My Father, Wandering

A large painting used to hang in the living room of my childhood home. The artwork is no longer there, having been carried away to a closet during one of my mother’s more sweeping renovations when my father was still alive and residing in the nursing home. I think of this painting as the one with the dark blue letters over a murky orange background. The painting evokes the pleasure of reading, with the artist giving careful attention to each printed character, as if the curves and forms of the letters themselves are the subject of interest. I’m reminded of printer’s type, rolled in deep blue ink, with a warm background suggestive of a hazy sunset. A wisp of a figure, perhaps a foot high, squeezes between two of the letters, as if having been exploring the stacks in a library, and now, burdened by the weight of all the words, pauses, mouth open with melancholy. At some point in my youth, I became aware that the artist of this painting was my father, J. Rene Gonzales.

I think of my father as someone who wandered. Even after his frequent reassignments in the Army—Arkansas, Louisiana, Maine, North Carolina, and Korea—he continued to move from place to place: Texas, New York City, New Hampshire, Vermont, and several cities in upstate New York, never staying anywhere for long. As he moved about, he broke contact with his Mexican-American family in Austin, Texas, for 25 years, keeping his distance until well after our family settled in Middle Grove, New York. He made very few trips back to his family home, and, toward the end of his life, Alzheimer’s made him so ill he couldn’t travel back. In my attempts to revive and understand him, if only for myself, I started to latch on to my mother’s phrase: he was such a wanderer—a bohemian. People with dementia typically lose their ability to recognize familiar faces and places. They begin to wander or get lost or become confused about their location. This wandering can be dangerous, even deadly. The stress of this risk can weigh down caregivers and families. After my father’s illness, I began to think of his “wandering” with a new, different meaning.

When I was a child, the most distinctive features of my father’s physical appearance were his salt-speckled curly black hair and rich brown eyes. His cheekbones and the bridge of his nose were pronounced, yet not severe. One of his former lovers, a Cornell student in the 1960s, described him as “handsome,” but in a distinctly non-Ivy League way: “intense, artistic, cynical.” At a glance, he stood out. Exotic, interesting. Distinguished, memorable. Not Anglo. In other words, he—and we—didn’t blend in 1970s upstate New York. My mother added, in hushed tones, that my father might be a gypsy. Of course she didn’t mean the historic, real-world Roma peoples. Nor was it used as a slur. Rather, she was evoking a literary romanticization, like the writings of one of her favorite poets, Federico García Lorca. This was the problematic, mythic, and imaginary idea of the gypsy and bohemian—a racialized other—that my parents admired, found useful, and discovered could help them make sense of their place in the world.

Once, when my father was driving, we came upon an old VW Bug that had gone off the road. My father stopped the car and got out to help them. He and one of the passengers were rocking the car, working against the suction of the springtime mud, trying to get it back on the road. As he was doing this, still holding on to the car, suddenly the other passenger jumped back in and they sped off, leaving my father angrily gesticulating.

“What were you thinking?” My mother seemed shocked, sitting in the passenger seat, glaring at my father.

“Well, they deserved it.”

From my place in the backseat, I understood they were referring to my father’s gestures, the arm-waving. A short argument ensued:

“I bring you to upstate New York and can’t have you going about putting curses on people. You’re not supposed to do that.” If she was being facetious, it went over my head.

“Ugh. Look at my shoes.”

“Are you all right?”

________

In the early 19th century, the term “bohemian” began to be applied to a group of young artists who seemed to live outside their own time and place. They moved about without regard to traditional societal boundaries, rejected hard work and thrift, lived by their wits, sought a living as fortune tellers, tricksters, or entertainers. The term “bohemian” in France traditionally had referred to the Roma, thought to have come from Bohemia in Central Europe. Together with the Wandering Jew, the bohemian was often racialized as a dark-skinned “other”: they were outsiders, perhaps even criminals. Meanwhile, artworks and writings began to appear glamourizing this life, even as the bohemian identity came to be associated with lowlifes and forbidden pleasures. By the 1840s, the term “bohemian” was popularly understood—internationally—to refer to people who were wanderers, outsiders, on the brink of success or failure, artistically inclined yet prone to excess and self-destruction. Their choice of a lifestyle on the margins—and their racial and class ambiguity—was seen to be a political and social statement.

The first time I heard my mother call my father a bohemian, I wasn’t sure what she meant, in the way a child might not fully understand a political abstraction like “conservative.” Early on, as I began to notice her repetitions of the phrase, I didn’t understand my father as a bohemian, whatever that was, never mind recognize his choice of lifestyle on the fringes as his antidote to the monotony of middle-class professional life. To be sure, he loved art, striving for respect in his relationships with others. Later in my life, to help me tease out a clearer understanding of my mother’s phrase, my wife suggested I read Elizabeth Wilson’s Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts. To my surprise and curiosity, I found a tension in the bohemian idea as we have received it. Specifically, the bohemian idea is composed of opposites: drinker and abstainer, spendthrift and saver, failure and success. It’s as if the bohemian inhabits only the extreme ends of the spectrum, but not the middle. I want to believe my father was a bohemian: a vagabond, a wanderer, a genius, a shining success, a failure—with all the contradictions. And that he chose this lifestyle as a remedy for the same problem I would struggle with in my own life, the boredom and discomfort of middle-class routine. More telling, though, is that bohemia helped me see more clearly the multiple ways we were outsiders; to see that mainstream, white society didn’t understand my father—and even gazed at our family with suspicion.

When I was about eight years old, bicycle thieves helped themselves to my father’s and my bikes from our garage. My friend Jimmy and I walked the neighborhood, asking, we thought, in an innocent way, whether anyone had seen our bikes. One family, or pair of families, with teenagers a few houses down, beyond the crick and the swamp, took offense to our questions, believing we were accusing them of the theft.

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At first, they came at night. We were sitting watching TV in our living room when an object crashed through our side window. It turned out to be a large glass marble. In the weeks that followed, they came in broad daylight, as if emboldened. Three young men rode by our house, doubling up on two bicycles, and with a slingshot broke another one of our windows—a side window that happened to be next to a large picture window. We saw them do it. In the subsequent days, they rode in menacing circles in front of our house. My father finally had enough and went out to confront them.

“We’d like you to pay for these windows! We saw you do it. End this nonsense now!”

“Don’t give me the evil eye,” K. S. shouted back. “That’s harassing me! You have no proof! I got three men in jail for harassing me!”

This went on, it seemed, for the whole summer. They came back with a pellet gun—an air-powered rifle—shooting from a car, a green amc Gremlin, and hit the picture window, but it didn’t shatter. The boys returned day after day, putting more pellets into the picture window, until four or five spider webs spread through the window, but it didn’t collapse. The metal projectiles may as well have been lightning bolts. For weeks, a throbbing electric current of terror coursed through me, but my parents acted as though the assault were a mere nuisance. They may have been scared, but they didn’t let on. They called the police several times. They called our insurance. The window was replaced. My parents lived their ordinary lives, skipped breakfast every weekday, had to get to work by 9:00 a.m. My mother drove the car to the bus stop in town, took the bus to Albany, and so on. But in the next room, now, my mother was pleading with my father:

“Why did you have to curse him with the evil eye? Why did you confront them? It’s that—I’m worried. Are we so different? Sometimes I wonder why we ever moved here.”

Was my mother just using an Anglo stereotype about Spanish-descended people? I don’t know. The evil eye: a look or a glance capable of inflicting harm, an idea perhaps a thousand years old, even dating to biblical times, ubiquitous throughout Western culture. But in my childhood imagination then, my father, whose difference was powerful, was protecting me.

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Jose Rene Gonzales was born in 1934. He was raised in Austin, Texas, and graduated from Austin High School. Through a connection made by his father, he interned as a page for Texas state representative Obie E. Jones—to my knowledge, his only involvement with formal politics. He took some classes at the University of Texas at Austin but soon left to join the Army, to his father’s absolute dismay. In the Army, he changed his name from Jose to Joe, a young man’s step away from his family toward Anglo conformity. Family disruption has been part of economic migrations in North America for hundreds of years, and historians have noted how Tejanos left Texas in great numbers in the mid-20th century to pursue economic opportunities in the Midwest and California. Even so, to my knowledge, little has been written about Tejanos leaving their families for the Army and then for the Northeast and its communities of outsiders. After my father left the Army, he landed in Ithaca, New York, a small, welcoming city known for Cornell University and its natural beauty. What caused Joe to leave his family in search of something different? We don’t know. But mainstream society’s mistrust of him—or even outright rejection—almost certainly brought about Joe’s embrace of the Northeast and its margins, as well as another name change to Rene. By age 33, this Tejano’s break from his family was nearly complete.

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The artist Erich Mühsam wrote that he once asked a group of artistic companions gathered at the Café des Westens in Berlin before the First World War, “Who amongst us had come to his vocation as an artist without family conflict? It emerged that all of us without a single exception were apostates, had rejected our origins, were wayward sons.” Bohemia was thus a place for recovery from family strife, a location for do-it-yourself therapeutic care and a community center.

Once, at a family reunion I attended in Austin, my uncle commented, “Rene needed the beat of a different drummer. It was like him. That’s how he was.” My uncle seemed to bear no ill will against my father, nor to perceive any slight from my father’s disappearance. I think often about how the Northeast of the United States and, relatedly, its communities of artistic outsiders, provided for my father that different drumbeat. In leaving behind his politically progressive but traditional, middle-class family in Austin, my father disidentified himself as a member of an extended Tejano family and identified instead with a different group of people on the margins—bohemians, although he may not have given himself this name. Nevertheless, my father’s choices match an arguably bohemian cultural pattern, not the “Latino success story,” as his father had accomplished back in Austin with his thriving sewing machine repair business and furniture store: both fledgling nodes of Tejano political power in Austin and symbols of the middle-class respectability he hoped to see his children take on for themselves. Nor is it today’s story of identity politics and reclamation of Chicano pride and solidarity. To be sure, my father’s story of becoming a bohemian is quite different and, true to form, reveals a problem in the core of middle-class stability, the perennial conflict of its tedium and dullness. Yet there was a Tejano tension here, as well, with my grandfather who’d worked so hard to fit in, and his son who eventually walked away from the white society that didn’t accept him.

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The bohemian has always promised a release for the bourgeois, an escape from the weariness of workaday life, though she doesn’t always reliably deliver—regularity being the domain of the bourgeois. The bohemian promised adventure and excitement, while the bourgeois promised stability, regularity, and survival. The bohemian is anti-bourgeois—against the middle class, the townspeople, the materialistic, those primarily interested in commercial and industrial pursuits.

Somehow, the bohemian ideal is strongly connected to what an artist is today. Why is this so? In medieval and Renaissance society, the artist was a respected member of a professional guild, a craftsperson in service to society. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the successful artist was a well-adjusted individual, often socially elevated by proximity to their patrons in the courts of the day. Artists, as skilled craftspeople, sought upward mobility into the middle class, leading to the establishment of professional academies for art, further legitimizing the middle-class status of artists. The artist who led a disordered life was not the norm, nor the ideal. The 19th-century bohemian, however, belonged to an identifiable subculture. Such artists—along with intellectuals, writers, and radicals—tried, in a collective enterprise, to create an alternative world within Western society, one formed by artists who took a critical view of society.

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When Rene arrived in Ithaca, New York, in 1960, for him the Northeast stood for unprecedented freedom. Just out of the Army, he’d come to study architecture at Cornell University. Of the time, the writer Thomas Pynchon, a Cornell alum, remarked there happened to be many students from Latin America in the School of Architecture, noting their parties were regarded as the best around. Yet Rene didn’t make much of his Latino background, a friend recalled. On the campus, Rene would meet Angela Lahs, one of a pair of German artists who together had come to Ithaca from abroad. The two women had both studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin and had ventured to Ithaca, in the United States, seeking not only economic and artistic opportunities but also certainly a new way of life. Rene and Angela fell in love, married, and had a daughter together. A mutual friend recalled Angela preparing canvases that would appear in a regional show in Utica, New York. Their daughter, Olivia, said her mother exhibited work at a local museum called the Upstairs Gallery. Rene, for his part, struggled in the competitive architecture program and eventually left without a degree.

Soon Rene was running a coffee shop on Eddy Street in Ithaca where Richard Fariña used to play. Tom Paxton, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and other folk singers also performed there. I picture Rene waiting on tables, wearing a white apron, taking orders in his notebook, and encouraging customers to read their poetry or display their art there. The name of the coffee shop and its exact location are lost to memory, but it must be said the most important meeting place of bohemia was the café. By participating in café life, one became bohemian. It was the hotspot for journalists and editors, painters and models, actors and directors. Even today modern cafés often display artworks, acting as informal art galleries. The price of admission was but a small cup of coffee, recalled Stefan Zweig, writing about the Viennese cafés of his youth before the First World War. Upon payment, one could sit for hours, talk, write, play cards, receive mail, and go through an unlimited number of newspapers and magazines. Yet on the borders of bohemia, property developers eyed the territory, seeing commercial possibility. Artists and bohemians were the advance guard for the gentrifying forces. Rene and his friends also used to hang out and drink at a bar called the Palms. Rene made runs by car to New York City to buy bagels for the coffee shop, about a five-hour drive on a two-lane road that was considered something of a lifeline for Ithacans and formed a fluid connection between Ithaca and the city.

It was around this time, I suppose, when my father changed his name again, this time from Joe to Rene, his middle name, which to my English-speaking ear sounds more French, or, shall we say, bohème. I don’t know when my father started making art, but I believe Angela inspired him to make art in a more serious way. I also believe the orange painting with the dark blue letters comes from this period.

“It was a time ripe for experimentation,” Olivia said when I asked her about his art. “Doubtless since he was smart and creative, these influences were exciting to him and he would want to be a part of it all.”

________

Once, my mother tried to explain to me the idea of timelessness. I don’t remember when, or how, it came up. It may have been in high school, or at home while on break in college, or in my early 20s: “Your father doesn’t abide by our sense of time,” she said, sipping her cup of tea. “His people dwell among the timeless. He thinks not in terms of hours and days but years and thousands of years. You’ll understand someday.” I later assumed she was talking about a popular but erroneous idea about Native Americans generally—and the Maya specifically: that they are peaceful philosophers, stargazers, calendar keepers. This view of the Maya would be rejected by the 1990s, but my mom had soaked up all the previous myths about the Maya, the sort of ideas she’d read about in magazines and the New York Times. Never mind that historically there were no Maya in the northern regions of Mexico from which my father’s family hailed. Typically, in the notion of “Indian time,” as we Americans have tended to think of it, Mexicans are laid back and loose about time: it doesn’t matter if we’re late. Or, more simply, Mexicans are usually late. This view, let me say firmly, is false. As I write today, I recognize the subtle racism that my parents were steeped in and that coursed through our family life. But this difference—or regular claiming of difference—located us firmly in bohemia.

My mother told a story about a ski trip she and my dad made by car, years before I was born. I imagine through the windshield a snowy Vermont landscape. The windshield wipers pulse in an anxious rhythm. My father is driving the car, my mother gingerly holding a paper cup of coffee. They were young: she in her late 20s, he in his early 30s. Her long, straight blonde hair spills out from beneath a winter cap with a tassel. Their downhill ski equipment, piled in the back seat, juts up behind them.

“Rene, stop the car.” She grasps her temple.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m seeing something. Flashing lights. Stop the car.”

But there were no flashing lights out there, on the road. At least, not yet.

________

When my mother said my father was a bohemian, my first reaction was to think he was a failure or a fraud. He painted and made drawings but never exhibited. He took artistic photos but never published. He subsisted on a variety of low-paying jobs with minimal responsibility. He took some college courses but never completed a degree. He often drank to excess, until, when I was 12, in a remarkable transformation, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and proudly talked about it with everyone. He reinvented himself.

This specter of failure—it haunts the bohemian, tangled though this idea may be. By nature, the bohemian leaves us on edge, wondering if the current effort will be a great success or a pathetic failure. The bohemian by extension is made up of contradictory qualities and themes: Sometimes he is a wannabe genius without talent, a lazy person, a loser, squandering his life and time away under the delusion that his time will come. Other times he emerges from malaise as a true genius. Thus the idea—or myth, more precisely—of the bohemian consists of opposites: genius and fraud, puritan and addict, workaholic and wastrel.

Furthermore, our ideas about artistic failure are linked, culturally, to the art market. With industrialization in the late 1700s, market relations grew up alongside old systems of artistic patronage. Where before artists had been commissioned or given pensions by patrons and the academy, they now could sell their artworks directly to buyers in the art market. This transformation meant the artists were liberated from wealthy, aristocratic patrons and their biases, only to become dependent on the growing middle-class culture and its tastes.

Certainly, the market wasn’t friendly to every aspirant. Artists cultivated the idea that, if the artist didn’t succeed, it was the fault of society and not the artist. Pushed to an extreme, to succeed was to fail and vice versa. The artist personally was becoming an increasingly symbolic figure, a position untenable for many, while a select few reaped great fame and riches. At the same time, artists increasingly saw the market as amoral—an indifferent judge of an artist’s merit. If the development of consumer capitalism brought a growing middle class and professional work and routine, it also gave birth to a new mass culture, favoring thrift and hard work. It also brought about such wonders as department stores offering manufactured goods for sale as material rewards. But the bohemians saw these prizes as increasingly similar, wearisome, and inauthentic. Capital itself was proving to have no morality nor, arguably, any logic at all. I can begin to understand my father’s laid-back creative manner—as opposed to a strict discipline, which I never observed. This didn’t mean failure. It meant his relaxed approach to art-making was part of an ethos of living life: not driving for success at full throttle but creating art when the spirit moved him, and only wanting to be fully loved.

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Rene moved again, this time to New York City, in 1967, spending a couple of years working and living in the City of Dreams during an innovative time. His relationship and marriage with Angela lasted only a few years. Rene abandoned Angela and their daughter and had an affair with a woman I’ll call Teresa Sutton. From Ithaca, Rene and Teresa traveled to New York City together after Teresa’s graduation from Cornell. While there, both of them worked on an off-Broadway production Teresa described as “a precursor to Hair.” My mother mentioned Rene had worked on an off-Broadway production with Morgan Freeman, thus this production may have been 1967’s The Nigger Lovers, which, despite the abrasive title, was a critically acclaimed play about the Freedom Riders and the early civil rights movement. The contemporaneous Hair debuted off-Broadway in October 1967.

Rene and Teresa rented an apartment on Staten Island, where the rent was cheap and they could park on the street and have more space. Rene worked as clerk-of-the-works on large construction projects in the city; meanwhile, in the evenings, his construction and carpentry skills were appreciated on the theater set. Teresa worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. In the early 1960s, Warhol’s Factory gained a reputation for being open to all comers. At its late-night dance parties, hustlers and drag queens encountered the New York art world’s literati. My father would later claim to have gone to Warhol parties at the Factory, but Teresa denied any memory of that. However, she said, they may have gone to parties where there was a Warhol groupie or two.

After less than two years, Teresa recalled, the relationship soured, and she left him. So Rene moved again. I would next trace him to a ski resort in New Hampshire, where he was working at a summer theater program, a place to which, presumably, he’d come through his New York theater connections. Shortly thereafter, he would turn up in Stowe, Vermont, also working for a theater program, and, where, in 1968, he would meet my mother, Coral Crosman. In later years, my mother and father often returned to Greenwich Village to visit. My mother used to tell a story to illustrate how well-known my father was in and around the Village. She’d be walking the streets with him, and they’d be stopped repeatedly by passersby, “Rene, how are you? Where’ve you been?”

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In 1977, my parents bought an old farmhouse in upstate New York, in the middle of nowhere. It dates at least to the early 1800s, before which point the records begin to get difficult to trace, my mother later attested, because of shifting property lines and the obscurity of early American handwriting. Among our neighbors were the writer Joseph Bruchac and the poet Kit Hathaway. Bruchac would establish himself by writing compelling books for young people about Native Americans. Our families hung out some at parties, and I’d get together with his son, Jesse, who was my age. Jesse introduced me to the rock band Queen; he had their records “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “We Will Rock You,” which to me, at age six, sounded absolutely like the devil, boisterous and exalting. The Bruchacs, as I recall, were also fanatical about karate; Joe had a black belt in karate and gave a demonstration at our elementary school. Jesse was also learning karate and advancing confidently. I see this story, and everything about the Bruchacs, really, as an example of our middle-class attempts to feel a little less ordinary, more international, and thus, maybe, more bohemian. After I’d spent a day playing at Jesse’s house, Joe gave me a ride home in his pickup truck, with Jesse and me holding on to a thick rope for security, the pickup bed buckling on the curves, the wind buffeting our hair.

We didn’t truly live in the middle of nowhere. Middle Grove, our hamlet, was located a few miles from Saratoga Springs, a city of predominantly Republican politics, which also happened to boast an arts community surrounding Skidmore College and its strong arts program, a summer resort atmosphere, artists taking advantage of Café Lena, the Yaddo artists’ colony, the Saratoga Track (where they raced horses), and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (spac). To the extent that we were bohemians, living on the fringes of Saratoga, we were dependent on a version of middle-class life that valued art. Our proximity to the larger cities of Albany, Schenectady, and Troy, plus the chance to make vacation trips further afield, connected us to a wider world. We were a short bike ride from a small museum called Petrified Sea Gardens, whose displays reminded us our area once lay at the bottom of the sea.

My father brought several of his paintings with him when we moved into this new house. Some of them I caught a glimpse of; others I would only learn about years later. Then, the house didn’t need a lot of repairs, but by the end of the 1980s, when I was in high school and about to leave for college, it seemed in dire need. The carpet on the stairs was torn and ragged. The siding was peeling. What little insulation we had barely kept out the winter cold. The chipboard interior paneling had become old and unfashionable.

My mother published a book of poetry, Journey to Middle Grove, which, she claimed playfully, sold quickly in our local area because of its title. In summer, we were just a few miles’ bike ride to the Sheep Dip and other swimming holes on the Kayaderosseras Creek, which cooled our bodies and sustained our souls. With these details—the creaky house, the paintings in the closets, the self-published books of poetry on the shelves, the visits to nearby swimming holes—we created our own version of bohemia.

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In Middle Grove, we lived a 15-minute drive from the town bars, along a winding and hilly country road. I spent a lot of weekends with my father in bars. My drinks were Shirley Temples, his were Scotch. My father drove the car while I sat in the passenger seat, the car swerving around corners, drifting onto the shoulder, and jerking back into the lane. He held the wheel in the straightaways, and then began to sway. His eyelids drooped, and his head dropped down, and then snapped to attention. I imagined how I would grab the steering wheel, kick my leg over, and stab the brake. I practiced this maneuver in my head, over and over.

He went to the bar, I suppose, for the same reasons so many people do: the impromptu social scene, the escape, the pleasure. When my mother asked my father to take me for a Saturday afternoon, he brought me to a bar. I’d glamorize it too much if I said bar-going was his only way back to bohemia. It wasn’t that. Perhaps he went to the bars because he couldn’t find pleasure doing “normal” Saturday things like lawn care or home maintenance. He had companions and camaraderie at the bar. All his responsibilities faded away. His settled but tedious life was forgotten. He might even forget fatherhood.

But also, as I would later learn, he suffered from an illness that made his body demand drink. Perhaps he was looking for something he couldn’t find, and although he once may have been able to find it in a bar, he gradually may have reached the awareness he no longer could. If bohemia was such an ideal way of life, why did it require excess and self-destruction? As I learned from my father, bohemia could break down.

As society industrialized with clockwork regularity, it created a niche for the ragtag bohemian to step forward, to propose a release. The Romantic poet Lord Byron became an aristocratic outlaw, or an artist-as-outlaw, a man doomed to self-destruction as well as fated for greatness. He fascinated the public—the bourgeois included—in the early 19th century as he questioned the basic tenets of English morality both in his writing and in his very public life. The bourgeois may have been committed to an orderly existence, but the intrigues of the Romantics fascinated them and kept their orderly lives bearable.

Even so, many of the bohemians who succeeded the Romantics succumbed to their own tragedies, giving way to their own excess, as if the price of escape was one’s own life. Stories of bohemian excess and self-destruction would repeat themselves well into the rock-and-roll era, in the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse. Under the impression that bohemianism meant getting drunk or high together all the time, people senselessly reenacted old patterns, and the stories persisted. Decadence and careening toward self-destruction had become a lifestyle—and near-failure or failure itself a signal accomplishment. Yet the stories also contradicted the myth of failure, such as in tales of the vaunting greatness of Andy Warhol. According to legend, with all its contradictions, bohemians could as easily be excessive workaholics, misers, or teetotalers.

When I was 12, I visited my father in rehab. A single-car accident and a charge of driving while intoxicated had led him there. I sat on the campus grounds with my parents and my sister, and a friend of my father’s from Ithaca from the 1960s, Phil, who was in rehab at the same time. Flower gardens and gently swaying pine trees surrounded us as clouds billowed across the sky. It was a comfortable day in late July. We ate picnic food: hamburgers from the grill with relish and ketchup, baked beans, and coleslaw. My father seemed so calm then. He was 49, healthy and relaxed. He was sober. His hair was shiny black, his face clean shaven, his eyes alert and attentive, and his body in good shape, as if he’d been exercising. This was the miracle I saw. He was a changed man. Sober. In my mind, it was as if he’d been through a heroic six-week battle against alcohol and won.

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In my father’s room, I came across a collection of figural drawings—nudes—in a sketch pad. I was about eight years old. The drawings were done in pen and pencil. There were studies of arms and legs in isolation. Figures in recline. Faces in relaxation and ecstasy. Another time, I rummaged through his drawer, finding a lens cap for a 35 mm camera and the drawing of a knee, tenderly executed, only the knee. He kept in his room two paintings on panel, each about four feet high and two-and-a-half feet wide, with black, white, and gray letters on a monochrome background—pieces related in style to the one with dark blue letters over a murky orange background. Shortly after we moved into the old farmhouse in Middle Grove, he began decorating. He brought home two large peanut sacks made of burlap—each sack was perhaps four feet high and three-and-a-half feet wide. They had different messages printed on them in large block type: “Don’t crush, fold, spindle, or mutilate.” “Don’t tread on me.” He built wooden frames inside these sacks and hung them on the living room wall, and we had artwork in the vein of Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages. The house was a center hall colonial, with the kitchen and the living room on either side of the main hall and stairs leading up. In the center hall, he hung a painting of an eagle, perched on a branch over a background of the red-and-white stripes of an American flag. I’m not sure if the message was patriotic, ironic, or deliberately ambiguous. I never saw him make any of these paintings. He brought them with him, presumably from Ithaca and New York City, likely having made them in the 1960s and early 70s. In Middle Grove, he was always making sculptures from found objects and displaying them around the house: scraps of iron and steel, hooks and bolts, levers and gears, springs and wires. He often collected these during trips to the town dump.

One day, my father visited the town dump and brought home the frame of a go-kart. It had a rusted metal frame; a torn, black vinyl-upholstered seat; and just the two rear wheels, the tires flat. Working together, my father, our neighbor, his son (my friend), and I added front wheels from my old bicycle, new rear tires, an engine from a lawn mower, an accelerator, and a brake pedal, and we had a car that children could drive. As a 10 year old, I was fascinated by this feat of thrift and renewal. In the mind of a child, it was transcendent.

My father’s artistic output may seem rather small, but there were some bohemians who lived for only the lifestyle. Their artistic output was rather small. What mattered was that we got together with our neighbors and reconstituted what we found at the dump, showing off our work, going for a high-speed spin around the front yard in that go-kart, mud flipping from those front tires.

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In the 1800s, artists began making new art that needed to exist and resonate simultaneously on the planes of the economic, the political, the artistic, and the personal. The artists acted out the difficulty and tension of doing so in their way of life: their lifestyle as outsiders was the statement, their marginal existence their means of critique. Artists magnified the mythic story even more when they began to depict it and write about it, typically in memoirs and reminiscences. Even as I write, I find myself frequently stuck, knowing, but unsure exactly how, that my father’s existence as a bohemian extended beyond the fact he didn’t have a bank account—though my mother did. Or that the home where I spent the first five years of my life had no running water, except for the leaky roof.

Such a house—on the fringes, in the country, beyond suburbia—may seem to represent a place for the abject poor, the failures, the marginal, the down-and-out. But my mother and father saw a bohemian tinge in it. It was a choice—a glamorous, romantic, artistic one. It allowed my mother to pursue her creative writing and my father to purposefully wander. My parents, like many other Americans, collaborated on making legendary a particular version of the artist: the bohemian outsider whose marginal lifestyle was an artistic statement in its own right, a struggle against unfulfilled lives ruled by the clock, in opposition to the unfairness and inequality in the world.

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My father was always there to pick me up from soccer practice, my afterschool job, or evening jazz band rehearsals. He wasn’t laid-back and loose about time.

Never in my experience was he late. He was like a machine, so reliably punctual I took it for granted. In fact, he was early—early to develop Alzheimer’s at age 54. When the phone rang, I thought it might be Mom with news about Dad. When I was in my mid-20s, we didn’t talk on the phone much—usually we wrote letters. When I answered, and it was Mom,

I joked about my being another psychic in our family.

On that Vermont ski trip, when my parents were young. Dad pulling the car over, stopping, Mom recovering at the roadside, then, getting underway again, only to find, 20 minutes later, on the way to the ski resort, one OC—“out-of-control trajectory,” Mom said, explaining, as she put it, Dad’s initialism. “Horrible car wreck, surrounded by police cruisers with their lights.” Dad figured they would have put themselves in the path of that OC if the flashing lights hadn’t occurred in Mom’s vision, and he hadn’t pulled over—early.

“I can’t put up with it anymore,” Mom said, her voice singeing over the line. I was in my Chicago studio apartment, on the phone. “He’s a big man,” she continued. “Still very strong. He struggled with me. Tried to hit me. I can’t have him hit me. Of course it’s not him. It’s the disease. I’m just so sorry you were too young, you never got to see him as he truly was. I signed the paperwork for him to be admitted to Fort Hudson.”

Fort Hudson, I knew, was the facility for long-term dementia care. Mom had talked about this, that Dad would need to go there someday. Now it was happening. She was increasingly afraid he might wander off and get lost, despite the locks she kept on the outsides of the doors. He was 63 years old; I was 25. My chest throbbed with hurt, and I was ashamed of my reaction. I was torn because I wanted to respect my mother and wanted her to be safe. But I kept thinking: Surely it must be too early. Timelessness. Indian time. He thinks not in terms of hours and days, but years and thousands of years. Surely in Mayan time, gypsy time, bohemian time, he’s too early.

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Bohemia—mere set of ideas though it may be—helped me understand my father and his choices: wanderer, outsider, artist. His lifestyle itself was his art. But if the anchor of bohemia was the café, in my father’s life, it devolved into something altogether different. When I was a child, we didn’t go from café to café; we went from bar to bar. He pressed nearer to his own self-destruction and barely pulled out of it.

Certainly, the bohemian and bourgeois desire and need each other; it’s a love–hate relationship because the former seeks to make society unstable. Since the bourgeois wants order, they repel each other and return to a stasis at a distance. After my father came home from rehab, he swung to the opposite pole. I can picture my mother and father in a sort of modern dance: she, the dutiful state worker, rising at 4:00 a.m. to write fiction; he, now reinvented as the steady one, toeing the line for his job of the moment, escaping into the talk at his weekly AA meetings.

When I think of my mother in those days, I believe she still saw him with a bohemian tinge. I can hear her dropping key words: “He was such a wanderer—a bohemian. You didn’t know him as he truly was.” For her, these words were terms of endearment, affection, respect, acceptance, and love. I can see the warmth of her eyes, the comfort and sense of peace in her face when she talked about him. “He was trying to do something different and meaningful with his life, and he succeeded. People loved him.”

After he began showing signs of Alzheimer’s, he started volunteering as an aide for a memory care facility. This was to be his new café. In their regular arts and crafts projects, his art-making resumed. I remember a life-size, black, ceramic rabbit with a dazzling, uniform glaze. A cut-out paper turkey traced from his hand. A collage of celebrity photographs and headlines clipped from a magazine and pasted on construction paper. He may have seemed like another unfortunate senior with dementia, but actually he was a traveling fortune-teller, a magician, an entertainer with a few tricks up his sleeve. This was my father, the bohemian who volunteered at the memory care facility, to help people with Alzheimer’s see an alternative way forward. It may not have been important for him to see these changes he was going through and to frame them as bohemian, but it mattered to us.

I see, years after my father has gone, on a living room side table in Middle Grove, his black ceramic rabbit: its tall, round-tipped ears, its plump body, its shimmering opal glaze, its cockeyed almost-smirk of an expression. I’m urgently drawn to it. I pick it up, turning it around and upside down, because I’m looking for my father’s signature. On the underside, there’s nothing more than a chalky softness like bone. My eyes search the unglazed bottom, asking it to tell me more.