My great fantasy when I was in my early teens was that my dad and I would go bowling on a Saturday morning, then go out to breakfast together. Maybe to one of those broken down waterfront joints next to the wharf where coffee was served in thick, white mugs. Just the two of us. We’d watch the big ships come down the Mississippi. He could tell me stories of when he was young, tramping around the country during the Depression, eating in places like this.

Why bowling? I don’t know. Maybe because I thought I’d have him all to myself. The only time it was me and my dad was when he took me fishing. And even then, we didn’t talk much. He’d wake me up at two in the morning, and I’d sit there in the back of the car, half asleep, still in my pajamas. Every so often I’d open my eyes to see where we were. We’re on the Airline Highway, passing the airport. We’re driving through the bayous with cypress stumps sticking up out of the swamps. We’re on a dirt road passing the shacks by the oil refineries. Fire shooting out of a big smokestack in the middle of the night. The car comes to a stop and we’re in Grande Isle just as the sun’s coming up.

By the time it was light, we’d be out on the water in the Gulf of Mexico with a bunch of men who were all grizzly and unshaven, loud and playful. The smell of diesel fuel mixed with the odor of fishheads used for bait. The boat went up and down, smacking the choppy waves that got higher and higher the further we got from land. Finally, we came to the oil rigs. When they cut the engine and threw anchor, I had to hold on for dear life as the boat rocked and rode the waves. The men were smoking and drinking and yelling back and forth, throwing their lines into the water, pulling up the fish. They seemed to come flying on board as if their fins were wings. Spade fish and red snapper.  There wasn’t time for my dad and I to talk in all that confusion. It was mostly the slime and blood of the fish, and my worrying that he was sneaking a drink, and would end up drunk by the time we got back to shore. On the way home I watched how he drove the car, so that if he got so drunk he couldn’t drive, I’d be able to get us home. I worried that my mother would yell and threaten divorce if she smelled the whiskey on his breath, and then maybe they’d fight and the mirror in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom would get broken again and mom would start slapping us kids, and then Dad would go on a binge that would last for days and we wouldn’t know if he would ever come home again.

So bowling seemed tame. Afterwards, we could get French Market doughnuts, maybe talk about his life before he met my mom, that life of adventure during the Depression when he “rode the rails and slept in hobo jungles,” when he saw “Dempsey fight Firpo and get knocked clear outa the ring,” and when he was a cowboy out west. I liked it when he told us stories of his days as a cowboy, getting shot in a gun battle and being nursed back to life by a Mexican woman named Jaunita. I was 14 before I realized the cowboy stories were made up.

 If my dad were alive today, I’d want to take him and my 12-year-old son bowling. I’d want my dad to know Josh, want Josh to know his grandfather. I’d want my dad to see how Josh and I go out every Friday night to see a play, that we’ve been doing this since he was 10, and how before that we went to the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax every Friday since he was eight. Josh always has more popcorn and candy than his mother would like, but what the hell. We’ve seen Shakespeare and Thornton Wilder, Chekhov and Neil Simon, Moliere and Arthur Miller, Sophocles and Eugene O’Neil, Ibsen and Samuel Beckett, Ionesco and Neil Simon, Pirandello and Edward Albee. It’s better than bowling.

So anyway, Josh and I saw Strindberg’s Dance of Death this weekend at the Company Rep in North Hollywood. An adaptation by Friedrich Duerrenmatt. A battle of the sexes, to put it mildly.  The play figuratively takes place in the boxing ring of their living room. The husband enters the stage and sits up left while the wife enters and sits down right. An announcer steps into the center of the ring and says,  “Round One, Conversation Before Dinner.” Then they sit there for five minutes saying absolutely nothing. Tick tock. Tick tock. Silence. I’ve never heard silence get such a laugh. It came in waves. Silence, then laughter, then tired silence. Waiting. You figure, okay, joke’s over. But no, the silence goes on. Then laughter again. Then silence. Then laughter. Then silence and more silence. Acceptance of the profundity of their lack of communication. Everyone, actors and audience alike, finally lapse into this sad and weary silence.

On the way home I told Josh about Strindberg’s life, how he married several times, always very young women.

“Sounds like he was a player,” Josh said.

Last night Lori, Josh and I went to see De Sica’s Bicycle Thief at the New Beverly Cinema. A bad print, and the bulb kept going out in the projector. But it was still exquisite. Father and son searching all over Rome for the bicycle stolen from the father that morning after he finally gets a job that requires a bicycle, the bicycle he got out of hock by selling all the family’s linens. “We don’t need sheets,” his wife says as she strips the bed. Bruno is about 10 years old. So many moments in that film, silences between dialogue. The purity of De Sica’s shots that seem more interested in the human face than cinematic composition. I don’t want to give the end away for anyone who hasn’t seen this masterpiece of Italian Neo-Realism, but at the end, as the film fades to black, the two walk away from us into the world awaiting them, a sad ending, surely, but to say the ending is sad would be to trivialize its profound complexity. Bruno takes his father’s hand and we see them from the back as they disappear into the crowd, trudge their weary way homeward, leaving the world to darkness, and the Italian word FINE appears in white on the black background. After reading the English subtitles throughout the film, there’s an odd confusion when that final word appears. As if De Sica were commenting on the ending, father and son walking off into the rest of their lives together, the son burdened at such an early age with the awareness of his father’s desperation and imperfection—yet De Sica seems to be saying that everything will be fine, not to worry. FINE. But no, you re-adjust. The word is in Italian. It’s not fine, it’s The End. Finito. Everyone in the audience sits there, silent. No one gets up to go. We sit staring at the black screen, at the word FINE. A long silence before one or two people begin to clap, deliberate claps. Then the slow, deliberate applause of everyone in the theatre, then silence again before we stand up to go home.

When we leave the theatre, just before we cross the street to our car, Josh takes my hand. A very casual kind of thing, something he hasn’t done in years, since he was little and took my hand whenever we crossed the street. Hugs and small embraces are rare these days, as Josh takes off into that teenage macho thing. But there was his hand taking hold of mine. I wasn’t sure how obvious I should be about it, so I just let my hand dangle a bit, let him hold me without me holding back. Then as we stepped off the curb, I grasped and entwined, and we crossed the street together, holding hands, like when he was a little boy. We continued to hold until we got to the car, talking the whole time about the film.

Josh has his bedtime ritual with his mom, and I still haven’t learned the sequence, good night, good night, sleep tight, sleep tight, bed bugs bite, bed bugs bite, then these little sounds that are impossible to describe, hawwooo, hawwooo, uuuwaaahh, uuuuwaaaaah, weeeeoooh, weeeeooooh.

It’s like a song two animals might sing to each other. I’ve tried but never get the sequence right, so I’m not exactly allowed to do it. So he and I have our own ritual. It’s a bit of a joke, and Lori always cracks up when we do it.

“Night.”

“Night.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Then there’s a perfectly timed pause, and both of us say at exactly the same time, “Just kidding!” Then we laugh, and it feels good, we get to be sentimental and mushy, but we get to undercut it as well, so the teenage boy feels clever and gets to protect that macho thing.

So last night, after the movie, we did it again, all the way through the “just kidding” part. Maybe it was the movie, that heartbreaking movie, and the father and son thing. But after the “just kidding,” I walked to the door, and just as I was closing it, said, “Love you,” a frail whisper sent like a paper airplane into the darkened room, and he answered back, just as quietly, “Love you too.”

I decided to wait, to see if he’d say “just kidding” again. We’d just turned off the light so I couldn’t see anything, just the shadow of him in bed, under the covers, his hands holding the duvet up to his chin. The dog’s rustling into position at the foot of his bed. In the distance, I could hear Lori in the kitchen close the dishwasher with that little snap. I waited another second, let the silence grow larger. Was he thinking the same thing I was thinking? Was he waiting to see if I was going to say “just kidding” again? I let the silence hang a bit longer, as if to clarify our joint decision not to say anything. We were both going to endure the silence, a silence that was not about separation or disconnection, but about an affirmation of the love between us.

I closed the door, leaving that little crack as usual. Then into the kitchen to help Lori with the rest of the dishes.

“Don’t bang the dishes,” she said.

“No, I’ll be quiet.”

And we cleaned up around the kitchen, whispering to each other until we were sure he was asleep.