My Dad's Workless Ethic
I was 11 when my father brought home a huge Texas Instruments calculator that cost nearly $150. It was 1972, and home calculators had just been invented; only scientists and millionaires had them. Dad had to have one, too.
Dad wasn't a millionaire. He didn't even seem to work at a regular job. My sister and I knew that he had been a nightlife writer -- our mother married him partly for the great table at the Copacabana -- and that he had written for Ernie Kovacs at NBC, but by the time we began spending weekend custody visits with him, his jobs were few and far between.
'Very early on, I never seemed to have money,' he tells me. 'But I wanted a lot of things. My tastes were patrician.'
'You could have done the Horatio Alger thing,' I say. 'You could have gone out and worked hard.'
There is a brief pause. 'To hell with that!' he says cheerfully.
When I was young, Dad lived mostly on a $60 unemployment check, sleeping at his mother's apartment in the city or on his boat on Long Island. I was told that I had agreed to pay for this boat myself, at age 3, with a savings bond given to me at birth. Dad doesn't remember that now, but he admits that it sounds like something he would think up and that his rules about money have always been unusual. If you want something, he thinks, you should . . . arrange it.
Other girls had fathers who came to school from their offices in suits, carrying briefcases containing paychecks. Beside them stood my father in jeans and cowboy boots, impatient to go buy a tin of caviar he couldn't afford.
What had he been doing all week?
'I had a great fantasy,' he would begin. 'I pick up this beautiful girl hitchhiking, and we really hit it off. It turns out her father is the sultan of Brunei. He's grateful. He gives me a million dollars.'
My father would furnish an imaginary mansion with a stainless-steel refrigerator full of smoked salmon. From there, his daydream mutated and grew and was never told the same way twice -- he was, after all, a writer. Spinning fantasy into reality was his job, we thought. It seemed like decent work.
My mother said she divorced my father because her own work ethic was set in concrete and his roamed loose in the ozone, inextricably linked to fate, an entity he referred to as They. Every once in a while, They rained money down on him, enough for a three-pound lobster or, hell, maybe a new car. Whatever he got was spent instantly on luxuries -- edible or with engines. Cocktail rings for short-lived girlfriends. Big loans to friends or strangers for worthless causes. People should never have to explain why they wanted money, he said. Money just wanted to be wanted. They would reward you if you kept that in mind. Dad did, and They did too.
My father met his two best friends nearly 70 years ago at summer camp. 'We used to go out in the woods together to blow things up and have long soulful conversations,' he remembers. 'We made this promise: if any one of us struck it good, he would take care of the others.'
His friends went West and ended up in oil exploration. Obeying the childhood vow, they made my father a small-percentage partner in some of the wells they drilled. The odds were slim, but the fantasizing was superb -- just like the sultan of Brunei, Dad was in the oil business! And guess what? One of those wells turned out to be the first in a massive oil field in Montana, and my dad entered the upper middle class. The friends considered it a fair trade. 'Your father,' one of them once told me, 'he's smart; he's funny; he can do crossword puzzles, you know?'
In his late 40's, Dad moved to Denver and became a columnist, a radio and TV commentator and what one local paper called a 'raconteur-about-town.' Naturally, these gigs pay almost nothing, unless you count local celebrity, which he does.
How do you balance a squandering father against a mother who insists that work is good for the soul? Which version of reality sounds better? I've worked all my adult life, but 40-hour-a-week office jobs always filled me with dread; I got out as soon as I could.
'Oh, yes, the dread,' my father says. 'I know all about it.'
Which isn't to say dread can't be defied. Two years ago, in response to being told he was too sick to drive, Dad bought a brand new Chevrolet Suburban. The new car is equipped with an industrial-strength winch. Why?
The answer to this question is so obvious: you never know what might happen to you once you have a winch, provided you shell out for a good one.
The best they make, my father would advise. Top of the line.
MEMOIRS Robin Chotzinoff is the author of 'People With Dirty Hands.'