Love and Fury

by Richard Hoffman

  We didn’t care that everything was way too big. “Neat!” we said. We didn’t care a bit if we flapped when we ran, our canteens and shovels and cartridge belts falling down from our hipless waists, the chin-strapped helmet liners wobbling on our heads, because these were not toys; these things were real!

  We would grow into them. Our war was still in the future, the war that would turn some of us into cynics, that would rip apart families, that would send some abroad in search of safety, and that would chisel more than fifty thousand boyhood dreamers out of their lives and onto black basalt wedged like a blade in the heart of our native land.

  I remember a Memorial Day weekend many years later. We were riding in the car, Kathi and me and the kids, possibly going on a visit to my father in Pennsylvania. Perhaps we had been listening to news on the radio because suddenly our son Robert, five years old, riding in the backseat with his baby sister, made a declaration: “War is bad!” His mother and I agreed, both of the generation that came of age in 1968. “But Poppop fought in a war,” Robert offered, “he fought in a parachuter war.”

  It was a kind of query so we answered him by explaining, carefully, that sometimes a person has to decide between two things that both seem wrong and that some people fought in the war because they wanted to stop the killing that was already going on. He was quiet for a long time. He fell asleep. When he woke he rubbed his eyes, stretched, yawned, and said, “Tell me again.”

  “Tell you what again?”

  “Tell me about the time when Poppop came down out of the sky and stopped the war.”

  Just a few years later, when Robert was in second grade, Operation Desert Wind became Operation Desert Storm and the brothers, fathers, and uncles of several kids in his school were called to active duty and sent to the Persian Gulf. The principal decided that the kids deserved some reassurance, and someone to answer their questions about what was going on, so she assembled a schoolwide program that featured the local recruitment officer from the Army Reserve.

  But I was more concerned with a nine-year-old boy watching a man in a crisp uniform with colorful medals above his heart, standing straighter than he’d ever seen anyone stand before, with his hat under his arm, his brass buttons shining, wearing white gloves. Were I that boy I would be trying to narrow my eyes, jut out my jaw, stand up straight, and quickly become somebody else: the man up there on stage saying we live in the greatest nation on earth and that liberty must always have heroes to defend it from its enemies. And all those bloody et ceteras.

  The visiting room is a large, stark room of beige ceramic brick, with blue seats in rows fixed to the floor. One of the guards points me to a seat, and after about ten minutes, Damion comes through the door and checks in at the desk where a guard sits on a raised platform. I see him scanning the crowded room so I raise my hand; he beams for a moment before returning to his blank prison visage, a mask to wear as he makes his way past other prisoners and their visitors, other prisoners he may need to be wary of, whom he must communicate with here—by looking or not looking at them, by nodding or not, by his carriage, his walk on his way to where I sit. Social tripwires I can’t see are everywhere around him. Asked about this, he will shrug. “It is what it is.”

  Prison is a box in which we put our nightmares, our worst fears; prisoners are the actors we’ve chosen to cast in the roles of malefactors. (And how do we audition them?) The whole place is the architectural expression of self-righteousness. Each of the guards is free, within wide parameters, to exercise his personal biases, doubtless believing he is operating as a force for order, safety, virtue, law. One of the guards seems to have appointed himself Damion’s nemesis, undermining him at every opportunity. According to Veronica, it is because she and Damion are an interracial couple. “We will be sitting across from each other, holding hands, and that jerk will come walking down the row past couples making out and—almost fucking!—and warn us that any more intimate contact will end the visit.” This same guard has repeatedly written up Damion for offenses so minor (and in at least one case fictional) they are preposterous. But when it comes to jobs inside the prison—in the kitchen, laundry, etc.—jobs for which one gets “good time,” i.e., time off one’s sentence, it is the number of infractions, not their severity or even veracity, that will disqualify you.

  I get it that it’s a shitty job. I get that their authority is being tested every day. I get that in some important ways they are as dehumanized by the situation as the inmates. Still, one can feel their contempt for anyone who is there who doesn’t need to be. Visitors, yes. But especially volunteers, the army of naïve do-gooders who seem always to be convinced of a contagious virtue they are carrying. They only make things worse with their bullshit.

  I was one of them years ago. In this very prison, among others. I volunteered with the Alternatives to Violence Program, or AVP, but only on two weekends. Both times I was the only male on the team of five. Mostly I stood off to the side and watched the women present the material. The program is designed so that after several weekends you become certified to teach the curriculum; after a few more, you’re certified to lead a team.

  I recall returning from the first weekend disturbed and uncomfortable, but it was hard for me to grasp what was bothering me, especially since it was my first time inside a prison, but I sensed it had something to do with the approach my AVP colleagues were taking. Still, who was I to criticize?

  So I returned a couple of weekends later for the second session of the course. At one point, when the lead teacher turned to write on a newsprint pad mounted on an easel— “de-escalate”—one of the inmates caught my eye and nodded in her direction, making a lewd gesture with his hand and mouth. None of the women saw it. He looked at me, all but winked at me: we know the score, don’t we? I did nothing. Which put me on his side, I suppose.

  And yet, that moment, and that inmate’s vulgar schoolboy gesture, snapped me out of any illusion that we were getting through to any of the men in the room. The immaturity and misogyny of that moment, not to mention the look I received from the inmate and the complicity of my inaction, combined in a way I recognized. For all of our differences, we men in that room by and large had shared the standard-issue American boyhood. In that curriculum, violence, not so much hidden as disguised—as athleticism, as patriotism, as ambition—is of the essence. And so I came to believe that the women were starting from the wrong set of assumptions. These prisoners were not men who had strayed from the path, not at all; they had learned their culture’s lessons, our culture’s lessons, all too well; they were the guys who got an A in the course, and had they had other opportunities, other arenas in which to deploy their gladiatorial training, they might have been CEOs or senators. They would get an A in this course, too, because after all, telling women what you have figured out they want to hear is also part of the hidden curriculum of boyhood.

  I seldom hear anything that sounds like the truth about boyhood. I myself have been lying about boyhood ever since it ended. Not that I can point to a moment when it ended. I used to do that, too, tell about the moment I became a man, but that was another lie. As I work to strip away the lies, I see why it was I needed each of them. Or maybe as I outgrow the need for each lie, it becomes clear to me for what it is, becomes defined and articulate, and slips away, but not before I get a glimpse of all the other lies—and a few truths, too—it was connected to. Sometimes it feels as if I am unraveling, but I no longer think that’s a bad thing. Maybe when I’m done unraveling there will be time enough remaining to make something new of myself, something more of my own design. If not, then at least I will have spent my time on a project of my own, quixotic though it may have been.

  Remaking oneself. Isn’t that what prison affords the opportunity to do? Wasn’t that its original purpose? Is this not called a “correctional institution”? In reality, I doubt that society wants more Gramscis, Dostoyevskys, Malcolms.

  About a year after my AVP experience, I was given the chance to lead a
men’s group at “The Farm,” Concord’s prerelease facility. It was not an AA meeting or really anything like it. But it was called Tools of Recovery and based on a curriculum a local pastor and clinician had devised. The term “recovery” was understood broadly. When I first agreed to lead this group, the program was designed as an eight-week course. It usually took five or six weeks for the men to finish giving voice to their resentment at being incarcerated. During that time my role was to listen. I recall one man doing time for possession of a handgun:

  “In my neighborhood? Where I live? Know what we call a nigger with no gun?

  “Dead.”

  The second time I ran the course, I lengthened it to ten weeks. Finally, it found its real length—twelve weeks. I remember one guy in an early class who really helped me to shape subsequent discussions. Many of the men had children, and we were talking about what it takes to be a good father. Some were angry that their children’s mothers never brought them for a visit. Others were remorseful about missing years of their kids’ growing up. But this guy was thinking of his own father. “My father?” he said, “my father? I fuckin’ hate that guy! I fuckin’ hate him! But I fuckin’ love him, too. Y’know what I mean?” Or maybe it was the other way around. I honestly don’t remember. What I recall is the ferocity of his emotion and how utterly deflated he was a moment later. The oscillation between a hateful bitterness and an angry love is exhausting.

  As Damion comes close and smiles, I see my grandson in his face. I rise and hug him, both of us mumbling, “How are you? Good to see you. Good to see you, too. I’m good. I’m good.” I believe I can see the boy he was, a child still so present it’s heartbreaking, the boy who deserved so much more than he was given, and I can watch his face, first puzzled and then closing, as he comes to know, in some wordless, unacknowledged way, that I have been looking into him, that I am trying to bring what he’s told me of his life here, now, to this encounter, that I want to know him. I have embarrassed him, I think, even frightened him a little.

  Over the course of several visits, we have talked about prison life, legal matters, Jamaica, Veronica, Robert, Kathi, our conversation punctuated by stories about D, who is now four and offering hypotheses for everything he doesn’t understand. I bring him the latest funny thing he said, or something I have observed, or else Damion recounts D’s last visit to him there at the prison. We have talked about our fathers, about being beaten by our fathers, about our disappointment in them and our attachment to them, about our confusion, about our love and fury.

  The man next to us, two chairs away, is seated across from a woman I take to be his mother. She is feeding him, that is, she’s bought him a sandwich from the vending machine and microwaved it. Steam escapes as he opens the plastic bag. The smell is not appetizing, but he takes a big bite, thanks her with his mouth full, chewing.

  I tell Damion what D said to me a few days before. The two of us lay on the living room rug while I taught him the coins: pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters. Sometimes he called nickels “nipples” and dimes “diamonds.” I tell him how just that morning he drew a picture of a playground. And that I said that when someone is going to build a playground, they always draw a picture first.

  “Like a map!” D said, and I saw his pride and pleasure at another concept clicking into place. I thought I might offer the word blueprint, but thought better of it. Map was just fine. Damion is smiling, slowly shaking his head from side to side. “That kid’s a trip,” he says. “The other night I called Veronica and he answered the phone.”

  “Yeah, he’s doing that now. He races to the phone to be the one to answer it.”

  “But get this. He says to me, ‘Daddy, can you come over tonight?’”

  “‘D!’ I said, ‘you know I can’t come over there. I have to stay here.’”

  “‘Daddy?’ he says.”

  “I said, ‘What?’”

  “He says, ‘Why are you in jail?’”

  “I’m thinking, What the . . .”

  Damion admits he wasn’t ready for this question. Until very recently, D was content to tell everyone his daddy lived in a castle, a big castle. Now, telling this, Damion’s blinking back tears.

  “I told him we could talk about that when I get out of here. ‘I’ll tell you when I come home,’ I said. ‘I promise.’”

  “‘Why won’t you tell me now?’ he says to me. I’m not sure what to say. I mean, can you believe this kid? At four years old? So I say, ‘I will. I will tell you. When it’s time. Let me talk to your mommy now.’ Then the line was silent. I can hear somebody breathing, so I’m like, ‘Veronica?’”

  “‘No. It’s still me, Daddy. Tell me why you are in jail. Tell me now.’” Telling me this, he smiles and shakes his head with pride in this exasperating little boy, but he’s sniffing and swallowing hard.

  “‘Because I had a gun,’ I said to him.”

  “‘Did you shoot somebody?’ he asks me. He wants to know if I’m a bad guy.”

  “I’m like, ‘No, no. I never shot nobody. I would never want to shoot nobody. Never.’”

  “Then he says, ‘But guns are bad?’”

  “‘Yes, guns are bad!’ I tell him. ‘That’s why I’m in jail.’”

  “‘Daddy?’ he says.”

  “I mean, the kid won’t let up. So I say, ‘What? Are you going to let me speak to your mother?’”

  “He’s like, ‘Daddy?’”

  “And I’m all messed up by this whole conversation and I say, ‘What?’”

  “‘Thank you for telling me why you’re in jail,’ he says. ‘I love you.’ Can you believe it?”

  “So I say, ‘I love you too, D. Now let me talk to Mommy.’ Man!” Damion’s leaning forward now, elbows on his knees; he sniffs and collects himself, looks up and smiles. “That kid’s a trip.”

  And I don’t swap him the next story, the one I brought with me that I thought he’d like, the way I used to bring my brother Bobby stories of things I’d seen living in New York. I feel like an idiot for not seeing how cruel it would have been. Kathi and I had taken D to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem to see some Native American dancing as part of an exhibit. D was rightly impressed by the hoop dance. “How does he do the magic with the hoops?” And it was, certainly, magical: hoops, in several combinations, became wings of birds, butterflies, a ball, a cage, a horse. I didn’t get to see D’s face since he was on my shoulders; Kathi says he was enthralled. He also enjoyed an exhibit about water. On the way home we talked about the hoop dance. Kathi said the dancer mentioned during the Q&A that his father had taught him the dance.

  “When I was a little, little boy,” D said from the back seat, “my father taught me things. I have a father, too.”

  “Yes. Yes you do!” said Kathi.

  “And when I was a little boy, a little, little boy, he taught me lots and lots of things.”

  Silence.

  Instead I tell Damion how just that morning we went to the playground in our neighborhood, where there are always tricycles and wagons left by neighbors whose kids have outgrown them. I tell him about D wrapping his arms and ankles around the thin and supple branch of a young maple gone to orange, and hanging there just a few feet from the ground. “Look at me, Grandpa!”

  But I don’t know how to convey my experience of the morning. A wind came up and blew leaves from the tree-tops. “Look at me, Grandpa!” And I looked at him knowing, deeply, that we are all here for only some brief season of seasons we have no name for. “Life” is too commonplace, and carries no feeling. “Lifespan” has a span in it, a bridge, a concept I can’t always muster the faith for. Call it our portion, a single share of the plenitude of time, with little or nothing to do with anything but love, partaking of everything that ever was or will be.

  Damion and I just grin at each other until he says, again, “That kid’s a trip.”

  All my life I’ve carried a sense that the world is beyond our knowing, beyond our capacity to understand. Since the age of eight or nin
e I have awakened every morning to the questions, “Why Bobby and not me? Why Bob and Mike, but not me, or Joe?” What cosmic lottery decides that? What God decrees it? I cannot refuse this roaring chord of fear, awe, gratitude, and sadness, it has been the roar in my ears ever since. It is, I believe, the elemental form of the religious impulse.

  It seems to me now that my ninth year was a turning point. My brother Bobby, eight, was no longer able to walk. I remember little about this colossal change in our lives. My parents told me nothing. I remember being punished for my impatience with Bobby, “Come on!” I’d say, and he would whine, “I can’t. I can’t!” I couldn’t parse the fury I felt then, couldn’t tell the difference between rage at what was happening to him and anger at my brother himself. He was moved out of our bedroom, into the fold-out sofa downstairs and—When did it arrive? How is it suddenly one day there, as if it belonged in the spot—next to the sofa, foot rest up, its scissored chassis folded closed, the wheelchair, chrome and green vinyl. What could my parents have said? How could they have explained what must have only then been sinking in?

  Yes, everything changed that year. Of course I was not a self-conscious observer, so to say that everything changed is a judgment I make now, sifting through memories. And the lack of memories, the paucity of physical impressions, is surprising to me. I have such vivid sensual recall of so much of my childhood that I must take this poverty as a sign of just how confused and abstracted I had become. What was happening to my brother had a name but no meaning, a terrible reality but no explanation.

  Could my parents have taken me aside, a nine-year-old, and said, “We know you and your brother have been playmates all your lives, but that’s over”? Could they have explained that Bobby was never going to walk again? That he would grow weaker and weaker now until he died? As I said, I have few specific memories of this change, so maybe they did try to tell me what was happening. Or maybe they did explain it to me but I didn’t understand, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Or maybe they were trying to spare me the worst of it.