My life is not the only piece of evidence that my ancestors should have been discouraged, using the most insistent rhetoric necessary, from breeding with other humans; if it were, this would scuttle the entire argument. I often receive messages reminding me, explicitly or via their underlying premises, that despite the unfortunate damage I’ve inflicted on people along the way, my confining my ruinous gametes to the extrauterine sector of the biosphere should count for something in the citizenship credit column.
Over the weekend, my mom e-mailed me to tell me that my dad’s older sister, who’s 80 or 81, has been placed in a long-term care facility near Orlando, Florida, that swampy airlock before Hell where everyone eventually lives if allowed to descend into sufficient levels of misery. Until about a year ago, this aunt, always the main communicator on that side of the family, called my dad regularly. After these calls tailed off, my dad, out of character, took the initiative to call her. He discovered that she was no longer using a computer because she didn't know how. More recently, she has evidently forgotten how to dial a phone. She also may have liver cancer.
Excepting one time when I was two, part of a trip I remember little of, I never met this ostensibly close relative. Still, I have a hard time believing ending her life in a drawn-out malignancy-riddled oblivion is what my aunt would want, based on the few facts I’ve accumulated about her over the years. It’s an incomplete picture, like everything filtered through my dad and a few associated lenses, but a powerful one.
My Aunt EK was born in the wrong era for her mind, and her self, to be accepted, let alone appreciated. I don’t think this was ever made explicit via the proper channels, but she was a lesbian and knew it from the start, meaning that she grew up in middle 1950s America with completely forbidden ideas, all while attending Catholic school. (I don’t think she ever took a life partner, or if she did it must never have been for long.) By all accounts, including her own boisterous chatter about her formidable academic “CV,” she was scholastically and otherwise brilliant. She became a nurse at a time when nurses, almost all of them women, were openly treated as something between indentured servants and hostile witnesses in most hospital and clinical settings. If you were called a dumb cunt, it was a closed incident and accepted as fact that you weren’t to screw up in the same way again.
Combine all of this with the dexterity of Aunt EK’s mind (and her high opinion thereof) and her hard-earned feelings about what would later be called the patriarchy by far softer women, she was well positioned to seek both personal and professional revenge.
It took a while, but Aunt EK did just that. She headed off to school periodically and wound up with a Ph.D. in psychiatric nursing at a time when these were very rare among women. She became a hospital administrator. At some point, for reasons no one must have asked about or listened to, she also took a detour to divinity school. In the mid-1990s, she wound up in Rwanda with a humanitarian group during the height of the U.S. involvement in that nation’s treacheries and banalities. Finally, she got what had to be the job of her dreams: Busting doctors for Medicare fraud. This required her, for practical purposes, to live in Florida, which is to crooked medical practices what the Olduvai Gorge is to archaeological anthropology. I don’t know how many scalps she claimed in the form of physician medical licenses, but God fucking bless her, I hope she let out a bulldyke war-whoop in her office every time she got to run a red pen through the name of another Prickwad T. Scamster, M.D. Although she and I may be the only two on that side of the family with college degrees, I think she was glad when I DNF’d medical school.
It is of some note to genetics students that Aunt EK’s mother, my paternal grandmother, died of, or at least with, Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 100, at least eleven years after being diagnosed with the disease. She was born in 1912, a few months after the Titanic sank, the same year Fenway Park was built, not terribly far apart in space. She died about a month after becoming a centenarian, at around the same time I last spoke to my dad. She spent the last year of her life in hospice. Whatever fueled her fundamental engine, it wasn’t to be trifled with. I can’t say how my father’s own mind is doing, other than probably steeped in beer and as detached as possible. I also can’t be bothered to look into the heritability of progressive dementia. I just know that if I could have passed something bad along to the next generation of Becks, I most likely would have, or so it always feels.
Most of the information above I actually learned from my mother. I know very little about my dad’s childhood and young-adult years, and long ago gave up making meaningful inquiries. It’s been over twenty years since I’ve communicated with anyone on my dad’s side of the family besides him. Still, I can offer a Wikipedia-like version, with about that level of presumed accuracy.
My dad was born in a hardscrabble town in Ohio toward the end of World War II, not far from Wheeling, West Virginia. I think he’s the second-oldest of the four kids my paternal grandparents had. EK was the oldest, then dad, then my dad’s sister A who married a second cousin and had predictably sweet, football-headed kids, then J Junior. I think. All are still alive. Happily, from what I can gather, most of the chronic or even intermittent jailbirds, absentee parents and other off-the-grid souls in the clan lie the other, more familiar matrilineal side.
My dad told me occasional stories when I was growing up of his swimming in the Ohio River, then among the filthiest waterways in the world. He and his buddies would watch toilet paper spill out of big town sewers into the river, then find their way up or down the banks of the mammoth expanse of opalescent brown-green to swim someplace they at least wouldn’t see what they knew was there. As much. When they would go fishing, what emerged on their hooks sometimes had three eyes or fins with holes in them, courtesy of, among many other places, the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and whatever industrial piss-hollers had been planted alongside the sad, massive flow of slurrywater to Tiltonsville, Ohio.
My father’s father was a construction worker who died in the aftermath of an on-the-job accident when my dad was 16 or 17. He fell from a bridge he was working on to a barge, suffering a broken back and more, and passed away of a heart attack soon afterward. Thus I never met my grandfather J. I’ve never even seen a photo of him.
The only time I talked to my now-ailing aunt on the phone, when I was in my mid-twenties, I brought up the fact that my father was blase’ about his own father’s death, jokingly describing himself as having hit the pool halls the day of the funeral, or words to that effect. My aunt was practically outraged; her memory of my father’s traumatized reaction was so different from my father’s own terse account that I basically stopped asking my dad questions about his background and relatives. It’s not that I think he was ever untruthful. I just think he’s as incapable as an ordinary, functioning man can be of forming reliable emotional memories.
The news about my aunt's increasingly unreliable brain and thoughts of my dad has me pondering something truly remarkable: Never once did my own father tell me that, by his reckoning, I did something well. Not once in my life. There are certainly fathers who were more actively contemptuous of their kids at every step, and more physically and verbally abusive, but the ones I’m aware of tend to balance that out with equally noisy praise, even if it’s sometimes disguised as something else.
Not for any of the countless awards I got at every level of school or in running or, no joke, the Army, or for an 800 on the math SAT, or for helping him move wood from the pile to the porch in a perfect geometric symphony when it was subzero outside, or for just doing something nice for my little sister (not that he noticed, or that these was frequent gestures anyway). Not one time, as a kid or a teenager or a young or older adult.
Impressive. Amazing, even. I’m not saying I deserved gushing accolades or am being denied reparations now. This just seems a statistically colossal achievement on the part of my father. White privilege.
One time, on Christmas night, when I was eight, my dad told me he loved me. He had gotten into the whiskey, which, despite his nightly six or eight Budweisers, was rare, and I will never forget the stink of my dad the one time he said those supposedly magic words, sitting on the edge of my new Star Wars bedspread, and how many times I later gibbered them shitfaced and reeking myself at someone else, pathetic but meaning it. I get how hard it is to be close, especially when you suck at shit.
My dad is no monster. He’s laconic to a shitty, basically unreachable fault. He has a sort of code, though I never quite cracked all of it. And because I can assume the same emotions-off stance on command, I’m inclined to withdraw the reaching-out after only token resistance. I went through a period when I was well-entrenched in alcohol sobriety where I tried to mend fences — the 2012 incident that served as the coup de grace was trivial in the grand scheme of my transgressions, but such is the essence of family schisms — but that time is gone. Whatever happens now, happens, and this will end with someone writing a bad poem to a dead person, or not.
When I was about 12, my dad got to talking about some catch he had made in Little League that was the talk of the small town for a spell. An over-the-shoulder basket-style catch, like Willie Mays is famous for, except my dad says it was all luck, other than him running his ass off and putting his glove out at the right time. He was buzzed, and I remember thinking, well, you just described every symptom of a good catch. Luck, eh. I actually asked my Aunt A about this one during a visit to central Florida in the mid-1990s, because it was weird of my dad to boast even about stuff sons want to hear from their dads. Apparently, he wasn’t lying — Aunt A and my grandmother immediately remembered what I was talking about. They said he ran like the fucking wind. At least my grandmother put it that way. My grandmother was a true piece of work, a human battle-axe, extraordinarily energetic and profane and racist well into her nineties (my dad is not); from the passenger seat, I witnessed her try to drag-race some teenage hillbillies at a traffic light in Winter Garden, Florida when she was 85. She lost, but was competent behind the wheel of that boat of a Buick.
My mom and Grammy Beck, who would have been a potent figure at MAGA rallies, never quite got along. So other than that self-guided trip to Winter Garden in my late twenties, I only spent a few of her 36,500-plus days with her, most of them when she visited New Hampshire when I was six or seven.
Some of what I internalized from my dad has been useful. He has an implacable sense of order. He is gifted at math, though he doesn’t know it; he went right into the Air Force (and the edges of the Viet Nam War) to escape his father’s fate and eventually followed a buddy he met in the service back to New Hampshire, where he met my eventual mom, and settled into a career as an electronics technician and then a computer programmer. (“Eventual mom” is a weird, vaguely uncomfortable concept.) He has a zero-tolerance policy for lying — this was when the belt would inevitably come out when I was a kid, and despite the unwieldy mechanism, I got the point — and littering. And because my dad decided to go to one extreme of the demerits-vs.-plaudits balance, I tend to downplay my strengths and achievements, which is fine and itself laudable as long as I also acknowledge that I have skills in life and might want to make use of these from time to time.
On the whole, I'm surprised I'm not even more of a flat-out asshole than I am, assuming I’m even a competent judge of this, and that it took me as long as it has to check out of life other than tending to the basics of shoving food into my face-anus and waiting for it to fall out of my ass-mouth, and finding ways to pass the time in between without thinking of the number of ways I despise myself and everyone else. I think I had to stay sober for a few years to confirm that I hadn’t been missing anything vital all along. Yet even as I write this, I am counting my blessings. I continue to realize and respect just how deep my ties to my friends are. They continue to offer me support and literal work, and despite the world feeling like a grayscale place thanks to COVID-19, I am never short of experiencing at least transient amusement. Real fulfillment and gratification are more elusive, but at least feel worth pursuing thanks to the archipelago of amusements.
If any part of this self-analysis matters, it’s that I seem to have steadfastly committed to not making some of my dad’s mistakes by simply damming up the river of possibilities at a point farther upstream than he did.
My mom has told me that my dad thinks he was a shitty father. I actually don’t think he was, not by any meaningful standard; if anything, he’s only assuming that role now. My parents were basically hippie-kids (my dad was a Vietnam vet, but the onset of the 70s, and me, he was really a longhair with a Fender Telecaster) who were trying to do what everyone else who seemed happy enough was doing, and they tried. And more than they fucked up, they got it right. Mostly my mom, I guess, but that’s why God assures everyone two parents. My mom kept insisting I try different sports when all I wanted to do was read and fuck around with computers or building kits or occasionally get lost in the woods on purpose. She never pressed me to keep up with the bullshit I didn’t like, including brief stints in racquetball and gymnastics in some terrible order. But she eventually prodded me into something that I could wrap my life and spirit around, for good or ill. And my dad, though he never uttered more than a word in public, went to every one of my races in high school. Knowing he was proud, maybe in spite of himself, does mean something.
I'm not a hard person to figure out. I can justify, if not prove to the satisfaction of the jury, the serious criticism I offer of people and institutions, and the latest escapades in the running world have made this all too easy. But if I had more going on in my life — and I honestly can't imagine having wound up any different, in the end, than I have now — I'm sure I wouldn't bother pointing this stuff out, even reveling in it. But I have closed myself off pretty neatly from the concept of taking anything resembling a risk to my terminally irritable but otherwise stable emotional state. Virtually every free, sane, self-sustaining person I know would rather be in an imperfect relationship than eternally between them, and that’s not stupidity keeping even the “bad” ones together in most cases, that’s a normal human response to loneliness. My threshold for not screwing up someone else’s mojo is set at a point that pretty much takes even hookers off the table, not that I’d go there, not that it’s wrong, not that I’d ever be that pitifully desperate.
And I am certain that I would have done worse, or at least judged myself far more harshly, than my own mon and dad did had I ventured into parenthood. That’s not intended to be mawkish or a lament. It’s that being a parent clearly isn’t for everyone, kind of like life itself, and sometimes the right people manage to opt out. In case you haven’t noticed, I can be self-absorbed. Self-ish, not always, at least these days. But that’s different.
Going back half a lifetime, I feel as if I have brought my mom's idealism into every new adult relationship, then fucked it up with every one of my dad's inherited or learned traits, and that there is nothing to be done about this except try to be good to people in more superficial, transactional ways. Not that these don’t bring mutual feel-goods, but again, it’s different. I find it easy to reconcile having no real investment in the future or even the present with wanting life to be more pleasant for people around me. Sometimes, the right words said to a younger idealist at the right time can…well, they can shatter the shit out of their idealism, but my prevailing idea in this moment is that the right “passing” encouragement can count for a lot when a kid is looking for assurance that someone at least gives two fucks. I don’t know any thinking person my age who didn’t have someone tell them something from a place of pure experience, nothing more, when they were younger, something they now consider vital. I am neither a philosopher nor a psychologist, but I can tell pretty accurately when someone just needs some thoughtful encouragement. Not genius words in baroque language. Just. Words. And my friends deserve more of that, too.
Back when I was seeing a therapist, had she been able to read my mind and appreciate the extent to which my general ideas about people are no longer subject to modification, she wouldn't have unfurled all the elegant and compelling rah-rah spiels urging me to continue to meet new people, or train for another race if I really wanted to, et cetera. She would have insisted with a look of shock that I just jerk off in practiced solitude until even that urge for human contact faded, and given me a long list of porn sites. Or at least I like to think so. Not that I’m harboring murderous or other unusual impulses. I think I just want someone to confirm that I had my shot, whatever it was and wherever it came from, and that it’s over, and now we can all laugh nervously and move on to the next joke, but please let me be able to find the gun while I remember what it’s for if, if it comes to that.
I read through this a few times, both to proofread and make sure it looks more like an irreverent recounting of some family history plus some overstated barbs than anything more dire. I think so. Believe me, enough unexpected and interesting things continue to happen in my life to take terminating it in the near future off the table. But it does concern me that when I have passed some hazy point of being unable to think to my own satisfaction, I may not realize it or take action quickly enough to ensure my carcass not being commandeered and needlessly sustained, at great expense, in some facility for drooling, uncomprehending primates. Forgive me if I just described a relative, but I think it’s fair to say none of us want to be that grandmother. or aunt.
Or dad.