Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-05-27- 7:14 a.m.

If You Don't Cry... (Part II)

(If you haven't yet, read Part One)

“There once was a man who just couldn't cry. He hadn't cried for years and for years. Napalmed babies and the movie “Love Story” for instance could not produce tears. As a child he had cried as all children will. Then at some point his tear ducts ran dry. He grew to be a man, the feces hit the fan. Things got bad, but he couldn't cry. His dog was run over, his wife up and left him. And after that he got sacked from his job. Lost his arm in the war, was laughed at by a whore. Ah, but sill not a sniffle or sob. His novel was refused, his movie was panned. His big Broadway show was a flop. He got sent off to jail; you guessed it, no bail. Oh, but still not a dribble or drop. In jail he was beaten, bullied and buggered, and made to make license plates. Water and bread was all he was fed, but not once did a tear stain his face. Doctors were called in, scientists, too. Theologians were last and practically least. They all agreed sure enough; this was sure no cream puff, but in fact an insensitive beast. He was removed from jail and placed in a place for the insensitive and the insane. He played lots of chess and made lots of friends, and he wept every time it would rain. Once it rained forty days and it rained forty nights. And he cried and he cried and he cried and he cried. On the forty-first day, he passed away. He just dehydrated and died. Well, he went up to heaven, located his dog. Not only that, but he rejoined his arm. Down below, all the critics, they took it all back. Cancer robbed the whore of her charm. His ex-wife died of stretch marks, his ex-employer went broke. The theologians were finally found out. Right down to the ground, that old jail house burned down, and the earth suffered perpetual drought.”
- Loudon Wainwright III
It would be easy enough to blame my inability to cry on my parents. The timing certainly seems coincidental, and it is the way of things to blame all our failings and phobias of adulthood onto our childhood and our parents anyways. Or at least it was in the nineties. I’m not sure what is in vogue now. But despite recent trends in psychoanalysis, I find that overly simplistic and facile at best. Plus, I already have to blame them for the fact that I’ll never be six feet tall, and that I’m hairy enough to have to shave twice a day if I want to have a smooth face when I go out with someone, and that they didn’t have enough money when I was a kid to take me to the right restaurants or theaters or whatever to ensure that I would become an adult with that elusive quality of “class”. They did a decent job on me, so I figure it’s only fair I give them a break.
Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I wonder if the person I see is someone I fashioned out of clay. I don’t know if you can understand this, but there is hardly anything about me that I didn’t decide beforehand. My likes, my dislikes, even my personality, are in a large part based on these choices. I decided that I would like film noir before I ever watched one. I decided that I should be a smoker before I picked up my first pack. I decided I would enjoy scotch and not rum. I determined my tastes by thinking about what kind of a person this me was going to be.
I think I always did this, but I didn’t begin to do it consciously until I was fifteen years old, and my best friends were Pablo and Neal. Pablo wasn’t a particularly introspective guy, but Neal certainly was. His father was in the foreign service, and Neal had spent most of his youth growing up in West Africa. As a rather pale Irish-Catholic kid, I imagine he was a rather isolated youth, and I think that had something to do with it. But later, as high school sophomores, Neal and I used to sit around and decide what qualities we should have.
We were in the second semester of our sophomore year, studying in English class. At my high school, we used to have in addition to our regular reading, a vocabulary reader, with a new chapter we were responsible for every two weeks with twenty new words. And one of the words in this chapter was “stoic”. Neal and I were fascinated. We went to his house and looked up the Stoics in his father’s encyclopedia. And we made a very serious, very solemn decision that this was a great way to be. To be inexpressive, to be unmoved, to keep our feelings on the inside and only show them to whom we chose. To be inscrutable to the masses.
Look, I know this isn’t any less facile then blaming it on my parents. But I have so little to blame on peer pressure. I started smoking before anyone else I knew. I started drinking first. I had sex before anyone else I knew; I led my friends in our quest to be the first among our lot to smoke a joint. Everyone needs to have one thing they can blame on their lot in high school.
Everyone is in pain when they are fifteen. Everyone wishes they were bigger, older, better looking, smarter, dumber, richer, captain of the football team or the prom queen. Even the prom queen wishes she was different. But Neal and I knew that we weren’t going to become any of those things, at least not overnight. So we set a different goal for ourselves: to never let anyone at all ever see the pain we felt, even if our pain wasn’t special or any different than the pain every other person we knew then felt. We were going to hide ours. We were going to turn our pain into our own secret.
Not to long ago, a great and accomplished man said to me that “The best thing to fake is that you don’t give a shit about what anybody thinks of you. Because if you act like it long enough, you’ll fool yourself into really not giving a shit.” I didn’t tell him so, but I suppose I already knew.
There’s a moment in the pilot episode of The Sopranos that is simply perfect. I’m not the biggest fan of the show, overall. It had a brilliant first season, to its credit, a modern replication of Shakespeare’s “Wars of the Roses”. But since then, it has been repeating itself; David Chase has a limited number of things to say it seems. It still is capable of moments of brilliance, but they are fewer and farther between, and the overwhelming praise heaped upon the show by critics makes it even harder to bear. But one moment in the pilot rings absolutely true to me. It is the first session between Tony and Dr. Melfi, and Tony goes off on a rant about how these days everyone is running off to psychologists and talk shows to talk about their feelings. Tony wants to know what happened to Gary Cooper, to the strong, silent type, who just did what he had to do.
My dad is one of those men. My dad got his J.D., which he didn’t want, so that he could get a job he didn’t like, and has plugged away at it for over thirty years. He has tried hard, and done his best, and risen as far as he can go without a political appointment. But he hates it. He has stayed, long after all the people he started with left for other practices, or lobbyist jobs making twice or more the money he makes. Staying is the right thing for him to do; he has a talent for the law, but no passion for it. It isn’t that he lacks ambition; it is simply that none of his ambitions lie along the path he has chosen for himself.
But he doesn’t complain. He doesn’t fret. He made the choices he made because he had a fiancée and needed to stay in school to avoid the Vietnam draft, because he had a wife and wanted to have kids and they would need a home to grow up in and groceries on the table and braces and doctor’s visits, because he had two mortgages and loans to pay. And next year, when he has reached thirty-two years of government service and is eligible to retire with a full pension, he won’t, because all these things are still true, and because my brother will have just finished college and may be considering graduate school, and health problems are looming for both him and my mother and neither my brother nor I will be equipped to help. And the truth is he probably barely thinks about that.
For all the badmouthing that goes on about the “Cult of Masculinity”, no one seems to understand that this is really what the bulk of it is all about. My father has what he sees as obligations, as responsibilities. And meeting them comes first. His happiness came second to making sure I could have braces when I needed them. And no one seems to understand how huge that is. I’m only barely coming to terms with it now. Because that means more than just not having a lousy day at work show on your face when you come home and see your wife and kids.
My dad has to come home, every day, hating his life. Knowing that he has spent the last thirty years doing something he cares little about. Knowing that it is too late now for him to make a fresh start. He has to take solace in the things that bring him joy, or even simply diversion. He has to ignore everything else, put it aside for its own place and time, because these obligations he is tied to demand it. He ignores the fact that he has done few of the things in his life that he wanted to when he was starting out.
His solace, though, is that he gets to look in the mirror and feel he has lived his life the way he felt he should. He can be proud that he did his best to do right by the people he cares about, no matter what it cost himself. Even if he fucked up. Badly, sometimes.
That was sort of the idea in the beginning, even if I didn’t realize it then. I didn’t have a wife or kids to be obligated to. I didn’t have bills to pay. I just had an idea of myself, of who I could be, and I tried to make me responsible to that.
(Continue to Part Three.)

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If you want to make me
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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
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