I'm Sorry You Feel That Way Read Free Page B

with that one. But my father didn’t like him, didn’t approve of him, and for a long time, my father didn’t speak to me. Not even on Father’s Day when I showed up with a wrapped gift box containing a leather wallet. Not even when I said Happy Father’s Day, Dad. It took me getting knocked up before my father grudgingly spoke to me again.
    I named my son for him. My son’s middle name is my father’s first name. I think my father appreciated the gesture, but then I don’t know for sure. He’s never said.
    A friend of mine once told me to give it up, he was sick of hearing me go on about it. “Your old man is never going to love you the way you think he should,” my friend said. “He’s never going to ask the questions you want him to ask. The best thing you can do is learn to father yourself.”
    The father I’ve invented for myself is sitting at the kitchen table, shirtless and drinking iced tea. He’s eating pistachios, his fingers are stained red. It’s the summer of 1982. I’m twelve years old, and I’m hot and sweaty and just coming home from pretending my bike is really a palomino named Goldie. There’s a pile of stubbed-out Luckies littering the ashtray, there’s a Lucky hanging from his mouth. It’s been a long day towing cars out of ditches and painting cars in a sunless, claustrophobic garage. His hands have been scrubbed with a brush and some Goop, his shoulders are stiff, the tendons in his neck are tight, he’s got a headache, his back hurts, he looks tired.
    Hi, Daddy, I say.
    My father smiles. Hi, sweetheart, he says. He pats the seat beside him. He says what’s new with you?

The Boy
    R ecently, the boy showed me his feet. They were disgusting. They oozed, but they also looked dry. He said his feet were itchy and that they hurt. It hurt to stand, he said. It hurt to walk. He said he needed crutches or, even better, a motorized wheelchair. His feet smelled horrible, bringing to mind that Pablo Neruda poem about the blood of the children and how it’s like the blood of the children. No metaphor can begin to describe the atrocity, no comparison can come close. The same idea was applicable here: the boy’s terribly smelly feet smelled like terribly smelly feet.
    What happened to your feet? I said. How did they get to be like this?
    The boy said he didn’t know.
    We showed his feet to our next-door neighbor, a Vietnam veteran, who in one glance made a diagnosis: “My God! That’s trench foot! I haven’t seen that since Vietnam!”
    The boy was interrogated. He blinked under the harsh light, but he didn’t flinch. He only said his feet hurt, and he didn’t know how or why.
    I know why. Though this boy has a dresser full of clean socks, fresh socks, neatly folded socks, he one day decided he’d wear again the pair he’d already been wearing. He got out of the shower and put those dirty socks back on. That night, he wore them to bed. The next day, he wore them to school.
    If you ask the boy why, why would you do such a thing, he’ll shrug. He’ll smile. He’ll say he doesn’t know.
    The boy with trench foot is my son. He was born on April 20, 1992, a few days before the L.A. riots. His birthday is also Hitler’s birthday and the day of the shootings at Columbine High School. Other upsetting events around April 20 include the end of the siege of the Branch Davidian complex outside Waco, Texas, and the bombing of the federal court building in Oklahoma City. This bothers the boy. He believes that so many bad things having history on or around his birthday doesn’t bode well for him or his future. He thinks it reveals a flaw in character: his own, of course, but also mine.
    You know this boy. He was the one at the first T-ball practice who cried because he didn’t know how to run the bases. At T-ball games, he sat tucked away far in the outfield, pulling up the grass, watching dreamily as the ball rolled by. You made assumptions about him. Thin and nervous. Asthmatic child of a