Men don’t leave.
Back in February 1990, when I was getting near the end of my 18 months living and working in Reno, an interesting movie came out starring Jessica Lange.
It was called “Men Don’t Leave,” and it didn’t do all that much business. It was definitely quirky. Lange played a woman who had to hold her family together after the death of her husband. In thinking back on it, I had it in my mind that the title was because Lange’s husband had abandoned her, but it’s tough to blame someone for dying.
At any rate, Lange finds herself teaching her two sons what it means to be a man in the modern world.
Of course, the reason the title stayed with me was that I never got to know the man who should have been the greatest masculine influence in my life.
He left.
Before my third birthday.
And I never knew the man who provided half of my genetic makeup.
I have only one extremely vague memory of Wesley Kenneth Whitcomb, and I’m not even sure it’s real. He abandoned us and never returned. I’ve written about this before and I’m not going to rehash it. The reason I mention it at all is as a departure point for some thoughts about a different person.
Wesley’s first-born son.
Me.
What little I know of him was that he didn’t deal well with pressure, and one he found himself with a wife and two children at the age of 25, he bailed.
And we never saw him again.
My mother never really wanted to talk about him, and what little I knew came from photos, papers and other things I found.
My mother’s second husband, who I called Dad from age 6 to 58 (when he died at age 82) was everything Wesley wasn’t when it came to being a responsible man. I grew to appreciate him more as an adult, and I can honestly say most of what I know of honor and other good qualities came from Norman Rappaport.
The bad stuff comes mostly from Wesley.
What bad stuff, you ask?
Actually, I don’t need to ask.
I guess the best way of putting it is that during the years starting in 1992, when I married Nicole and acquired two wonderful children, I never ran around and did my best always to be there for my family. But there was a tiny part of me — maybe 5 percent — that when my workday ended and I got on the freeway to head west toward home, thought about heading east instead.
Toward Arizona, New Mexico and oblivion.
Maybe it isn’t fair to say that’s the Wesley part of me. Maybe after leaving at 25, he regretted it for the rest of his life and became a much better man because of the experience.
But I doubt it.
His parents had both died before I was born, but he had a maiden aunt who sent me birthday cards until I was 18. He could easily have found out how to get in touch with me, and he never did.
So the only effect he had on me was bad.
I am the man I turned out to be because of two other men — Norman Rappaport and my maternal grandfather Paul Kindinger.
Two men who stayed.
***
Note: I feel like I ought to be apologizing for using a picture from the movie and then saying almost nothing about the movie.
Nah.