Talking to my intro to journalism class about James Frey and his fungible definition of “memoir” (stuff that I remember that may not have actually happened, as least to me) has been interesting. A few of my students were Frey fans who felt betrayed by the Smoking Gun revelations and were now disinclined to read future works by him. And most assumed that making up stuff that you pass off as true was new under the sun.

How then explain Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, in which a nameless narrator describes events that occurred when Defoe was five years old? And presents himself as a grown merchant and Londoner (a character much like the author’s uncle it turns out)? Journalism was just being born then, and Defoe was one of the people birthing it, and we can imagine from what we know of his impertinent behavior that he probably enjoyed passing something off as fact that was fiction — albeit well-researched, believable fiction about real events.

Similarly, Mark Twain’s essay “A Private History of a Campaign That Failed” recounts the author’s less-than-heroic stint of military duty (he “fought” for the Confederacy in Missouri for a few weeks near the beginning of the Civil War). The characters and particulars of geography are factual but the story’s climax, in which Twain and his fellow Rangers shoot and kill a man who may or not have been a Union scout, is almost certainly fiction. He added the detail over time, both to give the story more heft and to clarify his opposition to war.

“I liked this story before you told me that the killing might not be real,” one of my students said. “I don’t know how I feel about it now.”

That’s a good place to start.

Watching James Frey get taken to the woodshed by Oprah last night, I thought of Johnny Cash. Not that the memoirist cum fabulist Frey is as good a writer as Cash was (seriously, who has a heart big enough to write a song like Big River? or enough cold water in their veins to attempt I Walk the Line?). But Cash rose to fame (and stays there, selling better than ever now that he’s dead) by extrapolating from his own rather modest brushes with the law. Folsom Prison Blues was inspired by a movie he saw when he was in the Army, though he got popped for pills and general drunkeness many times later on. But he did not tell people he spent years in prison; when they asked he told them the truth.

Johnny Cash was all about the truth, right up to the end. While Frey explained to Oprah how his hours in a local jail magically turned into months thusly: “I think part of what happened with a number of things in the book is when you go through an experience like the one I went through, you develop different coping mechanisms, and I think one of the coping mechanisms I developed was sort of this image of myself that was probably greater than—not probably, it was greater than I actually was.”

Whatever.

Merle Haggard actually did do some hard time; he was busted trying to break into a restaurant when it was open. (As they say in law enforcement, We don’t get the smart ones.) He saw Cash perform while incarcerated at San Quentin and resolved to follow his example. He went on to write such great prison songs as Mama Tried — “I turned 21 in prison/Doing life without parole/No one could steer me right/But mama tried” — not because he was doing life but because he could empathize. He knew, like Cash, that there but for the grace of God went him to the gas chamber.

Then there was that other great country singer, Dusty Dostoevski.

One thing I haven’t heard much in the Frey fracas is how some of this might have been avoided if he had stayed with the program. Dissing AA at every opportunity, the author has managed to avoid the principles of humility that might have kept him out of this mess. Every drunk and junkie I know wants to glorify their past but they’re afraid of what their sponsor might say. Those people are tougher than Oprah.

And of course, Frey would have had to publish his book anonymously, something that must sound pretty good to him right about now.

On the way out to California last week, standing in the scrum of passengers at the gate, waiting to board the fully committed Jet Blue flight to Oakland, a guy asked my son to hand him a set of headphones. Adam was staring into the middle distance, knackered by lack of sleep, life, circumstance. He didn’t hear the guy, a New Yorker with gray curling hair who bore a more than passing resemblance to Lou Reed. A woman grabbed some headphones from the bin and passed them to him and he said, to me, not realizing I was his father, “I want some of the drugs he’s on.”

Well, no, Lou. You don’t. Over the last five years Adam has been prescribed a host of medication meant to address his depression, his anxiety, his anger, his concentration…and there have been times that I suspected that they were as much the problem as the cure. One of the things I hoped to do on my visit was visit with the doctor who was currently doing the prescribing and see if there might be some adjustments that could be made.

The doctor was better than others I had met. He seemed to listen when my son talked and was open to my concerns. True, there was a moment when, listening to Adam, I thought he might press a button under his desk, summoning hidden white-jacketed attendants. But who could blame him? Maybe he could lock me up while he was at it. But instead he decided to try something slightly different, and meet again in a few weeks time. I have never thought medication alone was the cure for anything and looking at the doctor’s computer screen, on which the history of my son’s past prescriptions looked longer than the list of departing flights at JFK, only confirmed that belief.

Standing outside the hospital pharmacy, waiting for Adam to fill his latest prescription, I stared at the Chinese restaurant across the street and wrote a haiku:

Five Happiness has
Take out menu — which one are
We to try this time?

I don’t know what your idea of hell is but a trailer park in the middle of the desert is one of mine. Not that I have anything against trailers (though I wouldn’t want to live in one) or deserts (ditto). But the trailer park in Barstow where my father died ten days ago was faceless; in the times I visited I saw a live person maybe twice, despite the fact there were cars parked outside, TV antennas. People didn’t go there to live, it always seemed to me. They went there to die.

Barstow itself is like the last outpost before Armageddon. The only visible business is the Borax salt mines outside of town and the series of chain hotels, restaurants and retail stores that have popped up there since I last visited, in 1999. Today you can get a cappuccino at the drive-thru Starbucks in Barstow and buy a wallet at the Coach store outside of town. The old hotels, the historic Route 66 places with burning-out neon signs that read HO or TEL at night, with arrows pointing toward nothing, are dying too. Many of them were boarded up with no For Sale sign. The owners, I presume, are far beyond hope.

I think my father must have been in the same state when he died. He had systematically burned almost every bridge between him and other people over the years, and when his second wife died a year and a half ago, everyone figured it was just a matter of time. Like everything else. Given the ailments he suffered over the years — a collapsed lung, a stroke, two kinds of cancer, emphysema, diabetes et al — it’s amazing he lasted until he was 81.

He was cremated without ceremony. There was a will from which I had been excluded. Not that I had expected anything (I was amazed to find that they had saved some money and that the trailer was worth something) but my older brother and sister, who had to put up with far more of his grief than I did, surely deserved something for their troubles. They were with him in the end there, when no one wanted to be. I had no idea how easy it was to insult someone from the grave.

The first night I was there I awoke in the middle of the night and wrote myself a note: “You expect nothing and you get less.” I spent the next day helping clean out his trailer. Among his possessions I was offered a guitar, a Civil War era sword, some unpublished manuscripts of his and some pictures of my brothers and sisters. I took the photos and left.

My older brother Brian was down in Barstow last week, dealing with my ailing father, someone who gave his children, collectively, nothing. After my parents broke up, when I was about ten, Brian went to live with him. This was good and bad, good because he and my mother were not getting along, bad because, as Brian said last week, “That first summer I thought that Dad really loved me. By the end of the summer I realized that he didn’t love anybody.”

That’s a tough nut to crack when you are 14. I was about 30 before I came to the same realization and am stilll grappling with the ramifications. It does explain a lot, though, including why no one wants to deal with Dad right now. My older sister is down there now, probably counting the days until she can go. And wondering why I’m not there to help her.

Which is, of course, a longer story. I told Brian that if he represents one extreme in the spectrum of how to deal with my father — answering cruelty with compassion — and younger brother Ethan is the other (die already), I’m like Switzerland. Which as we know makes a mean cuckoo clock.

But in the broken email threads we siblings have had re Pop I have explained that my son is job number one right now. He seems to have lost a lot of coping strategies and I am trying to get him up to speed. Fortunately for him, an absent & sometimes hostile father has compelled me to act differently with my own son.

He was having trouble with his iPod, said it wouldn’t charge. I plugged it into the Bose speaker my wife gave me for Christmas, which is sitting right next to the bed. It seemed to be charging when I went to sleep the other night — and once it was fully charged, at about one am, it began to play VERY LOUDLY. Before I turned it off I looked at the screen; it was “Nihilsim” by Rancid.

Or the other way around.