Free The Funny Man by John Warner Page B

gone . That would be ridiculous, impossible even, but there is for sure much, much less of it, primarily thanks to the divorce, a fiscal cleaver leaving two halves, one of which I no longer have access to. The trial is proving to be spectacularly expensive and the offers hadn’t been rolling in even prior to the incident.
    Not long before Beth and I were to get married, my father made us both scotches and took me aside to the porch and we sat together and my father raised his glass in a toast and said, “Son, I’m going to tell you the key to happiness.” He wanted to tell me about the importance of “the nut.”
    I was surprised. This wasn’t our kind of relationship. Oh, there was love there. I felt it in the way the man knocked himself out for my mom and me, traditional-father-role-style, but it was almost all backstage, coming out from behind the curtain only on occasion, like once when I was around eight years old and the entire town had been buried in a blizzard and Dad couldn’t get to work and instead clomped down to the basement and dragged back upstairs with an armful of cross-country skiing gear that I’d never seen before.
    We set off down our empty suburban street, everything doused with snow so high that even the hydrants and mailboxes at the curbs were covered. The plows hadn’t come through yet, and my father blazed the trail while I followed behind, mimicking his swinging arms and kicking legs as we made our way to the golf course, a perfect, almost untouched expanse of white save for the tiny paw prints of squirrels and rabbits. As we entered the course I could then see the undulations of the ground, little hills to chug up and slide down. At the top of one, the tallest one we’d encountered, my father paused and waited for me and said, “This is really something, huh?” before schussing down into a depression and coming to a quick stop, hockey style.
    The way up the hill had been a gentle climb, but at the peak, I could see that the way down was rather steep and that my father had generated a pretty good amount of speed before slamming on the brakes. I hesitated. I’d never been on skis of any kind before and as far as I knew, cross-country was limited to flats only. These skis weren’t designed for this sort of move. But my father smiled up at me, eager for us to go on, and held his arms out, the poles dangling from his hands and said, “Come on, boy!”
    I pointed my skis down, directly into my father’s tracks. Because the snow had been tamped down, I gathered speed very quickly. I tried to bend my knees to absorb any jolts and this caused me to go even faster and as my father grew in my vision I realized that I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to stop. Looking up, I saw my father’s eyes go wide and his hands push forward to brace for a collision. At the last instant, I did the only thing I could do: Fall heavily into him. My face filled with snow, numbing my nose and lips and I felt the tip of my father’s pole jab my leg.
    “Ow,” I said.
    “What?”
    “My leg.”
    My father tore his gloves off and started pawing his hands over my body. “Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh,” he said. He was obviously and instantaneously terrified, and seeing this terrified me and I began crying. “Oh. Oh. Oh,” he said. “I felt it. I felt the tip go in. It pierced you. I felt it. Oh. Where? Your leg?”
    I shrieked now, my head bobbing frantically. This looked like the end of the world to me, the stoic man who stood on the sidelines of my baseball games and refused to scream like an idiot as did so many of the other fathers; the man who much later would look at a report card with two C’s and not yell, but instead shake his head sadly and say only two words, “wasted potential”; the man who brought me to the porch to give me advice and wisdom as I was about to embark on a marriage was melting down in front of my face.
    He slapped the snow away and pulled up the legs of my pants and his hands