I've been posting stories here for some months now about my mother. It's Father's Day so I've decided to write about my father.
My father, as I've mentioned here many times, worked for the Internal Revenue Service. It was a lousy job he took on a "just for now" basis while he looked for something better to do…and he wound up staying with the I.R.S. until he retired. He simply did not have any particular skill that would have allowed him to pursue any of his fantasies: Opera singer, baseball player, newspaper reporter or comedy writer. He was about as proud as a human being could be that I wound up realizing one of his dreams.
And he'd never pushed me in that direction, not one bit. Matter of fact, he tried several times to warn me away from the profession for two reasons. One was that the one time he'd made a serious attempt at it, things had not gone well. This was back in Hartford in the early forties, not long after the military had rejected him for most of the same reasons he never became a baseball player. He had a friend who had an "in" to someone at a local radio station. My father and the friend wrote up several pages of comedy material, took it to the guy at the radio station…and received a devastating turndown. It was so insensitive and heartbreaking, he said, that he never tried again. Many a time, he cautioned me how writing could break your heart.
So that was one reason he was wary of me doing what I've now been doing for 44 years. Another was that as a Revenue Officer, every professional writer he ever met was in deep financial trouble. This included some "name" authors and prolific screenwriters you'd think would have had a buck or two. That they rarely did made him worry when I went that route. It was important to him that I do something I loved but being a Depression-era kid, it was also important to him that I be able to make a real living at it.
He had a little trouble with the way I was paid in my profession: Nothing for weeks and then a big check, then nothing or a month or three. It didn't bother me but it bothered him. After I moved out of the family home and into my own apartment, he'd come by to visit me once or twice a week — he was joyously retired from the I.R.S. by then — and he'd say, trying to be casual about it, "So…any checks lately?" That was his way of saying, "Please…reassure me you're doing okay." That was especially important any week in which my name didn't appear onscreen on a TV show.
He died when I was 39 and right to the end, he was a world-class worrier. He worried about the oddest, most unlikely things — and never about himself; only about other people. If I was due at the house around 5 PM, he'd start worrying at 5:02 that maybe I'd been in a terrible auto accident. Once, I walked in at 5 on the dot and he said, "Oh, thank God. I was worried you'd had an accident or something." I pointed out that I was right on time. He said, "I know. But I had the feeling you were going to be early."
Usually, people like that tend to shout a lot and lose their tempers. Not my father. He almost never got at mad at me or anyone. He just plain didn't see the point of it. When I was in my early teens, I had a best friend named Rick. When I went over to Rick's house for the day, I would literally hear Rick's father yell at him more than I heard my own father yell at me in those 39 years. I could probably list every time he raised his voice at me during those 39 years in about three Twitter messages.
I'll tell you one story right now. At what was for him enormous expense, my father arranged for me to get braces when I was thirteen. The orthodontist was a colorful man named Dr. Nathan M. Seltzer who was based in Beverly Hills and who did a lot of work on kids who went into show business. You've seen many a Dr. Seltzer smile on TV and movie stars who are roughly my age. At one point, I was supposed to wear this ghastly retainer at night — a terrible contraption that Josef Mengele would have condemned as cruel and unusual punishment. If Dick Cheney had known of these, he would have done away with Waterboarding and threatened prisoners with Dr. Seltzer Night Retainers. And believe me, those guys wouldn't have just talked. They'd have yodeled.
One morning, I awoke with bleeding gums. My mother and I phoned Dr. Seltzer and he said, "Stop wearing it until your appointment next week and I'll adjust it." So I didn't wear it the next night. Somehow, we neglected to tell my father about this.
The next morning, he casually asked me if wearing the retainer had interfered with my sleep last night. I told him I hadn't worn it — and before I could tell him why, he exploded. He was paying a lot of money for that orthodonture and I damn well was going to wear it. I don't think I ever saw him as furious as he was at that moment and it was a long time before I could get a word in, not even edgewise but between his sentences, to tell him about what Doc Seltzer had said. When I did, he said he didn't believe me. He was even angrier at me for concocting such a feeble lie. Then he stormed out of the house to go pick up my mother at the market. Shortly after that, Rick arrived.
Thirty minutes later, Rick and I were playing croquet in the backyard when my father came out of the house in tears, hugged me and apologized about eighty times. My mother had told him what Dr. Seltzer had said. I was crying, too…and I remember thinking it was embarrassing that Rick was seeing my father and me crying. But as my father headed back into the house and I turned towards Rick, I saw that he was crying more than either of us. I asked him why. He said, "My father isn't always right but he would kill himself before he'd apologize to me for anything."
I'd seen Rick's father in action and he was right. It was one of those moments when I realized how very special my father was.
Another came a few years later. It was my father's unfortunate job to go to people who were seriously in arrears in their taxes and say, "We need to negotiate a payment schedule." He hated it. No, that's not strong enough. He hated, hated, hated it. He especially hated it when the people were desperate and in trouble.
Not all were. Some of them were very rich guys who just felt it was beneath them to pay taxes. When my father called on one, he'd walk into a mansion in Bel Air or Beverly Hills. Most of them had on their walls one or more framed photos of themselves with Ronald Reagan and/or Richard Nixon.
My father knew what that meant. These guys would never pay their taxes in full and probably not at all. He'd be lucky to get five cents on the dollar out of them. And he'd be real lucky if his boss didn't call him in and say, "We got a complaint from someone in Washington about you harassing this fine, patriotic gentleman." My father was about as menacing as Wally Cox with a broken fly swatter. In the meantime, the boss would order him to get every cent plus penalties out of the poor woman in Venice whose husband had never paid their joint taxes, then had deserted her and the six kids she now couldn't afford to feed.
The woman in Venice was a real person. My father came home pale from the afternoon he called on her. She owed more money than she could ever possibly come up with and since she was not a Reagan donor, she was expected to actually pay it. She had six kids who were all running around her little dilapidated home barefoot.
My father had a thing about "barefoot." No matter who the person was, if they didn't have shoes on and weren't on the beach or en route to a swimming pool, he felt sorry for them. It was from his upbringing, I guess, that he associated shoelessness with stark, life-threatening poverty. After I was six or seven years old, I was discouraged from it.
We used to get a lot of these mailings that asked us to "adopt" an orphaned child in some third world country — one of those deals where you send the kid five bucks and he can somehow eat for nine months. They would include what looked like trading cards of these impoverished children and ask you to select one or two and send money for them. My father would always send money for any child who was barefoot. If a kid had shoes on or if the photo didn't show his or her feet, no bucks…but he was very generous with the others.
He asked the woman in Venice why the kids who were old enough to be in school weren't there. She had a chilling answer: "The school won't let them attend without shoes and I can't afford to buy shoes for them." This was the person my father had been ordered to get thousands of dollars out of.
For days after his first meeting with the woman, my father was haunted by the image of those kids scurrying about sans footwear, unable to go to school and better themselves. Finally, one night about 3 AM, he woke my mother up and said, "I need to do something I probably shouldn't do but I have to do it." My mother knew what he was thinking and she said, "Do what you have to do," kissed him and rolled over and went back to sleep.
The next day, my father went to a Stride-Rite shoe store in Santa Monica and made arrangements with the manager. The woman would bring in the six kids and he would pay for one pair of shoes for each. Children's shoes cost a lot of money and working for the I.R.S. didn't pay well so it was a big, significant expenditure…but he had to do it. I think that year we didn't go on summer vacation because of it but I sure didn't mind. I did ask if I could somehow get the free March of Comics comic books that Stride-Rite gave out when you purchased shoes at their stores.
He also went to bat for the woman with his superiors, finally getting them to settle her case for considerably less than the full amount. She was so grateful for that and for the shoes, she found out who my father's boss was and wrote him a letter, praising Bernie Evanier for his kindness. She meant well by it but my father was scolded. People were supposed to be afraid of an I.R.S. man, he was reminded. They were not supposed to think he'd tear up most of their bill and buy their kids shoes. Not unless they were a pal of Nixon's, at least.
He was still glad he'd done it. He did things like that all his life, often anonymously. I think I need to write more about my father here…and not so much for your benefit as for mine.