I. Probably Reliving Old Lies Endlessly

So, my father tried to kill somebody. Big deal, nothing unique, happens all the time. At every 3:34 a.m. in every time zone in the world, somebody’s father comes home drunk, grabs a pistol, waves it at his wife and youngest son standing between him and the door, and says, 

Anybody gets in my way, I’ll kill ‘em,

then drives off and tries to shoot somebody. Nothing spectacular. No reason for my entire body to flinch when my screen door opens unexpectedly and I fear my father’s ghost intruding. And hell, it’s been four decades years since he lost his shit—it ought to be something I grandiosely chuckle at. I should be done wondering whether he looked at me or at my mother first when he threatened to kill us. Whether he said it with a bravado-filled wink like Steve McQueen, with a snarl on his lips like Jack Palance, or with a righteous scowl like Sidney Poitier in They Call me MISTER Tibbs. Or like some actor I’ve never heard of who carries guns to get people’s attention, then solves interpersonal crises with perfect Gandhian nonviolence. 

I should be done wondering whether I stepped away from the door before my mother or after her, whether I smiled at my dad in hope of diverting his rage, 

done thinking of him as the über proletarian, the working man who stood up to the bosses like Spartacus and died for it,

done bragging to people that he was a serious boxer (since he never got beyond Golden Gloves),

done believing that he had a career ahead of him in urban planning once he finished community college (since he mostly took creative writing classes),

done believing that the stories he wrote, which sit now in my office closet, are what blessed/cursed me with the writing bug (since it probably would have happened anyway),

done caring whether he really died of a stroke like the doctors said, and not from a suicidal combination of Thorazine and whiskey (as my brother Mike and I sometimes wondered aloud, back when we were still talking). 

When I remember/imagine my father cracking, my lies and half-lies protect me from the truths I would rather not know about him. The core of the man, the very roots of him, the way he lived and breathed and walked this earth. They inject themselves into my every action, including but not limited to: 

my fingers on this keyboard, 

the way my face sneers up when I hear my sons whine,  

how the world gets four-dimensional sometimes, especially when I’m driving, and contains not only height/width/depth but traces of all the men my father could have been.

II. Pitiful Regrets Over Lame-assed Emotions

So I never got to know my father as a man. Big deal, nothing unique, happens all the time. Our streets and prisons and barracks and universities are littered with men who never got to fight with their fathers, to hear them blaspheme creation, to walk beside them after performing miserably at some meaningless childhood sporting event.  

Losing a father is an occupational hazard of being human, but some of us turn that loss into an art form, into a religion—a brand of Shintoism, of reverence for one’s ancestors, that rebuilds our souls around the hollowness our fathers left behind. A religion that worships what it doesn’t know, such as: 

A. The brand of workboots he preferred, 
B. How he picked the grime out from beneath his fingertips, 
C. How he swore at balky machines when our tender ears weren’t around to hear, 
D. How he talked to his fellow proletarians,
E. How he could tell if somebody was rich,
F. How he sneered to let rich people know he hated them, 
G. How he hid his shame over our poverty, 
H. What part of passing women he checked out first,
I. How many beers he needed to start talking politics,
J. How many beers he needed to start crying. 

For decades I tried on the guises that might have been his, hoping to strengthen my bond with the laborers of the world. I wanted someone to define myself against, but instead I got a hollow: a no-father with no-attributes. 

You’re lucky, a fellow quasi-proletarian friend once told me. I know exactly who my father is, and how I’m like him. But you can make your father anything you want. 

Which is sanctimonious bullshit. It’s a complex place, this father-hollow. A womb we can self-impregnate with visions of what our fathers might have given us. We can abort those visions as necessary, give birth to them and leave them in a forest to die. We can feed and clothe them until they’re old enough to beg, then abandon them on street corners and start working on the next incarnation of the lies we claim, then nurture, then relinquish. 

III. Possibly Lowering Others’ Ludicrous Expectations

Back then they called me Little Professor. At least my mom did. Sometimes she says,
Remember how we called you Little Professor? And now you are one? 

Which is also, in its own way, sanctimonious bullshit. But mom, look how long it took me to get here. Look how thoroughly and spitefully I fucked up every chance at success I had until I’d lived more days than dad ever had. But mom, after he died I didn’t want to be a Little Professor at all. I wanted to be a kid who hung around and wasted time with his friends every day, who didn’t have all the right answers, who didn’t have such a bright future. I was a kid with a dead proletarian for a father, a guy who made nothing of himself but trouble, and I wanted your expectations of me to be lower so that I could overachieve. Do you know how that feels, having such high expectations that you can never overachieve?  

But mom, you can still lower them retroactively. I’d like you to, because it would mean that I can stop driving myself to work ever harder and just relax. Drink beer and watch cage fighting on TV. Buy a lawn tractor and drive it all day.  You told me I could be anything I wanted if I worked hard enough, following the great proletarian principle of always working, always giving 110% to overcome the supposed unfair advantage that rich kids had over me. 

Rich kids—I can still hear you saying that with a disparaging sneer in your voice. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean, mom. Rich kids, even nastier than dad said it. Like they should have their pinkies cut off to make up for all the damn money they had that we didn’t have. Us proletarians, with our easily-shattered confidence and our workworkwork. 

IV. Perhaps Repeating Ostensibly Ludicrous Exploits

I used to try to be my father when I walked through rough parts of New York, Boston, LA, Denver. Looking for an excuse to pound someone bloody for taking the first swing, or to get myself half-killed so I’d stop pretending to be the fighter my dad was. I didn’t grow up like him, the oldest son among eight kids, in the hard-assed town of Paterson, NJ. Didn’t spend seven years of his life locked up for insubordination, escape, and robbery. I didn’t sit my girlfriends down at bars to flirt with other men so I could have an excuse to beat the shit out of them.

When I hit thirty and starting having a life I’d regret losing, I stopped walking through the bad parts of town and aped my father in subtler ways. I made myself coarse and uncivilized, especially in front of genteel strangers. I talked fast and slurred—gimme dat, dawg, aaarenge, cawfi—like I’d dropped out of eighth grade and never left New Jersey. I’d fuck women I barely knew just to watch them being overcome by the force of my body—as I imagined my father would enjoy, though I have no documentary evidence of such. It’s not the kind of thing a son asks a mother, and I never met any of his other women.

The probability that my father had other women ruled what I did with my penis for years. But now that I’m successfully married and avoid the bad parts of every town, all I do to ape my father’s exploits is get incensed at my sons. I merely clench my teeth and twitch my upper lip, then catapult myself into a snarl and a barked order. Stop that crap. I said NO. What the hell did I just tell you? 

The hateful vibe pulses out from my chest toward the offending child, who falls back in primal fear and shame. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I do you proud, dad. I’ll send you a psychic email the next time I feel it happening so you can observe me, analyze my technique, offer me feedback. 

V. Potential Recriminations Over Lifestyle Evolution

One spring day I talked with my favorite teacher ever. We sat outside the English Department office at UMass-Boston, a proletarian school if ever there was one. Built on a former garbage dump, that’s how damn proletarian it was. With pipes poking up from the tops of buildings to vent the methane. I told her I wanted to drop out of school and work like I was supposed to, like I was born to.  She told me: 

Anyone who can write papers about film theory like you do forever relinquishes any claim to the word ‘proletarian.’ 

And she knew from proletarian, let me tell you. Grew up in Israel, lived on a kibbutz. So I didn’t apply for the job at the cardboard box factory that would have paid me an astronomical $18 an hour. I went to grad school instead, took on more student loans, married a woman above my standing who earned most of my love but all of my resentment. As that first marriage failed, I tried to reinvent myself as a working class intellectual in the tradition of… 

Well, I couldn’t think of anybody then. Still can’t. I hear this mythical beast called the “working class intellectual” has found its last home in Britain. Or maybe it’s Cameroon. 

 
Now I’m married again, to a woman even less proletarian than my ex-wife. We have a financial adviser. I cheer as our retirement funds are go-go-go and moan when they are low-low-low. I listen, with sincere care, to rich sons and daughters who manage charitable trusts and must endlessly debate which causes to put their family’s money behind. 

Oh yes, I’ve turned the bend. The only proletarian things left about me are (1) the chip I balance on my left shoulder whenever I’m around genuine proles; (2) my desire to buy vintage Red Wing Irish Setter workboots with Vibram soles, which I loved as a teenager; (3) my pronunciation of the word aaarenge, which I cling to as my birthright.  
There, that’s it. The entire inventory. I shall now bemoan this great loss in song. 

O, for the modern-day Spartacus I will never become! 
O, for how ashamed my teenage self would be of me today! 
O, for all the friendships I ruined with my judgement! 
O, for those Red Wing boots again! 
O, for the swagger again, the skulking eyes, the petty animosities! 
O, for all the bridges, which I burned with my bare, belabored hands! 

VI. Parenthood Royally Overemphasizes Lessons of Emptiness

I am confused as hell about the fatherhood thing, and I know I’m going to pass that confusion on to my sons. Every glare, every harsh correction, every don’t, carries a tacit acquiescence to my parenting failures. And thus to my father’s failures, which are destined to become my sons’ failures if I’m not careful. Or is that already destined by blood, by the glares and screams and sharp words that have already passed between us and become part of our cells’ collective memory? To wit: 

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? 

(originally published in Puerto del Sol, 2013)