I put my self-improvement program to the test on my paper route, my main source of income. Whenever a new resident moves in, I introduce myself and offer two weeks of free delivery. “It’s a great way to find out what’s going on in your new neighborhood,” I tell them. Sometimes they ask about the best grocery store nearby or a good place to take a walk, and I get caught up in a real conversation.
Behind those lighted windows, I find, live hermits and businessmen, good-looking housewives in bathrobes and crabby old ladies, along with lots of squabbling children. One old man, who lives alone in a house full of books, always invites me in and talks to me about what he’s been reading. I enjoy the paper route, mainly because it keeps me away from the trailer and the tensions at home.
Of all unlikely people, Eugene Crowe’s blue-collar father gives me new life. I’m helping Eugene with his homework one evening, and his father overhears us from the next room. As I’m leaving, he says, between puffs on a cigarette: “You know, if I was runnin’ a construction site and needed to get some stuff moved with a wheelbarrow, I’d sooner hire you than some big strapping kid. You’d figger out how to do it better, in less time.”
A compliment from an adult! Walking home, I realize that must be his way of thanking me for helping his son. I tuck away what he says, deep inside, where I have learned to keep the most important things.
* * *
—
From Marshall, who has read some psychology, I learn about the onion theory of personality. “It’s like this,” he says. “Most people see the outer layers of the onion, the self you present to the world. When people get closer and you trust them, then you peel away some more layers. Deepest of all you find the inner self, your true core.”
I think long and hard about the onion theory. It makes sense, but I’ve learned it’s best not to peel back any layers—that’s when I get hurt. I feel safest when no one knows what’s going on inside me. And when I probe that inner core, I come up with a blank. Maybe I should just concentrate on the outer layers.
I ask myself, What kind of personality do I want? I know already that I will never excel at sports or win a popularity contest. I settle instead on a reserved, serious personality. To my surprise, at the beginning of my junior year I receive an invitation to join the Key Club, a high school branch of Kiwanis International that takes on service projects such as cleaning up parks and public areas. The club needs a secretary, and I assume they picked me because I seem the studious type who won’t mind taking notes.
Encouraged, I begin a makeover project. First, I tackle my accent, vowel by vowel, trying to erase traits of the Deep South. I work on words like ten and y’all that Philadelphians have made fun of. Since the rest of the nation judges Southerners as backward, ignorant, and racist, I want to disassociate myself from my region.
Next, I reconfigure my handwriting. Mine seems fussy and frilly, too much like a girl’s. I practice forming each letter in a more modern, streamlined style.
According to a book on adolescence that Mother gave me, I am supposed to be caught in a roller coaster of emotions, laughing one minute and crying the next. Quite the contrary, I don’t know what my feelings are supposed to be or even what they actually are. Perhaps the safest path is to squelch all emotions. Too many times I’ve listened to Marshall and Mother scream at each other—as if rage has collected behind a steel door that suddenly bursts open to let the heat gush out.
To me, emotions seem a waste of energy. You let anger build up and explode at someone, then grovel back and try to make peace. You sense fear and flee in terror from a harmless mouse or spider. You feel happy one evening and the next day wake up depressed or hungover. Wouldn’t it be simpler to skip the emotions and just get to the end state?
In my speech class the teacher reads aloud selections from Siddhartha, a novel about a young disciple in the time of Gautama Buddha. I know nothing about Buddhism, but as she reads the story I identify with Siddhartha’s search for a cure to his sickness with life. He disciplines himself to overcome desire and achieve the “ecstasy of indifference.” I adopt that phrase, and long for what it expresses. I practice an impassive facial expression and a fake smile, a quick upturn twitch of the lips.
I begin reading novels by Sartre and Camus, some of which are just making their way across the Atlantic. “It makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten,” says a character in Camus’s The Stranger, “since in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before.”
The words leap from the page. That’s me! I think as I read. I like the flat, fatalistic tone of these novels, so different from the hyped-up emotions of church and revival services.
The ideas in these books set my heart racing. They contradict everything I have heard at church, where I’m taught that every action or thought has eternal consequences. Then, in the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—a Christian!—I find the same spirit of indifference: “Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it…. Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way…. Hang yourself, and you will regret it. Do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it.”
I think of the times I have attended the funeral of a distant relative and stood unaffected on the sidelines as friends and relatives threw their arms over the casket and wept. That is how I feel about all of life during these shut-down years.
I begin looking at high school through jaded eyes. I loathe the football games, where oversized gladiators gain their classmates’ adulation by chasing a leather ball back and forth across the field. On the sidelines, milky-legged cheerleaders in short skirts jump up and down clapping their hands to nursery-rhyme cheers. I watch the “drill team” toss shiny batons in the air like circus-clown jugglers, and the “homecoming court” with its absurd mimicry of medieval kings and queens. It all seems a stupid, meaningless charade.
* * *
—
My inner core, the center of the onion, is hardening so that no one can reach it.
One day I say something Mother thinks impudent, and she slaps me full in the face, so hard that it leaves the red imprint of her fingers on my cheek. I read on her face a flicker of fright at what she has done. We both remember last summer’s broken jaw, and stare at each other for a few silent seconds. Then I give her my one-second fake smile and turn away. She has lost the power to physically hurt me.
Around that time, I encounter Friedrich Nietzsche. Long ago, this famous German philosopher described the path to self-control that I have been stumbling toward. “It’s up to you to be well, to get strong,” the doctor told me. Nietzsche trained for self-mastery, living on a strict diet and forcing himself to go to bed at two in the morning and rise at six. I think of adventure stories I read as a kid: Ernest Shackleton sailing in a lifeboat through iceberg-choked waters and hurricane-force winds in order to summon help for his stranded men in Antarctica; the undersized scholar T. E. Lawrence depriving himself of food and water for days as he walked a thousand miles across the Arabian Desert.
How can I put these lofty principles into practice? The Buddhist books speak of “refusing to prefer.” Heat/cold, bad smell/good smell, harmony/dissonance, pain/pleasure—these are arbitrary categories that can be overcome.
The summer before my senior year, I take an undesirable job working for the county on a garbage truck. On my first day, I notice that people don’t even look at a garbageman; they avert their eyes. The career garbagemen are all muscular Black guys who hoist heavy metal barrels on their shoulders and dump them in the growling maw of the truck. One of them sizes me up. “Hey, white boy, you’re too skinny for them barrels,” he says. “We’ll put you in charge of the grass piles and bags of leaves.”
I don’t mind the sweetly rotten smell of moldering grass. But will I ever get used to the smell of putrefying garbage? To m
y surprise, after a few days I barely notice the odor. Marshall and Mother certainly do: I come home a sweaty mess, with dirt tracks on my arms and my T-shirts stained foul with scraps of fermented food.
Working outdoors in an Atlanta summer also cures my aversion to heat. Soon the Black workers let me leave my seat in the cab with the white driver and ride with them on the back. After our last pickup I stand on the running board and hang out sideways to catch the breeze as the truck races to the dump. It’s the only time all day when I feel less than sweltering—and I don’t care.
As the school year begins and the weather chills, I deliberately go coatless, even on rainy days. I am trying to flatten the extremes of heat and cold, to keep them from affecting me. I remind myself of what Shackleton endured on his voyage from Antarctica.
I come across a phrase used by boot-camp sergeants in the French Foreign Legion: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Run five miles, and your feet respond with aches and blisters. But keep it up day after day and the pain will disappear as blisters thicken into calluses. This, too, becomes a goal: to absorb pain without succumbing to it or dishing it out in return.
My sixth and final broken arm occurs that year. At church one Sunday, I accidentally smack my right elbow against the sharp corner of a pew. It swells and turns red, though I can tell the bone hasn’t broken. I decide to test my self-control. I go to the bedroom and whack it once, twice against the iron frame of the top bunk bed. Immediately, I feel a familiar sensation, the hot stab of a fracture. Yet the pain barely registers. Weakness has left my body.
* * *
—
Above all else, I seek self-control. Nietzsche drew a contrast between masters and victims: a master controls his own life, authorizes himself rather than letting others write the script.
I’ve heard people make comments like That’s just not my personality. I could never do that. I’m not that way. I resist all such thoughts. Camp and church have taught me that much of life consists of acting. Pray from the pulpit or give a tear-jerking testimony at camp, and suddenly you’re a spiritual giant. Do the opposite, and you’re a renegade. People judge by the outside—as long as you keep the inside well hidden.
At school, I observe other students like a waiter eavesdropping at a restaurant table. Who do people admire? I notice that wit has the same effect in a high school group as spiritual behavior does at church. I collect a few one-liners and jokes. Before long, friends appear. I listen intently to people’s stories, nodding sympathetically with apparent interest. I feel two-faced, but it gets results. For the first time, classmates seem to enjoy being around me.
I practice conversing about a topic in which I have no interest, and then engage a classmate: “I hear Richard Petty’s car got banned from NASCAR because of the hemi-head engine.” Although I couldn’t tell a hemi-head engine from a toaster oven, and have barely heard of Richard Petty, just tossing out that comment energizes kids at lunch for ten minutes. I drop the same sentence at another lunch table two days later, and it produces the same result.
While my classmates are heatedly discussing the new NASCAR rules, I search my brain for another conversation starter: “Did you hear the Beatles are coming to Atlanta?”
I volunteer for the school newspaper, literary magazine, and yearbook. Interviewing other students gives me a way to get inside their heads, to leech off their lives. When I write someone else’s story, I can stop being Philip for a time and view the world through a different set of eyes. I attend meetings every afternoon and evening, which has the supreme advantage of keeping me away from home.
Returning to the trailer at the end of the day, I shed my new personality and hang it up like a jacket, receding into my introverted life of books. Mother can sense that she is losing her sons: Marshall will soon depart for college, and I’m spending as little time at home as possible. The divide between school and home widens.
* * *
—
One incident from my senior year, more than any other, tests what I have learned from Nietzsche. As the school year starts, a classmate named Hal, a political fanatic, gets the harebrained idea of organizing student government in a way that mimics national politics. Hal draws up a program whereby each homeroom will elect one student to the “House of Representatives,” and each grade will elect two senators to the upper chamber. Underclassmen love the idea, because by sheer numbers their three grades will control the House. Hal’s American Party signs up a thousand members. Most juniors and seniors, focused on graduation, pay no attention to the scheme.
For a reason I still don’t understand, I determine to quash the whole project. Hal is a classic nerd: overweight, unstylish, academic. Perhaps his idealism grates against my cynicism.
To counter Hal, I form the Student Rights Party with a grand total of eight members, my equally cynical friends. The ex-football-coach principal calls me in and grills me. “Exactly what student rights do you have in mind?” he asks with a scowl. I mention a few issues: undercover photos of rats found in the lunchroom cafeteria, censorship of the school newspaper, an overcrowded parking lot. He bristles, but lets me go. I doubt he sees the SRP as any kind of threat.
Since there are five grades at Gordon, eighth through twelfth, the SRP calculates that we only need to win six positions in the student senate to give us veto power over anything the mickey-mouse House of Representatives might pass. We identify two of the most popular sophomores, juniors, and seniors, respectively, and I cajole them into running as senatorial candidates. Two well-liked seniors, a beauty and a jock, I persuade to run for president and vice president.
Hal mobilizes his army with a newspaper, a written platform, and a full slate of American Party candidates for every homeroom, senate, and student-body position. If elected, they promise to propose a Supreme Court to judge student infractions. The Student Rights Party fields eight candidates. In our platform we propose abolishing the House of Representatives. We stay up late creating slogans and making posters that prominently feature the photos of our candidates.
In the end, it’s no contest. Hal has recruited a platoon of eager vote-counters from the lower classes. In a large room, supervised by faculty members, they sit at a long table recording the ballots on adding machines. I don’t need a calculator to project the winners; I can read the results on their crestfallen young faces. Within an hour, the trend becomes clear. All our candidates are going to win. Hal departs the room in tears, his dream shattered.
For the rest of that school year, Hal and I do not speak, even though we share several classes. Finally, on a debate trip, I see him sitting alone at breakfast and, gritting my teeth, I ask if I can join him. We talk about the next day’s tournament schedule until an awkward silence sets in. For a couple of debaters, we are rather inarticulate. I swallow hard, and after a few false starts mumble a kind of apology.
Hal nods thanks and looks away. As he does so, I can see all the pain of the humiliating defeat on his downcast face.
* * *
—
Later the same year, I have a different, but equally disturbing conversation in my school lunchroom. On a day when I have no energy to fake conversation with my usual crowd, I sit next to a shy, skinny girl who never looks anyone in the eye. Though I recognize her from at least three classes, I don’t know her name.
I ask her a few questions about her life, and unexpectedly she lowers her guard. She tells me that when her father gets drunk, he beats both her and her mother. After school, she says, she tries to creep to her bedroom without being seen. She doesn’t know what to do. If she leaves the house, her father will meet her with a belt when she returns. If she stays, he might slip into her bedroom unannounced.
Listening, I begin to understand why she jumps nervously when teachers call on her; why she walks to the side of the hall, brushing against the lockers, her head facing the floor.
I say a few encouraging
comments and compliment her on a recent report she gave in class. But soon I run out of words. Nothing in my stock of rehearsed conversations applies to someone like her. For the last two years, I have worked on ways to advance myself, not to lift others.
That evening, a flutter of doubt hits me as I’m walking across the meadow to our lighted trailer. For all its faults, my home is nothing like hers. We both feel ourselves to be victims—slaves, to use Nietzsche’s word. Yet who is better, the one who goes through life with her head down or the one who finds ways to climb on the backs of others, as I did to Hal?
Abruptly, I see my makeover project in a different light. It occurs to me that deconstructing a person is easier than constructing one.
Families teach us how love exists in a realm beyond liking or disliking, coexisting with indifference, rivalry, and even antipathy.
—John Updike, “Brother Grasshopper”
CHAPTER 17
CRESCENDO
In one of my science books, a naturalist stumbles upon a bird and serpent entwined in a dance of death. A large blacksnake has looped itself around the body of a hen pheasant, pinioning her wings so that she cannot fly away. The bird makes a series of leaps several feet in the air, and with each crashing descent she pounds the snake’s body against the stony desert ground. Hissing in fury, the snake does not let go, but uses each leap to tighten its grip around the hen.
As I read that passage, I picture not a bird and a snake but my brother and mother, locked in a deadly embrace. During my high school years, as I retreated into a defensive shell at home, Marshall confronted God and Mother head-on.
Two scenes from Marshall’s senior year are etched in my memory. In the first, she grabs the belt on his pants and starts to unbuckle it, planning to use it on him. Marshall, now eighteen years old and six feet tall, thinks she is trying to pull down his pants to beat his bare bottom. He wraps his fingers around the belt buckle and pushes her away.
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