Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  The first person I ever saw smoking pot was my mother, sometime around 1977 or so, sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathy’s car, passing a little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie at the Westview in Catonsville, Maryland. I have a dim sense that at fourteen I neither disapproved of nor felt any surprise at this behavior, leading me to conclude that my mother already must have told me, prepared me with the information, that she was “experimenting” with pot (because that was all it ever amounted to for her—a brief reagent test conducted within the beaker of her new status as a single woman in the great wild laboratory of the 1970s). If I was shocked by the idea of my mother breaking the law, that shock must have been mitigated by the casualness, and by the lack of shame or embarrassment with which my mother, an otherwise upright, sober, and law-abiding taxpayer, went about it. It appeared to be no big deal for a couple of grown women to smoke a bowl: an innocent, everyday sign of the times. Nevertheless, smoking marijuana remained for years afterward nothing I had any interest in trying myself, not so much because I feared its effects or even because it was against the law but simply because I was a good boy, and as such I looked down my nose with a cosmic, Galactus-sized censoriousness at the kids I knew—stoners, burnouts—who smoked it. I would not have minded breaking the law or getting high, but I could not abide the thought of being bad.

  I clung to my increasingly cumbersome and ineffectual goodness, fighting a series of rearguard actions against the increasing presence in my life of rock and roll and sex, until, like the personnel of the U.S. embassy in Saigon leaping to the helicopters, I abandoned it entirely, at once. Early in October of my first term at Carnegie Mellon University, I was taught the rudiments of bong-handling by a team of experts. I lay down on the floor of a dorm room in Mudge Hall, under the light of a single red bulb, and swam through layers of warmth and well-being while an apparently infinite, starry, velvet-bright quantity of wonder was ladled into my ears by Jeff Beck, Jan Hammer and his spacefaring Group.

  That was 1980. I smoked marijuana (with odd European forays into the mysteries of hashish) over the course of the next twenty years, never every day, mostly on weekends or when some came around, but at times with all the fierce passion of a true hobbyist. The price went up, and the quality improved so acutely that the nature of the high began to alter without quite changing, like a television picture increasing the resolution of its image. My level of dope-smoking peaked, becoming nearly habitual just after the breakup of my first marriage in 1990, and began to dwindle thereafter as the elevated concentrations of THC (or something) took a toll and I found that getting high often left me feeling apprehensive, hypercritical of myself, and prone to an unwelcome awareness of my life as nothing but a pile of botched and unfinished tasks. Over the course of these pot years I graduated from college, got a master’s degree, wrote a number of novels, paid my bills and my taxes, etc. I was never arrested, never got into any kind of trouble, never broke anything that could not be repaired. Mostly it had been fun, sometimes hugely; sometimes not at all. Marijuana could intensify the sunshine of a perfect summer day, but it could also deepen the gloom of a wintry afternoon; it had bred false camaraderies and drawn my attention to deep flaws and fault lines when what mattered—what matters so often in the course of everyday human life—were the surfaces and the joins.

  Be honest, my wife and I had agreed.

  “I have smoked it a number of times,” I told my son. “But I don’t do it anymore.”

  This was true. Without ceremony or regret, I smoked marijuana for the last time in 2005—having not smoked any for at least a year before that—when I found myself, stoned out of my brain and very much not following the plot of Stephen Chow’s God of Cookery, unexpectedly called upon to engage in some urgent full-on parenting: There was an abortive sleepover and a necessary stretch of late-night driving to be done. Though I somehow managed to pull it off, gripping the wheel, heart pounding, the world beyond the windshield as trackless and unfathomable as any Jeff Beck guitar solo, I spent the next hour fighting off the knowledge that I was not up to the task, and I vowed that I would never risk putting my children or myself in that position again. On some fundamental level, I was no longer willing to endure, or capable of enjoying, that kind of fun.

  “Why did you stop?” those children wanted to know. “Because it’s really illegal?”

  “Well, it is really illegal,” I agreed. “In some ways, a lot more illegal than it used to be when I was younger. But that’s not really it. It has to do with, well, with being ready, you know. It’s just not something I’m ready to do anymore. And it’s not something you guys are ready to do, either. Right?”

  “Right,” they said at once, with all the firmness and certainty I would have mustered myself in those years before I sailed off into the red light and velvet darkness.

  “The truth is,” I told them, then pushed myself to live up to the principle my wife and I had established for contending not only with this issue but with all the other hypocrisies that life as a parent entails. I want to tell you / My head is filled with things to say, as George Harrison once sang, When you’re here / All those words, they seem to slip away. “The truth is that I’m confused about what to tell you,” I said. “But I mostly want us all to tell each other the truth.”

  They said that sounded all right to them and that I shouldn’t worry. That’s just what I would have said at their age.

  Almost every school day, at least one of my four children comes home with art: a drawing, a painting, a piece of handicraft, a construction-paper assemblage, an enigmatic apparatus made from pipe cleaners, sparkles, and clay. And almost every bit of it ends up in the trash. My wife and I have to remember to shove the things down deep, lest one of the kids stumble across the ruin of his or her laboriously stapled paper-plate-and-dried-bean maraca wedged in with the junk mail and the collapsed packaging from a twelve-pack of squeezable yogurt. But there is so much of the stuff; we don’t know what else to do with it. We don’t toss all of it. We keep the good stuff—or what strikes us, in the Zen of that instant between scraping out the lunch box and sorting the mail, as good. As worthier somehow: more vivid, more elaborate, more accurate, more sweated over. A crayon drawing that fills the entire sheet of newsprint from corner to corner, a lifelike smile on the bill of a penciled flamingo. We stack the good stuff in a big drawer, and when the drawer is finally full, we pull out the stuff and stick it in a plastic bin that we keep in the attic. We never revisit it. We never get the children’s artwork down and sort through it with them, the way we do with photo albums, and say “That’s how you used to draw curly hair” or “See how you made your letter E’s with seven crossbars?” I’m not sure why we’re saving it except that getting rid of it feels so awful.

  Under the curatorship of my mother, my brother’s and my collected artwork is, if I may say so, a vastly more impoverished archive. From the years preceding high school there is almost nothing at all. The countless scenes of strafing Spitfires taking heavy German ack-ack fire, the corrugated-cardboard-and-foil George Washington hatchets, the clay menorahs (I never did make any dreidels out of clay), the works in crayon resist and papier-mâché and yarn and in media so mixed as to include Cheerios, autumn leaves, and dirt—gone, all of it. Do I care? Does it pain me to have lost forever this irrefutable evidence of my having been, if neither a prodigy nor an embryonic Matisse, a child? If my mother had held on to more of my childhood artwork, would I be happier now? Would the narrative that I have constructed of the nature and course of my childhood be more complete? I guess ultimately, I have no way of answering these questions. It’s like wondering whether sex would be more pleasurable if I had not been worked over by that old Jew with a knife at the age of eight days. How much more pleasurable, really, do I need it to be?

  When I run across one of the pieces of artwork that my mother did save—paintings that I made in my junior and senior years of high school, for the most part—the prevailing emotion I experi
ence, with breathtaking vividness, is the acute discontent that I felt at the time of their creation, a dissatisfaction purified of any residual sense of pride or accomplishment. Their flaws of perspective and construction, the places where I cheated or fudged or simply could not pull something off, even a faint tempera-scented whiff of the general miasma of mortification and insufficiency in which I then swam—they all present themselves to my sight and recollection with a force that makes me a little ill.

  I’m not trying to excuse the act of throwing away my children’s artwork. The crookedest mark of a colored pencil on the back of a bank-deposit envelope, vaguely in the shape of a fish, is like a bright, stray trace of the boundless pleasure I take in watching my kids interact with the world. The set of processes joining their minds to their fingertips is a source of profound interest and endless speculation, a mystery that, through their artworks, my children endlessly expound. I know that if I live long enough, a time will come when their childhoods will strike me as having been mythically brief. Almost nothing will remain of these days, and they will be women and men, and I will look back on the lost piles of their drawings and paintings and sketches, the cubic yards of rubbings and scratchings consigned to the recycling bin, the reef’s worth of shells, sand, and coral glued to their découpage souvenirs of vacations in Hawaii and Maine, and rue my barbarism. I will be haunted by the memory of the way my younger daughter looks at me when she chances upon a crumpled sheet of paper in the recycling bin, bearing the picture, the very portrait, of five minutes stolen from the headlong rush of their hour in my care: She looks betrayed.

  “I don’t know how that got in there,” I tell her. “That was clearly a mistake. What a great dog.”

  “It’s a girl kung fu master.”

  “Of course,” I say. When she isn’t looking, I throw it away again.

  It’s not only her artwork that I’m busy throwing away. Almost every hour that I spend with my children is disposed of just as surely, tossed aside, burned through like money by a man on a spree. The sum total of my clear memories of them—of their unintended aphorisms, gnomic jokes, and the sad plain truths they have expressed about the world; of incidents of precociousness, Gothic madness, sleepwalking, mythomania, and vomiting; of the way light has struck their hair or eyelashes on vanished afternoons; of the stupefying tedium of games we have played on rainy Sundays; of highlights and horrors from their encyclopedic history of odorousness; of the 297,000 minor kvetchings and heartfelt pleas I have responded to over the past eleven years with fury, tenderness, utter lack of interest, or a heartless and automatic compassion—those memories, when combined with the sum total of photographs that we have managed to take, probably add up, for all four of my children, to under 1 percent of everything that we have undergone, lived through, and taken pleasure in together.

  The truth is that in every way, I am squandering the treasure of my life. It’s not that I don’t take enough pictures, though I don’t, or that I don’t keep a diary, though iCal and my monthly Visa bill are the closest I come to a thoughtful prose record of events. Every day is like a kid’s drawing, offered to you with a strange mixture of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.

  I was there, in Grant Park, on the night when Barack Obama began to shoulder all the possible meanings of his victory. You could hear it in his voice as the weight of it settled on him, and in the simple, judicious gravity of his language. You could see it in the glint, like the reflection of some awful or awesome vista, that lit his tired eyes. On a giant television screen to the right of the dais we could see what the world was seeing, and we could begin to imagine all the things that for Obama and for all of us were going to change henceforward. It was heady to contemplate, and thrilling, and after such a fierce and interminable campaign, there was also a tremendous sense of relief as we passed from the months of active wishing to this hour of having it be so. But among the most powerful emotions that stirred me as I stood there in the crowd, on that unseasonably warm evening with my son Abraham perched on my shoulders, was sadness. And that caught me a little unawares. I felt guilty about it. I knew I was only supposed to be happy at that moment, thrilled, grave, tired, relieved, duly awestruck—but happy. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about his two little girls.

  Like the rest of the world, even many of those who had (by their own accounts the next morning) voted, connived, pontificated, or railed against Barack Obama, I held my breath as I watched him first walk out to the podium that night with Michelle, Malia, and Sasha. The four of them, dressed in shades of red and black, seemed to catch and hold a different kind of light, the light of history, astonishing and clear. Time stopped, and I was conscious as I have been very few times in my life—the morning of September 11, 2001, was, terribly, another—of seeing something that had never been seen. It was not only the beauty, or the blackness, or the youth of the new first family, or some combination of the three. It was the unmistakable air of mutual engagement the Obamas give off, the sense of being a fully operational—loving, struggling, seeking, adjusting, testing, playing, mythologizing, arguing, rationalizing, celebrating, compromising, affirming, denying—family. I felt that I had never seen a presidential family that was so clearly a working family in the sense of the everyday effort involved. When I was born, there were children in the White House, though they moved out, half orphaned, before I was six months old. I can remember Tricia Nixon’s wedding, and Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton getting braces or rolling Easter eggs on the White House lawn. But none of those families ever reminded me, ever seemed to reflect—at the fundamental level of daily operations where every great, august, well-reasoned principle and theory you profess or hold dear gets proved or shattered—my own.

  With his daughters darting around his long legs, I saw Barack Obama as a father, like me. And I folded my hands behind my son’s knobby back, to bolster him there on my shoulders, and gave his bottom a squeeze, and watched those radiant girls waving and smiling at the quarter-million of us, faces and voices and starry camera flashes, and thought I would never have the nerve or the strength or the sense of mission or the grace or the cruelty to do that to you, kid. There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child’s perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence. And so, for a moment that night, all I could do was look up at the smiling little Obamas and pity them for everything they did not realize they were now going to lose: My heart broke, and I had this wild wish to undo everything we all had worked and hoped so hard, for so long, to bring about.

  And then I noticed the way I seemed to be exempting myself, holding myself aloof, from responsibility for the kind of injury that I imagined Barack Obama had determined to inflict upon his children in the service of his conviction, his calling, his sense of duty, his altruism, his tragic or glorious destiny, and I felt the burden of my son weigh heavier on my own shoulders. You don’t have to become the president of the United States to betray your children. Being a father is an unlimited obligation, one that even the best of us, with the least demanding of children, could never hope to fulfill entirely. Children’s thirst for their fathers can never be slaked, no matter how bottomless and brimming the vessel. I have abandoned my children a thousand times, failed them, left their care and comfort to others, wandered in by telephone or e-mail from the void of a life on the road, issued arbitrary and contradictory commands from my mountaintop when all that was wanted was a place on my lap, absented myself from their bedtime routine on a nigh
t when they needed me more than usual, forestalled, deferred, or neglected their needs in the name of something I told myself merited the sacrifice. All that was in the very nature of fatherhood; it came with the territory.

  Now, when I looked at Obama, whose own father had taken off when he was still a small boy, never to return, the pity I felt was for him. I hoisted my son higher on my shoulders and thought about his distant ancestor and namesake, armed with the fire and the knife of his great purpose, leading his son up Mount Moriah to pay the price that must be paid for the sacrifice that must be offered.

  “Look at him,” I urged my son. “Look at Barack. Look at Malia and Sasha. Abraham, look at them, remember them. You’ll remember this night for the rest of your life.”

  “How do you know I won’t forget?” my endlessly, implacably reasoning five-year-old said. He has always been a bit of a contrarian, and he may not have been fully in the spirit of Grant Park that night, either. “Maybe you won’t be there.”

  He was right. I won’t be there some day, one day, when he looks back and finds that he still remembers the faraway night on my long-departed shoulders, the night in Chicago when everything began to change, for him and for Malia and Sasha and for the world. But I didn’t tell him that. Let him, let all of us, I thought, hold on to our innocence a little bit longer.

  [ III ]

  Squares and rectangles. That’s what we had. Squares, rectangles, and wheels with chewy black rubber tires. Sloping red “roof” bricks of which there never seemed to be enough to cover a house. Trees shaped more like real trees than the schematic dendrites you get now. Windows and doors with snap-in glazing: more squares and rectangles. Six colors: basic red, white, blue, yellow, green, and black. And that was it.