A Goofy Movie

The first time I watch A Goofy Movie, I'm 38 years old. My wife and daughter are out of town, and I've taken an edible, DoorDashed a piece of cheesecake, and settled into the corner of the sectional with my dogs. I have the thought that I should watch this with my daughter, not alone and a little high and a little sad, but it also fills the hole I'm waddling through given the sudden absence of a child in my home, the noise and messes and questions and more noises and more messes and more questions. Things I shouldn’t miss but do. Things I worry about, talk to my therapist about.

The movie starts with Goofy’s son Max setting out to win over his love interest, Roxanne, by interrupting a school assembly to perform a cover of Powerline's "Stand Up.” The assembly reminds me of my own assemblies twenty years prior—kids in baggy pants, unbuttoned flannels with tee-shirts underneath, Bobby's single pierced ear. Max's Powerline-inspired getup, polarized sunglasses, a jumpsuit that cinches at the ankles and elbows. I see myself in these things, or at least a version of myself, which isn’t something that happens so much when I watch movies anymore. I watch The Incredibles with my daughter and relate with the parents arguing over how to raise their kids. I watch This is 40 with my wife and relate with Paul Rudd sitting on the toilet pretending to shit so he can have a moment of silence. I watch A Goofy Movie by myself, though, and relate with the teenager because of the TV cart Bobby steals from the school media center, the camcorder P.J. records the stunt with, Max's peers watching the performance with their eyes, not their phones.

I've been thinking lately about how old I feel, how old I am, how my twentieth high school reunion is this year, how I'm closer to 50 than I am to the version of myself that watched the news coverage of 9/11 in my high school cafeteria. I think about this when my phone tells me my cheesecake is sitting on my front porch because I get up without pain given the hip replacement I had before my 37th birthday, a procedure I was young for but old enough to have done.

Not long after Max’s stunt, Principal Mazur calls Goofy to tell him what Max has done. He says that Goofy should reevaluate the way he's raising his child, warns him that Max could end up in the electric chair. Goofy grapples with the uncertainty of parenthood, whether he’s messed up, whether he can turn things around and provide for his son, put him in line, so he decides to protect his boy from arrest and jail and the electric chair by taking him on a fishing trip. I see this and picture the elementary schools my wife and I have been touring, the house in the ‘burbs we moved to, a deed restricted community. I realize I don’t know what a deed restricted community is, just that it sounds safe, the kind of place you ought to raise a kid. I think about how I have no idea what I’m doing, wonder when I would have learned to.

My sophomore year of high school, I wrote an essay on Lord of the Flies for my English class. Our family computer was the same kind of thing I imagine Max writing on—an off-white hulk of a monitor, a matching tower that hid underneath the desk, hummed at startup, beeped and ground to connect to AOL. I was failing English; later that year, Principal Beeker would call my parents to discuss my lack of academic achievement, my disciplinary issues, my inability to stay awake. The Lord of the Flies essay was my life preserver, the assignment I could use to get myself over the hump, pass the semester. I’d told my mom this, but she’d been drinking and hadn’t remembered. Around midnight she stumbled into our computer room, spit a what the fuck are you doing? and leaned, maybe fell against the wall. I told her I was sorry, started to explain myself but she cut me off, reached down and unplugged the computer. When I scrambled out of the chair and toward the outlet, she shoved me away, told me to get to bed. I did. The next morning, she woke me up by hitting me with a rake, telling me not to test her again. I remember this and think that she, too, had no idea what she was doing.

In the ten minutes between Max's performance at the school assembly and Goofy telling Max about the fishing trip, Max has secured a date with Roxane to Staci's party, where they'll watch the Powerline concert on pay-per-view; heard his name chanted by the student body in front of the school; and danced/sang/skateboarded his way home. He no longer feels outcast; he no longer worries about impressing the girl. What Max hears when Goofy breaks the news, then, isn’t that he’s going on a fishing trip with his dad, but that he’s losing everything he’s gained since his performance earlier that day. It's around this time that I realize 1.) that I've already eaten most of the cheesecake I ordered to last the movie, and 2.) that the closeness I'd felt with Max, the relationship I'd shared, is gone. I try to bring it back by remembering myself in Max’s shoes, remembering Sara O'Neill inviting me to Warped Tour one summer, the feeling that my future hinged on how it went, that whether she held my hand leaned against me or kissed me mattered more the SATs, college admissions, working an extra shift to buy my first cell phone.

I remember it but don't relate to it. Or maybe I can relate to it but choose not to.

I still own the copy of Lord of the Flies that I read in English class. I own the AOL CD I used on our old computer, too. I own a windbreaker that cinches at the waist and wrists, the camcorder my friends and I used to record dumb videos with one another. I keep photos of me from high school in my work bag, boys in tee-shirts under unbuttoned flannel, red eyes from the flash of disposable cameras. I keep the journal I wrote in at the boy's home after mom called the cops on me, had me arrested. I keep a note I wrote in it about when Mom dropped me off for the Scared Straight program at the county jail, laughed when I hesitated to get out of the car, told me I'd better not drop the soap. I keep things inside, too, but not because I want to. I keep the memory of her telling me she loves me but doesn't like me, the one of her sending me to school with SlimFasts until I lost weight, the one of her insisting I eat undercooked chicken she'd prepared, plated. I both remember it and relate to it whether I choose to or not, watch it back in my head day after day after day.

An hour or so into A Goofy Movie, Goofy and Max get out of the car and into an argument on the side of the road, but Goofy forgets to put on the parking brake, sending the car speeding down a mountain. The series of goofs ends with the two of them stranded atop their car, which floats along a gushing river, rock formations on either side. The gist of it is that they're stuck with one another without much of a way out, forcing them to reconcile. Their conversation climaxes when Max yells that he has his own life now, and Goofy, somber, replies, "I know that. I just wanted to be a part of it." It's the culmination of so much of what the film builds towards—Max's desire for independence, Goofy's worry that his son will become a delinquent, the pain of shifting family dynamics, and I think about how this would have hit if I'd watched it sooner. At 15, when I was arrested. At 22, when I moved away from my mom, started my own life, lost a hundred pounds and graduated college with a 4.0. At 26, 30, 31, when I came back, helped check my mom into rehab.

Two weeks after my daughter was born, I was holding her in the NICU when my dad called to let me know that my mom had died. I tightened my daughter's swaddle, tucked the feeding tubes and monitor cables beside her, and set her in her hospital-issued bassinet, signed myself out at the nursing station. I sanitized my hands, told the nurses I'd be back after a while, and they buzzed me out. My wife waited for me in the hallway. I stepped toward her then ran toward her, gripped her shirt in my fists, cried, told her what had happened. Told her that our daughter would never meet her nana, as my mom wanted to be called. We didn't know it at the time, but an autopsy later confirmed that she'd mixed some combination of alcohol and pills that her body couldn't handle. Or maybe we said we didn't know, but we did. It was always going to end in that sort of way, and I'm taken back to it when I see Goofy's defeat, the way his eyebrows lower, his shoulders slacken, his lip almost trembles. The desire to be a part of someone's life, to have fallen short.

A Goofy Movie ends with Goofy and Max returning home. Max has fulfilled his promise to Roxanne that he'd appear on TV at Powerline's concert in Los Angeles, but he admits to her that he'd lied, that he did what he said he would but that he never actually set out to do it at all, that he wanted to impress her. The moment's interrupted by Goofy himself, though, who due to a series of goofs, flies through the air and lands face first through the awning over Roxane's porch. Max introduces the two, introduces his dad, Goofy.

My wife and daughter come home two days after I watch A Goofy Movie. I give my daughter a bath that night, ask her about her weekend with my wife's parents. She tells me she missed me, and I tell her I missed her, too, that we'll read books together tonight, snuggle until she falls asleep. She asks me if I promise, and I tell her I do. I pull her out of the bath, set her on a towel, pull the hood over her head and tuck the sides around her. She's five now, but I picture her at two weeks when I wrap her like this. I pick her up to walk to her room but stop at a picture of my parents in the hall. They're young in it, maybe younger than I was when I met my wife. My mom is smiling, one hand on her hip, the other wrapped around my dad. Her teeth, her eyes, are white, bright, vibrant. Her hair, permed, blows across her face. They're standing on a gazebo on a beach in Florida not long after getting married. They’re fulfilled, happy, alive.

"That's your Nana," I tell her. My daughter reaches out, runs a tiny finger across her face.

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