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"\n\n I was 12 the first time I visited California, which as far as I was concerned was twelve years too late. I could barely sit still during the plane ride, thinking of all the girls I was going to have sex with once I became a Californian, the coolness that would drip from my every freckled pore. My father had recently moved to L.A. for the job of his dreams, and now my mom and I were flying out to visit him before returning to Baltimore to pack up the house and bid farewell to our lame eastern selves. I knew from my dad&amp;#39;s tickled voice on the phone that something marvelous had happened to him and that it had to do with the money he was making or perhaps the warm ocean breeze ruffling his hair in the pictures he&amp;#39;d sent.\n\n When he picked us up at the airport, I barely recognized him. He was wearing prescription sunglasses, some snazzy titanium numbers that said CARRERA on one lens, and his normally pink face was tanned from all the tennis he&amp;#39;d been playing. He had his shirt undone to the third button. Even his hair looked different: lighter and rakishly askew. He&amp;#39;d always been irresistible to me, but now I found him outright glamorous.\n\n He drove us to the house he&amp;#39;d rented in Rolling Hills, a tony gated community perched above the cliffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It was a beautiful summer day, and you could smell the salt air from the Pacific coming through the window. There was none of that Maryland mugginess that made you drip downstairs in the middle of the night and stick your head in the freezer. My siblings were all older than I was, getting ready to return to their boring eastern colleges, and I felt badly for them that they wouldn&amp;#39;t be living out here with me in the land of endless summer.\n\n I don&amp;#39;t think I realized how rich we&amp;#39;d become until the moment we pulled up to the entrance of Rolling Hills and the man in the little guardhouse actually tipped his cap. The gate lifted, ushering us into someone&amp;#39;s vision of paradise. By &amp;quot;someone&amp;#39;s&amp;quot; I guess I mean my father&amp;#39;s. There were horse trails and faux hacienda signs and old wagon wheels sitting in people&amp;#39;s yards in islands of unmown grass, like the Hollywood back lot for some Waspy New England burg. And yet it was Californian through and through, the ranch-style homes as flat and gargantuan as UFOs. We slowed down to pass a group of horseback riders in skintight pants, and even the manure plopping from their horses seemed expensive to me, better smelling than the dogshit smearing our sidewalk in Baltimore.\n\nEventually we pulled into the driveway of our house. I got out of the car and was greeted by an enormous bird with a sapphire neck and a tail as long as a surfboard. It peered at me nonchalantly for a minute and then dragged itself into the bushes.\n\n &amp;quot;Was that a peacock?&amp;quot; I asked.\n\n &amp;quot;A wild one,&amp;quot; my father said. &amp;quot;They&amp;#39;re everywhere around here.&amp;quot;\n\n There was pride in his face, a touch of giddiness. He grinned, and I don&amp;#39;t remember having seen my father look so happy before. My mom and I couldn&amp;#39;t help grinning back. It was like he&amp;#39;d cooked this all up especially for us\u2014the peacocks, the ocean breeze, the rolling-in-it hills. We were Californians now, a part of his dream.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n People like my father will always think of California as a manifestation of their dreams, and in this respect he wasn&amp;#39;t too different from the California dreamers of the past. Even the name itself\u2014which first appeared in Las Sergas de Esplandi\u00E1n, a Spanish romance novel from the sixteenth century\u2014was meant to make the mouth water with the promise of untold treasure. &amp;quot;California,&amp;quot; as portrayed in the novel, was an island paradise populated only by women with &amp;quot;hardy bodies.&amp;quot; Everything they owned was precious, because &amp;quot;in the whole island, there was no metal but gold.&amp;quot; In other words, there were two girls for every boy, and the living was easy. From the gold rush to the dot-com boom, the myth of an earthly paradise welling over with riches and beautiful natives has proved remarkably durable.\n\n These days, explorers to California will encounter a very different island. Twenty-five billion dollars of estimated debt and an unemployment rate topping 12 percent. An elementary-school system ranked forty-eighth in the nation. Subdivisions turned into ghost towns, and tens of thousands of families who&amp;#39;ve lost their homes. All this, if you believe the press, is proof of California&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;implosion,&amp;quot; as if we were victims of an overnight disaster. But the truth is, there&amp;#39;ve always been two Golden States: the one we yearn for and the one that most Californians wake up to every morning. As Woody Guthrie put it seventy years ago: California is a Garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see. / But be\u00ADlieve it or not, you won&amp;#39;t find it so hot / If you ain&amp;#39;t got the do re mi. \n\nMy father, who risked all our do re mi in pursuit of his own California dream, is a case in point. He&amp;#39;d been doing very well in Baltimore, earning six figures as the vice president of a bank, but he tossed his job out the window when some Reaganomics-drunk investor (&amp;quot;an admirer,&amp;quot; my father called him) phoned him out of the blue to see if he wanted to direct a savings and loan out west. And for a while after we moved, he seemed to live up to the opulent vision he&amp;#39;d dazzled me with on my first visit. Unsatisfied with our first house in Rolling Hills, he leased us a big Mediterranean nearby for $5,000 a month, roughly $11,000 today. There was a swimming pool and a tennis court and a barn where my father put up a pen for his two hunting dogs. I didn&amp;#39;t know what he was doing to make so much money, but I wholeheartedly endorsed it. In particular, I endorsed his expanding fleet of European sports cars, which he liked to bring to professional sporting events and rev over and over again in the parking lot to impress people, so loudly and relentlessly that he once ran out of gas.\n\n One of these cars was a Lotus Esprit, the same kind that turns into a submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me. In 1983, I was susceptible to anything with four wheels and my father&amp;#39;s esteem. One look at the Lotus and I was head over heels. Just the name itself\u2014French and alliterative and sexy as a girl&amp;#39;s\u2014could send me into a swoon. When no one was home, I&amp;#39;d steal the spare set of keys from my parents&amp;#39; room and head out to the driveway in my Ray-Bans, revving the engine in neutral as I&amp;#39;d seen my father do, working the mahogany gearshift and pretending to screech around hairpin turns. The creamy smell of leather grew with the heat, and to this day I associate it with my father&amp;#39;s California, the smell of sun and power and superfluous luxury.\n\n Then there was my dad himself, who seemed as glamorous in many ways as his car. He wore driving gloves and those Porsche Carrera sunglasses and dressed impeccably in Brooks Brothers suits, a picture of blue-blooded dapperness. On the weekends, he traded in his tie for an ascot, which he tucked into his shirt like a scarf. He was the fastest driver I&amp;#39;ve ever seen, slaloming through freeway traffic or tailgating anyone in the left lane who wasn&amp;#39;t doing a hundred. Once he terrified one of my friends so badly that she grabbed the parking brake and almost caused an accident. My dad blew up at her and made her cry. At the time, I thought his anger was entirely justified.\n\n One morning\u2014I must have been 14 by then\u2014I woke up and went outside for a spin, to captain the Lotus through my dreams, and discovered the car was gone. Vanished. My father never took it to work, never moved it from its allotted space behind the house except to impress people on the weekends. I glanced around, but nothing else seemed strange: The marine layer I&amp;#39;d grown accustomed to had begun to burn off, leaving a pondlike shimmer on the tennis court. My father&amp;#39;s shorthaired pointers whimpered in their cage. From the canyon below our house, where the older kids in the neighborhood went to drink beer, came the lonely meows of a peacock. I peeked in the garage, but the Lotus wasn&amp;#39;t there either. At lunch I asked my mom about it, and she said that my father had decided to sell the car. She fidgeted as she told me this, as if she could barely look me in the eye. My mom&amp;#39;s face that day\u2014her strange, antsy embarrassment\u2014feels to me now like the beginning of the end.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n My father didn&amp;#39;t let on that anything was amiss. I knew nothing about the real estate crash, of course, or that savings and loans like my father&amp;#39;s were going bankrupt all over the country, the calamitous tide of fraud and reckless lending that would become the SL crisis. I didn&amp;#39;t know that it would culminate in the failure of 1,043 SL&amp;#39;s or cost taxpayers over $120 billion to repair the damage. In Baltimore, at least, my dad had taken me to his office occasionally, a breathtakingly messy place that smelled like fast food and B.O. and rox ink, the floor carpeted with documents I wasn&amp;#39;t allowed to step on. Strangely, though, after we moved, he never once brought me to his work. To this day, my own mother can&amp;#39;t tell me a thing about what he was doing those years in California. As far as I was concerned, the secrecy added to his glamour. But even before more things began to disappear\u2014the pool table and tennis lessons and Ferrari sedan he kept in the garage\u2014the truth of my father&amp;#39;s failure came out in subtler ways.\n\n Not long after the Lotus vanished from the driveway, he took me to a barbecue at a colleague&amp;#39;s beach club in Newport Beach. I was flattered. He rarely spent time with me one-on-one, too busy living out his fantasy to take much notice of me. What I wanted more than anything was for this dashing figure to tell me I was part of that fantasy\u2014that he cared about me, in some precious way, as much as his cars. I knew he was capable of such adoration, because he mooned over my older brother, whose dark handsomeness and hard-drinking exploits were far more interesting to him than my good grades and admiration. He&amp;#39;d talk about how, twice in two years, my brother had crashed the Alfa Romeo he&amp;#39;d bought him, and my father couldn&amp;#39;t help beaming with pride. I would have done just about anything to make his face look like that.\n\n At the beach club, my father circled the parking lot a couple of times in the car he drove most often, a Porsche 928. I don&amp;#39;t know why he wanted to impress the guests so badly, but I suspect it had something to do with the vision of Californian life arrayed so platonically before us: the mothers in bikinis, the thwock of Smashballs, the smell of sun lotion mid with the briny breeze from the ocean, whose gentle waves seemed to frost the sand like a cake. Boys in Jams and rope bracelets slurped Cokes or played volleyball or skimboarded across the wash with sunglasses on. These of course were the effortlessly tan Californian kids I so admired and feared, the ones who knew how to surf and skateboard and had managed to lose their virginities at preposterously young ages, generally to their older sisters&amp;#39; friends. They said &amp;quot;gnarly&amp;quot; with a straight face and spoke in a diabetic drawl that made each word seem like a message washed up on the beach. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn&amp;#39;t get tan, and though I burned my face and arms every summer to a freckled variant of brown, my legs were hopelessly immune to the sun&amp;#39;s rays. Somehow my father&amp;#39;s legs were even whiter. In shorts he looked like a half-finished page in a coloring book. I&amp;#39;m guessing they were his secret shame, proof of the midwestern German heritage he longed to escape.\n\n That afternoon he was wearing tennis shorts. As we were waiting for hamburgers from the grill, I overheard the host tell him he needed to get some color on his legs.\n\n &amp;quot;No thanks,&amp;quot; my dad said, grinning. &amp;quot;I try to keep them as far from colored as possible.&amp;quot;\n\n The man smiled but took a step backward, busying himself with the spatula. I had never heard my father say the word colored before; for some reason, the racism shocked me less than the antiquated weirdness of the term. But what really startled me was my dad&amp;#39;s face, which, as we stood there waiting for our host to look up from the grill, turned pink as a grapefruit. The more the man ignored us, the pinker it became. When he finally served us our burgers, my dad mumbled out a thank you, avoiding his eyes.\n\n Later, we sat in the sand as the other kids my age played a game of beach volleyball. My father must have seen an opening of some kind, because to my great embarrassment he stood up between matches and asked if I could join in. I tried to refuse, but there was no way to do so with\u00ADout seeming like even more of a loser. I was a decent athlete\u2014I&amp;#39;d played lacrosse and hockey in Baltimore\u2014but did not understand the most basic mechanics involved in keeping a ball up in the air with my forearms. While the other kids set and dug and belly flopped for shots, I stood in the corner of the court, praying that the ball would miraculously avoid my jurisdiction. Finally someone spiked the ball right at me, and I did something tragic. I caught it. I glanced at my father, still clutching the thing to my stomach. His eyes were squinched up, fid somewhere near my feet, as if he couldn&amp;#39;t stand to look me in the face. It took me a second to realize he was staring at my legs.\n\n At the time, my father&amp;#39;s shame was overshadowed by the disgrace I felt in front of my teammates. Now, though, when I&amp;#39;m watering the plants or jogging around the reservoir near my house, I&amp;#39;ll think of my father&amp;#39;s face that day and feel the punch of that ball in my stomach. I&amp;#39;ll fantasize about all the things I might have done, like clock him in the teeth. Perhaps\u2014at least I tell myself this, I insist on it, because the memory still hurts me deeply\u2014he was really making the face at himself.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Before that, I&amp;#39;d often questioned whether I belonged in California, but that day at the beach was the first time I questioned whether my father belonged there as well. I began to question other things about him, too. Growing up, I&amp;#39;d more or less sub\u00ADscribed to his Gatsbyesque invention of himself as an aristocrat. There were the ascots, of course, usually paired with tweed. He liked to go bird hunting on the weekends, despite being a terrible shot. For a brief period he insisted we dress up for dinner every night, which for my brother and me meant coats and ties. He boarded horses in the country and prodded my oldest sister to take up polo. He refused to let us wear baseball caps indoors and liked to keep a Manwich-thick wad of cash in his billfold, flaunting it in front of cashiers. Even before the ascots and the polo, he&amp;#39;d saddled his children with increasingly absurd names meant to conjure riding breeches and hunt clubs: Alexander, Laurel, Pendleton, and his pi\u00E8ce de r\u00E9sistance, my own: Roderic. I didn&amp;#39;t know that my dad had been one of the poorest kids at his wealthy private school in Milwaukee, and so I&amp;#39;d always accepted these affectations as part of my father&amp;#39;s identity, as essential to who he was as his love of bratwurst.\n\n Now, though, his blue-blooded habits began to seem absurd. For the first time I saw them in the same light as my own desperate attempts to fit in, which had begun to seem absurd to me as well. Despite an aggressive marketing campaign, I&amp;#39;d failed to become Californian in a way that would convince anyone but the drunkest tourist. I wore jungle-print Vans and shirts with wooden buttons and Wayfarers that were also made, inexplicably, of wood. I had a white Op poncho that I liked to wear with nothing underneath, thinking I looked like Jim Morrison on the cover of Morrison Hotel. My moment of reckoning came when I was at the mall with my best friend, Will, another East Coast transplant, and some surfers called me a &amp;quot;dingleberry.&amp;quot; I had to ask Will what a dingleberry was, and his graphic description made such an impression on me that I went home and took off all my clothes and hid my jungle-print Vans at the back of the closet.\n\n Soon after that, I bought my first punk record\u2014Los Angeles, by X\u2014and began to discover another California, one far removed from the beach bunnies and slack-eyed surfers who&amp;#39;d seemed to me like the epitome of West Coast cool. Minutemen, Black Flag, the Dream Syndicate: The songs coming out of my turntable were about as unsunny as could be, noisy and weird and full of anger at the well-tanned rich. And the singers, Californians themselves, weren&amp;#39;t afraid to be smart. I started dressing like my old self again, slipping off to Hollywood clubs whenever I could, amazed at all the pale, black-booted kids pogoing in flannel. It was a culture as distant from my dad&amp;#39;s beach-club ambitions as you can possibly imagine.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n It&amp;#39;s this real California\u2014and not the one my father invented for us\u2014that I still call home, one that&amp;#39;s closer to my heart than any place on earth. There&amp;#39;s something about my father&amp;#39;s love for the state, no matter how misdirected it was, that seems to have seeped into my blood. Or perhaps it&amp;#39;s the love itself that I love. Which is to say: Even if the dream isn&amp;#39;t real, the dreamers are. There&amp;#39;s something about the struggling actors and screenwriters and immigrants who live here, the pioneer spirit that despite everything still brings people to the edge of America in search of success, that makes me feel at home.\n\n Sometimes, when I&amp;#39;m feeling stressed-out about my life in L.A. or my children&amp;#39;s futures, I drive up to Griffith Observatory on a clear day and stand in the cool shadow of its dome, staring out at the enormous city below, from the snowcapped San Gabriels hovering like a mirage over the skyscrapers downtown to the Pacific in the distance. I used to get stoned here with my high school friends and watch the sun go down over the ocean, turning the city into a valley of lights, and the shiver of amazement I used to feel still slinks across my scalp, the wonder that one city could hold so much life in its pocket.\n\n My father would never have driven to Griffith Park to check out the view; he didn&amp;#39;t have any interest in peeling back the layers of myth and visiting the actual city. At the time, I had no idea how badly things were going for him\u2014no idea that he was being sued by former partners or that his own board of directors had fired him. For a year or so, my dad was tied up in legal battles, sinking deeper and deeper into debt. As the California he adored began to betray him, he responded like a jilted lover, making himself as noticeable as possible. He invested in personalized license plates based on our last name, which he shortened to POOK. Between my mom and older siblings, we still had several cars, and for a brief period there were POOKs 1 through 5. Sometimes he&amp;#39;d show up at my soccer games or cross-country meets in POOK 1, his Porsche, which he would park on the grass for everyone to admire. He&amp;#39;d root for me as I played, yelling Thataboy, Puchner! until he was hoarse. I didn&amp;#39;t want anything to do with him or his cars, as embarrassing to me now as jungle-print Vans. After the game, I&amp;#39;d run off the field without saying hello.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Our last Christmas in Rolling Hills, before we moved to a duplex near the shopping mall, my father decided that he wanted to buy me a road bike. By then he must have been close to broke, siphoning off the money my grandparents had left to me and my siblings. I don&amp;#39;t know how he got the idea of cycling into his head, but I can imagine how iconically Californian the sport must have seemed to him. You couldn&amp;#39;t drive down a street of Palos Verdes without seeing packs of men in Lycra outfits, hunched over their bikes in those itty-bitty caps. To me, whose California now consisted of Repo Man and John Fante and albums about working-class strife, the whole sport seemed as stupid as playing golf. Still, my father seemed to think this was the perfect gift, and I was loathe to break his heart. In truth, all I&amp;#39;d ever wanted from him was his pride and attention. Even when he was rooting for me on the soccer field or introducing me by citing my academic &amp;quot;accomplishments,&amp;quot; it always seemed like another way of revving his engine.\n\n We went to a fancy bike shop in Orange County, with rows of bicycles hanging from the ceiling. I couldn&amp;#39;t tell a crank from a chainwheel, but my dad insisted on describing me as &amp;quot;extremely athletic.&amp;quot; The salesman steered us to a bike on the floor at the front of the shop.\n\n &amp;quot;This is our entry-level model. A real nice bit of engineering for the price.&amp;quot;\n\n My dad looked at the price tag dangling from its seat. The bike seemed extravagant, more than I would ever need, but my dad was unimpressed. &amp;quot;Do you have anything else?&amp;quot; he asked.\n\n The salesman looked at my father. For the first time, he seemed to take in my father&amp;#39;s clothes, his eyes snagging on the ascot stuffed into his shirt. &amp;quot;I could sell you something you don&amp;#39;t need, but I think for the novice rider, this is an ideal bike.&amp;quot;\n\n My father frowned. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#39;s see what else you have.&amp;quot;\n\n The salesman glanced at me and raised his eyebrows. He did not understand that he&amp;#39;d thrown down the gauntlet. He showed us bike after bike, each one more beautiful than the last; my dad would listen intently to the salesman&amp;#39;s spiel, to jargon he couldn&amp;#39;t possibly have understood, and then insist on seeing something more expensive, &amp;quot;just to know what our options are.&amp;quot; Eventually we arrived at a baby blue frame hanging by itself at the rear of the store. It looked like a chandelier, something you shouldn&amp;#39;t touch. There was no price tag on it\u2014only the name, Colnago, paired with a perfect white shamrock. I admit to feeling a twirl of longing. It was the same frame, the salesman explained, that somebody had ridden in the Tour de France. My dad inspected the bike with an expression that can only be described as proprietary.\n\n He asked how much it was, but I could tell he&amp;#39;d already made up his mind. The salesman took him aside. My dad&amp;#39;s face changed. He looked frightened, even a little sick. \n\n &amp;quot;Dad, I don&amp;#39;t need a bike like that,&amp;quot; I told him when the salesman went to ring him up.\n\n &amp;quot;No use getting a bike you&amp;#39;ll outgrow.&amp;quot;\n\n &amp;quot;But this is for someone who, like, races.&amp;quot;\n\n He looked at me angrily. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s for anybody who wants it.&amp;quot;\n\n In the parking lot, trying to fit the bike into the back of his Porsche, my father seemed withdrawn. The sky was big and cloudless, the same heartbreaking blue as the bike he&amp;#39;d just bought. It was January; in Baltimore we would have been shoveling snow from the driveway. When I glanced back at the shop, the salesmen were smiling to themselves, watching my dad try to wedge the frame over the backseat.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Before leaving L.A., my father told my mom three things: &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m divorcing you, we&amp;#39;re $2 million in debt, and I&amp;#39;m marrying a woman who&amp;#39;s pregnant with my child.&amp;quot; He&amp;#39;d already tapped into my cousins&amp;#39; inheritance and was rapidly burning through all their money. One of the last times I saw him, he was living in the middle of the Utah desert, squeezed into a condo with a young son and a family of stepchildren, all his belongings auctioned off because he couldn&amp;#39;t pay his storage bill. It was the first time I&amp;#39;d visited him in a couple of years. He wore ascots now only on special occasions, content to spend the day in sweats and Mephisto sneakers. By this time I&amp;#39;d worked up a powerful fury at him\u2014for deserting me, for stealing my cousins&amp;#39; money, for failing to live up to the glamorous image I&amp;#39;d had of him\u2014and could barely look him in the eye.\n\n&amp;quot;How&amp;#39;s San Francisco?&amp;quot; he asked. I&amp;#39;d moved there after grad school.\n\n &amp;quot;Beautiful,&amp;quot; I said.\n\n &amp;quot;You&amp;#39;re teaching at the state university?&amp;quot; he said, with genuine disappointment. &amp;quot;Aren&amp;#39;t they all idiots?&amp;quot;\n\n I ignored him.\n\n &amp;quot;But you&amp;#39;re on the coast, at least. The ocean. We&amp;#39;ll be moving back as soon as I can get on my feet again.&amp;quot;\n\n I looked out the window at the empty scrubland stretching to the horizon. Even then, I knew he&amp;#39;d never be going back, that he&amp;#39;d most likely die in a place he felt little affection for. At the time, it seemed to me like just deserts. What I didn&amp;#39;t know was how bad things would get\u2014that my stepmother would end up moving to Beverly Hills to work as the personal assistant of an 85-year-old tycoon, a man she would later marry, and sending money home to Utah to support the family. That was an irony I couldn&amp;#39;t have imagined: that some nouveau aristocrat in California, living on the estate of my father&amp;#39;s dreams, would end up supporting him.\n\n That evening, my father decided he wanted to take me out to dinner. I expected him to change out of his sweatpants, but he sat on the stairs and slipped on his tennis shoes.\n\n &amp;quot;Are you, um, ready?&amp;quot; I asked.\n\n &amp;quot;I just need to find my wallet.&amp;quot;\n\n He had some grease stains on his T-shirt. For a moment something caught in my throat. I went into the bathroom to keep him from seeing my face. My dad&amp;#39;s wallet was sitting next to the sink. After a minute, I left the bathroom and tried to hand him his wallet, but he dropped it on the stairs. Several driver&amp;#39;s licenses spilled out, each with my father&amp;#39;s picture on it. He scrambled to put them back, and I pretended not to look. I did not want to think about what sort of con he might be perpetrating, did not want to see how far he had fallen.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n I have my own California dream now, much humbler in comparison. It&amp;#39;s not a dream of gold-lined shores but a hope\u2014foolhardy, perhaps\u2014that the state will be able to look after my children&amp;#39;s basic needs. Not long ago, my daughter&amp;#39;s elementary school, one of the best in the city, was forced to squeeze its fourth and fifth graders into a single classroom. This is the new reality, they told us. Reality never really interested my father, or the California fortune hunters of the past, and I can&amp;#39;t help blaming them\u2014him\u2014for the mess we&amp;#39;re in. Read about the SL crisis that spelled my father&amp;#39;s ruin and you&amp;#39;ll feel an uncomfortable prickle of d\u00E9j\u00E0 vu: unregulated bankers, reckless loans insured by the government, a federal bailout that cost taxpayers billions and spawned a nationwide recession. If one goes to Southern California to see the future, as Alison Lurie once said, then it&amp;#39;s a future that&amp;#39;s been showing the same movie for some time.\n\n For this reason, perhaps, I have a hard time thinking of my father, once such a golden boy, without immediately thinking of the once golden state where he met his ruin. After all, they have so much in common: Both disliked tas, both had big dreams for themselves, both insisted on spending money they didn&amp;#39;t have. They deserved each other in so many ways. If only they&amp;#39;d been less mercenary, more willing to invest in their futures, then things might be different.\n\n When my father was dying from cancer, I flew out to help and found someone I barely recognized, about as far from the raffish figure in tweed as can be imagined. Those weeks before he died, there weren&amp;#39;t any deathbed redemptions, no Hollywood hugs or teary confessions. He still ranted about idiots and tried to get me to sign on to a loan because his credit was shot. One night I drove him to dinner\u2014in his Ford Taurus, indistinguishable from a zillion rentals\u2014while he rested his head against the window. I&amp;#39;d seen him ride in the passenger seat only once in my life, when he&amp;#39;d taught me to drive. At the restaurant, he kept glancing up at me while he picked at his fish. I asked him what was wrong, and he took off the baseball cap he&amp;#39;d been wearing, as if remembering the rule he&amp;#39;d had when we were kids. The inside of his cap was lined with white hairs, like dandelion fluff. He told me, haltingly, that he wished he&amp;#39;d done something different with his life. His eyes were rheumy and tired, and he seemed real to me then\u2014perhaps for the first time. I watched him return to his food. For a man who&amp;#39;d spent his entire life showing off to people, it was a brave thing to say.\n\n This is not about forgiveness. I still think about that day at the beach, or the fact that my father abandoned me for so long\u2014years with hardly a phone call\u2014and my heart clenches with rage. We live in the age of forgiveness, of bailouts, of doing our best to move on. Too often these gestures have only to do with creating a nice tidy narrative, one we can wrap up and hide away somewhere and promise ourselves will never happen again. We choose the myth over reality every time. It&amp;#39;s the Californian\u2014which is to say, the American\u2014way.\n\n But it&amp;#39;s just as tempting, I think, to see men like my father as two-dimensional villains. Strangely, when I think about who my dad longed to be all those years, I don&amp;#39;t think about him out west, but rather as he was before we moved, when he seemed to me in some ways more Californian\u2014at least in his goofy charisma and ability to dazzle. I remember one Halloween when I was 6 or 7: I&amp;#39;d gone trick-or-treating with a friend of mine, and we were coming home after a major haul when some teenagers sprinted by and stole our bags of candy. I ran home, bawling. My father listened to my tale of woe and then went out with me in the dark, hoisting me on his shoulders so that I had to duck under the oaks and chestnut trees lining the sidewalk. I was dressed, I think, as Dracula. From house to house we went, man and vampire, ringing people&amp;#39;s doorbells until they came to the door in slippers or pajamas. Flushed with annoyance, their faces softened as my father recounted my story. They sighed and shook their heads and dumped the remains of their Halloween stash into the grocery bag I&amp;#39;d brought from home, a showering of goodies, piles of Smarties and Tootsie Pops and candy corn. In five minutes, we had more candy than I&amp;#39;d lost, but my father pressed on, stopping at every door in the neighborhood. It had to be embarrassing for him, to knock on these darkened houses, but he did it anyway. For once he was not trying to impress anyone, and yet I think the people\u2014seeing how my father was spending his evening\u2014believed me to be a lucky boy. Certainly I felt like one that night. By the end I had more loot than I could carry, and yet my father persisted, giving me for once what I wanted, collecting a bounty he didn&amp;#39;t have to buy.\n\n Eric Puchner is the author of Model Home and Music Through the Floor."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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