Who’s Your Daddy?

Everybody has a favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger quote. In “Kindergarten Cop,” the Governator is a cop masquerading as a teacher in order to find a drug dealer. He plays a little game with the kids, saying, in trademark cadence, “You tell me: who is your daddy and what does he do?” I just watched the clip again and it absolutely slays me every time.

My daddy is a retired philosophy professor, but this had little meaning to me as a small child. There’s a great episode of “The Wonder Years” in which Fred Savage’s Kevin wants to know what his dad does for a living, and his dad really doesn’t know how to explain. I don’t know that I asked my dad to explain, but I must have intuited that there wasn’t much point. He was often in his office “preparing to teach.” And I knew it had to do with books. And he wrote a book, “Truth and Value in Nietzsche,” which did not aid in my understanding.

As I got into my teens and got interested in things philosophical, I started to have a picture of who my daddy was and what he did. He was a Teacher of Deep Thoughts. He taught college students, and he advised graduate students. He specialized in Nietzsche, yes, but also medical ethics, and theory of justice (John Rawls and Robert Nozick). He was an intellectual, and I came from an intellectual family.

And it showed. I was a know-it-all who, like most know-it-alls, didn’t actually know much at all, and that’s not going to endear you to many people, particularly to blue collar types, people who work with their hands, and, well, gym teachers.

Gym teachers annoyed and scared me. And I assume I must have annoyed them. I wasn’t athletic, I spoke pretentiously… I wasn’t one of the guys in the locker room. And the locker room, by the way, was an unfunny version of a John Hughes movie scene. I was bullied, in word and deed, all through middle and high school. The towel whippings I took have led to a life-long habit of labeling certain kinds of guys as “towel poppers.” And my impression was always that the gym teachers looked the other way on all this bullying past the point of condoning it, even encouraging it.

Oh, we do like to tar whole groups with the brush of the sins of the few, don’t we? Easy to say now. But I grew up hating gym teachers. They represented something to me. They were everything that was wrong with education. They were what I hated about school distilled into large, mean-spirited bodies.

And the living embodiment of all that was Coach Deinhardt. He was young when I was in school. Maybe not 30 yet. And I remember him as big and built, with a square jaw, a military hair cut, and demeanor of a drill sergeant to match. And he treated us like recruits in boot camp, entreating us to do what he wanted in garbled yells that I could not understand much less follow. One of my friends quotes his order to get in the shower as, “SHOWAYOMAGGOTYBODY!” Which translates as, “Shower your maggoty body,” but came out as an expletive of machine-gun-fire grunts. Did he actually say that? I don’t know, but it’s how I remember the dude.

So imagine my horror the other day when a Facebook friend posted an article from the Binghamton paper reporting that Steve Deinhardt had been named Interim Superintendent of Schools. There was a picture. No. Way. Could it be? Older, larger, but that jaw was still in there, and yes, it’s THAT guy. And all my disdain for gym teachers and the ills of public education (particularly administration) came rushing back. Wow. It was a bad joke. Several of us chimed into the thread to call him names. One friend of a friend defended him. Some people change, I suppose, and I can’t with a straight face say I know the first thing about the guy. He’s a symbol to me.

And anyway, this is not a memoir about Coach Steve Deinhardt. I just need you to understand how I felt about gym teachers when I first met my wife back in 1986. Before we started dating, we went out for coffee several times, and talked about absolutely everything: what’s your major? Do you like poetry? You’re a dancer, huh? Yeah, I love Penguin Café Orchestra, too. The Jam, huh… didn’t really listen to them much, but that’s cool. Your mom’s a teacher, huh? Mine is a poet and runs a small press.

So, who is your daddy and what does he do? Mine? Oh, he teaches philosophy. Really? That’s unusual. And yours? Well, he’s an elementary school gym teacher. AUGHHHHH! [Insert “Phycho” sound effect here.] Now, you probably think I’m joking when I tell you I almost ran away from her before we got started. I mean… she was pretty much perfect, you know? Beautiful, artistic, smart, curious, tough, self-motivated (my wife is awesome). But I was worried that her father was a gym teacher? In a word, yes. He was going to be an asshole. I knew it. Could I date a girl whose dad was an asshole?

In a week, we were dating and within days I was invited over to meet the family. I knew they were serious Catholics, and maybe THAT should have scared me, but it didn’t. I was worried about the gym teacher. I hit it off immediately with Helen, my future mother-in-law. She was sharp, playful, just a little bit wicked, and we smoked cigarettes together. And here was the father, and… he… was… nice.

“Cautious Ken” Harris, my father-in-law, is sweet and completely no-nonsense. He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t, and he’ll tell you. He dotes on his kids to a fault. He’s a cryer, the tears coming easily when he’s moved, which he is a lot. He flat-out worshiped his late wife. I liked him just fine, though the gym teacher thing still concerned me (he won’t like me because I’m not an athlete, I feared). And maybe he wasn’t so sure about me at the start. I was kind of a pretentious ass, after all.

But my relationship with Ken has only gotten stronger over the years. I think he realized fairly early that I was devoted to his daughter, and that was what he really cared about. But much later in life, something really… well, strange happened that has brought us closer.

After Helen passed away, I gave a poetry reading at Writers & Books. My wife invited her family, and I thought perhaps my poet brother-in-law would come, but did not expect anyone else. Just before I started, in walked my sister- and father-in-law. I panicked slightly. Very little of my poetry is off-color, but some of it is, and I wasn’t sure what I’d picked for that reading. Would they be scandalized? I started to shuffle though the stack and then realized that I’d prepared to read these, and these were what I would read. I got on with it, and by all reports, it went well. Once I started reading, I was relaxed and had a good time with it. The audience reacted to things. It was a great experience.

When the reading ended, I remembered that Ken was there, and he was walking up to me. Moment of truth. He would now realize the odd couple we’d always been. He would tell me, in his trademark way, that he thought my poems were “stupid.” He would say he didn’t understand what anybody saw in any of it. No. He had this look of wonder on his face, and told me that he thought I was just great. (He did say, “That other guy’s poems were stupid,” but oh well). And he went on about it. I was incredibly moved.

But that’s not the strange part. Next time I saw Ken, he told me that he’d started writing poems. And I’ll be darned it he hasn’t kept it up for many years since them. He is prolific, and has even self-published two volumes, which he distributes to the family and friends. When I saw him last night, he was complaining that nobody seems to want to read his poems, and we commiserated on that. No, nobody does want to read poems, I said. The only reason to write them is that you can’t help yourself.

I’m still the pretentious fop son of a poet and a philosopher, of course. I can’t remodel houses like Ken Harris can. But you know, we both love watching sports on TV, we both love his daughter, he loves my cooking, and neither of us can stop writing poetry. And all that has made us as close and close can be. As I watched my strong, athletic brother-in-law slowly help my fragile, 88-year-old father-in-law down a short flight of stairs last night, I was struck by how much I love the guy. And I felt like this needed saying. Right now.