Mickey's Misadventures
How my mostly absent star architect father ended up peeing on my neighbor's door
Mickey, my mom, my sister, and I after moving to Big Sur. I made some of the patches for my jacket by hand.
Sun damaged, below average height, with a slow midwestern drawl, and shy around strangers, Mickey was not the womanizer he aspired to be. He was known for inviting people to dinner, eating as much as possible, and then “forgetting” his wallet. Living in town with 200 people, his reputation did him no favors.
I can tell these stories not because I was there, but precisely because Big Sur is so small and filled full of fun characters that not only gossip, but participate in making the gossip happen. All the more so by a guy who was nominated by Architectural Digest as one of the 100 most important architects of the 20th century.
The local sheriff, Pat, was once driving behind Mickey and saw his silhouette take a drink out of a beer bottle. Pat turned on his lights.
“Mickey,” he asked, “Do you have an extra beer?”
(Pat let just about everyone off easy. He once pulled my mom over when I was in the car. Not only did she not have a driver’s license, she had never been in possession of one. She was in his car for a very long time. And when she came back, she said, “Well that was easy.”)
Mickey expected that he would see an uptick in his social life upon becoming a recognized architect, but just as his fortunes turned the corner, he met a videographer at MIT on a trip to Cambridge, MA named Diane. One day she showed up at his door and never left. This didn’t work out well for either of them—Mickey with his imagination for what could have been and Diane for dealing with his imagination of what could have been. The crazy little man in our heads has a way of ruining our lives, few more than Mickey.
Then, one day, tragically and comically, Mickey ran himself over with his own car.
Highway 1 is a windy road with a precipitous drop on one side, but both of my parents managed to drive it drunk at high speeds and survive to old age. My mom flipped her car more than once and survived. It wasn’t going over the edge that got my dad. Coming home from a bar, he got out to pee and didn’t put the car in gear. The car rolled forward and smashed into him, tearing his carotid artery.
He drove back from town to Diane’s apartment and went to bed. When he woke up the next morning, he found that he couldn’t tie his shoes.
From then on, he became an exaggerated version of himself. Even slower in speech and ever more miserly, he made Diane pay for half of the bill every time they ate out. He also became more ornery and drank more still.
Having grown up with my mother, I didn’t know my dad well. But every time I saw him…right up to the end of his life…he was a handful. Once he came and visited me in New York City. I made a bed for him in the kitchen, but when I got up in the middle of the night, he was gone.
The first sign that he was OK came at 8 in the morning, when my neighbor, Clyde, banged on my door.
“Is that old man your dad?” He was livid.
“Unfortunately.”
“Well, I heard someone knocking on my door, and when I opened it, he was standing there peeing!”
“Near your door?” I asked.
“ON my door!”
“Have you seen him since then?” Suddenly, Clyde became nervous and sympathetic toward the plight of an old man who hadn’t made it home. I could see in his eyes that he was already blaming himself for some imagined tragedy. This is lucky, because if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have ever had the chance to get to know him.
Clyde was tall, wore 1970s-stye glasses, and a poorly-fitting and dirty tee shirt. He was pale from never going outside his room. When we met in our opposite and open doorways, I focused most of my energy peeking into his apartment, looking beyond the puddle in the hallway to try to get a look at the frogs, which I always heard outside the door. Clyde was a real-life Junot film character. I imagined he grew and ate the frogs I heard through his door. I had his half of the back yard to myself because he had boarded up his rear windows.
“I um…no, I suppose…he is old, right?” The question threw him off and he returned to his dark apartment. I mopped up the puddle.
A few hours later, Mickey somehow managed to find his way back to the building and to the right apartment.
"What happened to you,” I asked, pointing to a gash on his forehead that was still bleeding.
“Uhhhhh…,” he said, touching the wound. “I…don’t…know. I must have tripped.”
I tucked him into bed and got him on a plane the next day.
The next time I saw him was at my sister’s wedding in New Orleans. My sister and her fiancee met me in the airport, looking worn out and angry.
“Is everything OK?” I asked?
“Your father,” Juan said simply.
“On a walkabout?” I guessed.
“A…yes, that is what it was,” Juan said. “This is New Orleans. It’s super dangerous here.”
“What happened?”
“He disappeared in the night. The next day, there was a big guy in his bedroom. Mickey was in his closet rifling through his pockets looking for money. The big man said ‘old man owes me money.’ We had to give him all we had to get rid of him.” I noticed Juan had circles under his eyes. He had been up most of the night.
Juan was skinny with an artist’s goatee and round wire glasses. He looked as if he should be carrying a paintbrush with him all the time.
“And Mickey didn’t tell you the story?” I asked politely.
“All he said was, ‘I met a lady.’ That’s it. Nothing else. Maybe you can get the story out of him.”
Juan and Michele had rented an ornate wooden double gallery house on the edge of the French Quarter for the celebration. This was in the days before Katrina, before most of these houses had been destroyed. One block had beauties like this. The next was shotgun shacks an a no go zone at night. Mickey found his way into the no go zone.
When I questioned him, I didn’t do much better. I got him settled and in a better mood, I asked him to fill in the blanks.
“Well…,” he said slowly. “I met a pretty lady.”
“Then what happened?” I realized then that I should have pressed for details to get him warmed up. What did she look like? Did she smell nice? Was she a local or a tourist?
“She had drugs,” he said by way of explanation. And that was that. No more information forthcoming other than her gender, appearance, and possession of something illegal.
Years went by before I saw him again, but we had obligatory phone conversations. He bought a an abandoned schoolhouse in Merida, a city in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. His sister moved there some time before with the idea that she could live like a queen in a beautiful colonial house on little more than Social Security.
I went down there to see my aunt and Mickey a few times. She and her friend Raymond had a few stories to tell, all similar to the ones in New York and New Orleans. Once, Raymond found him passed out in front of the police station and brought him home. Another time, Mickey had bought a large motorcycle (an Indian, I think), dropped it, couldn’t get it back up, and left it to a nice guy with a tow truck.
Mickey had bought a grand building with ceilings high enough that no ladder would help you change the lightbulbs. Most of the lightbulbs burned out as a result, and the house was pretty dark. There were colonial rooms surrounding an open courtyard. The mosquitos and bats moved freely between the courtyard and the house, the bats leaving white sticky droppings filled with mosquitos. As he grew older, the tropical flora quickly took over, with huge roots growing through the adobe walls.
Once, Diane needed a break, so I volunteered to watch over him. Celina came down with me, as did Shawna. Mickey was quite frail by then, and had a young caregiver from Big Sur named Lilly who was just as out of control as he was. On the first night, she was the one who disappeared and didn’t answer her phone.
After a full day had passed, we started to get desperate, imagining something bad happened to her in Mexico and we would need to find the body and then figure out where her parents were. Shawna read her diary for clues.
“She slept with Mickey,” Shawna said matter of factly, holding up the book. “It’s full of spelling errors. She even spelled his name without a ‘c.’ Lots of longing and broken hearted stuff.”
“Broken hearted?” I asked. “What do you mean without a ‘c’?”
“So, she came down here and decided she had enough.” Shawna guessed. “She didn’t seem broken hearted, just a little crazy. And she is what? 20?”
We all went out to look for her without any luck. The police said that she just went out to have fun, and that is what gringas do. I thought that was very sexist. I asked to speak with the sergeant hoping I could get someone to take action.
“I am the sergeant,” he said, “and I’m also a licensed caregiver. Do you need anyone to take care of your dad until she shows up?”
When we came back, Mickey was in the dining room with a bunch of young guys.
“Peter!” he said. “These are my new friends. I met them at a bar.” He was speaking quickly, at a pace that I didn’t know he was capable of. And he had a long piece of snot dangling from his nose that was bright white.
“How did you even get outside?” I asked. I had locked the gate so he couldn’t wander off too.
“I don’t know. I just went to a bar.”
Mickey didn’t speak a word of Spanish and could barely walk by himself on the cobblestone streets of Merida, so I grilled the kids.
“How did he even communicate with you?”
The guy, short and shady looking with long hair and a conch neckless simply put his finger up to his nose and snorted.
Just as I started to usher the kids out, Lilly came home with a young guy. The sergeant, with all of his biases, was a smart man.
We sat Lilly down and told her we were sending her and Mickey home as soon as we got the full story. Mikey, it turns out, was her boyfriend and his name really didn’t have a “c” in it.
At the end of his life, I spent time with Mickey. He wasn’t any less ornery, but he was confined to a wheelchair. I moved him to Thailand to live with my daughter, Nuan. (Nuan was stateless and from Burma. When we met, she called me dad, and that was that. Stateless people don’t have papers, even for marriage or property, so this seemed like a perfectly good way to form a family.)
In Thailand, he was loved and constantly surrounded by young people, which made him feel young and happy in turn.
Nuan hugged him and treated him like the baby he had once again become. In our apartment, he wore nothing but diapers and his sunglasses. But he still managed to wheel himself out the door in the middle of the night more than once.
“What are you looking for, Mickey?” I asked.
“A margarita and a prostitute,” he said, matter of factly.