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As long as I’ve known Howard, he’s been dead. Now that’s not entirely true, but it might as well have been, for I have no real memories of him, just twilit images, pretend memories inspired by dreams, or memories of dreams, or memories extended from ragged edged black and white photos. Maybe all I have of Howard is mere memory of memory, a borrowed memory not even my own. Howard died under questionable circumstances when I was three, leaving my mother, the lovely young widow, with six awkward and malnourished looking children to pray the rosary and to eat white bread and to talk about their dear dead father for years to come.
And talk we did. We all talked of him, passed on stories of his
gentleness, his quirky interests, his love for us, his violent seizures,
his absentminded brilliance. It was my mother’s stories that gave Howard
This dear dead daddy became a saint, a martyr, a hero who now shares rank with other fathers glamorized by death: John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Howard, being struck in the prime of his youth, mystery shrouding the circumstances of his death, could do no wrong. Howard’s image often comes to me, for many men look like Howard. Ordinary men, movie stars, academics, and punks. They all look like Howard. I see him in the bus reading paperback science fiction. I see him in the public library lost in the 500’s among astrophysics and quantum mechanics. I see him as the quiet proud hero in the movies. I see him ironic and goofy-faced on my TV screen. Even famous men can look like Howard. Ernie Kovaks, Gregory Peck , Buddy Holly, Rod Serling, John Lennon, Al Franken, Jeff Goldblum, David Byrne, Denzel Washington, Bruce Lee, Kurt Kobain, Tupac Shakur, all look like Howard, in their own way. Men who look nothing like each other and who hold nothing in common but the mere fact that each looks just exactly like Howard. I call Maribeth, my sister two thousand miles away. She sees Howard too, so when I tell her of a Howard sighting, she doesn’t laugh. “Hey, did I tell you? I’m taking a class from a guy who looks just like . . .” “Howard?” “Yes, he’s got the big lips, the green eyes, he’s even got the hair.” “Which hair? Fat Howard style, or the skinny Howard style?” Howard, like Elvis, had a thin young, and fat middle aged versions. “Skinny version, thick and curly and fluffy like Eraserhead.”
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“You mean that guy in the David Lynch movie?” “Yeah. Skinny, and gorgeous. I mean he’s really hot, he was a competitive ski bum so he’s tall and athletic. I think of him as Glam Howard.” “Howard couldn’t ski.” Maribeth likes to show off that since she’s five years older, she knows the real Howard. But I, the youngest, can see the essence of Howard in this man. I know a Howard when I see one. Better yet, I know a Howard when I read one, for I’ve developed a latent interest in physics. Not that I understand much of it, but I’m seduced by the poetry of Einstein, the audacity of Feynman, the wit of Hawking. And now there is a new smart guy on the scene, Stephen Wolfram, who suggests that computers can digitally uncover the secrets of the universe where mathematics falls short. God, that makes sense, since Howard, having been an early hard hat computer pioneer, one that crawled around on hands and knees inside hangar sized computers run on vacuum tubes, would have agreed. I can’t tell Maribeth about Wolfram. Her Howard is teenaged California Howard, tanned and ripped. He’d be selling corn dogs at the boardwalk reading Mad magazine, a leather holster slung low, with a slide rule at one hip, and a pipe at the other. My Howard is more intellectual than hers, and far more intense. That book blasting the space time continuum wasn’t really written for a lay audience, is way above my head, but I read it anyway, and the words comfort and tease like breathy wet whispers. A lullaby sung by a man. Deep and warm and resonant. Singing words you couldn’t possibly understand in the exotic language of physics. Now, how sexy is that? So is it wrong to fall in love with your father? Is it incestuous to find men who remind you of him alarmingly attractive? Probably not, for don’t all young girls crave the sole attention of their papas, the unshared lap, the audience of one? It’s late. I want to call Maribeth again to tell her my secret of a newfound lover. I want to tell her, that yes, I think Peter is gorgeous. Maybe not to her, but to me he’s got it all: the curls, the myopia, the shelves of books, the terms I don’t understand, the allusions I can’t follow, the exotica of an advanced vocabulary that purrs as he speaks. And he speaks and he speaks. I want to tell her that Peter is handsome in that gawky geekish way that only truly smart men can pull off. You know, the way the thin skinned cerebral types do with their blue network of veins bulging from bony hands, nails tipped with pure white crescents, that could do manual labor if they wanted to, if they needed too, but don’t because they’ve lost themselves in a book all afternoon. Their wide aquamarine eyes gaze dreamily from behind corrective lenses into the esoteric text of a professional journal, their mismatched clothes either twenty years out of style or twenty years ahead. I would tell her all this if I could, but she wouldn’t understand. Besides, this is my Howard, not hers. Let her invent her own tall, dark, ordinary version if she wants. This one is mine alone. Page 2
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