Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

  Years later, I would wish I’d been compelled by some wisdom spoken there, or had found a person to relate to, or a book to read. Instead, I left, wondering what the thing of it was, why it was so hard to draw a through line from a loved one’s drinking to the nonsense these church ladies busied themselves with. At the time, I was into literature, music, and politics. I was a teenager honing my bookish sensibility and I was alienated by the simple language, slogans, and pat answers offered by the program. In fact, anytime I came into contact with what I then considered the self-help industrial complex, I was both drawn in and repelled. There was always something to relate to in the literature, usually descriptions of the kind of emotional chaos that becomes normal in alcoholic families, but much of the material felt generalized to the point of meaninglessness. And it wasn’t hard to alienate me at the time. In the evenings, I read about anarchist uprisings and feminist installation art and the lyrics sheets inside the angry, antiwar, anticapitalist, anti-TV punk records I loved. Smack in the middle of adolescence, I was skeptical of anything for a mass audience, especially something as gentle as self-help.

  chapter four

  Because their marriage was dying or because my father was busy or detached or depressed or because I had grown dependent on the hit of intensity I experienced while worrying and meddling alongside my mother, I often played the role of another parent in our unfolding family saga. While still in high school, I remember sitting with my mother in the two cushioned chairs opposite my sister’s therapist and discussing her case, her plan for recovery. Harrowing as that time was, it makes me laugh to think of us, this ersatz parental unit, showing up places like that without explanation. I must have looked like a child in adult drag. But in the world of our family, it made a kind of sense. The therapist, a soft-eyed Marisa Tomei–type with a no-nonsense New Jersey manner, squinted at us a bit when she asked me, “Do you think it’s odd that you’re here instead of your father?” I did not.

  “Co-dependence originates in a tendency, particularly common among daughters in ‘dysfunctional’ families, to overcompensate for parental inadequacies by becoming parentified and by developing an excessive sensitivity to the needs of others,” wrote clinical psychologist Janice Haaken in a 1990 paper called “A Critical Analysis of the Co-Dependent Construct.” The thing Haaken doesn’t expressly say is that the daughters in dysfunctional families are often overcompensating for their fathers’ inadequacies in particular. Among the women I know who’ve dealt with a sibling’s addiction, this is a common dynamic. Unable to match his wife’s level of concern, Daddy drops (further) out of the picture and a daughter steps in. The care work of addiction is gendered and, as such, under-recognized.

  I became parentified. It felt like a natural extension of a way I already was—a sensitive middle child who was always enlivened by being let in on the intricacies of human dramas, being invited to expound on peacekeeping strategies. And it felt useful—indeed, crucial—to the family. As the cycle of addiction-related drama replayed itself again and again, I gained enough experience to see my own behaviors differently, to understand that they were harmful or self-destructive. Occasionally I knew in the moment that I was doing something pointless—knew, for example, that accusing my sister of being high or telling her how much she was hurting our parents wasn’t helpful, was maybe even cruel—but I didn’t know how to correct myself.

  Depression made a nest in my mind. I thought it must be that way for everyone—don’t all teenagers cry every day?—but apparently it isn’t. The racing fear that my sister would soon die, part of a Medusa’s head of coiled anxieties, began to take over my emotional life. The pit of snakes was how I described to myself a feeling I now recognize as the beginning of a panic attack. It was a quavering combination of nausea, envy, fear, and rage, a coalescing of all the bad things I’d seen, and all those I could only imagine. The pit of snakes was titillation and trauma: drugs, sex, and death. A mental place where I’d see things in patterns and then notice the pattern beginning to move, revealing itself to be a darkly crawling lattice of bees or maggots or eels.

  Years later, when my first baby was starting preschool, I told my mother that it hurt to think of him out in the world, experiencing all the tedium and specifically the humiliations of a life. It’s so uncomfortable loving someone this much, I said. She knew the feeling I described, but encouraged me to enjoy this innocent iteration of it. Watching them grow up is painful, but it’s also wonderful. This is the sweetest time of their lives—enjoy it while he’s little.

  You’re right, I said.

  Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems, she said then, in the half-ominous, half-breezy manner she uses to dispense timeless wisdom.

  By the time I was finishing high school, we had big problems. Grown-up problems. I still thought of my parents as young lovers—there had always been something easy and unencumbered about them—and the end of their love story came down on me with a crushing weight. The house had been sold. Poor Anya was consigned to live out the rest of high school alone, bouncing between our parents’ apartments. Lucia was lost to drugs, living in Brooklyn with her boyfriend, Lorenzo, who was charming and handsome and also perhaps the worst possible thing: a drug addict with money. Maybe this was just what adolescence feels like. The storybook quality of our early childhood had been a fantasy, and the exposure of its artifice, of the many falsifications it entailed, was a heartbreak, a bubble bursting. A pin to the gathered, dumbly bobbing bunch of helium balloons that held my childhood beliefs about the essential goodness of the world. Pop. Pop. Pop.

  I yearned to run. I did run on the soccer field until my legs shook and I was wobbly in my guts, then got a ride home in the crisp post-practice dusk from a senior with a driver’s license and ate everything I could find. Move a muscle, change a feeling, my depressive, soccer-playing father told me. He cheered me on from the sidelines and was visibly gladdened when I did well. By senior year, I was the soccer team captain. I was affable and social, but frequently overwhelmed by sadness. I loved my family—my heart, my home—so much, but the almost perverse closeness of our pack, part of our buoyant charm throughout my childhood, had come to feel suffocating. As high school ground to a close, I dreamed of small sunshine-less spaces that belonged entirely to me, the more book-lined and bunker-like the better. I didn’t like being seen. I just wanted cozy quiet: a fantasy of detachment from the webs of accountability in which I felt already puzzlingly ensnared. I began to tell myself that if I could get away and start my own life, I would be okay. So I balled up a dozen T-shirts, packed them in the powder-blue vintage suitcase from the thrift store on Route 73, and left.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  San Francisco had a darkness that was entirely unlike what I knew from the East Coast, maybe because my East Coast was circumscribed, as my parents had designed it. I was a child of the suburbs, carted into the city periodically for edification. In New York or Philadelphia, we passed through bad neighborhoods, but only on the way to better neighborhoods, to eat, see family, look at art. Or my father, a journalist who knew every square inch of New Jersey, led us on day trips to the Ironbound in Newark for paella or the back room of a Middle Eastern market in Paterson because they had the best hummus. On the East Coast, if you’re in a bad situation or on a scary block, you know. Things look different, feel different. People regard you differently. Someone might ask you bluntly what you’re doing there, whether maybe you’re lost. But in California, everything was so pretty. The sky was bigger. Industrial expanses looked functional, not forgotten, as they did in Elizabeth or Linden or on Brooklyn’s waterfront. Even decrepitude had a soft-hued beauty, the late-day sun pouring caramel light over powder-blue and milkshake-pink houses. Danger was illegible to me there—I couldn’t read the streets. And the menace that dwelled there felt less criminal and more psychotic. San Francisco in the 1990s had a distinctly sinister Manson vibe, the lingering hangover of
the far-gone hippie creeps who’d dropped too much acid. A small, bedraggled army clad in muted rainbow hues with pale eyes and leathery faces. Peace and love gone sour. San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, even Marin—these were places where you could meet someone, find yourself deep in conversation with them, and not realize for twenty minutes that they were raving mad. A person’s absolute nuttiness was a revelation that dawned slowly, unreliably, and was all the scarier for it.

  The city also felt freshly ravaged by AIDS, the animating terror of my youth. There were faces that bore the shadow of illness and grief and there was a traumatized quality to many places. The Castro, where I spent most of my time, was a cemetery of sorts, haunted by lives extinguished quickly, painfully, and senselessly. I worked among young men who had lost their pack.

  When Rachel, Kat, and I landed in San Francisco, we were taken in by a beloved friend of my parents, who set us up in the living room of her house out in the foggy Avenues. On a block dominated by quaint, pastel-colored Doelger homes, hers—painted black with red trim—looked like a goth oasis. The perfect place to land. In the mornings, we pored over the classifieds in her bright salmon-colored kitchen and made phone calls, then drove around the city looking at apartments and smoothing ourselves fleetingly into presentability in order to twinkle and grin through twenty-minute interviews for retail and service jobs. Our city map was unfolded and folded back up a dozen times a day. We found a three-bedroom apartment on Fourteenth Street between Guerrero and Valencia that would cost us each four hundred dollars a month, and got two jobs apiece.

  There were no meditation apps, no activated-charcoal water. To feel clean and alive we ate salads overflowing with sprouts, kidney beans, and avocado, drank sweet fruit smoothies, and took long walks, studying the cultural differences between this place and the place we’d come from—some of those differences were minute and debatable, and others stark enough to elaborate and expound upon for blocks. Our punk scene back home had grown slicker, more stylized and goth-leaning. Everyone wore black. But here, there was a touch of the circus in punks’ style. In the gritty, candy-colored Mission, girls had a special kind of grime. They wore ill-fitting vintage pencil skirts, oversized sweatshirts, and cowboy boots that rode mid-calf, exposing half of their hairy legs. Their magenta hair was permanently matted. Some women wore muscle T-shirts and had mustaches and would buy you drinks if you hung around the Lexington looking like you had a hometown chip on your shoulder, some shit to work out. They wrote poetry and played punk folk music. We lived a few doors down from Red Dora’s Bearded Lady, and I fell for butch girls and trans boys who had the swagger of the typical asshole guys I was drawn to. LIQUOR IN THE FRONT, POKER IN THE REAR read the café’s T-shirt, which bore the icons of nineties tattoo culture: flames and dice, dancing girls.

  I developed fierce crushes. I wanted one of the bearded ladies to save me, even to break my heart. I thought: What if you could be with a hot tough guy whose creamy emotional middle when you bit down—whose heart—was that of a woman? What if I could play caretaker-starlet to a slick, white-T-shirt-clad macho man who wouldn’t carry the unfortunate baggage of having been born a boy? It didn’t happen—I must have been afraid. I seemed, however, to know already that the masculinity I was in thrall to was just a flimsy performance no matter the person’s gender. You had to prop it up, though, act like it was real, in order to play your part and get what you wanted from it.

  I was learning about casual sex. About casualness, in general. That if you wanted to be seen as cool, you had to act cool, in the sense of being detached, unperturbed. I practiced it on the men who sought my attention. There was Miguel, the beautiful boy I worked with at the record shop, who flirted with me in the count-out room and left a note written on receipt paper in my jacket pocket that read, in art-school capital letters, IF YOU LET ME, I WILL. I acted nonchalant, never even acknowledged receipt of the message, though later, with a thick, shiny piece of packing tape, I affixed it to a page in my journal. I continued to play it cool around him, and we circled each other, the tension between us rising for a couple weeks, until one night around 2:00 A.M., our buzzer rang. The sound was so blaring it woke me and Kat, who emerged bleary-eyed from her bedroom. Her coffee shop shift in the Sunset started at six. Rachel came out of her room, too, although she was wide-awake, in peach velour short shorts, holding a calligraphy pen. You’re up? I said, though she often stayed up nearly all night and slept in until the late morning. Some nights she worked at It’s Tops, the twenty-four-hour diner, in a pink-and-black uniform dress with the name BONNIE—her waitress name—sewn above the breast. I’m drawing a bird. Who goes there, do you suppose? she asked, directing her chin toward the door and squinting one eye. I have a feeling that’s for me, I said, heading toward the stairs. If I’m not back in five, come down. Rachel, who had been my protector since we met in the fourth grade, snorted and said, Oh don’t worry, then retreated into her room. The building we lived in was set back from the street and to let someone in we had to walk from our doorway down a long alley to open the gate. I didn’t even put shoes on, I just felt a momentary charge of gratitude for the good fortune of having fallen asleep in a cute yellow nightgown and padded barefoot down the alley, my feet loudly slapping the concrete. The meaty thwap echoed off the walls of the narrow passageway. I opened the door and there was Miguel, smiling bashfully in apology for the time of night or for his own state. He stumbled a bit just trying to stand still there, eyeing me glassily. I let him follow me inside. He tasted like cigarettes and tequila and fucked me like a freight train on the bare mattress in my closet-sized bedroom, whispering in my ear in Spanish. Afterward, we gulped tepid tap water from pint glasses.

  During the day, everything was relaxed between us. Occasionally, his gaze lingered playfully, or he winked as he passed me in the tight aisles of compact discs, but mostly we acted like nothing had transpired between us. I savored the feeling of having a secret and knowing that the secret was sex. What good was sex, really, besides this, a place in my mind where I could store stealthily the footage from these cloak-and-dagger nights of noises, nests of hair and wetnesses, moments of looking, longing, release. Darkness. Myriad moles and holes, small sounds. The act itself was one thing—I think I enjoyed it. But the highlight reel I played back in my mind throughout the day was even sweeter to savor. Like the soreness in my body—this was the aftermath, the memory, the part of the experience that was mine alone. An unknowable, unlegislatable thing I had a right to. It felt hard-earned. This was what you got in exchange for the sleepless early morning hours lying next to someone you wished wasn’t in your bed.

  For a time, Miguel was a proper paramour, but we were not bound to each other. I had other less exciting, less mutual encounters, so I was also learning what it felt like to let something happen that you didn’t want to happen or to be terribly embarrassed by someone you had slept with. There were sloppy one-nighters with people we didn’t really know, who the girls and I would run into while eating breakfast on Sixteenth Street and—following the painfully stalled, stuttering exchange of chill pleasantries—laugh at. This tended to happen the morning after a night of drinking because every night was a night of drinking. The bloated, exposed, skin-crawling feeling of a bad hangover was worsened most strongly by one of these brunchtime run-ins, like the one with the guy we called Ballet Steve, a dancer friend of a friend of an acquaintance whom I’d gotten tanked with at the Kilowatt on cider that tasted like halfway-flat pear soda. In the cold light of day, he looked so much shorter, sounded so much more Canadian. I’d instinctively smiled when he saw us, but that drew him over, where he stood too long at our table, trying to find something to say after we’d traded initial observations about the weather. Did he feel that because we’d had sex earlier in the week, he owed me a lengthy conversation? Kat and I always strained for politeness. Rachel had chutzpah, and she never suffered fools.

  This has been great, Steve, she said, as the waitress set dow
n the extra maple syrup she’d asked for, but we’re going to continue on with our meal. Thanks for stopping to chat! I chortled into my breakfast beer.

  That’s the guy?! I said, incredulous, once he was out of earshot.

  That is the guy you brought home the other night, yes, said Kat.

  He looked so much cuter then, I said wistfully. It was puzzling, this part of growing up. How odd it was that people just fucked each other, and then saw each other on the street or in a restaurant and had to pretend to care enough to say hello. But even though it was the flipside of the power I’d felt with Miguel, there was power in the Ballet Steves, too. It all gave me the sense that I was the architect of my own romantic destiny. I might make a few mistakes, but affection, desire, and sex were there, flowing forces in my midst. It was simply a matter of choosing a worthy mate.

  I worked the first half of the day at the gift shop in the Mission, the kind of place stacked floor to ceiling with prayer candles and stickers and goofball novelty gifts and Día de los Muertos figurines. The owner was an odd woman in her forties who’d decided to hire me almost immediately when she introduced herself and I remarked that her name was an anagram of mine. In San Francisco, that kind of thing is a sure sign—of what, I still don’t fully know. The anagram lady ran a phone-sex hotline out of the back of the place. They didn’t seem to stick to any regular kind of schedule. There were only two other employees who manned the front of the store, both lovely, druggy weirdos in their twenties or thirties or forties—it all looked the same to me—and we split the week evenly among us. When one of them relieved me at the end of a shift, they treated me with a tenderness I resented mildly, not understanding that I must have seemed to them like a child. On my days, but for the yelping of cats and the mewling and purring of the phone-sex operators whom I could sometimes hear when I went into the back to make a cup of tea or use the bathroom, the shop was quiet and it was mine to preside over. Having the run of a small, dark store, something akin to what my parents called a “head shop,” was divine. I read, wrote letters to my East Coast friends and entries in my journal, and leaned for long hours on the glass display case, which held the kind of cheap, heavy silver jewelry toward which goths and hippies are both improbably drawn. Most important was that I controlled the stereo and piped into the dark shop whatever suited my mood. I’d spent high school cultivating a brassbound music snobbery almost macho in its deployment that only deepened once I worked at a record store. But at the shop there was only a CD player, so I stole stacks of soul and blues and alternative rock albums from Tower and carted them to the gift shop to play the next day. I lit incense and let the sounds envelop me as I indulged my passing moods. I never knew if the doughy guy with the dyed-black hair I saw scoring dope on the corner of Sixteenth and Guerrero really was Elliott Smith or whether I just wanted him to be Elliott Smith so badly because I was playing Either/Or nearly every day in the store and feeling my heart contort to accommodate the fresh depths of anguish and torment I heard in it. To think he was buying drugs just feet away while I smoked a Parliament in the doorway, half-sheltered from the slanting, sputtering rain, it was almost too much. I took it the way I took everything—as confirmation of the sadness of the world, a sign that I was built for sadness above all else.