Painting Rainbows

This is by no means a standard tribute in which I would extol all of the virtues of my father while white-washing or simply neglecting his vices and short-comings, something akin to a premature eulogy.  In fact, I would not call this a tribute at all but more of a character sketch which, in the case of my father, if I do it well and do it justice, may be the greatest tribute of all.  He was an extraordinary man who lived an extraordinary life.  I would go so far as to call him a modern-day tragic hero, and how can you accurately portray the majesty of the hero and his subsequent fall without some discussion of his warts and blemishes, his tragic flaws?  Who is Oedipus without blinding pride?   Or Macbeth without vaunting ambition?

I call it the sin of yearning.  Simply put, it is when we have a desire bordering on obsession for someone to be something they are not--in my father’s case, a warrior-artist-prophet-patriarch-warm-fuzzy-loving-doting-new-and-improved-Ozzie Nelson/Ward Cleaver Super Dad.  It is the stubborn refusal to love someone on their own terms, for who and what they are rather than what you would have them become.   

My father was not a hands-on Dad, not one to grasp the great teaching moment; not one to faithfully attend all of his children’s athletic games and performances or to dote over his grandchildren.  I don’t intend this as a criticism.  My father is what he is:  immensely talented, intellectually blessed, a superb athlete in his prime.  At his best he was charming, witty, principled, courageous, wise, debonair, in his words, “the cat’s meow!”  When he prayed he sometimes spoke with the tongue of angels, as if God were present in the room, yet he didn’t wear his religion on his sleeve and never flouted his ecclesiastical office.  At his worst he could be self-centered, stubborn, insensitive, impatient, demanding, prideful, short-sighted, and even foolhardy.  My father was many things, but he was pretty much a man to himself, i.e., independent. He was not indifferent to the travails of others, but he didn’t obsess over them.  He did what he could to help, and then he moved on.  He was capable of great acts of generosity and kindness, but he didn’t like to toot his horn about it. He preferred giving alms in secret.  Sometimes he could appear arrogant and aloof, but it was a cover-up.  In reality I think he was modest and shy. In his old age he has put few, if any, demands on his children aside from an occasional and humble request (i.e., when he needed help completing his life story).  He does his thing, and he allows us to do our things.  He loves us, but it has always been difficult for him to show his love—or better put, we his children have been too slow to decipher the way he expresses his love.  We wanted his love more conventionally packaged.  Hence, the sin of yearning.

An excellent example of someone who is not guilty of this sin is my father’s wife, Yung-Soon.  This delightful woman seems to know and understand who and what my father is.  She does not take offense at things he may say or do or not do.  He is eighty-plus years old, and she knows she is not going to teach this old dog new tricks, or vice versa.  So if he inadvertently says something thoughtless or insensitive, she laughs.  What are your choices, after all?  You can get angry, you can ignore it, you can go to therapy, you can pitch a fit, you can have an affair, you can file for divorce, you can run off to Bermuda with your personal trainer. Or you can laugh.  Laughing is inexpensive and better for your overall health and constitution.  Yung Soon learned this lesson early in life.

My father is not Ozzie Nelson; he is not Ward Cleaver.  Nor is he Homer Simpson or Ozzie Osborne.  He is a one-of-a-kind original, but it took me forty years to appreciate that.  I don’t want him to be Ozzie Nelson, and I certainly don’t want him to be Harriet. I want him to be, quite simply, Francis McDonald Fillerup.

For his eighty-fourth birthday, I mailed my father a card that featured a cartoon caveman Dad hollering at his rebellious if inventive son who is roasting a mastodon thigh over an open fire.  “You kids with your fancy fire!” grumbles the father.  “When I was your age, I ate my mastodon raw!  And I appreciated it!”  The card is titled “Neandrethal Dads.”

In some ways, my father, a child of the Depression, was close kin to this Neandretahl Dad.  As we were growing up, he would periodically remind us how easy our lot was compared to his:  rising at 4:00 AM on those bitter cold Wyoming winters to milk the cows, trudging to school in the snow uphill both ways, sleeping on a dirt floor.  In other ways, however, he was one of the more progressive fathers of his time.  He played high-speed, aggressive tennis and was a physical fitness buff years before those activities were en vogue; he was shaving his head when Michael Jordan’s parents were in grade school. And just about the time the other dads caught up to him, he raced ahead of the pack again, finding a separate peace in the world of color, tone, imagery, art. All of this was bound together by a unique spirituality, a sometimes perilous balancing act of living in but not of the world. In the Mormon church, we bandy a lot about that.  But here was a man whose circles intersected Howard Hughes and Chiang Kai-Shek.   He dined and danced with movie starlets, rubbed elbows with the rich and famous, yet somehow never lost sight of who he truly was—or perhaps that is an oversimplification.  Perhaps his entire life was a journey to discover the real Francis M. Fillerup, walking that tightrope between God and man, part of him drawn to that bigger, wilder sphere of lights, stars, action, but the better portion anchored by something as simple as his mother’s voice and a prayer:  “Francis. . .”

My father is the most complex man I have ever known.  I didn’t always think that.  As a rebellious, recalcitrant, stubborn, close-minded in my pseudo-open-mindedness teenager, when I watched disdainfully as he got up in the morning, donned his white shirt, suit, and tie, and drove over the hill to his executive job in L.A., and on Sundays donned the suit and tie again to stand at the pulpit and play bishop, I thought to myself, What a life!  Trapped in that eight-to-five rat race!  The dumb mad hamster running ferociously on his little wheel, going nowhere.  In my mind he was the epitome of the post Fifites cardboard cut-out Dad.  “Stick to your business, Mr. Businessman!” 

At age seventeen I promised myself  that I would never ever under any circumstances be like my father.  At age fifty-one I can say that I made good on that promise, not because my life is in any way extraordinary but quite the opposite.  His, on the other hand, was another story.

Some fathers are great teachers or they bond with their children via sports or the  great outdoors: they hunt, fish, kayak the Yang-tse River or fly to the Moon and back together.  Others are soft-spoken men who mold character through the sheer force of their example.  And then there are a few fathers who simply fall into a category of their own that I call Mythology.  Their names are surrounded by stories and anecdotes that over time have become bigger and grander until they are simply out-of-this world.  Except that in my father’s case they actually happened. Not the Big Fish that got away, but the even Bigger Fish that was netted and trophied in our collective family memory.  If someone asks me, “What was your father like?”  I don’t start stringing out a long list of adjectives.  I smile, turn to a brother or sister or close friend, and say, “Remember the time. . .”

As a bishop he was bigger than life.  Several times he would organize some grandiose Aaronic Priesthood trip.  One year he took us to Ensenada in Baja California to go deep sea fishing.  You could never get away with this in our current climate of over-protectiveness, terrorism, child abuse scandals, litigation-mania, and south-of-the-border politics. But back then we didn’t worry so much about those things.  Back then we didn’t have seat belts, either.

I was thirteen years old at the time. Our leaders had turned us loose for the afternoon to explore the local color.  So we wandered the streets of Ensenada in little packs of four and five, bopping in and out of the shops buying firecrackers, cherry bombs, M-80s, and other explosive toys that were verboten back in the States.  We didn’t question the ethics of this; we were young southern Californian kids, albeit the Mormon variety, and we were in Mexico, and buying fireworks was just part of the unofficial agenda. 

That night we camped on a beach just outside of town.  A group of college kids was camped on top of the cliff above us, playing loud music, laughing, drinking, carousing, and generally acting like college kids off on a lark in Mexico.  About 10:00 PM they started throwing cherry bombs at us, good-naturedly, no doubt.  Why go to Baja  if not to engage in war games?  Having loaded up with ammo during our town trip, we of course returned fire. This continued for an hour or so, the Mexican sky lit up with a dazzling display of mini-bombs that might have inspired Francis Scott Key, or Timothy O’Leary.   After an hour of this, my father the bishop decided that we’d had enough fun for the night.  If he was counting his blessings that no one had lost a hand or an eye, he didn’t show it.  He calmly approached the cliffs, waving to the enemy—not surrender but a truce—then walked towards us, his troops.  “All right,” he said, “that’s enough, boys.”  Sadly but obediently, we dropped our ammo.

At that instant, there was a small but sudden flash on the cliff.  A lighted fuse sizzled across the night, and my father ducked just as it exploded a foot above his head.  There was a moment’s silence—a dead calm as we read my father’s face.  I think I remember a slight smile on his lips as he spun around, thrust his arm like a sword towards the cliffs, and hollered, “Let ‘em have it, boys! Both barrels!”  It reminded me of that scene from Lawrence of Arabia when Peter O’Toole screams at the Arab rebels:  “No prisoners!  No prisoners!”

We charged—there must have been thirty of us—screaming, hooting, howling,  unleashing a merciless barrage of cherry bombs and M-80s into the star-spangled night. 

We had a young man in our Priests Quorum, Robert LoPresti.  He was a star Little League pitcher who two years later would pitch Birmingham High School to the L.A. City Championship.  Later he would pitch for Cal State Northridge.  He wasn’t the fastest pitcher in the city but certainly the most accurate.  Robert lit an M-80, wound up, and delivered.  We all watched as the fuse sizzled in a long, sloping trajectory and like a heat-seeking missle found its sweet spot, a slight opening in the overlapping flap of the command tent.  I remember the explosion, a burst of light within, and half a dozen silhouettes blown back against the flimsy walls.  There was another silence.  Dead calm on the Baja coast.  Even the waves momentarily ceased breaking.  Moments later an American flag on a pole poked out of the tent, waving back and forth.  Not truce, but unconditional surrender.  Down on the beach we exploded in celebration. If the sand had been a gridiron, we would have chaired my father victoriously off the field.

Was it irresponsible?  By today’s standards, yes.  Could someone have been seriously injured? Absolutely.  If a boy had lost a hand or an eye, would they have put my father on the rack?  Perhaps.  But it was a different world back then. Parents were more trusting and forgiving.  Besides, we were protected by our priesthood leaders, men of God who had weathered the Great Depression and fought a World War.   The travails of the Baja Peninsula seemed pretty tame after you had survived a frontal attack by a German Panzer division.  A few cherry bombs on a Baja beach were small petunias to our leaders.  Kid’s stuff.  And we were kids. 

In that instance, my father was the hero. Other times, he was guilty of hubris; he over-reached.  A year after the beach incident he hatched a plan to take the Aaronic Priesthood up Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the continental United States. My father always thought big. We would hike it in August, at summer’s end.  We drove up to the trailhead and headed out about ten A.M.  None of the boys had backpacking experience.  Most of the leaders were out of shape. The altitude threw everyone a curve. It was ten miles to the summit, and by mile four several boys and some leaders were dropping out.  By mile six it started raining, and only four out of our party of thirty remained—my father, my brother Steve and me, and one of the leaders.  We plodded on, ill-prepared in used Army surplus boots.  A light snow began falling, and a cold stream soon flowed down the talus trail, saturating our feet. Two miles from the summit we started a steep climb up killer switch-backs. The other leader turned back. My father, Steve, and I pressed on for another half-mile.  Our teeth were chattering, our feet were numb. My father stopped. “Do you want to turn back?” he asked.  He had asked us this at a dozen points along the way.  This was the first time we hadn’t answered.  We simply looked down at our feet, half buried in the water coursing down the rocky trail.  We knew he wanted to press on.  We knew that turning back shy of the summit was something you did not do.  “Let’s go,” he said. But when we looked up, he was heading the other direction, down. We were so quietly thankful.

Eleven years later almost to the day, my brother Steve and I attempted Mt. Whitney again.  I was twenty-five, he was twenty-six, a Marine in exquisite shape, yet it still proved a challenging climb.  Standing on the summit in the blowing cold and swirling flakes, we were finally vindicated.

A few other events are worth noting. We lived on a steep hill in the San Fernando Valley.  Sometimes my father would come out and play ball with us in the street. One day some teenagers roared by in a Mustang convertible.  My father motioned for them to slow down.  They motioned back in a way they shouldn’t have. When they returned a few minutes later, roaring by even faster and more recklessly than before, my father chased their car down the street with a baseball bat.  I think he landed two solid hits on their rear fender.  The teenagers screamed in terror:  “Are you crazy!”  My father hollered back:  “You bet I’m crazy!”  My father didn’t take crap.  He inspired fear and comedy.  Steve and I imitated him for a month after that, baseball bat and all. 

Another big event was the annual father and sons campout at Mt. Pinos.  Saturday morning following breakfast, fathers and sons would engage in friendly competition—football throw, rope climb, long jump, and so forth.  The culminating event was the obstacle course, a quarter-mile long run that started at the top of a hill, curved down through the pines to a heavily wooded area where you had to cross a skinny log, belly crawl under a rope grid, and then sprint to the top of the hill, diving through a suspended tire at the finish. It was the premier event, and my father was always one of the favorites to win.

On this particular day,  I was about nine years old.  I remember watching with Steve at the top of the hill.  The man with the stop watch said, “Go!” and my father took off down the hill at a dead sprint—a little too zealously, perhaps, because he stumbled head-first and slid partway down the mountain.  I like to think he came up out of a roll, never missing a beat, but in reality he sprang to his feet and kept running.  He was wearing white slacks and a t-shirt, dust stained now, but nevertheless his body looked like a phantom flashing through the trees. As he quick-stepped across the log, he threw a shoe.  Steve looked down, shaking his head.  But our father was still running:  under the rope grid, back on his feet, and sprinting up the final hill.  And this is the image I will never forget:  the September sun flashing on his shaved head, his arms and thighs churning, nostrils flaring, and the blood on his bare foot as he charged up that last hill;  the suntanned smell of the pine needles that pierced his feet, and his body like a missle flying through the center of that hanging tire, and the click of the stop watch.  Some kind of record, bishop!  Some kind of!  And the expressions on everyone’s face, including the young athlete he beat by half a second: beyond wonder, beyond awe. 

Of course, this was child’s play on his resume.  His most daring and courageous feats remained private.  He rarely spoke about his war experiences and certainly never boasted of them.  It was his duty, and like so many of his generation, he answered the call.  Only now, as he limps through his eighties, has he begun to record the stories behind the Purple Heart, the Silver Star for gallantry in battle, the angelic deliverances from death.              

My father had his own ways of unwinding and dealing with stress.  Tennis was one.  The other?  I remember him flying through the door at 10:50 PM on Tuesday nights, after a full evening of church meetings and interviews, just in time to catch the last ten minutes of Roller Derby, live from the Olympic Auditorium.  (Wednesday nights it was professional wrestling.)  He would grab a folding chair from the dinner table and plant it in front of the TV, his face twisting and convoluting as he cheered on Terry Lynch and Danny Riley of the L.A. Thunderbirds and dubbed as “knot-heads” and “jerks from Albekirk” the blond bomber, Julie Hardman, and her bearded sidekick of the Texas Outlaws.  “Come on!  Come on!  Get him!  Get him!” he would yell, clapping his hands,  his eyes widening and mouth twisting into a sinister smile as Ms. Lynch knocked Ms. Hardman over the guardrails and into the stands. “There!  That’s the ticket!”  Did I mention that throughout this brief spectacle my father had a carton of Ralph’s discount ice cream in his lap?  I mean, why bother with a bowl, right?  Who had time?  As in who had time to race into the kitchen to re-fill the bowl and miss of precious second of Ms. Lynch slamming Ms. Hardman’s helmeted head onto the hardwood?  Let’s cut to the chase, people!  Give me the whole carton!

My father was a sucker for ice cream.  By all good medical wisdom his arteries should have clogged up and quit on him by age 40.  But his genes (and heart) scoffed at scars that never felt a defibrillator.  He was in his seventies before his body finally screamed, “E-nuff!”  But when it finally quit, it quit big time.  His ankles gave out first, then his heart. He has to wear giant reinforced shoes, but he still manages to shuffle to and around a park near his home every day, two miles round-trip. And he has managed to keep his eyes which have become his primary asset in his old age.  As long as he can hold a brush and see the canvas, he can paint.  And as long as he can paint, he is going to hang around.  And that is a very good thing. 

Sometime after my mother died, my father drove to the Olympic auditorium to see roller derby live, an eyewitness view of the Tuesday night antics. Tatooed men in black leather and chains and loud mouthy women in tank tops and stretch pants were screaming like animals, throwing popcorn and peanuts and exhaling their beery breath.    My father gazed around at the crowd and shook his head.  I was not there, but later he confessed, in a private moment:  “I looked around at those people, and all I could think about was why Heavenly Father took my Donna instead of any one of these. . .” He knew the textbook answer, of course.  As a bishop he had comforted hundreds of people who had lost loved ones, but this one hit too close to home. It was a rare moment when his guard dropped.

Earlier I said that my father was a tragic hero—so blessed with smarts, athleticism, looks.  One MBA from Harvard, another from USC.  All the makings of a wunderkind.  But he was always just shy of the mark.  A dollar late, a nickel short.  He wanted to be a big splash in the business world, but he left Hughes just before the tycoon hit it ultra big.  He left a secure position at UCLA to try his hand as a stockbroker, and shortly after the market crashed.  Hughes rehired him several years later and put him in charge of several major divisions in the Hughes kingdom. Just when it appeared as if my father had at last fulfilled his early promise, Hughes died.  The kingdom was divided and my father was pink-slipped.  

The little empire that was his family began crumbling after my mother died, in 1970. Up until then we had been an average Mormon family, more or less, in L.A.  Seven children, a stay-at-home mom, a bread-winning dad. My mother died in February.  In June my father re-married a Jewish convert to the LDS church who we secretly dubbed the Queen of Sheba..  She had never been married before, let alone had children, and suddenly, presto!  there she was with six kids, four of them teenagers.  (Steve had escaped to BYU for his freshman year of college; I was starting my senior year of high school.)  That’s a tough gig under the best of circumstances for the best of birth moms.  When we said the rude, obnoxious, self-centered things teenagers say, the Queen took it personally.  She thought she had married into some nice, conventional Mormon family where everyone happily piled into the car Sunday morning for church.  She wanted to change things, shape us up or ship us out.  For instance, after dinner, she closed the kitchen.  Say what?  No midnight snacks?  This is the Fillerup household where we graze from sun-up till. . . well, sun-up.   My father was caught in a double-squeeze play:  your children or your wife?  Back then, you chose the wife.  I was the first to leave home, Debbie was next, then Jeff, then Cozette.  The two younger ones, Jon and Mimi, had not been sufficiently corrupted by their older siblings and were still deemed salvageable. In the Queen’s defense, I admit that I was an unusually obnoxious teenager:  If I had been the parent, I would have sent myself packing. 

The marriage lasted nine years, and I think my father was happy for much of it.  They moved to Las Vegas for the Hughes job.  Sun tans and tennis courts, the younger children doing well in school.  My father took his first oil painting class.  Life was good to him.  Then the Queen went searching for strange men.  The divorce was final in 1979.  My father remarried on the rebound, a short-lived affair, and spent the next several years wandering through the labyrinth of singles life where he learned other hard lessons.  And then he met Yung Soon. 

My father’s self-effacing humor extended to his children.  Did it harm us psychologically when he called us “knot-head” and “nincompoop” and “jerk from Albekirk!”  It certainly annealed our sense of humor.  We learned very quickly that you’d better be able to laugh or you’re dead in the water.  Or as my father used to say, “You’ve gotta be tough to be a Fillerup!”  And if a few nonsense names are going to knock you out of the race, you’d better re-think running it to begin with.  It was like that Johnny Cash song, “Boy Named Sue”:  this world’s rough and if a man’s going to make it he’s gotta be tough.  And then the prophetic line: “And I knew I wouldn’t be there to help you along. . .”  (My father didn’t name me Sue, but “Barney” didn’t exactly make me invisible.  It was a name I tried to dodge relentlessly until I learned more about my namesake, Dr. Rufus Bernard Von Kleinsmid, the chancellor of USC, known to his friends as “Barney.”  I wear my cardinal and gold with pride.) 

But I think we have to remember the underlying affection and humor in those labels. Sometimes my father would call us “knot-head” or “Jerk from Albekirk!” simply because our behavior had merited the label. Other times, he reeled off those names with a sort of bizarre familial humor, in the same tone that he would spew out a number of Francis Fillerupisms tailor-made for intimate contexts and occasions:  “You lounge lizard!  Get your soft butt on a hard chair!” (when he saw me loafing on the sofa in front of the TV);  “Chop-chop!  Dig-dig!  Anybody can be slow!” (when prompting us to kick it into gear: doing yard work,  rushing off to church), “You love those golden browns!” (whenever he was cook, regardless of his faire, they were called golden browns), “That’ll put hair on your chest!” (whenever he gave us food of any variety, but with extra gusto if the food happened to be golden browns), and his personal favorite, “You’re in great shape for the shape you’re in!” (just about anytime he greeted us after a lengthy separation).   In a way, it was a compliment when he called you “knot-head” or “nincompoop” or the “town clown village idiot.”  It meant you were an insider, one of the gang, tough enough to take a hit and laugh about it.  Emotional damage?   In this era of inflated self-esteem, or the national epidemic preoccupation with it, his behavior would border on verbal abuse. But assemble any of his children on a summer night and the conversation will inevitably steer towards Francis Fillerupisms, with much laughter as we verbally catalog the aphorisms of our childhood.  Psychological damage? 

For a long period he was still chasing rainbows: the idea man, driven by illusions of landing the big fish that had eluded him for so many years. Or perhaps it was simply his competitive spirit, or the need to justify those two MBAs, or to shake the rap as the wunderkind who never made it big.  Ultimately he dismissed those business ambitions in classic Francis Fillerup fashion. I happened to be visiting him in Hacienda Heights.  He was working for a restaurant company that was on the ropes.  The ship was going down, and the big bosses were going to take everyone on board with them. It was time for him to cut and run.  He and I drove into Century City early the next morning, pulled into the underground parking lot, and sneaked upstairs to clean out his office.  It was like a spy movie, with us playing hide-and-seek with the surveillance cameras and security guards.  We finished quickly and left as the City of Fallen Angels was waking up.   The fact that he could put all of the remains of his business career in a cardboard box says something of his state of mind and heart at the time.  We drove home, and he went into his backyard, set up his easel, and painted a dazzling landscape. 

Money was never my father’s prime objective or his love.  A Depression kid, he feared being without necessities and carefully monitored the comings and goings of his checkbook.  He wasn’t cheap but thrifty, and there is a mountain of difference. Steve and I used to joke that our father would drive all the way to Barstow to save five cents on navel oranges. He shopped  by the crates and buckets, in volume.  The ten gallon tub of peanut butter was our snack-time staple from our formative years through high school.

In the end, my father attained that private peace most of us long for but never have the good sense or the courage to embrace.  At age 84, my father paints.  He loves it and he is quite good at it.  I think it is safe to say that painting is his first love, discovered too late in life.  When I call him now, the first thing I ask is, “Have you painted anything today?”  He will pause a moment and reply, “Not since this afternoon.”  And this has become part of his repertoire, as standard and familiar as “You love those golden browns!” or “That’ll put hair on your chest!”

So that is my father.  He was—and is—many things:  warrior, athlete, father, husband, a natural born ham; dancer, thespian, bishop, counselor, teacher, businessman. He was anything but ordinary.  And at age 51, I look at the man whose life I tried so very hard not to replicate and whose footsteps I so deliberately and painstakingly tried to avoid, and instead see more and more of myself:  in his face, in his mannerisms, in the eyes, the jaw, the paradoxes of his personality--the need for privacy and solitude countered by a hunger for the limelight; the shameless ham and the recluse; the self-effacing servant tripped by false pride.  And, yes, the heart:  caught in that genetic rip-tide that inevitably draws the hearts of the sons to their fathers.  In the end, if you are a son and you are honest with yourself, you simply want your old man’s stamp of approval.  Mothers are easy.  With mothers you just have to show up.  But with fathers you have to somehow earn it; you have to prove yourself—slay a dragon, shoot the Moon, wrestle an alligator.  Ultimately, you want that look, that blue-eyed spark, that nod, that smile, that “well, done, my good and faithful son,” which in his lingo translates to a hearty, “Michael, you’re in great shape for the shape you’re in!”