The Ashtray: A True Story

Illustration by Thomas E. A. Palof

My father grew up poor and malnourished. He was the oldest child of Slovak immigrants, transplanted peasants who raised him on the near West Side of Cleveland during the Great Depression. He endured a childhood of eating boiled potatoes and cabbage while his father spent the family paycheck buying rounds of drinks at the local bar and playing the numbers. A scrawny, undersized kid in a tough neighborhood, my father tried to make up in attitude what he lacked in size. He strove to never let anyone get the upper hand on him. He had to have the last laugh. He had to show that he was not just as good as others, but better.

Sometimes this attitude meant showing he could take whatever was dished out (his was a generation that grew up in the shadow of John Wayne). He could never admit that he was sick or in pain. A man had to be stoic. Only women complained about being sick.

Sometimes showing his superiority meant jabbing other men with verbal barbs. (To a bearded colleague: “Hey, Pete, smoking that cigar makes you look like a movie star!” Yeah, Paul, who?” “Lassie taking a dump.”) At work, in conversation, he was known for being blunt – and for interrupting. He was proud of the nickname that his coworkers gave him: Little Napoleon.

As a child, I was amused by his repertoire of stunts and tricks. Watch me crinkle my tongue into a U shape, write my name backward and upside down simultaneously, using both hands at once, read your mind in a card trick, read your mind in a math trick, stand on my head. Only when I thought about these feats as an adult did I realize their purpose: to impress the female of the species with his superiority. Give him the attention of a young woman and he was a one-man circus. My favorite performance involved a match and a young woman in a short sheeve blouse or pair of shorts. First, he boosts that he is impervious to flame. As the woman watches, he takes a match book, removes a match and strikes it. As it burns briefly blue, he swipes the flame along his steady downturned palm, showing no signs that the fire is affecting him. Then he quickly blows out the match, lunges toward the woman with it, making as if to press the match tip against the naked flesh of her arm or leg, but, in reality, poking her with his finger, causing her to jump and eliciting a gasp and a laugh of relief from his victim when she realizes the trick.

His attitude showed in his public boozing too. No one was going to outdrink him. All my uncles on my father side drank. And danced. I have one memory of a basement party where, as a kid, I sat on a bar and filled shot glasses to be at the ready whenever the music stopped. That was the happy drinking. The dark side to my father was the unhappy, private drinking. When he was drunk, he was the aggressive prosecutor of your smallest weakness or fault, capable of haranguing you for an entire evening and following you into any room you tried to retreat into. By my mid-teens, I hated my father.

As an adult, I was glad to move far away from him. But after the scare of a brain seizure, he sobered up. He had always been someone who was more interested in interrupting you than listening, but, writing letters to my parents, I felt that I was finally being heard. Our relationship improved. In mid 1970s, when my parents and kid sister decided to visit my wife and me in Seattle, I looked forward to the visit, albeit nervously.

As sons will often feel about their fathers, I wanted to impress him, so I took him to the revolving restaurant atop the Space Needle, Seattle’s famous landmark. At that time, the place was one of the better city restaurants, with linen tablecloths and waiters that brushed the breadcrumbs off them with small metal combs. The view was incredible at night with the everchanging panorama of city lights and the purple bulk of far-off mountains.

My father was no sooner seated than he noticed the ashtray on the table, a glass ashtray with the emblem of the Space Needle etched on it. He acted as if he was going to slip the ashtray into his pocket as he said, “How would you like me to take this for you, as a souvenir?”

As he is saying this and making the gesture, a waitress walks up behind him, an older woman with craggy visage, a nest of gray hair crowning her head. She declares loudly, sternly, in mock outrage, “Don’t you dare!”

My father jumps in his seat, cringes like a child caught in the act, and guiltily puts the ashtray back. The waitress gives him a disapproving glance, and he laughs uneasily. I’m embarrassed – for myself and the rest of us. But we order, eat, talk, laugh, and enjoy the food and the view out the windows. I judge it a successful evening.

Our dining concluded, we ride the elevator down to street level, and I go get the car while my parents, sister and wife wait. My father climbs in the front passenger side and, for a moment, in the dark, I think, by his movement, that he is just settling himself into his seat. Then I realize that he is fumbling in the pocket of his heavy winter coat. But then, with a grand upsweep of his arm, he triumphantly thrusts it at me. I see its glint in the streetlight. The ashtray. “Here’s your souvenir!” he declares defiantly.

He had taken it after all. Now, my father was not a kleptomaniac nor a petty thief. In fact, I remember a contrary story from my childhood. We were riding in a car, just the two of us, driving through the neighborhood where he grew up. As we rode silently, we pass a mom-and-pop five-and-dime. He says to me, “See that store?”

“Yeah,” I reply.

“When I was kid, about your age, I had to make a decision about that store.”

His tone was serious, and I was attentive. He wasn’t in the habit of having reflective father-son talks with me.

He continued. “A friend of mine wanted me to sneak out at night and rob that store with him. I had to decide. And I decided that I wasn’t going to be a thief.”

End of story. We drive on, quiet again.

He wasn’t going to be a thief. Yet there’s that ashtray incident.

I think that I understood it best years later, when I watched David Mamet’s 1987 film House of Games. In the film, prim and proper psychiatrist Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) becomes attracted to conman Mike (Joe Mantegna) and his edgy underworld. Mike shows her how to con their way into a nice hotel room while the guest is out and the two make love in the hotel bed.

Afterward, as they dress, Mike gives her his philosophy of life.

“There are many sides to each of us. Good blood. Bad blood. Somehow all those parts have got to speak.”

He goes on, “I read a book once that said this, ‘If you’re fired from your job, when you’re going home, take something, a pencil, something to assert yourself.’ Take a memento. Take something from life.”

Assert yourself.

Years later. He has a stroke and is hospitalized.

When he is in recovery, I come to visit. Frail, unshaven, he is sitting in a chair beside the bed. As we talk, the doctor enters.

“How are you today, Mr. Palof?”

Fine, my father tells him.

Then the doctor asks him a series of questions: Is he experiencing any pain or numbness? Can he follow the doctor’s finger with his eyes? Can he squeeze the doctor’s fingers? Does he know the day of the week? Does he know where he is at? Does he know who the president is?

After asking all his questions, the doctor seems satisfied and makes a note in the chart.

Then, picking up on doctor’s last name, he asks, “Are you Polish?”

When the doctor says yes, my father asks him where he lives. He asks if he is married. Does he have children? Does he go to church? What church does he go to? Does he go every Sunday? On and on, with each question becoming more intrusive.

The doctor is pleasant and answers all the questions. I’m embarrassed.

When the doctor leaves, I say to my father, “Dad, what were you doing asking the doctor all those questions.

He says, “He asks me a lot questions, I ask him a lot of questions!”

Assert yourself.

My father has been dead for many years now. And I don’t think of him as often as I do my late mother and maternal grandfather who were gentler, more nurturing souls. When my father drank, he was terrible, to me, my mother, my brothers. You think: I will never be like that man. But life has a way of punishing you into grudging respect. Sometimes, when I’m out in public, surrounded by people who all seem younger and taller, better looking and better off than me, I have an impulse to go up to the nearest pretty girl and say, “You know, I can read your mind.”

THE END