This essay is adapted from DeConto’s spiritual memoir, This Littler Light: Some Thoughts on NOT Changing the World.
We want to count on the men in our lives. We might be feminists, but, still, doesn’t the definition of manhood have something to do with being dependable, stable, coming through, living up to who we’re supposed to be, doing the things that define us, whether as fathers or husbands or brothers or sons or craftsman or bosses or laborers? I spent a lot of my life trying to figure out where I could count on my Dad and where I couldn’t—would he define the sort of man I wanted to be, or its opposite?
Dad was my hero and my anti-hero all at the same time. He was everybody’s friend — funny, easygoing, not afraid to have a drink, but one of my earliest, haziest memories is of him and Mom throwing dishes and saltshakers at each other across the kitchen. Whether it was running off with his old high-school gang to watch football or gamble — or worse — he seemed to make Mom sad a lot. He’d been a star pitcher, third-baseman, and tennis player as a kid, but when I was about 4 years old I heard him yelling from the garage behind our house and ran out there to find him stumbling around, blinded by the chemicals he used to refinish furniture. He ended up being okay, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Dad wasn’t quite as invincible as I wanted him to be.
The furniture business was just one of many jobs Dad did to try and support us while hanging onto his real vocation as a musician. He drove a cab, just like Bobby the actor and Tony the boxer in Taxi, one of our favorite TV shows. He even looked the part with his long, reddish-brown curls tumbling out of his tweed driver’s cap. He delivered for a Greek pizzeria, bringing Mom fresh baklava and pizza for all of us; the gross fishy taste from his anchovies always ran onto my plain-cheese half. These seemed like dangerous, manly jobs: working with wood, driving all over town, playing electric-fuzz guitar through speakers bigger than me.
Dad had his music studio in the basement of our 100-year-old duplex in Lowell, Mass., an old cotton-mill city on the Merrimack River. Sometimes I’d go down there to listen to him practice. He liked to read to me from The Hobbit, so I recognized his poster of Bilbo, Gandalf and the dwarves climbing the Misty Mountains. Dad was working on a rock opera based on Tolkien’s story. That and the fieldstone walls made the basement feel not just creepy but mysterious and ancient — a real Man Cave.
When I was a baby, Dad had been able to earn most of his living with just music. In fact, as Mom labored on the night before my birth on January 9, 1977, Super Bowl Sunday, Dad had been playing in his duo, The Fabulous Linguini Brothers, at The Alewife bar owned by one of his cousins. Dad and his partner Bob Gentile were out four or five nights a week, playing cover songs in restaurants, bars and hotel lounges all over New England. He’d come home late from a gig the night before, but I woke him and Mom with pregnancy pains at 5 a.m. Saturday morning. They’d slept at my grandparents’ house that night, and they stayed there all day until Dad had to leave for The Alewife.
Mom called the bar around 11 p.m. to say she was in labor, and Nanny and Poppy were taking her to the hospital. The bartender told the waitress, who whispered in Dad’s ear right in the middle of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia.” Dad stood up and knocked over his microphone stand, filling the room with ear-splitting feedback before he could pick it up.
“My wife’s having a baby,” he announced to the full house.
The crowd cheered.