I had so many other questions to ask: What did he do for a living? Did he have other children? Was he married? Did he drink coffee? Was he happy? Were there pictures of me -- a smiling, chubby baby -- on the walls of his home or was it easier for him to forget I ever existed?

But I could not ask him any of this, because we had not actually met in person. At the age of 27, I saw my father for the first time when I found him on Facebook.

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I didn't freak out when I found out my wife and I were going to have a son. But as the day approached, I had a crisis of confidence. We were living in a studio in Los Angeles, sleeping on a mattress that smelled like pumpkin beer from the previous fall, driving a two-door, 30-year-old car. How were we supposed to do this?

It turns out I was asking the right questions. We needed a new car and a new house; we got Ford’s least-monstrous SUV and a three-bedroom rental that cost as much as my old Brooklyn one-bedroom. And then, in the final weeks before our son arrived, we started watching "Game of Thrones." By the time our boy was born, I didn’t want to swaddle him; I wanted to thrust him to the heavens on top of a parapet and declare, “All this will be yours!”

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I’m not a sports fan, as a rule. My progressive high school required that girls learn to play football, and my main memory from those gym classes is that I could throw a football with no more accuracy than I could throw anything else. I haven’t learned much in the intervening years. I remain unclear on what “intentional grounding” is. I am unsure what a neutral zone infraction consists of, and how that differs from encroachment. I don’t know who’s in what division, including my own home team, the Rams, although I do know enough to lament them, generally.

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My father, dressed in jeans and a sweater with a pashmina wrapped loosely about her neck, walked ahead of me, her girlfriend at her side. My father’s extensive collection of jewelry and her outfits still startle me. Everything is so form-fitting! It is cheating, I think, to wear women’s jeans and not have hips.

“It’s not fair,” I told her once. “You get all the perks of being a woman but none of the pain. You don’t have to get a period every month.”

I was forgetting about the procedures, the hormones, the electrolysis. But still.

We were in search of breakfast, which with my father in San Francisco means walking for at least 20 minutes to reach a restaurant I have yet to try because a repeat visit is unthinkable to her.

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Oh, also, one more thing you should know about him. He won't crap in the toilet. I hate to be so crass, but that's the fact of it. Peeing? Sure. Put him in front of a urinal, and he'll spray that toilet with his lack of aim. But "poop in the potty," as they say in the parenting biz? Not happening. Ever. When he needs to go, he asks for a pull-up, goes about his business, and then gets changed.

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We've come a long way since then. My wife and I have a real partnership. We work together on everything, and try to do the best for our kids every single day. After years of failing to find work, I grudgingly accepted the new economic reality and became a stay-at-home dad. I like to think I'm a good father, a modern man, but even I have my limits. There is one thing I absolutely will not do. I will not do a play date.

The thing is, I don't like interacting with other parents. It's enough that I shop and try to cook a nutritious meal every single night. Now I have to yammer on about my girl's love of kitties or stuffies or the Wonder Pets? That's valuable time taken away from my rapidly shrinking male pursuits.

Even the concept of the "play date" rubs me the wrong way. When I was a young boy, you went over to your friend's house and hung out, until you heard your mom yelling down the street to get your you-know-what home. The moms and dads were never involved in this activity. Why would they be? I wouldn't have wanted Mrs. Krula on my dirt-bomb team for all the Fantastic Four comics in the world.

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My daughter and I were walking briskly through a gigantic amusement park, past a huge pegboard loaded with bizarre, oversized dolls resembling Sponge Bobs on steroids, when Alexandra popped the question I was dreading.

"Please, Daddy! I really want a Domo! Puh-leeze!"

In her six years on this earth, the word "Domo" had never before left my daughter's lips, not once, not ever, but that's the nature of the beast. Silly Bandz and Uglydolls yesterday, some Japanese TV mascot called a Domo today, a yet-uninvented fad tomorrow. But the problem wasn't my daughter's fickleness. The problem was something else.

I glanced at the arcade in front of me. Not one of those ring-the-bell-with-brute-strength things. Whew. I'm no weakling, but strength has never been my, well, strength. Nor, thank God, did it involve a hoop. The last time I played basketball, Captain & Tennille were topping the charts. And I was quite relieved to see this particular game didn't require shooting anything with a gun. My scientist father played tennis my entire childhood: white sneaks, white socks, white shorts, white shirt. An NRA family we were not.

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The barber nodded. With a sigh, I took a seat, and he wet my head with a spray bottle. It made sense at this point to close my eyes. Then my head began to spin. I was hung over, and the foul funk of grief burned in my throat.

Three months earlier, the doctors in Florida said my dad was very sick. On the X-ray, you could see a ghostly starfish wrapped around his neck, tightening around pipes connecting head to heart.

I was still jumpy. The sound of scissors -- click, click, click -- took me back to the hospital. Opening my eyes, I watched as dark chunks of my hair fell to the ground. The barber paused to remove a straight razor from a paper sleeve, and I thought I smelled disinfectant. Into a bone handle went the blade, and I nearly retched.

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I'm kinda fond of Hooters. As chain restaurants go, it is a fine establishment with a specific culinary point of view. Food-wise it never tries to be anything it isn’t. The food is deeply fried and tastes like shame, but the bathrooms are always very clean. The domestic beer is served in a frosty cold mug.

The service is spectacular, and I'm not making a dumb joke about boobs here. I've had waitresses scare me up cigarettes after casually mentioning that I'd love a smoke, I've had waitresses offer to watch my computer while I go have a cigarette or make a run to one of the pristine bathrooms, I've even gotten the rare corporate beer buy-back. But mostly, the service is attentive and friendly without being overbearing and obnoxious, which is sort of an amazing feat considering the dress code.

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I finally got a glimpse of who he was as a person, though that person had departed an hour ago. Despite walls plastered with awards, numerous bestsellers, bushels of adoring fan mail and the company of great men, his face was etched with disappointment.

As a boy, my vision of my father was hindered by physical fear. All I saw was a giant, one who would periodically strike me to unleash his rage.

Just as I became a man, my father, William Manchester, rocketed to international fame after the publication of his bestseller "The Death of a President." Now he towered over me in the world. All I saw was how much he had achieved and how little I had in comparison.

Just as my father reached the age I am now, 60, the mask of the famous author slipped and I saw a very different face, that of his shadow.

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Every morning at six, we'd gas up at a 7-Eleven and treat ourselves to a Diet Dr. Pepper to get our juices flowing.

"What's our saying?" Dad would yell as he turned the key in our old brown Dodge pickup.

"The early bird gets the worm!" we would shout in unison.

It was the early 1980s and the oil boom was in full-swing. Our sales strategy consisted of driving the back roads of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas and Iowa looking for prospects. We kept our eyes peeled for the lone gas station attendant or a do-it-yourself mechanic working on his car. But what interested us most were the oil rig sites where, at any given time, a group of two or three migrant workers could be found taking a smoke break or digging into the sandwiches they'd brought from home.

"These guys have so much money in their pockets they are just waiting for an opportunity to spend it," Dad would say as we pulled up to a job site. "Well, they are about to get their chance."

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Daddy was a "professional gambler," if betting daily on greyhounds and thoroughbreds could be considered a profession rather than an addiction. His mornings were spent at the desk in my brother's room, hunched over the Racing Form in his robe. And most of his days and nights would be at Hialeah or Gulfstream or the Miami Beach Kennel Club, doing mysterious things that seemed to pass for his life's work.

The only legitimate thing Daddy ever did to earn money was invest in a plot of land on nearby Di Lido Island, so when someone asked us what Daddy did for a living we were able to say he was in "real estate." In fact, I was so prepped by Mom to say those two words that when the teacher asked my name in kindergarten, I proudly blurted "Real Estate."

I noticed a curious thing about gamblers from an early age: Daddy didn't get excited when he won at the track. No, the adrenaline would be flowing, the monologue would be deafening and he'd come roaring into the house, pacing up and down and yelling -- when he'd almost won. And he'd be cursing when he lost.

So when he was quiet, I figured he'd won some money. He wasn't often quiet.

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But unless you are writing a tell-all about your offspring or planning a reality pilot, it's apparently pretty hard to find a publisher willing to produce your "fertility thriller," which is what Avner is calling his first fiction book, "Misconception." (Get it?) According to Amazon, the book was put out by iUniverse, which is a self-publishing operation. Here is the first sentence of the already ridiculous product description:

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Dad's gone now and I don't play anymore, but I can't bring myself to get rid of my father's battered golf clubs. I've had them ever since he gave up the game over 25 years ago. I'm not fooling myself that I'll ever use them. If I decide to take up the sport again, I'd have to buy new clubs. They were, to say the least, well-worn when he donated them to me and by the time I put them away, crooked and bent as Irish blackthorn walking sticks.

Despite our shortcomings on the green, my father and I managed to approach each round of golf with a sense of carefree optimism. The five hours of topped irons, shanked woods and sand showers between the first swing and the defeated trudge to the parking lot brought us back to earth.

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My father comes from a generation of men -- perhaps the last -- for whom expressing affection towards their children, particularly children of the same sex, can be awkward. I'm sure this has something to do with evolving gender roles and what it means to "be a man." For my dad's generation -- the early baby boomers -- being a man meant providing a family with essentials, not emoting all over the place. Men were to be sturdy and stoic, not soft and sensitive.

I also get the impression that my dad wasn't too close to his parents. His mother seemed distant, his father eccentric -- neither the personification of affection. When I think back to my father's interactions with his parents before they passed, words like "cordial" and "businesslike" come to mind. He was kind to them because he's a kind person, but I never got the impression that he was maintaining fulfilling relationships. In light of that, I'm surprised he even knew how to express affection to my brother and me.

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My dad didn't get along with a lot of people, especially my mom. They fought all the time, bickering until one of them would flare up and storm off. Usually it was him. There are a collection of family vacation photos of just me, my sister and my mom. Dad would be somewhere else cooling off and we'd have strangers take a picture of the three of us. There we are at Disney World. There we are at Six Flags and there's our summer in New Mexico. Dad's nowhere to be found.

My parents had the kind of fights that weren't acceptable to the nice older couple who lived next door. So, sometimes the police would show up. The police always did a good job of making sure everyone was OK. I still have a soft spot for cops; I remember that scared little kid with tears in his eyes and the nice man telling him everything was going to be all right.

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"Which kid?" I said.

"You know which kid," said Doc. "Your mentally retarded kid, Mike."

"Yeah?" I said.

"And I think," Doc went on, "there should be a fence. Right here. Along here. You should build it. Because I just can't do it anymore."

"What kind of fence?" I said.

"I don't care," said Doc. "You just need to get it done! Chain-link. Picket. I don't care! Just a fence. That will stop him."

I thought about it for a few beats. I had just completed a 6-foot picket fence around my backyard. I thought this would contain my 11-year-old son, who has been diagnosed with what they call "severe and profound" mental retardation and autism. Mike was happy in the fenced-in backyard. For about a week. But then he began to search for ways to escape. And he found them. Through the house, through the garage and out. Simple enough. To actually contain him, we would need to watch him closely every minute of every day and night.

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Well, I like my mom and her shape-ups, but if it weren't for my dad, I would have been destined to a life of violins and Izod shirts. Chinese moms love buying Izod because it's cheaper than polo and people laugh at you, but for the record, looking like an ass clown and not having friends definitely doesn't help your SAT scores.

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"Daddy, I'm looking at all of my fairy dolls and they all say 'Made in China' on them," says an inquisitive 6-year old, holding a Silvermist doll from Disney Fairies. The oldest doesn't pay too much attention, even though the doll was given to her by Santa last year. Instead, she glances up from a blank piece of paper while hunched over a box of colored pencils on the living room floor. She is writing her annual day-after-Thanksgiving letter to Santa Claus. We've been doing this since she was 3. Looking at her, I think that this is the last time we will share this moment as parent and child.

"How should I start the letter different this year, Daddy?" she asks. We send letters to the Santa Claus Main Post Office in the Arctic Circle in Lapland, Finland. A real place. We even got letters back from them two years ago.

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The actor -- whom none of the sides would name -- said that he had been directed to do so as part of the scene. Mr. Birch objected, saying that the back rub was unnecessary, and told the actor to stop. …When the actor tried to explain further what he was doing, Mr. Birch said, according to [director Paul] Alexander: "Listen, man, I'm trying to make this easier on you -- don't touch her."

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