the ladder a couple times, and how I helped him by turning the switch on and off. I knew it was a boring story, but I thought I might embellish it a bit by insisting that both of us got electrocuted and had to give each other CPR. But then Matt broke the silence. Having searched for any kind of memory himself, he told about the car ride on the way to the campout: how we stopped at McDonald’s and had to jump-start the bug and how we played air guitar and bashed our heads against the dashboard to the tune of “Sweet Home Alabama.”

“Times with our sons or with our neighbors’ kids are important, do you know what I mean, dude?” Matt said to the fathers, most of them looking very confused. I nodded my head.

“I know what you mean,” I said, breaking the awkward silence.

“Sure you do, Doug,” he chortled, rubbing my head.

“Don,” I corrected. “My name is Don.”

“Sure it is, little man,” he said to me with a confused look on...