Pop!

By Mark Polanzak

When Mark Polanzak was seventeen, his father spontaneously combusted on the tennis court, vanishing forever. It is also entirely possible that he died of a heart attack. Either way, his father's death is a story Polanzak spends much of his life trying to get right.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9780990516934

Mark Polanzak

Mark Polanzak is author of the hybrid fiction/memoir POP! (Stillhouse, 2016). His stories have appeared in The Southern Review and The American Scholar, and anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017. He is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process and a contributor to the podcast, The Fail Safe. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program in fiction, Mark teaches writing and literature at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

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BIOGRAPHY

PROLOGUE ONE

POP!

Mark Polanzak’s father exploded. A puf of smoke.

Mark was eating pizza with his girlfriend in the converted attic over the garage of his parents’ house, when his mother collapsed into the rolling desk chair and slid a ways on the carpet, phone pressed to her right ear.

Dad’s dead.

But there was no need to rush to a hospital. No need to hurry somewhere to say goodbye to a body. The body had vanished. He had exploded, just blown up during his weekly tennis match with his friends. Dr. Hutch, his doubles partner, told Mark and his mother: it was deuce point, his father’s service game. Mark’s dad tossed the ball up, and when he made contact, there was a dull bang as if a bottle rocket had gone off, not loud, more like a pop. A little white smoke lingered where his dad had been in the act of serving. Then, his racquet was clanging to a rest on the baseline and the ball was rolling down the net. A fault.

It shocked everyone. Nurses Mark’s father had worked with, at the wake with the empty casket, they all said the same thing: He seemed so fit, so healthy.

Yeah, he told them. He was young. He exercised. You never know.

Mark’s brother and he had already purchased a Father’s Day present. This was the second week of June, 1998. The two freshly-fatherless sons drove to the sporting goods store to return the stringing machine, but they didn’t have a receipt.

But he exploded, you see, they told the clerk.

Store credit only.

The brothers browsed. David picked out a racquet and waved it in the air like a fly swatter; he played. JV. Approaching the register, though, he hesitated. Do you think it’s safe? he asked.

Your game is completely different, Mark assured him.

Yeah. I’ll never have Dad’s killer serve.

I’m joking, of course. No one combusts or explodes, as far as I know. This is the beginning of a fictional story I wrote. My dad did not blow up. Did not pop. He did die, though, and it wasn’t funny. But I wrote this funny story about my dad’s death. It goes on for many more pages, being funny and super distanced from the grief. Analogies can be drawn, though, from story to truth: the explosion and disappearance of the body reflects the unexpectedness of my father’s sudden death and my never seeing the body. The line about my father being so fit intends to be humorous in the story, but that’s what everyone actually did say. I didn’t understand why, as if it would have been appropriate to say the opposite, if it were true: Well, he was out of shape… The joke about my brother’s hesitation to play tennis again—as if playing tennis were the real killer—is an analogy to the fears my brother and I share that we’ve inherited our father’s genes and will die for the reason he died: heart disease. The absurdity of returning the gift and being forced to explain that he exploded? Well, those sorts of things happen. It seems ridiculous, in real life, to explain a death in certain situations. For instance, my family had to produce a death certificate in order to change the billing information on a phone line. Who knows what crimes criminals have thought up to create such red tape? So, the ridiculousness of the story’s situations isn’t radically far off from the truth. It seems psycho to lose your father at seventeen. It is. The story was aiming for that. That feeling, I guess.

Plus, certain details are true: it was on a tennis court and during a weekly tennis date with friends that the dying occurred. However, I have no idea who had serve, whether it was Ad In or Ad Out, Deuce, or during a side change when my father’s heart was attacked. What I’ve been told is that my dad mentioned to Dr. Hutch that he felt dizzy, then he sat on a bench to the side of the court, fainted, and his heart fluttered and fluttered. His heart began to spasm, trying to pump blood to where it needed to be. His heart tried for maybe a minute. And that was that.

An important ‘however.’ There was an urgent need to rush to a hospital. Dr. Hutch picked me and my mother up at the house. My girlfriend waited, too, for her mom to come and get her before Hutch arrived. How unceremonious to see her face while waiting for a trip to the hospital. She was not a bad person—a really good person actually—but just a face of ephemera, understood to soon be gone. A high school girlfriend. She was representative of a fun but passing thing in my life right in the middle of a moment that would remain. Her face is in an ever-lasting mind photo. Of destruction. My mother and I should have learned about our loss in an empty, new, and high cathedral.

My mother did say goodbye to the body. I did not. My brother did not. Dave, three thousand miles away in San Francisco, didn’t even know our dad was dead yet. I was offered the chance to say goodbye. Mom promised: He’s still warm. His arms are folded on his chest like he used to sleep. I don’t know how they knew he slept like that. She informed me of the state of Dad’s dead body in a special room, with a couch, adjacent to the emergency room. I could hear the bigger waiting room TV through the wall. An episode of Seinfeld was playing.

I didn’t go see the body at the wake either. A request went in to have the casket closed. At the time, I was too scared to look at my dad’s dead body. Didn’t know what it would do to me. I was capable of anything, I thought, and I just wanted to avoid a potential scene. However, I now think that I refused to say goodbye to my father’s body because it left open the chance to find him among the living. And I want to assure you that I’m not in denial. It’s been ten years since I’ve seen my dad, and this is because my dad is dead. But I didn’t see his body, so I’ve allowed some part of my brain to play with the idea that my father’s still out there. Maybe he escaped. Maybe he hated me and my mom and my brother and his own life. My father faked it. Disappeared. Like in the explosion story. I think about this possibility. I think that if I do clap eyes on Dad—on the subway, in some foreign city, on a someday—I’m going to clobber him.

But that is impossible.

I’ve never stopped inspecting strange men of my father’s build, aged appropriately. I haven’t stopped searching, looking, reimagining. Because my dad blew up one day, and that cannot be real.

I’ve written Dad’s death in many ways. I’ve written story after story about it. I think some of them are clever. That’s what writing students are supposed to do: take a real life event that has meaning and tell a story, but ‘tell it slant.’ So said (wrote?) Emily Dickinson, and every writing instructor reminded me of this. Emily Dickinson put all her poems in a drawer then died. She doesn’t know we know her. Didn’t want us to.

I want to tell you that I have been writing, taking workshops, been in writers’ groups, appeared and participated in conferences, edited literary journals, written book reviews, taught creative writing courses, conducted interviews with authors, and been publishing stories of my own for the past decade now. Writing stories is all I’ve studied. Studied with any real dedication. This fact bothers me. One: one doesn’t need formal education in writing to write a good story. Two: I’ve heard, said, and read so many various ideas and techniques on the subject of creative writing—many contradictory—that I have no idea what my own beliefs are anymore. Tree: ‘studying’ writing offends people. People like my best friend’s mother, who claims that one should go and live and have adventures before writing. I’ve always figured I’ve already been through an involuntary adventure. But I have chalked up more life experience in the study of writing. I learned all the tricks (which don’t work), all the rules (which don’t apply but here and there), all the clichés (which are alternately shit and Shinola), and I egotistically wish to banish them, to break boundaries, to prove all the teachers wrong. But I’m not going to do that. I have no idea why I’m writing instead of doing something, anything else. With this pain. Or whatever it is now. And. I want to know why. Here. In this.

I made my father’s death a disappearing act: the explosion, the spontaneous combustion, and examined the absurdity of life thereafter. I drowned my dad, and told the story of becoming a lifeguard. Gave my dad cancer. Shot my dad. Drove my father’s car of a cliff. Put my father in a burning building. Linked the death to a flower by the same name of the disease I killed him of with. Linked the death to idiosyncratic objects, comparing the death to little things, finding meaning in clever ways in order for the protagonist, always Mark—always me despite the renamings and recharacterizations— to learn just a little something about death. In the most absurd of them all, I kept my father alive and well while the protagonist grieved for not having anything to grieve about.

None of the stories do it right, though. None tell what really happened. None express how I feel.

I feel.

TUESDAY MORNING

Call me Martin, Max, Mason, Marty, Mitch, Marvin, Major, Matthew, Michael, Milo, Miles, Malcolm, Micah, Murphy, Mo, Morris, Manny, Marshall, Mitchell, and Mark. I do.

My mother mentions a bereavement group. That she is attending? That she is somethinging. There is a bereavement group meeting in a community center somewhere. It meets somewhere regularly. Maybe it meets in a church basement. Mom mentions it. She mentions me coming. Talking there? Who knows what exactly she is doing. What she knows. How she is communicating it to me. We are on the phone. It’s a tertiary act while frying eggs or reading over edits or thinking about something else or finding an ashtray. Staring of. Just saying yeah. There is a pattern to these conversations with my mom. Somewhere in her speaking is the word appointment or activity. There is an obligation with a date and time attached, maybe even a location. Doctor. Dentist. Play downtown. Museum exhibition. Open studio. Help at the house. Someone needs help moving. Wedding. Funeral. Lunch. My role is to say yeah and wait for the date to pass. This is the way of it. She knows it and doesn’t appear to mind; she doesn’t want to do the things she is asking me to participate in any more than I do. It works out well for the two of us. She likes making plans. Not doing them. She may even use me as an excuse just when she’s scheduled to head out the door.

I am not working that much, underemployed, having recently quit the bar bouncing, the midmorning to afternoon bartending, and English tutoring gigs. I should be searching for new gigs. I have nowhere to be. Almost ever. I held onto the creative writing workshops at the Adult Education Center in Boston. But essentially an unstructured life, so I make plans with myself to write, to edit, or to read. A fellowship without having to have won it—just underemployed and under-motivated to find work. Not having a job, not having any obligations but to oneself has its drawbacks. I can’t tell anyone that I am ‘busy’ and can’t say ‘no’ to anyone’s demands on my time. What are you doing that is so important? So, I say yeah to my mom. Say yes to something I don’t understand, something I don’t really hear. I flip the eggs out of the pan, underline the sentence to rewrite, snuf out the cigarette. Hang up. Almost totally forget the thing.

But the word bereavement is part of what I agreed to. And group and meeting. Somewhere in Massachusetts. This is what I remember for a minute here.

Wait a second! Is Mom attending a bereavement group now? Now? After ten years? Have I been checking in on her enough? She must not be attending. Someone told her about it. Some bereft so-and-so told her to just come by or stop in. Mom’s going along to this meeting in order to morally support someone who actually needs this type of group. That’s it. She’s doing a favor for this someone. And she wants me to accompany her accompanying, I guess. I feel. I satisfy myself.

Wait for the date to pass.

POP CULTURE

It’s scattershot. This stuff. We go over here. We go over there. We move forward. We get knocked back. In the middle of a normal Tuesday, something pops up, and we are thrown for a loop. We pick ourselves up, we dust ourselves of. Then we get turned upside down. We roll with the punches, then throw one of our own. We find ourselves in a job, in a relationship, and we ponder it maybe for a moment. How did we get here? Then something gets remembered. Something gets imagined. We say we want to live in the moment. We say that actually we have to plan for the future. We say that the past is the past. We say that the past is prelude. We say that the past must not be forgotten. We say the past is history. Spirits rise tonight. Trick or treat, we say. A firecracker goes POP. Fall into Winter. We say the future looks bright. We say tomorrow will be better. We say our future is doomed. We say the present is a constantly evolving past. We forget something, then we remember it wrong. We say that’s not the way it happened, no. We say, I can’t remember. We say, oh yeah, that’s it! We say that was before I, that was after we, that was right at the time that you, that was when we. We tell lies. We admit to telling lies. We lie to get to tomorrow. We are honest about the past when it’s past. We say, all that matters is now. We hope for the best and prepare for the worst. We say, next time we’ll know what to do. We say, if that ever happens again. We say, lesson learned. We say never again. We revise. We edit. We get it right. Then something pops up. We want the children to be the future. Our parents, the past. We say, we are in the prime of our lives. Everything is going to turn around today. Things are looking up. Peaks and valleys, we say. We say thank god for rollercoasters or we’d not know how to describe this life. We say, sleep on it. See how we feel in the morning. Put it to bed. Don’t borrow trouble. No use crying. Give up the ghost. We say enjoy it while we can. Have a cigar. Have a glass of champagne. We say Happy New Year. A confetti gun goes POP. We say it’s a clean slate. We say this year we will. We resolve to. We say no regrets. We say we’re sorry. We quit this. We take up that. We quit that. We say that was a phase. This is a fad. We say another go round. We say there’s only one ride. We say legacy. Monument. Memorial. We say dust to dust. We say Winter into Spring. Anniversary, we say. A champagne cork goes POP. We say Tuesday into Wednesday. We say hump day. We say halfway done. We say halfway started. We want the best for you. Best for us, too. We want to help out. We say we’re getting better at asking for help. Teamwork, we say. We say individual. We say this is your life! We say that when we were little we wanted to be. We say pipe dreams. Delusions of grandeur. We say sidetracked. Backtracked. Derailed. We say we’re en route. Be there shortly. We say we have a headache. Stomachache. We say we need to soul search. We say pursuit. Passion. Duty. Obsession. Hobby. Chore. We say we do it all for you. We say we won’t really do it if