A Freak Accident Brought Me Closer to My Domineering Dad
One summer in my early 20s, my dad’s ‘brilliant idea’ quite literally set us both on fire—and changed our relationship forever.
Over the summer, we launched The Personals, a new series of essays about smaller — but still largely impactful — moments. This latest one from writer and comedian Ivy Eisenberg is an absolute delight. We felt like we were right beside Ivy as she tried to dodge her father and vie for his approval all at once. Check it out or listen to Ivy read it aloud in her own voice by clicking play below and on our podcast Narratively Out Loud (where you can listen to lots of our past stories read aloud!).
Decades before GPS, my dad had the uncanny ability to hunt me down in his forest green Chevy wagon at the precise moment I was doing something questionable. I’d be engaged in some angsty teen behavior, like smoking a cigarette on my friend’s stoop or making out with a guy down the street. I’d look up and see the high beams of the wagon and my dad’s big head jutting out over the steering wheel, his shoulders hunched forward and his eyes squinting as he surveilled the surroundings like a police officer on the beat.
“Uh-oh, Ivy — here comes Lefty Louie,” one of my friends would say. My dad had a thick New York accent, which made him sound like a gangster from the 1940s, and he was especially gruff when he talked to my male friends, usually just grunting rather than engaging in intelligible conversation. From the time I had my first boyfriend at 15 years old, my dad would challenge every boy I brought home to a game of chess. Louis Eisenberg didn’t want any mollycoddle who couldn’t hold his own on a chessboard — or a basketball court for that matter — near any one of his four daughters. We all idolized Dad, constantly vying for his attention and approval. In response to any story we told, he would say “You shoulda done this” or, “Ya did the right thing.” We were always either 100 percent right or 100 percent wrong, and Dad’s adjudication was final.
One summer evening when I was 16 or so, I was fooling around in the back seat of one of my guy friends’ car with another of our crew. There was no way I would be going all the way with him. It was just a little necking among pals. He was an oily dude with flaccid white skin and frizzy ’70s-style tufts of hair decorating the sides of his face.
All of a sudden, another of our guy friends said to us through the car window — there was a gaggle of us hanging out on the block across from Becky’s house — “Hey Ivy, I think your dad just passed by.”
The next time Dad circled the block with the wagon, he found me walking toward the corner, headed home. He assumed — without proof! — that it was me in that back seat. How would he know that? I mean, it may have looked suspicious for me to be on the same side of the street as my male friends and only 100 feet past them, but my slutting around could not be confirmed. I denied it. I claimed that I was on my girlfriend’s stoop the whole time. Dad screamed at me the entire way back to the house, which was luckily right on the next block.
I stayed away from our house during those high school years, as much as I could, even fleeing our home in Far Rockaway, Queens, during summers to work at sleepaway camps and hotels. My parents thought the worst. It didn’t help that my two older sisters were well-behaved, studious and into more wholesome extracurriculars. My oldest sister was racking up honors as a mathematics major in college and volunteering for social action projects on campus. My next oldest sister got a scholarship for voice lessons and was studying opera. Both were thriving at local tuition-free universities.
But me? I was the only one of the siblings who smoked cigarettes, thanks to an addiction I developed when I was 15 after spending a summer as a camp counselor at a resort hotel.
I was sullen and distant. I missed family gatherings to hang out with friends, listened to rock music and stayed up until 1 a.m. every night watching The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson while finishing my homework. I missed as many days of school as I could without failing. I did manage to get decent grades though, and except for a bit of experimenting, I rarely even drank or did drugs. Among my friend group, I was actually the responsible one who made sure the other girls got home safely. But my parents had no clue about that.
The summer after I graduated high school, I went by bus to spend a week with my friend and her mom at a hotel in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. One evening, I was in the woods, off the side of the road, smoking pot out of a flute mouthpiece with a cute and very resourceful musician (one of those rare times 😉). Through the trees in the night air, I saw a station wagon drive by — we were four hours from my house, mind you — and I thought, “It must be the weed. There is no way my dad would go this far to track me down.” Was I imagining it? Either way, the marijuana made me paranoid and I raced back to my friend’s hotel room — arriving just one minute before Dad knocked on the door. Somehow, Dad had sniffed trouble all the way back in Far Rockaway, and decided to pick me up a day early to take me home.
It took a miserable year of commuting to the tuition-free Queens College while living at home for me to convince my parents to let me go away for school. Once I was finally allowed, I fled to Fredonia State University, the absolute farthest of the New York State public universities from Far Rockaway. After college graduation, I spent a year back in my parents’ house, humiliatingly unable to find a teaching job and suffering the indignation of having to listen to their advice on what I should be doing. Was some of it reasonable? In all likelihood it was, but I was craving “Ya did the right thing” and not, “You shoulda done that.”
The following summer, in 1979, I was headed to work at a sleepaway camp and then off to grad school. Dad offered me mom’s old Malibu Classic sedan to take to camp. This was great. As I would have my own wheels, there would be no excuse for Dad to drive by my remote location in his station wagon at an inopportune moment (or at least he likely wouldn’t find me if he tried).
The tricky thing about having a car that year, though, was that from May through July there was a national gas shortage. You had to go to the gas station two hours in advance and wait in a line 50 cars deep for gas — assuming it was your “day.” There would be “odd days” and “even days” depending on your license plate number. On the day I was to leave for the summer, I did not have enough gas to get to camp, and I was under a time crunch to get there.
“I’ll siphon the gas from my car to yours,” Dad offered.
Siphoning gas from one car to put in another was all the rage then — the phrase “siphoning gas” had become common parlance throughout the country. We were in the narrow driveway that we shared with our neighbors, and Dad began siphoning the gas into a bucket. Drip, drip, drip. It was going slowly. Then, he got an idea.
“If I hook up my electric drill to this, it will act like a pump and the gas will come out more quickly.”
I could see he was very proud of this brilliant invention, perhaps fantasizing about a new business endeavor.
“Ivy, hold the bucket,” Dad said, excitedly.
Dad hooked up the drill. For 60 seconds, it worked perfectly, like a well-oiled machine. Then “whoosh!” Suddenly, a flame burst forth from the drill, igniting the bucket, dad’s trousers and my jeans. I dropped the bucket, which yielded a trail of flames, and we ran from our driveway to the street, both still on fire. My dad screamed “OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, IVY,” while he raced to pat me down and extinguish the flames. “DAD! Your pants are on fire!” After I was extinguished, we patted him down. Somehow, we were able to put the fires out without getting burned. Our pants were ruined, but we were alive. And miraculously the gas tank in the car did not catch fire and explode from the nearby burning bucket, which was still in the driveway, its shooting flames dying down ever so gradually.
“Ivy, are you all right? I’m so stupid. I’m so stupid. That was so stupid,” Dad kept repeating.
He was in shock, he was shaking, and he was devastated that he almost killed me — both of us really. I was surprised and oddly warmed (no pun intended) by the shared experience we had just been through. Seeing Dad so upset and vulnerable made me realize that he loved me and that he was fallible. Look at how upset he is. He feels so bad. He cares so much about me, I thought. I knew he felt an obligation to take care of me, of course, but to have such powerful emotions about me? He was practically in tears. I felt like I was at my own funeral, witnessing remorse and grief and love from the beyond.
“We’re fine,” I said to Dad.
Dad, the rock of the family, did something stupid, and I had to calm him down and tell him everything would be all right. Some father-daughter pairs hike the Grand Canyon to forge a bond through shared adversity. Dad and I found that new relationship in our little driveway, trying to outsmart an electric drill when siphoning gas.
We changed clothes and headed off to the gas station to wait in line. It took only an extra hour and a half, when all was said and done. When I got to the counselor orientation at camp, I was still shaking and would continue to shake for a couple of days. But it was glorious to be in the crisp mountain air, standing outdoors in a circle with the other camp staff, introducing ourselves during an icebreaker activity. I had a great story to tell, and I had lived to tell it.
Ivy Eisenberg is a writer, storyteller and comedian whose essays have appeared in New York magazine, Tablet, Narratively, Next Avenue, Business Insider and Chicken Soup for the Soul. She is working on a memoir about growing up in the groovy and turbulent 1960s in Far Rockaway, Queens.
Jesse Sposato is Narratively’s executive editor. She has also written about feminism, health, friendship and culture for a variety of outlets, including Vanity Fair, InStyle, HuffPost, Memoir Land and more. She is currently working on a collection of essays about coming of age in the suburbs and being boy crazy.
Julie Benbassat is an award-winning illustrator, painter and animator.