I was born cool; that’s just the way I am. It’s very unusual for anything to shock me. Yet when my mother died, I was shocked by two things. First, I cried. Honestly, all told, for maybe two or three seconds, but that was completely unexpected for me. And second, Like that! I immediately forgave her. And again the sensation was “How did that happen?”
So, maybe if I think about it, I wasn’t born cool, but I became cool when I had to to get through this hard life. “Oh-blah di. . . etc,” and I don’t think about it much. But at the time, it was terrible, and I wanted to die, but now I’m fine, and she’s fine, and, of course, I’m still cool.
But my father’s death? God. That is all I can say. Twenty years gone, and I still feel his pain (and I know he feels mine.) He was a prince—“The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”(Julius Caesar, Shakespeare)—but God, what a struggle to be born in this life.
All of the actors are now dead, so I can’t say for sure, but his sister Jean— who actually raised him—told me that when he was born, he was either pulled out too fast or they dropped him down a flight of stairs, so that he was, from his birth, actually paralyzed on one side. He had a “hemiparesis” (half paralysis), which resulted in the left side of his body not catching up, muscle-wise, bone-wise, to the right side of his body. He did reach six feet of height, but his left side was always two inches shorter than his right, resulting in what’s called a “two-inch foot drop. He couldn’t walk without limping; he had no left calf, and every step he took was pain. Terrible, stabbing, wincing pain. Every breath. Every step. Every minute of his life.
And it seems crazy, ( I mean, it actually is crazy) but it never occurred to me that he had a limp. But, of course, he did; I mean, how could he not? One leg was two inches shorter than the other. He wore this torturous, orthopedic device on his foot that cost hundreds (now thousands) of dollars to make. And he could never walk, ever, in a pair of bedroom slippers. So, what a shock when I was twenty three, and I met this girl Rosa in my apartment (that is a stretch. . . ) complex who had come from West Islip—where he was a school principal—who had actually attended his school (Paumanok). “Oh, Mr. Demarest was your father? I remember him, with that terrible limp, always coming down the hall.” Was I shocked? Completely! I wanted to smack her in the face. Because, first, give me some credit. That was a fucked up thing to say—even ”innocently”— and second, that was the way that he walked. And third, I walked the same way too.
Once, at my thirtieth high school reunion, while I was walking with my good friend Hutch, (we had grown up together), he said, “I see that you’re not limping now.” And I thought, what is that supposed to mean? And, intuitively, reading my confusion, he said, “I remember that you were always limping in school. Now you’re fine. What happened then?”And you know what happened? I was unconsciously walking the same as my dad, favoring the right leg, wincing on the left. I loved my dad. It was sympathy.
His mother had died when he was twenty two months old. She had Bright’s disease, which was the name they called acute kidney disease; it was actually more common on the other side of the family, but that’s what she died of and my grandfather was neither willing nor able to raise a small child. So that’s why his thirteen year-old sister raised him.
Nothing against my grandfather. I really never knew him, and when I did, he had dementia, so there’s really nothing I can say, but my father told me a story once of how, when he was seven or eight years old, he didn’t feel like going to school. He’d leave the house each day and play in the fields, eat his lunch, play some more, and then come home when he saw the other kids begin walking home. For six weeks! The teachers never reported him absent, and his father never asked him what he did in school that day. He could not have been less interested.
Well, of course, that was a different time. Can you imagine the lawsuits of today? But can you also imagine, what if you were gone for six weeks, and no one missed you?
So, there are just two things I want to say. First, my father never ever made fun of me or belittled me, and my mother truly did. Horribly. Incessantly. It was terrible abuse. Honestly, “the less said, the better. . .” But it was —even though I have forgiven her— a terrible thing to have done to a child. And, of course, it started when I was an infant, so what kind of context was there to make sense? And, truthfully, my dad, though he had suffered so much, he was complicit and he knew it —I mean, he let it happen—but he was also incredibly kind. Not just to me but to everyone. He was, I think, an enlightened soul. Whenever my mother sent him upstairs to spank me, he would take the hairbrush and hit the side of the bed. Really, the danger was that I would really get spanked because I was obviously faking it so loudly “Ye-oww!Owww!”that my sadistic older sister would come in to watch. Here is the gift I remember the most: At his Memorial Service, quite unexpectedly, two former students from West Islip, now middle-aged men, came so they could share memories of him. They had both grown up in “broken homes,” with lethal potions of drunkenness, abandonment, and abusive foster parents. And yet they always knew they could come in to my father’s office to talk to him, let him get them some breakfast and know that he would be comforting to them. He was kind and the memory of this kindness saved them. Not just me, you see, but anyone.
And the other thing? He loved music. Or, more specifically, the flood-stage of music notes that coursed through his arteries. Because it is a fact—or at the least, I do believe, that if everyone could lose their minds for hot jazz music the way my father always lost his mind for “Caldonia” by Woody Herman and his Thundering Herd—then the world would be a much happier place. (“Tuck! No. . .wait! Listen to those horns!!”)
I could be wrong, but you get my point.
And he loved to sing although his voice wasn’t much. But he could sight read and sing the right notes from a chart. (Not quite perfect pitch but relative pitch although I am a musician and can’t tell you the difference.) When he and my mother moved to Florida, he joined a big, local amateur chorus. I honestly have no recollection of the name. And he loved it. It was something that gave him real meaning in his life. But after a few years, his dementia kicked in. Maybe it was Alzheimers; maybe it was just the intractable Demarest dementia that has taken out more than a few family members. Once, when I was visiting my parents (father) in Florida, I was sitting on the beach when some young guy came up to his girlfriend beside me. “Whoa!” he said, “Sorry. I got held up by this crazy old guy. Crazy.”
“Where?” she said. And he turned around and pointed to my dad. He was standing by the phone pole and smiling at me. And, of course, because of the difficulty of walking on the sand, it was an ordeal for him to come down to the beach. I can’t remember to this day if I ran up to get him.
On the next trip to Florida, I asked, ”How is the chorus?” And he was silent as if maybe he hadn’t heard me, and for some reason, I knew to hold my tongue. So we rode on, in silence, until he began:
“Well, I was making mistakes, you know, singing the wrong notes; coming in at the wrong places. . .”
“Yeah? And. . .”
“The director. . . he said, ‘Why don’t you just stand there and not open your mouth?’”I clutched my head inside my hands. What . . . . if you were gone for six weeks and no one missed you? This man had been damaged for all of his life and now he had apparent brain damage? No. No. It wasn’t fair.
Eventually, he was moved into Assisted Living, where he forgot all the names of my mother, my sisters and pretty much everyone else except: “Tuck!” he’d yell every time I called him. “How is Jin Jin? How is she?” He just adored my tiny Chinese daughter, who’d been left by a roadside in China by her mother. He had one more child to be kind to. And he was, my one true Buddha dad.
And you’ve probably deduced that I treasured him, of course —but really, what I want to say is that he was kind. My dad was kind.
