This Week’s Clue: Fred’s Last Adventure

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 17 of
This Week’s Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since
March, 1997. It would be the issue of April 23. Enjoy.

I remember it as though it were yesterday.

It was the spring of 1973.

I came home from school to find my dad, Frederick H. Blankenhorn, engaged in nailing a plywood platform into the back of the white van he used at Tower TV, the repair shop he owned in Massapequa, on Long Island.

He looked happy. He almost never looked happy, so I asked what was going on.

Dad said he was going away. He was leaving in the morning, didn’t know for where, didn’t know for how long. He went back to hammering.

My dad was 52, and I already knew where he was headed. California. My dad loved California the way other men loved their God. Ours was the only home in Massapequa with a subscription to the Sunday LA Times, and my father devoured it, every Thursday, when it finally hit our mailbox. He especially loved the real estate section. Once, when it didn’t arrive, he hustled me into this same van and we drove to Times Square in New York, where I hopped out and bought his copy from a stand while he drove around the block.

That was an adventure.

This was to be my father’s adventure, his last great adventure. He
had never wanted to come back to New York, back to his relatives, back
to the cold, back to obligation. But he felt that obligation. He had a wife
now, my mother, and he would meet that obligation. Like so many in The
Greatest Generation he would suck it up, play the role, do the work,
raise the kids.

He raised 4. We had a house a block from the water. We had good
schools to go to. We had food on the table. But it was a hard slog. My
dad had never gotten past 8th grade. He worked 69 hours each week at
Tower TV, 12 hours weekdays, 9 hours on Saturdays. He felt age creep up
on him at Tower TV. His hair thinned and went gray, his skin began to
sag, he had to get flip-up bifocals, the inner lens thin for close
work, the second lens thicker so he could see to drive. Worse he’d had
to buy a couch, for the plywood-walled shell in the back he called his
office, where he would take a dreamless sleep every afternoon, when his
blood pressure got too high. The nap felt like death.

For me, Tower TV was something else. It was a schoolhouse. I started
going there at 3, walking in from a nursery school next door as the air
raid siren across the street blared. I learned to file tubes there, to
arrange resistors by their colored bands. I filed the Sams Photofacts,
pictures and schematics of each new TV set and radio, which came in
every month, and which we used to trace circuits. I learned people,
generations of repair jockeys, the World War II veteran who came to work
in a uniform shirt, the crew cut guy with the beer gut, the long-haired
high school kid who would lay upside-down in a customer’s car to pull
his radio out, his belly button showing as he stretched and his shirt
came out of his pants.

I learned about customers, and watched my dad read them. He offered
a "free bench check" and if he liked the man, and if the problem was a
blown tube, he might replace it and just charge for the part. If he
didn’t like them he’d remove the set’s back and take it behind a false wall for later, even when I knew
the repair was simple. We had a free tube tester in the front of the
shop and I’d watch other customers stand before it, the tubes from
their sets in a box or a bag, setting each into one of many sockets on
the board, pressing a button, hoping for a red light which meant they’d
found their own problem and could come home triumphant, big chief money
saver.

In the shop my dad was always Fred. Never dad. I was never paid, and
this probably violated plenty of laws. But I didn’t mind. Sometimes
he’d send me to the deli across the street, for thick roast beef
sandwiches on white bread, and iced tea. I’d pour sugar into the tea
and suck it up from the bottom of the paper cup with a straw. To me it was heaven.

To him it was hell. Dad was a physical man, who loved the physical
world. Tower TV was his prison, and it looked like a life sentence.

So now that I was graduating high school he could stand it no more.
This was his last chance. He had to get out. His wife didn’t
understand, his neighbors didn’t understand. No one did.

I did. Or thought I did, anyway.

Soon after my dad left, James Garner’s show The Rockford Files came to TV, and over
the next years I imagined my dad as Rockford, cruising the freeways,
fighting bad guys. I wasn’t too far wrong. He wrote me in June, 1973, said
he’d gotten a job working burglar alarms. He had an apartment, the
family would join him, dropping me off at college along the way. He had
a gun, and drove the freeways to alarm calls. He was on 24 hour call.
He would speak to people in a calm voice, show them how a rat or a
customer had broken the tape on the windows, repair it through the
banter, make them feel safe.

It earned him enough so he could buy a new house, in Orange County, just a few miles from the sea, the place my mother and brother now call home, with Carl’s kids filling the halls, and the voice of Carl’s beautiful wife Regina filling the air as my mom’s voice once did.

To me the job sounded like hell. To him it was heaven.

Why am I telling you this? I looked in the mirror today and realized
I am now exactly the same age that my dad was then. I am, in some
ways, just as he was while nailing in that plywood bed frame. I feel my
age, my kids are near grown, and I finally understand his need.

I
wanted to tell you that adventure is always possible, that every day is
a new chance, that your obligations to others can’t replace the one you
have to yourself.

No happy ending lasts. A few years after moving west, my dad fell
through a false roof at a client’s office, breaking his hip, his
pelvis, his elbow. He bought a small lock shop, and his heart started
giving out. His aorta broke, and he could never again suck in his gut
because of the scar. He did grow old, as he’d feared he would. He died
in 1999, was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea.

But I carry his lessons, the good as well as the bad. I have no urge
to move, but I would like to travel. I take my heart medicine. I adore
my wife, and my kids, and our house. As a writer I find every day is a
new adventure, every interview, every story, every blog post a new adventure.

This post was an adventure. Thank you for taking it with me. Take care of yourself, and if you need to follow your heart, please do.