Or maybe—here I am ashamed at the narcissism of my inquiry—maybe I was not their first concern, not the first of their sons who needed an explanation.
Kathi’s oncologist called to report that the second surgery had gone well. Radiation would suffice; there was no need for further surgery or chemo. She scheduled her treatments for early in the morning five days a week, and continued to teach her classes. As the weeks went on, fatigue became a fact of life, along with radiation burns, patches of tender purple skin, blisters. Salves, ointments, naps, and her ferocious commitment to her students kept her going.
I didn’t know this at the time, but after that second surgery, Kathi had asked a friend if she could stay with her for a while if she felt the need. Our house was too chaotic and stressful. D, a year old, loved his grandmother intensely and always wanted her to pick him up; Veronica was working hard as a floor nurse in a rehab hospital; I was working two jobs and revising the book of stories I’d been writing; the kitchen sink was always piled with pots and pans and dishes, toys and books were strewn everywhere—there was nowhere restful or even very private where Kathi could heal.
My father, the youngest of five children, was born August 29, 1925. That year saw the invention of the first mechanical “televisor,” precursor of the modern television. Calvin Coolidge was president. The month before, in Tennessee, John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution in a public school. Al Jolson starred on Broadway, in blackface, in Big Boy. Alcoholic beverages were illegal. Recently enacted Child Labor Laws were being protested by anti-union “right-to-work” legislators. It is staggering to think of the technological changes my father witnessed during his lifetime, and sobering to think we are still contending over science education, still largely divided by racism, still looking for ways to exploit, rather than reward, labor.
Our first television was second hand, a long, low piece of walnut furniture with a kind of window in front to protect the rounded and bulging screen, the olive drab of army fatigues. A flat wire called the lead-in wire connected the array of tubes inside the set to an antenna on the roof. On more than a few occasions when we had a snowy picture or a double image, my father would open the window nearest the TV, from which the lead-in wire ascended to the roof, and instruct me to tell him when the picture was in focus. He would climb the ladder to the roof, then turn the antenna while I yelled up from below, “That’s better. That’s better. Good! No! Too far! Too far!”
I remember one occasion when I’d yelled that the picture was good, but by the time my father came back down and stood in front of it, it wasn’t. “I thought you said we had it.”
“We did! We did! I don’t know what happened.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” my father muttered. He smacked the side of the television hard, twice. “Try tugging on that lead-in wire.” I leaned out the window and gave the wire a good yank. My father had been looking back and forth from the set to me; then he looked past me. “Shit!” he said, and I turned just in time to see the whole antenna, spidery and silver, land in the yard with a crash like an alien spaceship.
Keeping the television working was important, especially when Bobby became confined to his wheelchair. Whenever one of the sets, always second hand, “went on the fritz,” my father would say, “I hope it’s not the picture tube!” I understood the picture tube as the heart of the television; if it gave out, we’d have to find another one. The back of the TV was a piece of Masonite easily removed to reveal the array of tubes inside, and whenever there was trouble, my father would carefully remove them all, lay them out on the rug, and draw himself a diagram so he would know where each was to be returned. All of them were cylinders, of various heights and hefts, and each had a series of pins on the bottom where they were inserted into holes in the circuit board. Some were miniature inverted jars; others were round and smooth at the top like the glass case on an expensive cigar (not so very expensive, sold at the very same drugstore), and still others came to a little nipple on top. Inside were wires and bits of thin metal arranged in some magical way, perhaps kept separate by a disk of thin plastic, brown or green, that directed or redirected or modified the “ juice” in a particular way that scientists had invented and other scientists, like my Uncle Bert, taking a night course to become a TV repairman, could understand.
But for the rest of us there was this trial and error, this wonderful errand I looked forward to, of bringing every last tube from the back of the set clinking gently in a rolled-up paper bag to the drugstore, where the tester stood just outside the wooden phone booth with its folding glass door and fat directory, half white, half yellow, hanging from a chain. The tester was an upright console with a large map or diagram above it with silhouettes, actual size, of each kind of tube. Next to each tube were numbers and letters corresponding to those on the tubes themselves (if you could find them) and a diagram of the arrangement of pins on its bottom. The console itself had an array of sockets for the tubes, also lettered and numbered.
The most important and interesting feature of the console, however, was the meter with its long and sensitive needle that would gauge—what? How “ juicy” each tube still was? When you’d matched the tube to the diagram, found its number, checked the number on the tube, and plugged it into the correct socket on the console, the needle would slowly and surely sweep from its resting place in the red, left side of the spectrum, to the green, right side. Except when it didn’t. That was a “dead soldier” my father said, the analogy twice removed from its literal source, arriving via the term for an empty bottle of beer. Then I knew that the reason the set had gone on the fritz right in the middle of Your Show of Shows, or I Love Lucy, or Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, was that the little soldier had given up the ghost. (I couldn’t help but think of this ending as a kind of flash or pop like a sizzled flashbulb, which, come to think of it, was a tinier version of these tubes.)
Aha! I’d say, the needle in the red, entirely unpersuaded to budge, that’s the one! Then I’d take it to the druggist, who would pull out a long drawer under the counter and rummage around until he found the box with the right number on it; always he’d slide the tube from the box and compare it to the dead one, just to be doubly sure it was the right one, and then I paid and, a job well done, headed back home to my father behind the television.
Sometimes he’d need help to put the tubes back in. “Argh, my goddamn fingers are too big. I don’t want to take all those others out again. You try. Here. Can you see where it goes?” My father would shine the flashlight for me. “Can you get it?”
That this was the dawn of the electronic age, of the visual mediadrome and a new consensus reality, was lost on me, of course, but the seed of that knowledge was there in my wonder, holding one of the elegant glass-and-metal tubes up to the light: a machine without any moving parts. Magic.
The understandings of my father’s generation, about war and women and violence and masculinity, codified and dramatized in film and television, and massively reinforced by advertising, became the culture in which I was raised, one that largely supplanted earlier values. To my father’s generation, the destruction of Europe seemed to validate American ways.
Watching Attack! again, as an adult, I see that I didn’t recall much about the story itself. Perhaps I hadn’t yet acquired the skill or developed the cognitive apparatus to follow the narrative, only to absorb the imagery, that indelible imagery. I also had no way to know if the film was accurate in depicting a world without women and a war without civilians. It may be the distinguishing feature of my generation that we were the first in history to have the world portrayed for us, to us, at us, in such literal and convincing terms before we had any real experience of it.
I am not in the habit of clipping photos from newspapers, but I have kept a photograph that appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe at the start of the Afghan war, at this writing officially the longest in American history: a man, a Taliban fighter, is on the ground with no pants on, blood all over his legs, b
egging for his life. The photo captures, no doubt, the moment before his murder by victorious Northern Alliance soldiers who surround him, pointing their guns at the pathetic figure. From behind the main shooter in the center of the photo a man comes running with his palm held out in the universal sign for “Stop!” His face is horrified and his mouth is wide open so that if we could hear him we would understand, even without speaking a word of his language, that he is trying to give an order to desist, and that he already realizes he is too late. What is unclear, however, is whether his order is directed at the man with the gun or the man with the camera.
In 1938, in Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell wrote about his inability to shoot at a fascist courier because the man was “holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran . . . a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting him.” But here is a man without pants at all, his bloody robe hiked up around his waist, his hairy legs, his fat behind, his creatureliness undeniable. The blood on his legs, the gore on his hiked-up robe, may be evidence (it seems likely, given the horror on his face) that a mutilation has already taken place. Has he had his genitals shot off? The savagery of such an act would be consistent with the reported behavior of these men in other circumstances, for example, God help us, when entering villages, where wholesale rape, murder, and unimaginable acts of brutality are the order of the day.
Could it be that these warriors believe that what they are doing to the bare-assed bloody man in the photo is depriving him of his “manhood,” which to them is more important than life itself? This delusion, of manhood—identified with the genitals as befits a phallic cult—as a state of being more important even than one’s humanity, even than one’s life, justifies any cruelty toward another male. When the phallus is turned into a weapon of power against female human beings, then the domination and indignity it represents is the whole point. Death, whose inverted view of everything has found expression in these actions, is, of course, the final, literal outcome.
The moral blindness of these men—along with the blindness of those who flew jetliners into the World Trade Center or of those who fire missiles into wedding feasts—to the creatureliness of mothers and sisters and daughters and men who struggle to hold up their pants, is the triumph of a death-dealing metaphysics, the ascendance of symbol over reality. It seems fair then to ask what has changed since 1938, when Orwell could not pull that trigger. What has happened to men? In the years since then, mass mechanized death entered history and therefore our consciousness, and its terror has been passed down through the last several generations. The threat of instantaneous mass death, the theme of my cold war boyhood, does not inspire fellow feeling. This abiding fear, it hardly needs to be said, is a new thing in human history. And the horror experienced and survived by so many of our parents and grandparents has been bequeathed us in ways both visible and hidden, as violence and silence.
It is by now firmly understood that trauma repressed, denied its expression in language or art, will be passed on down the generations. In their landmark work, History Beyond Trauma, Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Guadilliere contend that we inherit the trauma even of wars and other cataclysms distant in place and time. Unarticulated trauma is expressed in myriad behaviors that communicate trauma’s injurious imprint from parent to child and shape the child’s emotional expectations and psychic assumptions.
I was born three years and 364 days after the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, and three years and nine months after the first atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; three years, eight months, and four days after Japan surrendered to General MacArthur on the battleship USS Missouri on September 2, 1945. I remember seeing a picture of this when I was a boy, maybe in an old Life magazine still lying around the house, or a National Geographic: a couple of tables set up; General MacArthur there with the representatives of the Japanese emperor Hirohito; sailors, all leaning over rails, sitting on every deck of the ship looking as relaxed, animated, and happy as a theater packed full of kids for a typical feature at the Rialto, where on Saturdays we could get in for a can of beans or noodle soup to be donated to the Salvation Army food pantry. It’s over! It’s over! Thank God, it’s over!
But relief at being alive is not the same as pleasure in being alive. A whole generation got to work restoring normalcy. But it had been a worldwide cataclysm; tens of millions of people had died; and a new and brutal idea emerged from that fact. Put simply, this toxic idea seems to be that the whole of the world is an arena in which one strives, that all the others one encounters there are adversaries or allies, and that there are necessarily winners, who live, and losers, who die.
It was Halloween, not long after September 11, 2001, and all over our neighborhood, along with jack o’ lanterns and plastic skulls and cardboard witches, people were flying the colors. It was a windy day and everywhere flags were flapping like crazy, as if to tear themselves from poles and fly away, I thought, as if they understood they would be called upon, soon, to do their ugly duty again.
Our neighborhood makes a big deal of Halloween; small single-family houses built for returning Civil War vets are close together and make trick-or-treating easy. Angels, pirates, knights, superheroes, and, of course, witches and goblins go door to door for a couple of hours after dark, and people keep lots of candy on hand to drop in the bags and pillowcases the kids hold out. It struck me that year that the theme among the older boys, eleven or twelve, was decidedly military, lots of camouflage, camo paint on their faces, plastic rifles. One had a chain around another’s neck as he dragged him up our front stairs: “He’s my prisoner!” he said, and gave a yank on the chain. The other kid smiled and gave me a quick little wave. He had a turban on.
As always, as much as they could get away with given the fact that there were so many adults around, the older kids ran after the younger ones, trying to scare them. One young boy, in a skeleton suit from the store, ran past the front steps. “It’s the tally bomb!” he cried out, looking to me for help. “The tally bomb is coming!”
I know it cannot be true, and I know that it is simplistic, but when I look at that photograph from the beginning of the Afghan war, I think that any and all alternatives to this, to what is being enacted in this photo, are good by contrast. Why argue about which ones are best? Would the man on the ground do that?
Ah, but if he weren’t on the ground, he would be arguing for his position, as he no doubt had lately been doing, with a gun. Does he still believe, now, that there is another life? Now that he wants desperately to take a few more breaths? All I can do, all any of us can do now, is represented in the photo by that desperate running man with his palm held up: stop! But to whom is he, to whom am I, to whom are we, speaking? And why? I have no answer, do you? I am only a survivor, one among the many mourners.
I could write a guidebook to Allentown, but it would be filled with monsters. Its pleasures and joys would be secret and taken on the run by children running a gauntlet of post-traumatic adults swinging their fists, their religion, their dicks at them as they stumbled for daylight. Its pleasures and joys would be private and largely solitary: the ice-cold water of the Jordan Creek’s rapids; the cool shade under the bell of a weeping willow, a stack of library books next to the couch, even the quiet of the church of an afternoon where I could retreat to incant the rosary and enchant myself with candles in red glass cups in rows and the sweet residue of incense in the air and the understanding faces of the sculptured saints that seemed to say they understood and who held their hands in ways that signaled, “Hush. You don’t have to figure out how to say it, kid, I know. I know.” What a relief.
Pleasure. Relief. Not being able to tell the difference is the precondition for addiction. The first time I tried to smoke a cigarette, I almost ripped my throat out coughing! I felt lightheaded and a little sick. I persisted, though. I could learn how to do it the way it was done in the
movies and on TV. The way the adults did it. Cool. The way my father did it with me sitting on his lap while he blew smoke rings right through one another! Soon I could inhale without coughing and soon after that a craving began. The relief of that craving I called pleasure.
Why does my father remain such a mystery to me? I don’t believe he had a terrible secret he kept from us, or that there is something he took to his grave that is yet to be discovered; it’s more that he couldn’t find a way to articulate his own complexity, his inner life, his essence. If he sometimes behaved as if he was ashamed, that doesn’t mean he should have been. In any case, I think his inability to express the nature and variety of his feelings made me want to at least try to articulate mine.
When he worked at the Boys Club, my father would regularly bring home rubber molds for plaster of Paris “knick-knacks”—first you turned the mold inside out and greased it thoroughly with Vaseline, then you popped it back right side out and poured it full of the mixture of powder and water you’d stirred to a pudding in a mixing bowl. The next day you could easily peel the rubber from the hardened figures and wipe them off with a damp rag. Then they were ready for painting, my favorite part. We certainly had some garish birds and rabbits and squirrels on the shelves and counters of our house!
One day, when I was in second or third grade, I think, he brought home a projector and a small reel of film. The Boys Club hambone team had been to a tournament and won second place. My father, as a counselor, was their coach. He had driven the Boys Club pickup truck with the kids in the back the hour to Philadelphia, and he was outraged that the judges had awarded first place to a team from Philly. As he threaded the projector he went on about how he thought his team had been robbed because he was white. “Couldn’t give it to the kids with the white coach. How would that look? Hoo boy, those judges wouldn’t have made it out of there alive! And I told them, too. I told the kids that as far as I was concerned, they won. Don’t be fooled, I told them. You would have won if you had had a colored coach.”
Love and Fury Page 15
