Having anger inside you is sort of like being an alcoholic. (Hey, maybe there's a reason they two are often found in the same individuals!) You can fall off the wagon any minute, and you never know when it'll happen. You have to remain constantly vigilant.
I remember the last time I fell off, the last time anger filled my body to the point where it became a poison. Boston in 2011. June, I think it was. The anger came out of me and I felt so much like my father that I couldn't stand myself for months. Maybe I still can't, and I've just gotten used to the feeling.
(The following is excerpted from a piece originally published in Puerto del Sol, 2013. You can read the rest of it here, if you haven't already.)
I took my family to Boston and we had a wonderful day at the aquarium and we went to Faneuil Hall for dinner and the kids got teriyaki chicken and my wife and I got Thai curry
and then we had gelato and everything was going fine and we scrounged up two quarters and a penny so the kids could make a souvenir in one of those annoying crank machines you see in touristy places
and the penny came out fine and they played with it for three minutes but when my older son put the souvenir penny in his pocket, the younger one felt ripped off
because he only had a penny and a quarter and we couldn’t find another damn quarter no matter how much we searched through all our crap so he couldn’t get a cranked-out penny of his own and he cried like hell
even though I explained to him quite logically that we didn’t have the second quarter we needed and that he would have to share the goddamn motherfucking penny they already had
and though I didn’t use those words with my mouth I certainly spoke them with my body and my younger son felt them so perfectly that he started crying inconsolably
which I hate—and have always hated because no matter how much love and attention you give a child, it is never enough—and I got pissed at him
as pissed as I have ever been at another human being in public because this kind of shit happened every fucking day and I couldn’t take it anymore, and when my breathing got shallow and my brain clamped down
I wanted to blow my head off just to get rid of the pain because I knew I wanted to hit him
not hurt him, just whack him backhanded across he cheek so he damn well knew I was not tolerating his bullshit anymore
and in that moment I knew my father had felt the same thing for me more times than I wished or hoped to remember
and I knew that everything I used to call his proletarian rage was nothing but the squelching of his own desire to hit me when I cried.
After that the whole weekend went to hell. I became the inconsolable one. Boys, if you ever read this, know that I’m ashamed of that moment and am doing my best to root its ramifications out of me. Confessing onto the page like this. Dressing like anything but a proletarian, getting rid of any clothes that make me look remotely proletarian. Putting cuticle cream on the raw edges of my fingernails. I am pulling this disease up by the roots, but this scares me because:
What if I succeed, and this disease is all I have, and there are no more roots left to me?
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