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.

Months earlier, hacking and hacking, the surgeons removed as much of my dad’s tumor as possible, but it seemed too late — the stuff had probably spread to bones and blood. He lay in the hospital bed, his neck a ruined gash, no longer able to eat or speak. As we prepared for rounds of desperate radiation, we kept round-the-clock vigil, hours in a room echoing with medical beeps and alarms. Pleading with nurses — please administer the pain meds, but not too much, we want him to be able to walk, we need him alive enough to endure the radiation — we also stalked the physical therapy twins, two stout men who, if they would only come again, would see he was awake enough to stand, that he was well enough to live. Meanwhile, his stomach bloated on liquid food, and we took turns swabbing a blazing forehead with damp cloth. Then the pain came, and I watched as his eyes rolled into the back of his head. He screamed without sound.

In the barber’s chair, months later, my teeth chattered, and I thought about the blood and meat in a man’s neck, and all that was required for that meat and blood to function. I looked up and saw the barber’s knife hanging in the air, over my own neck.

At 6-foot-2, my dad had been a legendary bon vivant, his graying pompadour a guide to the good life. He visited us in New York and we partied till dawn. He read all the right books. He wore $600 shoes he found on sale for 30 bucks. So it was a shock to see him, years later, with arms limp, mute, delirious with pain, glasses crooked on his nose, gums atrophied from disuse. Dipping a towel into warm water, I rubbed shaving cream onto scratchy cheeks. It was a tense moment: He’d always been so particular about his toilet, and now, with all the blood thinners he’d taken, not only was I basically guaranteed not to shave up to his old standards, but he also might bleed to death. There was no room for error. In the hospital those tense days, there was never room for error. We tried so hard! Then, despite it all, a few weeks after the surgery, my fabulous dad was dead at 59.

The difficult part wasn’t just that he was gone. Everyone, eventually, goes. Another part of the agony was that we, the living, having tried so hard in the hospital, were supposed to emerge from that white room and somehow care again about a normal life. I tried, but hours and days seemed to slip away.

The barber dragged a sharp knife over my skin. He pushed my nose to one side, jabbing at stray hairs with flicks of his wrist. He held an earlobe in two strong fingers and drew a perfect line of hair down my chin. The singer crackled on the radio, and there was a neat row of barber’s brushes on the wall. Sun streamed in through an open door. My mustache was being expertly trimmed, and I couldn’t remember when I’d last been close to such care. To my surprise — could it be true? — I found myself taking pleasure in this skill, this job done well.

Finished at last, the barber sat me up. I looked in the mirror. I was a son with a dead father, but also a young man with a new haircut. Laughing — I’d never been so well groomed — I realized I’d been made to look like Erik Estrada. Beaming at his handiwork, blow dryer roaring, the barber put away tools and rubbed lemon oil into my scalp. My hair had grown, now it was cut, and I bounded out into a new afternoon. What other choice did I have?

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.

And speaking of the dress code, while those tank tops can be kind of awe-inspiring, the Hooters ensemble, as a whole, is a turn-off. It looks like it was developed by a colorblind exercise fetishist in 1983. It’s a hard look for most earth women to pull off successfully.

Hooters is an asexual place for me. I don’t go there to get my blood pumping; I go there to feel my blood clogging as I watch the Phillies and get some work done. I don’t go to Hooters for a pseudo-sexual performance in the same way I don’t go to the strip club for the buffet (that’s for hardcore perverts).

So I didn’t think it would be weird to take the kid to Hooters.

I had never taken either of my kids to Hooters before, especially not at night when random bikini or lingerie contests occasionally break out, because I’m not sure my daughter needs to be exposed to that kind of awkward chaos just yet. But in the daylight hours, Hooters not only has fried pickles, but it also has high chairs, and a kids’ menu, although I might argue that it’s all a kids’ menu. (And now might argue that the kids’ menu is an affront.)

After all, I’ve taken my daughter to much seedier establishments around Philadelphia in pursuit of sandwiches. Why not try a clean corporate world with a weird dress code? Outside a sandwich shop in South Philly a man with an unintentionally exposed handgun in his waistband once tickled my daughter’s chin to make her laugh and told me what a lucky guy I was. Nice fella.

My daughter has also seen women (occasionally working) in much skimpier outfits, and the fabric of our family has not been torn asunder as a result. In fact, when I met my daughter’s mother, she was working behind a bar in a place that served wings and she was wearing a top that was nearly, if not equally, form fitting as those found at Hooters. I thought it might even be a good lesson for my daughter to see that we don’t judge or treat people differently because of the way they’re dressed, and that people are not the sum total of their apparel; for instance, I am not a hobo, even though I dress like one.

I expected to walk into Hooters at 11 a.m. and have a bunch of bored waitresses fawning all over my daughter. We’d get attention and good laughs, maybe even a comped order of mozzarella sticks, and my daughter would see how casually and normally Daddy interacts with women in tight tank tops.

Instead we walked in at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday and found a smattering of guys sitting by themselves or in pairs at the bar already drinking hard and vying for attention from waitresses who looked seriously thrown off their rhythm by the arrival of a 2-year-old.

It was in that moment that I realized that beyond all the debate about exhibitionism and objectification, Hooters is a bar, and forcing your kid on a group of adults who want to get drunk is a dick move, especially guys who want to get drunk at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday … at a Hooters. That type of guy is looking for something a little more extreme to go with his problems than what the corner bar has to offer.

But more important, my daughter’s presence obviously affected the way the waitresses could deal with those guys. The kid’s presence was disrupting the ever-shifting balance of power between client and patron in a sexually charged alcohol-fueled situation. I had upended the delicate Hooters ecosphere.

The guys who had just been joking with the bartenders looked at me like they would like to strangle me with a pair of flesh-toned leggings. The waitresses were cold; instead of the usual big, “Welcome to Hooters!” I got a clipped, “Can I help you with something?” Instead of being shown to our table we were hemmed in by a stony-faced phalanx of orange-and-white-clad servers who silently established a perimeter around us preventing entrance into the main dining room or access to a table by the bar, a well-endowed Praetorian Guard, protecting the sanctity of their establishment from the sticky-fingered cuteness of my 2-year-old. They were all cold eyes, and concerned looks, whereas normally it’s all about smiles and calisthenics. They looked at me like I was stupid for bringing my daughter to Hooters. Me! Stupid?! I had never had icy service at Hooters, but as the greeter had a muffled conversation with one of the other perimeter guards and pointed at me and my daughter I made the command decision to get our fried pickles to go.

The next 10 minutes were some of the longest of my life. As we waited for our order, the only sound was the replay telecast of Duke vs. the University of Eastern Irkutsk — or whatever the hell ballgame is playing on Tuesday at 11 a.m. on ESPN2. My daughter was understandably mesmerized by the bright orange shorts and the ladies with hair extensions. She made entreaties to be noticed by some of the waitresses and she was rebuffed with extreme prejudice. Then she headed over to start gabbing at some of the guys at the bar, who did not seem to offer the smiles she is so used to receiving. I picked her up and held her until our pickles finally arrived. As the door closed behind us, I could hear the 11 a.m. Hooters fiesta begin again.

Perhaps it would have been different if we were there for the lunch rush when the place was packed, but I’m not willing to take the chance again. Hooters touches the holy trinity of guydom with booze, sports and women’s sexuality. And it’s not fair to anyone to slap a kid in the middle of it. Not to the people who work there and have to worry about the kid’s safety and boundaries, and not to the kid, who wonders why everyone is acting so weird.

In five years of fatherhood, here is the one tangible lesson I can pass along: Don’t take your daughter to Hooters. Or the racetrack. Or the bar. (Brooklyn, I’m talking to you.) As cool and comfortable as I want my kids to be in a wide variety of situations, there are some joints that are a little too spicy for the young’uns (if you know what I mean). Like me, you may want to be a cool and casual relaxed parent with cool, casual and relaxed kids, but how relaxed are your kids going to be when their earliest memories are strangers recoiling from them in shame and fear and annoyance? Part of what I want for my kids will come from trying to avoid weird and uncomfortable situations before they’re ready. That means being a little more thoughtful about their feelings and other people’s feelings. That means being thoughtful and considerate — two things that were not a big part of my emotional vocabulary before I had children. It doesn’t come naturally, but it’s coming.

Spending time with your kids is one of the most important parts of being a parent. Figuring out how to act like a grown-up and still have fun during that time may be equally important. Here’s what I learned: Get the fried pickles to go.

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.

As the skeletons clattered from our family closet — my father’s secret lifetime of self-destructive habits, his marriage that was something out of a horror movie — I could only blink in disbelief. How could these two men, these two lives, coexist in a single body?

Was he a writer of tireless discipline, who could work around the clock, who published 18 books, some over a thousand pages long? Or the man powerless in the face of his addictions?

Was he the man who’d met four presidents, who’d fought Bobby and Jackie Kennedy and won? Or the husband who sat alone in his own home because his wife wouldn’t let his friends inside, not even his brother?

Was he the Marine who received a Navy Cross for grabbing a machine gun and running up a hill into an enemy position? Or was he the person who cowered before his dentist, who was afraid to fire secretaries, who could barely stand to enter a roomful of strangers?

Eight years before my father died, his heart was within days of giving out on him. I drove him to the hospital for a quadruple bypass, acutely aware that these might be our last moments together. I asked him how he felt — to offer comfort, to touch his heart just once while I still could. He said, “I’m not afraid. I stared death in the face on Okinawa and said, ‘Fuck you!’” We rode the rest of the way in silence.

It’s the tough Marine whose picture stares, pipe clenched in his teeth, from the cover of his 1980 memoir of combat, “Goodbye Darkness.” After he died I found a series of outtakes from that photo shoot. He mugs for the camera, putting on mask after mask. What stuck with me was the one of him grinning, saturnine, all powerful. But not one of them was really him.

When the mother of my childhood best friend died, a woman who was dear to my entire family, my father delivered the eulogy. He was overcome by tears and could barely finish speaking. I had never seen my father cry. Maybe this was the real person coming out at last. But in the car after the funeral he said, “I disgraced myself.”

He was a frail boy, terrible at sports. His father beat him, demanding, “Don’t cry.” The jeers of his peers and blows of his father rained down on a person of extraordinary sensitivity. That sensitivity would later prove a valuable asset for him as a writer. But as a youth he could only cover it in thick armor. That armor served him well in literal combat. It also closed him off from feelings of fear and loneliness.

What he felt instead were the extraordinary highs and lows of his fluctuating self-esteem. He’d always suffered mood swings, but fame and chemicals escalated their intensity. He was forever on top of the world or at the bottom of the deepest pit, never in between.

I spoke with one of his few surviving Marine buddies, who offered this simple wisdom, “Your father was just a man. A good man, but just a man.”

And there’s the real person that neither of us could ever see: just a man.

“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.”

Whenever Dad or I spotted what looked like a good prospect, Dad parked the truck, hopped out and initiated a conversation.

“Is it hot enough for you, today?” he would ask, or “I think it’s quitting time, don’t you?”

If the guy responded positively, Dad would make small talk for a couple more minutes to warm him up. Then he would casually mention that he was liquidating some tools and ask if the guy would like to take a look.

I always waited for the designated moment to bring out the merchandise. Sometimes Dad just looked over at the truck and gave me a quick nod. On other occasions, it boiled down to time.

“If I’m still gone after five minutes, bring me a wrench set,” he would say as he left the truck.

When it was time, I grabbed the agreed upon tools from the back of the truck, ran to Dad’s side and flashed my warmest smile. When our prospect saw that Dad had a daughter with him, it usually softened him up and he was willing to spend $15 even if he didn’t need a wrench set. Unlike my siblings, who viewed our father as a stranger who rarely visited, I understood Dad and his need to be free. But it was during those long hours on the road that I really began to see what drove him.

Dad filled me with stories about his childhood. He told me about growing up on a farm in a four-room shack without heat, running water or even an indoor toilet. Each morning at 4 a.m., Dad helped Grandpa feed the pigs and milk the cows. Then he headed off to elementary school while Grandpa traveled sixty miles to a construction job — which barely netted enough to cover the basics for a growing family that would swell to 11 children.

“I would read these books on slavery and about how slaves were given a rundown shack and a little food in exchange for their labor,” Dad told me as we drove down the road. “Then I would look at my dad and realize he was a slave. He worked so hard every day and all he got in exchange was barely enough to put a shack over our heads and feed us. I decided that I was going to do whatever it took to escape that life. “

To others, Dad and I might have looked like slaves ourselves. Each day we were forced to earn enough money to survive until the next and rarely took time off. When we had a good sales day, we rented a room at a Motel 6. When we didn’t, we crashed in a rest area or a truck stop parking lot.

We spent 12 hours a day in a hot truck without air conditioning. But to Dad and me, it was paradise. Each morning we headed out on an open highway, the truck taking us wherever we wanted to go as we belted out the lyrics to Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” our theme song. And unlike the never-ending home church sessions and suffocating, rigid lifestyle I faced at home, Dad and I had only one rule: sell tools.

With the pressure always on us to make money, we rarely had time for entertainment. But we occasionally took a break and treated ourselves to a movie or a steak and baked potato at Shoney’s. We also had a standing weekly date with the TV show “Dallas.” Dad loved the main character, J.R., both because he was a savvy, ruthless businessman who had millions of dollars, and because Dad’s name, Jerry Ricks, shared the same initials.

“You know what time it is, don’t you?” Dad would say each Sunday night, a few minutes before the show was to begin.

“It’s Dallas time!” I would call out.

If we were at a motel, we kicked back on our beds with a can of Diet Dr. Pepper a piece and flipped on the TV. If we were spending the night in the truck, we found a truck stop lounge, plopped down on one of the couches, and lost ourselves in the lives of J.R., Sue Ellen and the rest of the Dallas gang.

Our time on the road together ended when I started my junior year in high school. Dad and I had a run-in with the law that had shaken both of us and made me rethink our lifestyle. But more than that, I was now sixteen and wanted to date and hang out with friends. Dad was also ready to move on. He had met a woman we both knew would take my place on the road.

Our lives drifted apart. He got married and eventually so did I. We both started new families and settled in different parts of the country.

Dad’s now almost 72 and at 44, I’m the age he was the last summer we traveled together — with a 12-year-old daughter of my own who’s a lot like I was back then.

I called him the other day to tell him I would be in his city the last week in June. We’d had a rare, explosive argument a few weeks earlier and I knew we were both hurting. We needed to recapture the magic of our time together — back when it was just the two of us, a truck full of tools, an open road and Willie Nelson singing on the radio.

“How about if we have a dad/daughter date, just you and me,” I said into the phone, feeling myself yearning for the past. “I’ll take you out for a nice dinner and maybe we can even rent a motel room, just like old times.”

“Yes. Absolutely,” he said, the heavy weight lifting from voice. “We need that, you and me. We really do.”

He paused for a moment and I knew what was coming.

“Maybe I should load up an old truck with tools and you and me hit the road for a week or two. What do you think about that?”

I smiled at the up-tick in his voice.

“Yeah those days were really something, weren’t they, Ingrid?” he continued, his voice trailing off. “Whatever happens in life, no one can ever take that away from us.”

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.

The closest conversations I can remember with Daddy were at dinnertime, when he’d offer a nickel to my sister, my brother or me — whichever of us gave the best report of our school day. We competed for the 5 cents until we realized it wasn’t worth it unless he upped the payoff to a dime.

We lived in rented apartments and bungalows until one year when Daddy must have bet big on long shots in the daily double and we moved to a half-block-long, marble-floored art moderne mansion with a buzzer in the floor of the dining room to call “the Help.” The following year we were poor again, and Daddy would go into my wallet to borrow my allowance. He always said he’d pay me back, but he never did.

Our parents weren’t officially separated — almost no couples were in those days — and yet half the year they lived apart. From April to September, he holed up in a seedy Boston hotel called the Touraine where the elevator was manned by a one-legged operator. It was near the dog track at Revere.

But we didn’t see all that much of Daddy even while he was home in Miami Beach, and my brother and sister and I thought his leaving was as natural as the hurricanes that arrived in his absence.

Mom seemed happier when he left, which confused the hell out of my childhood self, who believed in sitcom family units where daddies wore suits to dinner and moms served apple pie in gingham aprons, not families where Daddy went off to work at the race track and stayed away for six months, and called to wish his daughter a happy birthday, on the wrong day, and asked, “How old are you now, Lea?” At least he got my name straight.

It did come in handy on occasion, though. After my grandfather taught me to read at 2 years old, my dad was not only proud, he figured out a way to capitalize on his “smartypants daughter.” He would use me as a shill.

So we would walk around where the tourists would hang out in South Beach. If he found someone reading the Racing Form, Daddy would say, “I’ll take out my Racing Form and you can point to something and my baby daughter will read it.”

Then the gamblers would figure he had prepped me to learn from the paper he held. They must have thought that I could memorize, but I was too young to read, and they were on to something and could make some money.

“OK,” some would say, “I’ll bet you she won’t read — and I get to choose from my form.” But I usually could read whatever they put in front of me. Often it was the name of horses, and Daddy would prep me as a game: “Murray’s Desire.” “Long Boat Key.” “Blue Dame.”

“She’s a midget,” they’d grumble, forking over a Benjamin.

Mom divorced Daddy when I was in my 20s, and for a while he lived in a small apartment by the dog track. She remarried him a year later.

Not long before his death at the age of 83, we were watching a “60 Minutes” segment together about gambling addiction. Daddy was long “retired,” but still visited the track during the day, and often gambled away his Social Security check.

After the TV segment, my dad turned to me. This was his chance to show me, finally, that he had learned something about his lifetime of ruined potential and broken relationships. A chance to say he was sorry to the daughter whom he had involved in his gambling since she was a toddler, the neglected daughter whose age he still did not know, and who very well could have been named for Hialeah Race Track.

Daddy looked at me with resignation and shame. It took him a long time to get the words out.

“That wasn’t easy to watch,” he said.

I was ready for his late epiphany, and a chance for some closure for both of us.

“It’s really too bad,” he said, staring at me with the sad look of an old man. “I mean, I know addicted gamblers like that.”

How could I possibly have understood my father when he never could understand himself?