Read Online The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields - Free Book Online

movie is about how everyone has a covered-up side. People don’t always show you the way that they are.”)
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    On a Saturday afternoon a few years ago, at Seattle’s Green Lake pool, while I swam laps, my father swam a little, then lifted a few weights, took a sauna, and dozed, which he adamantly denied, as he always does. In the locker room, a 10-year-old kid started humming to himself, at first quite quietly, the
Batman
theme, which my father didn’t recognize at first, but when I told him, he nodded. In less than a minute, the tune had made its way through the locker room—about a dozen pubescent boys humming the song. Some sang seriously; others joked around. Some stood on benches; others whapped their towels at one another’s asses. Some danced around buck naked; others continued getting dressed. It was surprising and mysterious and confusing and beautiful and ridiculous and thrilling, though not to my father, who finds nearly all manifestations of mass entertainment—with the important exception of sports—appalling. “Popular culture,” as he explained to me in the car on the way home, “is not real community. It’s
substitute
community.”
    At the end of Ann Beattie’s story “The Burning House,” a husband and wife who are separating finally confront each other. She speaks first.

    â€œI want to know if you’re coming or going.”
    He takes a deep breath, lets it out, continues to lie very still.
    â€œEverything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake: you’ve surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they’re crazy, like Tucker, if they’re gay as the Queen of May, like Reddy Fox, even if they’re just six years old—I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.”
    He takes her hand. “I’m looking down on all this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

    Superman.
    My father lives in Woodlake, a Bay Area condo/sports complex for senior citizens. This is a place where tough old birds come to die, but they think it’s an Olympic training camp: mineral water and Frisbees. Jacuzzi, sauna, tennis courts, weight room, bingo parlor, dance hall, jet-black parking lot, jet-propelled automobiles, white stucco apartments, ice plant growing everywhere. Ducks quack across an artificial pond. Well-preserved, sun-baked septuagenarians stroll the putting green. Grandmas in string bikinis stride from the swimming pool. Dad’s cohorts scamper around the courts, wearing tennis whites and floppy hats and state-of-the-art shoes and C sunglasses, wielding their oversized rackets like canes and butterfly nets. My father’s studio apartment is remarkable only for the sheer number of rackets, racket presses, tins of balls, shirts, shorts, sweatbands, warm-up suits, sweat socks, shoes, jocks tossed about. It isn’t an apartment filled with my father. It’s a pro shop filled with the sport of tennis.
    In almost every piece he writes on his antique Remington for his Woodlake-sponsored writing class—a dozen women, a retired dentist, and my father meet with the teacher every other Wednesday—he projects himself as a balanced okaynik, Mr. Bonhomie. He’s held more than fifty jobs in journalism and public relations and social welfare, been fired from many of them, been plagued by manic depression for fifty years, been hospitalized and received electroshock therapy countless times, is a genius at loss. Lily Tomlin was thinking of my father when she said, “Language was invented