So is this the story of a son failing a father or is it the story of a father failing a son? It’s both, I think, which to me is the same as saying that it’s neither.
A Brief Aside
Amanda and I do not plan to have children. The reasons for this are, as with any couple, complicated. Or maybe they aren’t. There are thousands of books and articles that you can read about the pros, cons, and what-ifs of procreation, so I’m not going to dwell on them here. The bottom line for us is that it’s not something we see fitting into our lives. And yet, despite our being in agreement on this, I have always had a difficult time saying it—to her, to our families, to our friends, to myself. It’s surprising, frankly, that I have managed to make myself write this paragraph and put it here for you to read.
My mother would very much like grandchildren. She has been un-shy about saying so, but knows that in the end it isn’t her decision to make, as the children would not be her responsibility to raise. She regards having children as the single most rewarding experience of her life, and it makes her sad to think that I might not get to have that experience myself. To be honest, it makes me sad also, to think about missing out on all that, but not so sad that I’m willing to do the things that I would need to do in order to make it happen.
For one thing, I would probably need to get a different wife, and I don’t want a different wife. If Amanda is 80-20 against having kids, let’s say that I’m 70-30 against. I can get as close as 60-40 if you let me hold a baby for a while, but the odds never break even, much less tip into the procreative side of the scale. Like a lot of men raised with all the privileges of patriarchy, for most of my life I carried an unacknowledged and unchallenged assumption that ambivalence about kids was my birthright. I could stay on the fence about it, and eventually some woman would come along and make me do it, and I would do it, maybe less grudgingly than I was letting on (or maybe not), and then I’d either be a good dad or a bad one, and when it was going well I would tell people laughingly about how I had been hesitant but she made me and it was the best thing we ever did; and when it was going poorly I would convince myself that I only did it because she insisted, curse her for costing me my freedom and my life’s work.
This is an extreme description, admittedly a bit cartoonish, but I don’t think it’s that far off from what a lot of men of my generation go through, perhaps what most men in most generations go through. (Notably, this is not an ideology my own father exhibited. For all his hesitation to have children, for all his fear about love and money and safety, he shared my mother’s view that parenthood was the most rewarding experience he ever had.) What this performative ambivalence says, though you never quite actually say it (which is a privilege in itself) is that someone else is going to have to do the hard work for you, to bear, in turn, the burdens of desire, conviction, and consequence, while the nominal “partner” plays Hamlet, or maybe just plays video games. Because I decided to share my life with a woman who was not interested in assuming the role of beleaguered persuader, and who was bracingly forthright about what she did and did not want for herself, I was forced to reckon with what I actually wanted for myself, and by extension for us.
So what do I want? I want the life I have more than the life I might have had instead. I want to not make the compromises my parents made. I want to not struggle the way they struggled or live a life that looks like theirs. I have different priorities, and different struggles, and so will set different goals than they did, make different compromises than they made, succeed or fail on entirely different terms. For them, there were a lot of things they were willing to give up in order to have children. For me, having children is the thing I’m willing to give up.
I like kids. I think they’re fun. I don’t mind changing diapers, playing games with toddlers, chatting with teens. I like being a cousin, a family friend; I’d make a good godfather, I think. I have a strong bond with our cat. Does it follow, therefore, that I would be able to stay calm when I got the phone call from the school about the broken arm? When the late-night text buzzed, “Dad I’m at this party and I need you to pick me up…”
Would I scream myself hoarse like my father used to when the bad grade appeared on the report card? Would I walk away from my writing career, the hard-fought-for, jealously protected, hardly lucrative, and absolutely not child-sustaining passion around which I have organized my entire life? If making that sacrifice is what it took to put food on the table? If it ensured that Junior got to go to summer camp? Can I imagine that child one day writing me a letter like the one I wrote to my own father? Can I imagine myself reading that letter, and what it would say? What are the great charges that would be levied against me, and would I plead guilty or not guilty? What would I write back by way of explanation, apology, or defense?
The answer to some or all of the questions posed above might well be quite compelling (or elating or terrifying), but I’ve obviated the need to ask them. There is no right or wrong here, no good choice or bad choice—only the choice we made, and continue to make. It does not bother me that I’m not going to be somebody’s father. But it does raise a practical question: What to do with all these broadly dadlike instincts, with the urge to be, if not a father, at least fatherly?
* * *
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In a host of obvious and not-so-obvious ways, teacher-student relationships are familial, pseudo-parental. I didn’t think about this when I was on the student side of that binary, but after we left New York, I found myself thinking about it all the time, and lamenting what I’d lost. If you’ve ever tried to earn a living as an adjunct professor, you know how absurd this sounds. I was free of the adjunct hamster wheel, free of New York rent, free to write. But it turned out that I’d invested a lot more than I’d realized in my identity as a teacher.
To be really, really clear here: My students are not my children. First of all, they are adults, eighteen at the very youngest, and some of them much older. (Some are older than I am.) Second of all, they already have parents. But for an aspiring artist of any kind, and maybe for a writer especially, unless you are yourself the child of a successful artist (which comes with its own set of challenges), it is all but guaranteed that your parents won’t understand your artistic ambition, and may not condone it. Even if they want to, they probably won’t know how. I can barely imagine what my parents must have made of my elementary school attempts to emulate the Stephen King books they probably should have known better than to let me read, or my attempts at “transgressive” fiction and “experimental” poetry during college. Forget the mortification induced by the subject matter or the neophyte execution; they had no contextual framework for (or interest in) the forms themselves.
For the average kid who grows up aspiring to write, and who for that reason enrolls in a creative writing class when she gets to college, the professor she encounters in that classroom is probably the first person she has ever met who has written a book, much less published one. And when you’re teaching freshmen, as I did at the Pratt Institute, it is furthermore likely that you are the first adult to consider that student’s work seriously or at any significant length. You’re likely the first person in her life to read the work as work, to call it by that name. You’re also the first adult to spend consistent, significant amounts of time around these kids during their first months and years out of their parents’ house. They do a lot of growing up in front of you, both on the page and in the classroom and at bars a few blocks off-campus where you weren’t expecting to run into them and vice versa. They will date one another and submit their breakup dramas to the workshop as fiction. They will, in one memorable case, show up to class without pants on—because, they’ll explain, they couldn’t find any pants in their dorm room but they didn’t want to miss class. (You will not ask them why their room had no pants in it.) You will assign them Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and they will use their critical response paper to come out to you (and possibly
to themselves) as genderqueer.
Only a fool would deny that there is something parental about all of this. For some teachers, that’s the worst part of the job. They’ll do what they can to keep boundaries firm, and themselves aloof, and I’ll allow that there is a lesson worth learning from that kind of teacher: A person who won’t help you clean up your mess teaches you how to clean it up on your own, or at least how to leave it at the classroom door. Personally, I don’t mind some mess.
Boundaries, of course, are important. Some should never be crossed. I think we all know (or ought to know) what those are. The creative arts are necessarily intimate disciplines. People trust you with their vulnerability, their ambition, their talent, and their dreams. We need not rehearse here the ways that such trust can be abused or exploited. But it seems to me cruel and counterproductive to ignore or stifle all possible intimacy rather than to honor and make use of it. The model is filial, not erotic.
A classroom on the first day of the semester is a gathering of strangers: Some of these people you’ll come to know and grow to care for; others you’ll hardly be able to stand. Some of your early predictions about who falls into which category will prove mistaken. Some will sit at the back and stay quiet, turn in their adequate work on time, and you’ll never get to know them at all. But every student deserves the chance to make the profound connection, to have their breakthrough, for this class to be the best class they ever took. The teacher’s job is to make the space of the classroom as productive and inclusive as possible. If you do that, if you give as much as you are able, then it’s up to each student to take what they need and leave the rest. It may be that the single most important thing you have to offer them is one possible model for one way of living: not a should but a could. You’re confirming for them something that they’ve always suspected or hoped was true, but had never before been able to prove. Namely, that people like you exist and that a life like yours is possible.
In my first years as a teacher, my primary concern was to eke out a living while protecting my time so I could write. As I got more used to doing the work (and after I had put a couple of books into the world) I came to understand teaching as a vocation in itself. I began to think more about the role I was playing in my students’ lives, and what it would take to try to be for them what my own best teachers had been for me.
Spending time with precocious, dedicated, aspiring writers has been a major boon to my own creative and intellectual life. Being there for students and helping them succeed is a source of personal as well as professional validation. I enjoy teaching, feel nourished by it in what I imagine is much the same way my father felt teaching his nephews to throw a baseball back before I was born, or coaching my Little League teams, which he did for every team I ever played on and then kept doing for years after I quit. He spent countless hours with other fathers’ sons, teaching them what their own fathers couldn’t and what his own son didn’t want to know. I know that I am lucky to have had him as a role model, and that the depth of his attention and the democracy of his approach are foundational elements of my own pedagogy.
It feels good to be good at something, to share what you know, to have people remember you as the person who took the time, who changed their life for the better in however great or small a way. It wasn’t until I experienced the radical isolation and dislocation that followed my departure from New York that I realized the full extent of what teaching had been doing for me, which is one reason why, when the opportunity to teach again presented itself, I jumped at the chance. Even though it meant stepping back into dislocation, even though it would ultimately mean nearly two years alone on the road.
Riding with the Ghost
Every time I drove to the Kroger out on Keystone Avenue, past an ugly strip of vape stores and fast-food joints, I noticed a billboard for the Indy Arms Company, a gun shop and shooting range. The winter was bleak, the cold gray days bleeding together. Dad was a mess: physically weak, an emotional wreck, his anti-shaking medication increasingly unreliable in its efficacy. On dragged the weeks and then months after the inauguration. On social media and cable news people were working themselves into fits about how Trump was about to resign in disgrace and flee to Russia, or the “Deep State” was going to sabotage the will of the people by undermining him, or maybe they were going to save us from the autocratic coup he was planning, or maybe had already carried out.
I was halfway through my time in Indianapolis as Butler’s writer-in-residence. I was looking forward to getting back to Portland, but I knew that I would find myself in the same situation I’d been in before I left: lonely, unemployed, adrift in both my daily life and my larger sense of myself as a writer. One of my self-imposed goals for Indianapolis was to finish the novel that I’d started in 2014 and had been in an on-off relationship with ever since. Now there were no more excuses. I had the time, the space, and the job title. All that was left was for me to do the work. But the work wasn’t working, and the deeper I dug into the project, the more certain I became that it never would. The book wasn’t good, it wasn’t going to get better, and I didn’t want to spend any more of my life in its claustrophobic, half-baked world. There was some relief, even liberation, in admitting this to myself, but that small comfort was far outmatched by a feeling of loss: for my wasted time and energy, for the hopes I’d harbored for the novel (the usual: fortune, acclaim, et cetera). My job title felt fraudulent; my career like it was over. And there was that sign on the road again, the huge crosshairs logo, and me with my little tote bag full of chicken breast and organic bell peppers, taking a long look as I drove past.
* * *
—
Other than .22s at summer camp, the only time I had ever fired guns was during college, at an anarcho-communist pecan farm outside of Gainesville, Florida, during the Christmas break of my freshman year. I spent two weeks out there helping plant a thousand pine saplings in one of their fields. The plan was to grow the pines, harvest the timber, and use the money to pay off the mortgage and thus ensure the farm to anarcho-communism for all time. I loved these people and was eager to live in their dream, if only for the break between semesters. On New Year’s Day 2001 we shot up stacks of old TVs that they had been saving for the occasion. I remember a revolver, and a shotgun loaded with what somebody called “pumpkin balls.” I remember the level and aim and the indrawn breath and the trigger pull, how it takes more force than you think it would (“eight pounds,” they say, which isn’t much for an arm but is substantial for an index finger) and the faces of those TVs as they sagged and spidered. The power that you felt knowing that you had flung that damage across the distance, the stacks wobbling and eventually toppling over. And the way that we talked, calm and casual, about how after the revolution came these were the kinds of skills we were going to want to have.
Was all that really sixteen years ago and longer? And now, perhaps, a revolution had come, only not the one we’d banked on. Indiana has long been a hotbed for white supremacy, and there was a lot of fear in the air—on the Internet, on the news, in nervous chitchat—that violence might break out at any time. Also, my in-laws are gun owners. (Responsible ones, it should be said.) They both grew up in the Deep South and have concealed-carry permits. Once I was out on my father-in-law’s boat, just me and him, and he asked me to get him something from the glove box because he was steering. In reaching for it I passed my hand over a pistol, which in my innocence I thought must be a flare gun, and when I said something to that effect he let out a short laugh and gave me a look I hope to never again see on his face so long as I am married to his daughter.
I had thought at various times about asking him to take me shooting; I thought we might both enjoy that. But I had never asked, in part because I hadn’t wanted to admit that if we did go, he would have to teach me how to shoot. (Could it go without saying that we were out on his boat that day because he was patiently teaching me to fish?) Here then was another
factor in my abiding interest in the Indy Arms Company.
At the same time, I knew, I was doing this at least in part to be able to tell the story of having done it, a story I could tell Dad, or whoever else—the story of that time I went and shot guns in Indiana. But I didn’t tell anyone. Why not? Because I couldn’t explain what I was drawn by. Because I wanted to live alone with the idea—which included not just shooting a gun but also, perhaps, buying one—a bit longer. Because I knew he would try to give me advice, teach me over the phone everything he knew (or thought he knew) about marksmanship, all of which would be based on forty-year-old knowledge, itself gleaned from a different kind of gun entirely, an ancient rifle from a stint on his high school shooting team, an episode he’d never mentioned until the day I found the weapon—still in its original case, with two boxes of bullets—amid the Stuff in the Nashville storage unit. Against my better judgment, I’d shipped it to him with everything else, and so it sat now in his bedroom closet at the Sunrise Lakes apartment. I did not want to get him talking about that gun.
* * *
—
I went to the range on March 22 at 10 A.M. for their Introduction to Handguns class, which got me the instruction I needed, a gun to use, range time, and a dozen bullets—all for one tidy package price. It turned out that I was the only person who’d signed up for the session, and so the “class” became a private lesson. The instructor was a local kid, twenty-five or twenty-six, an Afghan war vet, honorably discharged after an injury that may or may not have been suffered on the field of battle but was in any case not visible. Something about his back, I think he said. I thought about the experiential and psychic gulf between what he was doing at twenty-three and what I was doing at that same age, between his life and mine.
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