Duel Father/Daughter Escapism, Invisible Disability
and the dubious elixir that was the late-90's WB Tuesday night lineup
When a close musician friend of my father’s whose age was more approximate to mine than his described her experiences with ADHD, he was stunned. I wasn’t there for this conversation, but he described the shock of recognition he felt: oh my god that’s me, that’s absolutely me. Ever since that moment, it’s been impossible to wonder what he might have accomplished, or, less capitalistically, how much easier his adult life could have been, if he had been given the opportunity to understand that he had a condition that could’ve been treated. “Opportunity” is an interesting concept in this contest, because my father had everything, on a material level. He grew up in a mansion on Octavia St. in New Orleans with a full staff (at least one member of which he felt closer to than to his own parents, that’s a whole book in itself, that I’ll probably never be a strong enough writer to do justice to), and, owing to all that had been available to him growing up, I never knew what an “appetizer” was supposed to be because I was always full my the time our entrees arrived. I was at least nine or ten before it donned on me that dinner for two isn’t intended to include upwards of 4-6 appetizers.
I googled “Is ADHD a disability” and the immediate answer was yes, and I’m not sure if I can convey how tripped out I am to think, sixteen years after his untimely death, “oh my god my father and I were both disabled.” But mine was visible and his was not. It’s heartbreaking to think that the symptoms he displayed might have registered as simple failure: why can’t he stay in one place for longer than an hour, why did he struggle with remembering to pay bills, why did he get so overwhelmed on moving day(s) that eventually, mid-packing, he would just take an ill-timed but seemingly necessary nap? And why did he so often drive around for weeks with a stamped-and-addressed card sitting on the dashboard, long ready to send, but unmailed?
My dad liked to downplay his depths of spirit. He’d talk about himself like he wasn’t a very intellectual person, but then he’d come at you with these insights about humanity or art that showed a constant stream of singular thoughtfulness. One time, in a move theater, as we were settling into our seats for the then-newest Robin Williams comedy, he said, “You know what I love best about coming to see a movie like this? Everyone here has come here to laugh.”
Who talks like that? Not someone who doesn’t think about things. But the narrative he was most comfortable with, for reasons unknown, was that I was the one who thought about things. He often had an immature sense of humor, true, but the joy it came from, the insatiable love for humanity it came from, was anything but underdeveloped. And if you had asked him, during my childhood or teenage years, why it was that he was so generous with the TV remote control as to let me choose what we would watch together during dinner, he’d probably have said that he’s childish enough to enjoy what I enjoy. At this vantage point, though, I see our shared television hours as two different acts: 1.) something we were building together, a specific facet of the bond we had and 2.) a combined hommage to our favorite addictive coping mechanism, sustained mental escape.
And since the for-better-or-worse dawn of television, has there ever been an escape as reliable as the healthily close family whose issues never seem to be with one another and whose problems are solved within a half-an-hour to 45 minutes minus commercial breaks? It’s an effective enough intoxicant to usurp all aesthetic and intellectual standards, or at least it certainly was for us. And nowhere was this more obvious than in our shared and very secret love for the WB’s most santimonious late-90’s offering, 7th Heaven.
This was the one show we watched together whose dialogue had us half-gaping in horror. How…how could you have a person say that, like that? And still we watched. When Ruthie, the littlest member of the led-by-a-pastor-patriarch so-white-it-hurts-your-eyes family wanted to wear a speghetti-strapped tank top, my dad did a spot on impression of her mother saying, “In a perfect world, a young girl could safely walk down a dark alley wearing a tank top. But this is not a perfect world, and a young girl cannot safely walk down a dark alley wearing a tank top.”
That’s just a badly written line, sex-positive feminism and politics aside. There were so many lines like this! And yet, there we were, laughing when the show did not intend for us to laugh, but still watching. Always watching. Tuesday nights at 7pm, we never missed it. I should add, for full disclosure, that I’m sure I had an unacknowledged crush on Hot Older Sister (Jessica Beale) in addition to my bedroom-door-attesting crush on Hot Older Brother (Barry Watson). I suppose that went a long, long way.
There was one truly serious episode that did contain several vital historical details that stuck with me. It featured a holocaust survivor who had come to speak at Forgettable Younger Brother’s school. I’ve always guessed that her harrowing story had to be a real one, though I’ve never felt compelled to check for sure. No matter what, we know the details were real. But in the world of the show, one villian existed that I had no idea we would come to see decades later as an actual set of people, more of them than I could have possibly known how to understand: the Halocaust denier. There was, of course, nothing humorous in the way they sought to make us aware of these people, as well as deepen our awareness of the history of Jewish genocide without shrinking away from some of its most impossible realities, an admirable decision on the writers’ part. But even here, where our sympathies burned in sync, the dialogue remained impossible to take seriously on its face. Forgettable Younger Brother remarks that, to the shock, shame, and disbelief certainly shared by my father and me, “Larry’s dad told him that the Halocaust never happened.” The Camden family patriarch and minister extraordinaire leans down to his young son’s level and takes him by the shoulders, all fine and emotionally appopriate blocking for such a moment. Then he looks into his son’s eyes and says, his voice deep and sober, ready to embody its God-given role for dispensing hard truths, “Larry’s father obviously has a problem.”
“SLIGHTLY,” my dad blurted out, his constant ironic adverb for that which was far more than slightly true. We understood that any laughter we unwittingly dispensed at the delivery of this line was complicated, and I think it’s only now that I can say I get it, kind of. This was the first moment in all of our weeks of watching 7th Heaven on Tuesday nights at 7pm that the “family friendly” nature of its bland-ass language proved a handicap in making its point. Okay, so perhaps a minister wouldn’t have called Larry’s father the names that my father and I would have, but still. Being a history-denying bigot is not “having a problem.” It’s being a bigot. It’s possibly being violent. It’s certainly being hateful. Bigotry is not a disability. Both my father and I could’ve attested to that.
I once tried to explain to a classroom of middle-schoolers that when I was growing up, there was no cursing on TV. No one could quite believe it, just as they couldn’t imagine a world in which you’ve missed your show — missed it, couldn’t watch it for a whole week — if you missed an episode during its airtime. Now that it’s possible to watch TV at work and at school and on the subway and at the doctor’s office and in public bathrooms, I can’t help but wonder if it’s gotten even harder for people to step back and as why they’re actually watching something. I’m not saying that my dad and I had emotional conversations about what we were escaping into, we certainly didn’t, so maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference. 7th Heaven was followed by the seminal teen soap opera Dawson’s Creek and then by the seminal teen horror-romance-drama-with-several-helpings-of-comedy Buffy the Vampire Slayer, neither of which my dad had any use for, which was all just as well, because none of the unspoken delights hidden in either show were the kind that a closeted bisexual teenager would want to share with her family.
More on that later. Maybe. We’ll see.