The Eulogy
(As originally given 5/1/2017)
I’ve heard a slew of never before been told stories about my Dad in the past few days; every one made perfect sense. That’s saying a lot because my Dad hardly ever made sense. My best friend growing up I think captured him the best.
As he headed to court one day, scared out of his mind, my friend prepared for a hearing in front of a judge for his first speeding ticket. His dad accompanied him and had done nothing to comfort him about the matter only adding to his terror, when who coincidentally happens to appear and start schmoozing them up, Mr. Marcus S. Teichner. P.A. In short order my Dad takes the edge off ensuring him it wasn’t a big deal, that he was the victim, it was all about quotas and POS cops performing waste of time activities instead of actually working for a living. He totally eased my friends nerves and had him and his dad laughing which was incredible because his dad was a St. Louis Park Police Officer. He also seemed to vividly remember carpooling in the cutlass cruiser station wagon that smelled strongly of Kindho vietnamese food.
That was him though, creative, funny, forceful, brilliant, generous, tough, empathetic, eccentric, outspoken and principled. He defied odds and frankly, comprehension. He had the power and determination to do and did incredible things his whole life… the Marcus way. If I only had one word to describe him it’d be “conviction,” in that he had it… and helped people fight them for a nominal fee. (Sorry that’s a horrible lawyer joke, but I am my father’s son).
Conviction too, was his unraveling.
From the outside he was quirky. His sense of humor pervaded everything he did. And it was sharp. His jokes were 5 steps ahead of you, it was like a comic connect the dots. He had this amazing and unique vocabulary that for whatever reason favored choice terms like “the peter principle, hominyms, nepotism, the f-bomb, a-hole, and a number of colorful terms for law enforcement”. He listed something like 12 offices on his business cards at one point that included the “schanfield professional building, Sandler Plaza and Libman towers.” The rest were various white castles and burger kings. Those business cards as well prominently featured a chess piece and the words “Have attorney will travel,” which though not funny to my 9yo self paid off when I finally discovered Palladin.
He really seems to have come into his own in 60s and 70s. He was this like Fonzie meets Charles Bronson character. The mustache alone was amazing, it practically had it’s own zipcode. Ask anyone from Herzl camp back then. “Oh Marcus Teichner? He was cool. We wanted to be him.” Add to it his time as an undercover narcotics officer and he’s a real life member of the mod squad.
That was his image though. His identity was rooted in this code, of what it meant to be a man, a jew, a father — a person in the “real” world. Men don’t gush emotion, they eat meat, they provide, they get what they take, and no one ever gets the best of them. They have thick luscious hair. He wouldn’t let people hold things over him, and he had very high expectations of himself. I have this theory that he was left-handed at one point and forced himself to be right handed. He talked about it so much that my brother Sean and I were, so much that you begin to wonder if he was covering something. I wouldn’t put it past him to force it if his pride was wrapped up in it. For better or worse it was a strict world view where pride was black and white. It gave him the determination to always defy what people expected of him and still never be satisfied. It was intense, where his self-worth came from, but he was so many other things at the same time too.
Being his sons, we were on the receiving end of his virtues. His drive for success pushed us all academically, but it also meant he spent a lot of time on the phone. I won’t go into that much save for his client phone calls were legendary in their duration, allegory, vulgarity and hustle. If you were ever a fly on the wall for one it was a masterclass in crass communication. The weekends were different though. My dad went from masterclass to master builder and we were his assistants. He loved to build and provide instruction. He was incredibly creative and hands on. Every project included draftsman quality diagrams and precise measurements. I think he wanted us to take up the mantle though he never actually let us do any of the building. We learned a lot of ways to just hold a drill for him while he did everything. Still it was incredible to watch the master work.
He was a night owl. He was always up. You just knew he’d be down in his office when you got home from going out in high school or if you just didn’t want to sleep, and he was more than happy to have the company. The TV would be blasting he’d be doing paperwork and eating junk food. He’d educate me on movies even from a young age, and he was pretty liberal on the content. I watched the terminator with him at age 8. It was fun to hangout down there and probably where I got closest with my Dad and where I started to see his health decline. More than anything we would talk. Talk about our days, his clients, politics, and what was important to him. What you need to know is that he wanted a better life for us than he had. But he wasn’t satisfied at that. There too were topics that were off limits, fixations and opinions that came out that with a harshness. He would rant about things I didn’t understand at the time because I didn’t grow up like he did. He was unwavering on a lot of topics I didn’t agree with. It could be dark. And over time it made it difficult to talk to him.
We were close and when I saw how unhealthy some of his convictions made him I wanted to help I wanted to change him. That wasn’t up to code though.
His health deteriorated but still he persisted. He was who he was, no matter our opinion. At the same time, he loved us all, he did. Though he and I drifted, my brothers and I got married, had kids and he took up the same ways with them. Building toys for them, telling jokes they didn’t get and watching a little too closely at how left-handed they might be. He was getting sicker and maybe his jokes were a bit harder to interpret, his workmanship relied more heavily on tape and cardboard but you could see how happy family made him. It was so bittersweet.
I’m happy he lived out the things he wanted to pursue, I’m lucky to have had such a strong willed man as my father and I’m incredibly heart broken that those things didn’t give him the health and happiness to be here with us today.
