"Going Home," 40"x72" oil painting by Steve Alpert
MEN are shaped by their fathers, for the most part, if their fathers are around enough to have an influence. I have a friend of who’s father lived around the corner, but they never met. He was born out of wedlock and was everybody’s dirty little secret. There is a hole in this friend’s soul. A yearning for acknowledgment from a father he never knew. My friend is accomplished in his field. How can a man have a son with his DNA and not want to know his son? The father is still alive and I still hold hope that they re-connect for both their sakes.
My father was a good provider for me and my mother despite his up and down entrepreneurial life. At one point we did have to sell the house and move into a small apartment, that was a very hard bunch of years for him, and for everyone around him, too. He was a difficult person. I don’t think my mother even liked him that much. My parents divorced when I was just about thirteen, a perilous enough time for a young fellow. I lost myself in sports and music, certainly not in academics. I was resourceful as I spent a lot of time by myself, and always a dog, thank goodness. My mother was off trying to have a life for herself, I felt sorry for her, and I knew there was not much I could do for her, really. And I knew she was not totally capable of fending for herself. I never held that against her, I juts went my own way. I learned to entertain myself one way or another. I don’t really know what happened to them as a couple. I think they were in love when they were very young, but my father was driven to move fast through life, not my mother. She was an artist, with great talent but little business acumen. My father was all business acumen. Emotionally, their marriage was dead as long as I can remember masked by lots of parties with other young couples who had made their escape from Brooklyn or Queens to the new post-war suburbs.
There was always rancor between my mother and father. I won’t pretend to write post-marriage analysis, but I do know my mother, when I was five, got involved in an affair with a man she married a few decades later. She checked out of the marriage, but who knows who really checked out first. My father was on the road a lot and my mother and I would make the drive to pick him up at LaGuardia Airport. The terminals were essentially hangars; drafty, cold, and dark. You could stand behind the fence on the airfield – and at Idlewild, before it became JFK seemed more like a vast remote swamp next to the ocean. I remember the dark and damp salty air out there. On these frequent trips, I remember the deafening roar of the big prop jets, and the intoxicating aroma of the jet fuel as the smell of travel and adventure, translating to me as, escape! My wanderlust was fed on these trips. I wanted on one of those planes and get the hell out of Dodge. The long line of men filed down the staircase from the hulking aircraft. Smoking cigars and pipes, smelling of gin and Old Spice, wearing hats, coat and tie, well worn attaché cases with their initials engraved gold in the worn leather. Returning from romantic destinations; Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco.
I never really knew where I fit into his life. My father was not the Little League coach kind of guy. There were many difficult times, mostly with him not taking much of an interest. He was only interested in doing what he was doing. So as a young man needing and wanting direction from a father figure, there was very little. That just wasn’t his thing. Too bad, I think now, I’ve gained much from my parenting days with my stepson. George missed out on stuff that would have softened his heart a little. His bitterness towards life raged unabated. I don’t really know what it was about.
Fast forward to my teen years. George made it real big for himself in the later years of his work life. He dabbled in many things, photography for one. He taught himself to become a very fine photographer, printing his own images and wound up running a non-profit photo gallery. I learned much being around all those images early on. Also on my father’s resume; breeding Arabian horses, publishing high quality art books for his artist friends, playing his music. He made things happen. A business associate of my father once said to me, “He is the kind of guy that makes the world go ‘round.” I always remember that description. He was that indeed, if nothing else.
Through junior high and high school on Sundays I would hop the train from New Rochelle to his Grand Central, then take the Lexington Ave subway to Union Square to his studio apartment in Greenwich Village, very cool, I thought. We’d watch football and order up deli sandwiches, then later maybe get up to Madison Square Garden for a Rangers game. We did this for years, these were the best times for me and my dad. He was relaxed, into his photography hobby big time, and we smoked cigars and had laughs. Many years later George lived in Scottsdale and many Sundays we would watch an entire NFL game while on the phone. It was our connection. I flew out to Pheonix for a few Superbowls games so we could watch together. He was in his big Barcalounger, and slept through many of them.
As an only both parents fed me their dirty laundry about the other. That brewed real anger in me, anger I would carry for a long time. I don’t know if they were campaigning for justification that each of them was right and not at fault for causing the marriage to fail. In today’s terms, it was way too much information.
I put a lot of distance between my father and me as he was becoming seriously wealthy in a business venture, and took up with a woman who lived down the block, who had a little baby boy. I was pushed out, and the anger in my belly enflamed quietly.
As became a young man the realtionship became difficult for both of us. I thought at the time that I was being singled out for some reason as the recipient of his lack of approval, of hardly being in his life. How many times over the years did he invite me to a social gathering of some sort only to have friends of his I had never met shake my hand asking me how I knew George,
“My name is Steve, George is my father.”
Turning to my father, “George, I didn’t know you had a son, you never said anything.” Do you know how many times this happened? I didn’t really exist. But, of course I did exist and soldiered on. The one great thing that I choose now to remember my father for was when I was twenty-seven and making my first film that would get me out of the editing room and into a career of producing, where I knew I belonged. We had dinner one night at a restaurant on the Upper West Side near my place, the only time he ever came up there. I explained the project, why it was important and how I planned on doing it. He said he had a client who would invest in it and for me to start work. I did.
It was underway, and went to have lunch at George’s office. His client was not in for the project and my stomach fell on the floor as I was already way into it. My father said he would match me dollar for dollar. And he did. The one time as a young man when I really needed someone to get behind me, believe in me and write checks – he was there. This is how I choose to remember my father now, the rest of it doesn’t really serve me. Or him. For all the hard times I was forced to endure, this one time he came through big-time. As an entrepreneur himself he recognized this moment in time was critical for me. Even paid for a beautiful screening at swell screening room, where I invited two really nice crowds of people.
This was a most important time in my life, and there was no one else in the world who would have understood what that film meant to me or would have helped me in this way. It changed my life, and my father was really the only one who had the understanding, inclination and wherewithal to boost me up at that time. This is what I choose to focus on in my memory of my father.
The day my father came to see the final cut of the film in my rented edit room on Bedford St in the West Village, he was deeply satisfied. This man, my father, my harshest critic, everyone’s harshest critic, loved my little film. I walked him onto the street in a pouring rain. We talked about how great the music guy I worked with was and he looked up at me as he ducked his big self into the taxi and said, “Yeah, but what about the great Producer!” The door slammed shut and off he went into the rain. I stood for a moment, soaking in the rain and the glory of my father’s approval. It was enough to last a lifetime. To be honest, there was much more combat to be endured with this man until his death many years after that glorious rainy day, but it was the gift of a lifetime that he gave to me, screw all the other stuff. And this is how I choose to remember my father.
I got the phone call I was expecting that morning in August of 1998. My father had died. I had seen him the week before in the hospital in Scottsdale. He was 76. Diabetes and misery took him and he really had to go. He was done. I put the phone down, and it was as if a bag of cement was lifted off my shoulders. Almost immediately after I place the phone down, I was confronted with a business partner who appeared in the doorway and a nasty argument ensued about something or other. I should have parted ways with this guy long before. I got out of there making a beeline to the nearest deli and ordered the same corned beef sandwich, fries and coleslaw I used to eat with my father when we watched football, washing it down with a Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry Soda. As I sat there, I wondered again for the thousandth time, what was my father so angry about? What was it he truly wanted? Maybe it was an internal battle of wanting to be single and fancy free to be the artist that he never really allowed himself to be in full blossom. He thrived on business, but some part of him became to truly hate it, I think. All the deceptions and game playing that is involved. He was a master of the game, but I don’t think he enjoyed it. I think he hated it. Eventually, it ate him up, maybe. He was the ultimate crafty competitor. And he was the serene artist. I think he was not able to integrate the two parts of himself and he was angry as hell about it. Given his druthers, I think he would have been perfectly satisfied playing his tuens on th epiano in a little lounge somewhere, and doin his photography. I think he wanted a simple life, but no way was able to even think about creating that.
It is one of the reasons I became an artist, went for it all and walked away from everything else, all the stuff my father could not walk away from. As much as I am like my father, I do not plan on ending up like him. May he rest in peace.
