Today one of my top 5 episodes was on the watch list. I love the third episode of the first season. The Room is focused on the identity of Nathaniel Senior. Nate takes the hearse to have the oil changed and discovers that his father had been exchanging services and goods for funeral arrangements. In researching the deceased father’s bartering system, Nate learns his dad had a sense of humor, smoked pot, and had a secret room over an Indian restaurant. I think this episode left a lasting impression on me because I have so many unanswered questions about my own father. And, much like Nate, I wonder what my father truly thought of me... if he was proud of me.
I fear the repercussions this particular blog might have. It seems that every time I write anything about my father, my family becomes upset and calls me everything but a fat white woman. I do not understand this. It hurts, because I love my family, and I have had to ‘block’ and take several of them off my Facebook Friends list. I hate this. What I cannot get them to understand is, well, me, mostly. I have to explain why I choose to change my name--which seems to bother them the most...like we are the Rockefellers or something. I guess I can see where they are coming from, but I don’t understand why it upsets them so, especially because Phillip and I have done so much research on my family and discovered that thanks to a census worker our German heritage was altered. We went from Meister to Miester and became Americanized. So, actually, I’m honoring my family and my German heritage.
I also changed my first name from Kally to Kali. I’m Pagan and wanted to honor my Goddess self, and so I chose Kali because it was close to my real name and I identify with Kali on a personal level. Kali, the Dark Mother, is a Goddess with whom devotees have a very loving and intimate bond, in spite of her fearful appearance. In this relationship, the worshipper becomes a child and Kali assumes the form of the ever-caring mother. Kali went out to fight against evil forces and became so entrenched in her battle that she lost sight of whom she was truly fighting. She is female anger energy. She is the mother whose anger overcomes her to the point she destroys anything that comes into her path. She is on an out-of-control rampage until Lord Shiva throws himself at Kali’s feet in an effort to awaken her from her place of rage. I get that. I am so angry. I have been angry as far back as I can remember. My hostility and need for vengeance have bubbled and festered inside me to the point I thought I might burst from my gut. I have worked on my anger for years. Most my anger is toward my father, whom I feel abandoned by.
What I try to get my family to understand is my knowledge of the roles people play in other people’s lives. I remember learning about this in a college psychology course. Each of us is a different person when we are with different individuals or groups. An example is that I am different with my mother from how I am with my friend Mike. There are things my mother knows about me that no one else does, but there are things Mike knows about me that no one else does (and it better stay that way, buddy). The conflict is when these two worlds collide. Some of the stuff one of them knows to be true about me would be unbelievable for the other person. That is just not their experience of me. My experience with my father was often difficult.
The man I knew as my father was a pot-smoking, guitar-playing, giant pirate, with a love of carnations and canned tamales covered in Catalina or French salad dressing. Just the thought of those tamales still sets off waves of nausea inside me. He was smart. He was a visionary who I feel was incredibly misunderstood at times. And, he loved me. It took me a long time to be able to believe that. No matter how much my family tried to tell me he loved me I could never trust that. I had to figure out his love for me on my own. My paternal grandmother, the last time we spoke to each other face to face, told me that she truly believed my father died from a broken heart. And, if our wounds kill us, that--I suppose--would be true. His giant heart gave out on him shortly after his 40th birthday. It baffles me that I have outlived my father by two years. I was twenty years old when he died, and at that time he seemed so old to me. Now that I’m forty-two I understand how much life he had yet to live and what was truly stolen from those who loved him.
Nate and I share this need to know--and ability to feel--others’ pain. I always found it odd I didn’t identify more with Nate. I think there’s a selfishness in Nate’s character that I could never look past. But part of me got him, and loved him for his beauty and flaws...much like Brenda does. I am so very Brenda.
In this episode Nate has a fantasy sequence involving all these scenarios of the life his father led and who his father was. They are comical, desperate, and tragic in their contexts. I understand Nate’s need to supply a story where there is none, because I like to play out these fantasies in my head about what it would have been like if my father were still alive, or if he had actually gone with Steve Walsh and become a huge rock star. Or maybe he went and still never made it. In some fantasies I’m a rock princess like Kelly Osbourne... dancing with the stars.
What I love about the episode is how it concludes with Nate discovering that he is more like his father than he originally thought, and that his father was a very good man. The audience also learns that Nathaniel Senior was a Vietnam veteran in this episode and that he served as a medic, which makes his decision to go into the funeral business seem just a bit sadder than it was in the first three episodes. The audience gets to see Nathaniel and Nate as two people who are each compelled to process death on a more personal level than the average person.
The scene that changed me when I first watched this episode was a scene where Nate smokes pot and talks with the ghost of his father. Nate asks his father all these questions about himself. His father yells at Nate, exclaiming “So many questions!” and he asks why Nate never asked him these questions while he was alive. I remember sobbing during this scene. I thought of the nights I sat up, unable to sleep, and begged the universe to give me just one more chance to ask my father all the questions I never got answered while he was alive. Later in the episode Nate hangs with his father’s ghost. This exchange helped me process so much pain I carried around about my father.
Nate: When are you going to stop fucking with me?
Nathaniel Senior: When are you going to stop caring about what I thought. (He pretends to cry imitating his son) “I never knew my father. I didn’t...” --Get over it. Please. Life is just too fuckin’ short.
My father would not want me to carry this pain around. I believe that. I have to believe he loved me to move forward. And the universe has given me such proof that this is true. It has sent me such wonderful men in my adult life--my Grant, Phillip, Mike, Rob, Vania, Danny, Kevin, Kelly, Jacob, Jeffery, Mitch, and Patrick...and it gave me my surrogate father Gary and his embrace and wisdom when I needed my father the most. It gave me Paul’s influence when I had lost sight of where I was going. It gave me my brothers who are so like my father. And, for all of this, I feel loved by my father and blessed.
Later in the episode, Nate finds some family photos and some hidden Polaroids of his nude mother. He gives the nudes to his mother and, blushing, she recalls the night the pictures were taken. Ruth monologues about how she and Nathaniel were so young and in love and how they had sex like maniacs in this tiny rented room because he was about to leave for Vietnam. She tells Nate his father swore to her that he carried the pictures in his pocket during the war to keep him safe. The irony in the scene is that Nate lies to her about where he located the pictures--he never tells her about the room. The audience is left to question whether that was the room where Nathaniel and Ruth spent that night together so many years ago. It is an endearing moment where Nate is allowed to have some questions answered about his father from beyond the grave. Sometimes, the answers we seek are within our grasp, if we let go of the urgency for an answer.
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