Pictures of You: Seth Fischer

“Smurfs,” by Seth Fischer

 

Sometime in 1983, a rogue photographer caught me covering my father with tiny plastic Smurfs. This transgression was so incredible to me when I made the photo album—by the looks of the tortured D’Nealian cursive, probably eight years later—that I wrote “I can’t believe dad let me” right below the photo.

It’s no surprise I couldn’t believe it. Dad is no fan of being the butt of shenanigans. Sure, he’ll put napkins on his head and call it a hat with the best of them, and when I was little, he was always down for a tickle war (as long as he won), but you should see the fight he puts up when my younger sister tries to boop his nose.

Really, though, what’s important is that this was not a good time in any of our lives: my parents were separating, my mom was mid-job search, my dad was up for tenure. I still hear the fights in that house sometimes, all these years later; because of the heating vents, I heard every word. Soon, I’d be bouncing back and forth between their houses, moving more than an Army brat, never feeling like I had a real home until, at the age of 15, I told my Dad I wouldn’t be moving anymore, the same year his parents died, his best friend committed suicide, and he had twins.

I broke his heart that year.

But back then, in 1983, these were Smurfs, and I was three or four, and maybe this gave me a special sort of power. My mom and dad, research psychologists who studied how children grow up, conceived me on a post-doc in Geneva in the late 70’s, when Smurfs were a huge deal in the French-speaking world. My parents were quite the trendsetters, bringing back Smurf books with them to show their friends before the TV show hit the US. They brought me back too, still in the oven, ready to be read to as soon as I popped out.

Over and over, with a look of complete glee, Dad has told me that when he thinks of Smurfs, he thinks of me.

Smurfs are kind of fucked up, or so I learned in college. I can’t exactly remember why. I remember reading they were fascist or communist or racist or anti-Semitic or something.  When I Google it now, the Internet seems to have written most of these complaints off as humorless, because, well, in a lot of ways, they are. But no matter how I spin it in my mind, it can’t be good, all those men, and so few women, and all those archetypes, and why were they blue? One of them is always blowing up things with bombs. And there was a feral one. And Smurfette, the only woman of reproductive age, was created by the main bad guy, Gargamel, and then Papa Smurf has to turn her hair from brunette to blond to make her a “real Smurf.” And then there’s that book where one of them turns black and loses his intelligence and starts biting people?

In academia, the word for all this is problematic.

In college, I marked it off as another way my parents, who, as developmental child psychologists, should have been perfect, had failed me. Are Smurfs really the sort of thing parents should be sharing with their newborn son?

I went home recently to spend some time with dad, and we were sitting at the kitchen table at his house in Boston. I’m proud of my dad. He’s done good work for the world, fought the standardized test industry, improved education for millions of people by working with governments and schools, learned the ins and outs of neuroscience and implemented it into teacher trainings—I could go on for pages. The world is a better place because he’s in it.

Of course, I wasn’t talking to him about any of that. I was talking to him about me. I’m in trouble financially. No one wants to become their parents, so I avoided psychology, and I work in the world of writing and editing. But I’m still in academia, like him, and here I was, wishing I could be more like him, a tenured professor.  All I wanted was to know where my next check was coming from. All I wanted was some security. By the time he was my age, my dad owned two properties.

I’m 35. I own a bicycle and a laptop.

He’d cooked his trademark delicious French toast. For health reasons, he now has to use gluten-free bread, but we made do. I ranted at him about the university system, how there is no longer really any such thing as tenure, how little security I have. He’s lost a few inches and some hair, but his hugs are the same warm cocoons as ever. “It’s a different world,” he said. We were trapped inside because of snow, snow that seems like it will never stop, even now, months later. So I told him about my finances, about student loan fiascos, about the relentless slog I see in front of me, about how I see no way out. About how tired I am. About how impossible the world has become.

He’ll be retiring soon.

“I’ve seen what my students go through after they graduate,” he said. “If I were you, I’d be really angry.”

I wasn’t expecting empathy from him, mostly because I felt like I was whining. But there I was, getting empathy. In my writing classes, I teach that the best writing is all about empathy, the very thing I thought my parents lacked when they divorced, what they should have known because of their trade.

My parents loved the Smurfs because they loved me, and anyway, the books were in French, a language they weren’t exactly fluent in. Really, who was lacking empathy? The Smurfs were a symbol of a future they were ecstatic about, my future. A future that is, at the moment, a little less than certain.

But in 1983, when I covered my father in merchandising, it didn’t matter that the Smurfs might be fascist or misogynist or racist or something. It didn’t yet matter all the ways we would someday fail each other. What mattered was that a nearly 40-year old man was covered in Smurfs, with an extremely amused look on his face, and his son was very proud to be the reason for that.

 

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Seth’s writing has appeared in Best Sex Writing, PANK, The Rumpus, Guernica, Gertrude, and elsewhere, and it has been listed as notable in The Best American Essays. He’s also been awarded fellowships by The Jentel Artist Residency Program and the Lambda Literary Foundation, and he teaches at Antioch University Los Angeles and Writing Workshops Los Angeles. He just finished a draft of a novel that features both goblins and Hello Dolly, and he’s now going back to writing his memoir about what it was like to be raised by four child psychologists.