Shades of Yellow:
How to Not Walk Away
West River Memorial Park, near the New Haven–West Haven border, features an impressive, World War I statue in bronze and granite carved by Karl Lang in 1936. Timothy Francis Ahearn, the sturdy doughboy hero, has thighs like a Heisman Trophy winner with a tapered trunk and muscular arms. When I was returning to life in 2007, slowly kicking back into gear after a ridiculously long struggle with self-harm and bipolar disorder in the mid-2000s, I visited the park frequently.
The soldier stands around nine-feet high, and is oxidized green from the weather. He’s caught mid-stride, writing a message to officers in back of him, warning of what’s ahead. He’s a hero, a symbol of bravery, of resilience. In that period, leaving a New Haven group home, trying to reconstruct myself as a mostly healthy, middle-aged man I’d sometimes stop and touch the statue’s base, or take a snapshot. I’ve seen him covered in snow, rain, and Mother Nature’s dander in spring, and he looks the same—dependable, reliable. Like nothing would ever knock him over.
Nothing.
The first time I saw my father fall I was four. He tumbled off a friend’s motorcycle in our neighborhood’s cul-de-sac. Maybe he skinned a knee, but the fall gave me a panic attack. I gasped and sprinted to him. He laughed it off, but to me it was excruciating. I made him promise he’d never ride again.
It was an irrational, silly thought, but, to me, my father was always Dad. He’d always known what to do, whom to call, what the correct, rational and moral decision should be in any situation. When I’d see photos of my three-year old father, adorable, hanging on to his mom in the sea at White Horse Beach in Plymouth, Massachusetts, I sensed, I knew he could already grasp everything. Looking at his little pudgy boy-face, I figured that kid was just inordinately wise. OK, maybe he couldn’t drive as a three-year old kid, but he could handle everything else. There was no doubt.
Some years later, I held my father’s penis in my hand and steered it towards the plastic urinal as he lay supine in the ER at St. Raphael’s in New Haven. He broke his neck in a freak fall at the local gym. Dehydrated from a long trip to India, he exercised the next day back and slipped in the shower. He fainted twice but struggled each time to a standing position. On the third fall, he passed out and fractured neck ligaments. Surgeons said a millimeter more to the left and he would’ve been paralyzed. For months he wore a neck brace, and today his feet and hands are slowed somewhat, lacking their former dexterity.
The Christmas Eve after the accident, I took him to a ten-dollar barbershop in Guilford, and helped him into a swiveling, lime-green vinyl chair. I took his brace off and there lay the wounded neck, tender and kind of wobbly looking. His shoulders sagged, and his face was pale, stricken. Oprah’s talk show was on in the parlor, famous faces were singing holiday songs that day, and my father recounted his story.
“What an odd thing,” the barber said, when my dad finished. “One slip and your life changes forever.”
The barber didn’t fit my stereotype—no chubby veteran or wizened Italian senior citizen, but a middle-aged woman with heavy makeup, and a nice round ass. The walls were covered in advertisements for Brylcreem and Ivory soap, and—straight out of a Norman Rockwell—boys scrambled to grab a seat in the corner. They picked up the local newspaper, snuck glances at Oprah. Later, when she finished with Dad’s hair, the barber lightly touched his neck and said, “You take care of that thing now, hon.”
“Jesus,” he said soon after the accident, “all I want to be able to do is zip my own goddamned pants.”
Originally published:
New Haven Review
Issue 015
February 2015