A Better Man

by Michael Ian Black

  My parents’ marriage lasted almost nine years, from 1968 to 1976. In that time, they had three kids, bouncing from Chicago to Washington State, back to Chicago, and, finally, to New Jersey. By the time they began divorce proceedings, so much had changed. The Vietnam War had ended, the sexual revolution had begun. Women were marching for equality. And my mom had fallen in love with the lady down the street. This time, her feelings were reciprocated. If my parents’ marriage had been a symptom of the old order, their divorce was a result of the new. New gender roles, new sexual expression, new opportunities. But also a new anger among those who preferred things the way they’d been. A cultural backlash that we’re still feeling today.

  To his credit, my dad never expressed anger to us kids at the way his marriage had panned out. He never badmouthed my mom, never said anything homophobic or mean-spirited about her relationship with Elaine.

  When he left, my dad took a little apartment near our house. We kids would head over there every other weekend to hang out, get McDonald’s, run around the shabby playground across the street. On Sunday nights, he’d drop us off and we’d run up the sidewalk to our house while he stayed in the car. We could see his headlights backing out through the slats in the living room vertical blinds.

  I wish I could ask him now about those days. What was it like for him to come home to that empty apartment every night, his life so different from the one he must have imagined when he walked down the temple aisle in his own new suit?

  It’s weird to me how marriage and fatherhood have become the cornerstones of my own life. Equally weird is how conventional my life turned out, how far removed from the fantasy life I envisioned for myself as a boy and young man. Here I am, writing from the kitchen counter of our home in the wilds of Connecticut. You and your sister have just left for school. The cat is scraping up the last of his breakfast from his bowl. I feel very much at home and at peace.

  Maybe it shouldn’t feel weird at all. After all, my life is similar to those of millions of men my age. Fathers, husbands, buyers of cat food. It’s all so domestic. Growing up, I thought of domesticity as a curse on the male spirit. It meant compromise. Selling out. It meant, I thought, that The System had won, whatever “The System” was. The status quo, I guess, the same vague rules and regulations I felt pressing in on me as a boy, the same pressures that I blamed for my dad’s death: If he hadn’t had to work so much, if he hadn’t had to take those night classes at Rutgers. If he’d been there for us more. If, if, if. The American dream felt rusty to me, a sucker’s bet. As a kid, I determined that I wouldn’t fall for it.

  Yes, I thought, I’d find somebody to love but I wouldn’t marry. A happy marriage seemed as chimerical as everything else. Many of my childhood friends’ parents were divorced and of the ones whose marriages remained, none seemed particularly happy.

  Will you ever marry?

  “Probably,” you answer, with a shrug.

  Even that noncommittal answer shows so much more optimism than I felt at your age. I didn’t think I ever would; I didn’t think it was worth the risk.

  After my dad died, I started paying more attention to the lives of the men around me. We lived in a U-shaped neighborhood of tightly packed townhouses clustered around a courtyard of assigned parking spaces. My bed was pushed against the bedroom window and, every morning, I’d peer out to watch the neighborhood husbands trudging from their houses, dusting the snow off their windshields with their coat sleeves, driving off to work. Around 5:30 or 6:00, they’d return to their parking spaces, trudge back up their sidewalks, disappear into their houses. Weekends were for running errands, schlepping the kids to soccer games, taking trash bags out to the big dumpster at the end of the road.

  I’m not sure what I was looking for when I watched those guys coming and going. Some sign that the life toward which I was heading, the life of a man, was worthwhile. What did “worthwhile” mean, exactly? I couldn’t have told you. But I had a sense.

  The one thing I knew about my future life as a man was that I wanted to be happy. Maybe that’s a dumb thing to say since everybody wants to be happy. But, as I said earlier, nobody ever talked about happiness as a goal, if they talked about it at all. Happiness felt like an accident, an emotional blip you experienced at birthday parties and on the first day of summer vacation. They asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” not “What do you think will make you happy when you grow up?”

  What’s the point of growing up if it’s going to suck? Childhood already felt kind of sucky. I wasn’t going to let adulthood be the same. Manhood was supposed to be a time of maximal freedom and opportunity, to do all the shit I couldn’t do as a kid. Stay out late, travel the world, eat bowls of Lucky Charms all day, every day.

  The things that I thought might bring me happiness as an adult seemed incompatible with the lives I saw from my bedroom window. As I’ve said, boys aren’t groomed for happiness. Instead, we’re directed toward accomplishment over contentment, every milestone pointing to the next. In some ways, we’re conditioned against happiness because a happy man could easily become a complacent man. Get enough complacent men together sitting around enjoying themselves and the next thing you know, they’re not producing as many goods and services as they might. Then what? The whole whirling machine flies off its gears. Too many people make too much money from other people’s unhappiness. Men aren’t taught to be happy. We’re taught to produce.

  The pressure on girls is almost the opposite; their happiness is presumed if (and only if) they fulfill a couple of requirements, all of which are based around the very idea of domesticity. Yes, we now encourage women to have careers, but we don’t expect those careers to “fulfill” them in the same way we do for men. A single woman, employed or not, is still thought to be lacking something. Moreover, a childless woman, no matter what else her life holds, is assumed to be lacking something that a childless man is not. The promise for girls, still, is that they will find happiness in marriage and motherhood. Never mind that a study by a behavioral scientist and expert on happiness, Paul Dolan, determined, “The healthiest and happiest population subgroup are women who never married or had children.”

  As for me, I didn’t know what path I could possibly take to find happiness. A traditional job, I thought, wouldn’t do it. Observations from my own life suggested marriage wouldn’t do it, either. Or kids. Or anything, really. The only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to get out of New Jersey. As soon as I could, I would pack my shit and go, and I would just keep going. Maybe I would become an actor, traveling from city to city, poor but free, and, hopefully, happy. Was that a man’s life?

  It certainly didn’t align with the men I saw around me or of any man I’d ever met. The closest analogy I could find for what I wanted were the carnies who operated the rides at the annual firemen’s fair. Wasn’t there a certain nomadic romance about running the ring-toss game in town after town? Maybe you’d meet a local girl and give her a giant stuffed bear even if she didn’t win the game, and you’d share a candy apple and make out in the glow of the Tilt-A-Whirl’s flashing lights. I didn’t want to run off and join the carnival, but I wanted that feeling.

  I wanted what a lot of young men want: adventure, independence, escape. I wanted something I couldn’t quite name. I wanted out. It just felt to me like there was something better out there—out in the bigness of America—that a guy could find, something more satisfying than money. Longer lasting. I didn’t know what it was. Nobody ever put a name to it.

  I remember the day Mom and Elaine dropped me off on my first day at NYU. It’s late summer. My new dorm is just across the street from Washington Square Park, spiritual home of the East Coast ’60s scene a couple decades before. After we haul my stuff into my room, Mom gives me a big hug, sniffling her goodbyes as they leave. It’s the moment I’ve been dreaming about since I could remember. Out of my little house, my little town, the little lives of the people there. I’ve just turned seventeen and I am free.

>   I walk outside. The city is humming: chess hustlers leaning over their tables, scrawny pot sellers whispering their wares under their breath as you pass, new students like me in T-shirts and shorts. To my left is Bleecker Bob’s Records and the dark old bohemian coffee shops where you can sit for hours stirring your drink and reading old paperbacks. A few blocks east is Tower Records and the big used clothing stores on Broadway. Keep going into Alphabet City, where punk rockers cluster in small groups on the sidewalk with their mangy dogs trying to scrounge up enough money to go drink at the Pyramid or 7B. Or I can turn around and walk deeper into the Village, maybe get a falafel or rummage through a used book store. Up a few blocks is the scruffy movie theater where they show The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight. Keep going and you end up in what I think of as “New York, New York,” the yawning mass of the city’s skyscrapers and office towers and brownstones and Central Park and all the places I will never visit when I am in school. That’s the go-go New York, where worker bees push buttons on computer keyboards and move money around the world. Down here in Washington Square Park are the artists and wannabe artists like me. We happy few, we pretentious few. We starry-eyed poseurs. I am enthralled with all of it and I spend several minutes taking in the air and watching the people streaming by. My people. I turn to my right and walk a couple blocks. Caffe Reggio, Cafe Wha?, the corner pizza place. I stop, unsure of where to go, what to do. I don’t have a lot of money and no real plan. After a few more minutes, I get bored, walk back to my dorm, and start unpacking my shit.

  Do you remember that summer vacation we took once to Spain? On the boardwalk there, we saw a street performer who blew giant, person-sized soap bubbles. We watched him pull a child from the crowd and blow a shimmering, iridescent soap bubble around the child’s entire body. That’s how all of New York felt to me. Like I was inside something fantastical, but also somehow separated from it.

  I had friends and things to do and I was working hard in school. Within a couple years, though, I was just as depressed as I’d ever been. I quit school, as I said, to become a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I remember calling Mom to tell her I’d gotten this crazy job offer and I wanted to go even though it meant dropping out of school for the semester, fully expecting her to chew my head off for even entertaining such a ridiculous idea. She wanted to know why I wanted to take the job.

  “They’re going to pay me to travel the country,” I told her.

  She was uncharacteristically quiet on the other end of the phone. I waited for an explosion that never came.

  “Just promise me you’ll go back to school.”

  “I promise,” I lied.

  A few days later, my friend Ben and I were packing up a brand-new, dark blue Chevy Astro van with our duffel bags and two Ninja Turtle sarcophagi containing our costumes and the heavy Turtle heads crammed with electronics and gears that made the eyes and mouths move. We drove into the New York side of the Lincoln Tunnel and came out in America.

  Here’s a rule for you, or, rather, a wish: If you ever get the chance, drive the country. See it from the ground, mile marker by mile marker. Plane travel doesn’t give you the scale of the place. You need to be on the ground. It’s not even that there’s so much to see, even though there is so much to see; it’s that you need to live in the experience of our immensity.

  Being out there, town by town and city by city, was as close as I ever got to being that carny. “Step right up, folks, see a real live rootin’-tootin’ radioactive Turtle.” It was the kind of otherworldly weirdness I’d read about in Hunter S. Thompson’s pieces for Rolling Stone, minus the drugs and alcohol. I didn’t do anything like that then, and didn’t feel like I needed to. Everything was already strange enough. Doing the weather at local TV stations and dancing for kids in Pizza Hut parking lots. Visiting hospitals, marching in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, standing on the roof of our van in the middle of a Kansas field singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the top of our lungs. All of that, and they were paying me. It was great. I felt free. Stinky, but free.

  I lasted four months on the road. Twenty-three thousand miles. By the end, I could barely muster the energy to put that fucking twenty-five-pound Turtle head on my shoulders, the weight of it resting squarely on the bridge of my nose. The suit smelled like BO and baby powder. Ben and I still got along, but four months together will strain any friendship. Ironically, the show was called the Coming Out of Our Shells Tour, but the longer I stayed on the road, the more I found myself retreating into my own shell. I knew I needed to leave. Ben enlisted a friend of his from back home in Tennessee to take my place and they dropped me at the airport. I flew back to New York and got a little apartment. My friends were all in school during the day. I walked around the city and tried to be happy.

  A couple years later, my friends and I got our TV show, The State. I got a little bit famous. The fun of that faded quickly. The show folded; I sold another show. The fun of that faded. I dated, but the fun of that faded. It began to feel like the only thing that gave me any happiness was novelty. If I just kept looking for the next new thing, I could ride my happiness the way Tarzan rode vines, swinging from thing to thing to thing forever. I had dreamed of being an actor and being free. I was an actor and I was free. So why was I still unhappy?

  The freedom I thought I’d wanted had been its own kind of trap, a distraction from getting to know myself. I loved so much of it, but it began dawning on me that I wasn’t going to ever feel whole if I continued looking for myself outside of myself. That was around the time I started dating Mom.

  At first, our relationship was another novelty. Me and a pretty Minnesota girl, a girl who had grown up, like me, just wanting to get out. Like me, she left as soon as she could. First for college in Minneapolis. Then to Paris. Then to D.C. Finally, she came to New York. Like me, she had an older brother and a younger sister with a mental disability. She was (and is) smart, funny, challenging. After a little while, she moved in. We hung out with friends, walked down to Ben & Jerry’s on warm nights. Squabbled. Made up. Ate a lot of buffalo wings. A few years later, I asked her to marry me.

  Even when I asked, I didn’t know if it was the right thing for me, or for us. We were celebrating Christmas a couple of days early because we were traveling to Minnesota the next day to be with her family. After we’d exchanged presents, I took out the ring. “Will you marry me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Which seemed about right. Neither of us knew. Would marriage be just another vine to swing on for a moment? Or would it provide something more sustaining for me, and for us?

  What changed? Why did I decide to take a chance on marriage when I didn’t know if I even believed in it? First, I loved your mom. We’d been together a few years and I didn’t see any reason why we would break up. So, my thinking went, if we’re not going to break up, maybe we should take the next step. Of course I worried. Of course I knew that marriages often fail, but I thought maybe ours would not. That maybe it would be worth the risk. If it ended, it ended; at least we would have tried.

  Then it’s eight months later and we’re at the altar exchanging our I-do’s. We kiss and sign some fancy calligraphed document attesting to our new status as wife and husband. We walk down the aisle, through the big wooden doors, and outside into the sun to receive our congratulations. That was twenty years ago, and this feels like a really awkward time to tell you that Mom and I are getting divorced.

  (That’s a joke.)

  Our reception is at a quirky club in Midtown. In a few years, it will be a carpet store. Our wedding photographer buzzes around. We’ve got a few of those photos hanging on our bedroom wall. In one of the pictures, I’m at the reception, some friends on either side of me. One of them leans toward me, talking. I’m listening and not listening, there and not there, a little smile on my face. It’s my dad’s smile.

  As you get older, I think you’ll discover the way time seems to bend in on itself. One event ties to anothe
r and to another and to another. Back and forth. Lives and people and events all wrapped together. One minute you’re a boy dreaming of escape, and then you do. You’re dreaming of finding love, and then you do. You get married, have a son, then a daughter, and it feels like they’re babies for so long, but then your son is leaving for college and you find yourself close to tears in the cereal aisle at the supermarket because they’re playing that Harry Chapin song, “Cat’s in the Cradle,” and you feel like an idiot because you’re standing there with a box of Grape-Nuts clutched to your chest thinking about your own dad who never saw you become a father yourself and never knew his grandkids and because all stories about men are, at least in part, stories of fathers and sons, our lives as knotted up together as old ropes.

  I’m at the kitchen island drinking my morning tea. I’ve got stuff to do today, writing and working, taking out the trash, maybe getting the car washed. I’m starting to think about what I’m going to make for dinner tonight. I don’t know how many more dinners we’ll all have together. Soon you’ll be gone and it’ll just be the three of us. Then Ruthie will go and it’ll just be me and Mom out here in the wilds of Connecticut. I remember getting dressed the day of my wedding and almost feeling like I was being carried along by something. Marriage and chores and family dinners to come. This isn’t the life I thought I’d have. I can’t tell you for sure if it’s better or worse than what I imagined for myself as a kid. What I can tell you is I’m happy.

  twelve

  It’s Just Plumbing

  Communicate with Your Partner (and Pick Up the Check)

  We might never have kissed if she hadn’t yelled at me. Mom and I were on our first date, a shopping excursion to SoHo. We’d piddled around downtown for a couple hours, then we came back to my little apartment and hung out on my ratty thrift store couch talking . . . and talking . . . and talking. Hours went by. Finally, she told me she was going to leave.