Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  Sure, it’s a lie—if there was a Jesus, chances are He wasn’t born under anything resembling the circumstances narrated by St. Luke, Linus, or the second grade at St. Paul’s. But unlike banning ghosts and witches from Halloween or adding a light splash of latke to the winter pageant, it’s a lie that tells the truth: about the hope and the promise that ought to attend the birth of every child, however mean or difficult the conditions of that birth and however disadvantaged and persecuted that child’s people; about the dangerous and woefully unredeemed state of the world and the potential that all children have to redeem it, or else perishing therein like the innocents doomed by Herod for the crime of having been born.

  There is no use pretending that Christmas is not beautiful, or that it can be finessed away or filed down to an innocuous nub by the rasp of cultural sensitivity. Changing the name of Halloween to the Harvest Festival changes nothing; it just adds another slug to the treasury of counterfeits out of which we pay our children’s fare through the world. Like all of us, my kids ought to hear the truth about Christianity, a truth that is built, like all human truths, on a story woven of wishes, possibilities, and lies. They need to be taught to judge the followers of Jesus as we all must be judged, and taught to judge on our own terms, by our own claims and asseverations, by the promises we hold out to the world, and by the betrayal of those promises. Unless we hear the story, the lie, in all its power, we will never fully understand the truth of it, nor how far short all of us—including those who most fervently profess that truth—fall.

  At the museum we handed over our coats to a pleasant young man with an English accent, and something about us, my children and me, stunned him. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open; he looked as if he had been, as I believe his countrymen would put it, gob-smacked.

  The source of his astonishment turned out to be, of all things, the design silkscreened on my older son’s T-shirt. The young Brit marveled at it, then at my son, then turned to me, helpless, hoping for an explanation of this impossible thing. “Is that—is that a Dalek?” he said.

  But that was not what he wanted to ask us; he knew the answer to the question. Of course it was a Dalek—one of those mobile armored shells, shaped roughly like traffic cones, studded at their base with convex dots and tricked out at the rounded tip with a couple of death-dealing wands (one of them resembling suspiciously a toilet plunger); metal husks whose kernels are the pulpy, sluglike, extremely irritable former inhabitants of the planet Skaro, embarked since 1964 on a tireless mission to conquer the universe of the classic British television program Doctor Who. What the young Englishman at the Smithsonian really wanted to ask was What the hell do you people know from Daleks? Here he was in America, a land and a television market in which Doctor Who had never taken off; the Daleks, shrill, priggish, occasionally rather hysterical cybernetic staples of the nightmares of British children for forty-five years, were supposed to be far away, across the sea, gone forever—canceled, even, along with the original program, in 1989.

  “There’s a new show,” I said. “A new Doctor Who.”

  “Is there?”

  My children and I looked at one another, marveling ourselves. Poor, sad little Englishman in Washington, so far from home. He didn’t know!

  “It’s on Sci-Fi Network,” my older daughter explained. At the moment, she was not wearing her Time Lord T-shirt (the show’s eponymous doctor hails from Gallifrey, homeworld of the Time Lords). “And BBC America and PBS. Or you can just download them from iTunes.”

  “I have a Cybermen T-shirt,” my youngest son put in, referring to the less perfectly terrifying yet still awesome-looking second-banana metal nemeses of the Doctor. “I wore it yesterday. But I threw up on it on the plane.”

  “And I have one with K-9,” said my younger daughter. During the 1970s run of the show, K-9 was a robot dog who—but no, perhaps we had better not get into K-9.

  “It’s a pretty good show,” I said, but I knew that my tone and my posture and the wild fannish tenor of my voice were saying It’s the greatest show ever in the history of television.

  As we began to engulf him in the intensity of our passion for Doctor Who, a different light came into the young man’s face, less bewildered, a light of tolerant understanding. He took our coats, his face animated by the faint hint of a smirk. He had us now. We were a family of geeks.

  “Ex-ter-minate,” we said in fluent Dalek.

  I don’t own a Doctor Who T-shirt, but if I did, like my children, I most certainly would have so informed the young Englishman taking our coats. Indeed, I would not have been able to prevent myself from doing so; I suppose I am a geek, the geek matrix of four bright geek spawn. And if you aren’t watching and loving the glorious new BBC incarnation of Doctor Who, geeking out on the mythos of Daleks and Time Lords and Cybermen, swooning to the polysexual heroics of Captain Jack Harkness, aching over the quantum transdimensional heartache of Rose Tyler, and granting yourself the supreme and steady pleasure of watching the dazzling Scottish actor David Tennant go about the business of being the tenth man to embody the time-and-space traveling Doctor on television since the show’s debut in 1963, then I pity you with the especial harsh pity of the geek.

  I had always hoped and worked with patience and care—offering running seminars in Vulcan physiology, Jon Anderson lyrics, the history of the Marvel Universe—to have geeky children, though the term geek, like its common synonym nerd, is woefully imprecise, with connotations of physical awkwardness, high-water trousers, loserhood, emotional retardation, etc. Geek carries as well the additional unfortunate echo of sideshow freaks orally decapitating chickens. Fan is more accurate, I suppose, but it spends too much time hanging around the sports page and ESPN, and anyway, the word (even with its fanspeak plural, fen) is a clipped form of the pejorative fanatic, with all its connotations of narrowness, intolerance, unreason, a condemnatory fervor. Fanboy gets tossed around a lot these days, but two of my children are female, and fanchild is not a word, and the term was originally coined to describe and deprecate a kind of mindless, by-the-greasy-handful consumption of popular culture, uncritical, automatic, halfway to zombie.

  Perhaps there is no perfect word for the kind of people I have raised my children to be: a word that encompasses obsessive scholarship, passionate curiosity, curatorial tenderness, and an irrepressible desire to join in the game, to inhabit in some manner—through writing, drawing, dressing up, or endless conversational riffing and Talmudic debate—the world of the endlessly inviting, endlessly inhabitable work of popular art. The closest I have ever come for myself is amateur, in all the original best senses of the word: a lover; a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession to do it—to explore the imaginary world—oneself. And if we must accept the inevitable connotation of hopeless ineptitude that amateur carries, then at least let us stipulate that we shall be hopeless and inept like Max Fischer, the hero of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore: in the most passionate, heedless, and whole-hearted way.

  I was that kind of a fanchild—a passionate amateur—I have grown up to be that kind of man, and my writing, straight up to my most recent novel, represents an ongoing effort to write myself into the worlds and the narratives, from those of Conan Doyle and Fritz Leiber to those of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gabriel García Márquez, that I grew up longing to inhabit. As a child, I was lucky enough to have a father who inculcated in me a love of Star Trek, Japanese monster movies, the Marx Brothers, comic books, and the like. I suppose we constituted a fan club of two. But when I was twelve years old, my parents divorced, and my father moved far away, leaving me to inhabit above all else, loving it or not, a world characterized chiefly by its immense solitude. I could not drive, and suburban Maryland was no white-hot center of fandom. I had no access to the world of self-published APAs and fanzines that preceded (and helped to shape the culture of) the Internet. My younger brother was born without the mutated fanboy protein, utterly uninterested in the question of whether Spock’s human mother had been won thro
ugh the ritual combat of the Pon Farr or whether the Atlantis of Superman’s mermaid girlfriend, Lori Lemaris, was the same as Aquaman’s Atlantis. I was left alone, a fan club of one, and perhaps that was not unusual, because solitude is the portion of every geek, nerd, or fanboy, and I was kind of an amateur of solitude, too.

  It is only recently, as I and my children (and lately, even their mother) have plunged into the exceptionally rich, dense, and time-layered world of Doctor Who fandom, that I’ve begun to understand the accidental gift that I (and she) have given our four little amateurs, geeking out in the back of the minivan over, let’s say, the exact nature of the plunderous, flatulent Slitheen family of extraterrestrials, or the intricate, paradoxical mystery of the Time War that supposedly wiped out all the Daleks and all the Time Lords except for the Doctor: We have given them one another.

  For in playing, or writing, or drawing, or simply talking oneself deep into the world of a popular artwork that invites the regard of the amateur, the fan, one is seeking above all to connect, not only with the world of the show, comic book, or film but with the encircling, embracing metaworld of all those who love it as much as you do. As a kid, I always seemed to have trouble with that aspect of the art of being a fan; for many, many years after my father left home, I found it difficult to reach out and find other people with whom I could construct a shared universe of enthusiasm. But my kids have one another, four little Whoheads in cryptic T-shirts that only they and a random British dude understand.

  And of course they have me, and—of course—I have them. Together we have spent hours not only watching and talking about the show but drawing our own versions of putative Eleventh and Twelfth and Twenty-Seventh Doctors, drawing pictures of Daleks and Cybermen and of the Tardis, the Doctor’s time-and-space machine, disguised as a vintage wooden phone booth. We have made Tardises and Daleks out of Lego bricks and have worked out our own scenarios for the resurrection of the unfortunate dimension-lost Rose Tyler.

  The greatest, most essential creation of fandom is fandom itself, and maybe all along, part of my desire to have so many children was the longing for a fan club to belong to, for imaginative fellowship, for the society of passionate amateurs like me. In my children, I have found a band of companions—like the companions, Rose Tyler among them, who have always accompanied the Doctor on his adventures—as surely as they have found companions in one another.

  Every one of the Doctor’s human companions comes to learn, eventually, the hard truth: Sooner or later, the adventure will cease. The Doctor will leave them behind, abandon them, move on to a new incarnation, a new season, a new companion; this melancholy fate lends a strange and mournful gravity to a show that is otherwise unfailingly jaunty, even when it is telling stories that are spooky, romantic, or profound. My own dear Doctor lost track of me on the Planet of the Seventies, and since then he and I never have quite found our way home. In the hands, minds, and geekish chatter of my children, I have found again that long-lost, long-desired connection. Each of us stands ready, at any moment, to talk Who, to riff and spin and sketch out new contours for the world we collectively inhabit, creating and endlessly re-creating the fandom that is our family.

  Maybe all families are a kind of fandom, an endlessly elaborated, endlessly disputed, endlessly reconfigured set of commentaries, extrapolations, and variations generated by passionate amateurs on the primal text of the parents’ love for each other. Sometimes the original program is canceled by death or separation; sometimes, as with Doctor Who, it endures and flourishes for decades. And maybe love, mortality, and loss, and all the children and mythologies and sorrows they engender, make passionate amateurs—nerds, geeks, and fanboys—of us all.

  [ X ]

  My oldest child became a bat mitzvah in an afternoon Sabbath service. She read from the Torah in flawless Hebrew, taught us something about what she had just read in poignant English, and was blessed by a woman of readily apparent holiness. And then she was on her way: a daughter of the Commandments.

  Now, everyone knows—sorry, Maimonides—that there really is only one Commandment and that, sooner or later, we all obey it. Toward the end of every Sabbath service, those in mourning or observing the anniversary of a parent’s death rise for the ancient Kaddish, and as the parent of that day’s bar or bat mitzvah, you can sit there beaming, proud, filled with love and knowing—knowing—that if you have done your job properly, it will not be long before your child will be getting up from a pew somewhere to take note in Aramaic of your own utter absence from the world.

  This poignance, this sense of the sweet and brutal passage of time, is a key part of what one is supposed to feel at weddings and bar mitzvahs. These ceremonies break your heart; they are designed, as A. B. Giamatti wrote of baseball, to break your heart. Autumnal thoughts are inevitable as you watch your child lay a first tentative foot on that high scrabbly hillside and look up, shading her eyes from the dazzle, toward the rest of her life. I can remember being thirteen and feeling stifled, half drowned, by the corniness of it any time some aunt at the piano took up the minor notes of “Sunrise, Sunset” and all the adults wiped their eyes and wondered where my infancy and their youth and all the days had gone. But you know what? I spent hours putting together an iTunes playlist for us to dance to at the reception after the service, soliciting suggestions via e-mail from a team of party-mix experts, black-belt Snoopy-style dancers, and former part-time semiprofessional soi-disant DJs, a process that resulted in a selection of tracks glorious and replete and nearly perfect, with Prince (“Kiss”), New Order (“Bizarre Love Triangle”), and L.T.D. (“Every Time I Turn Around, Back In Love Again”), and yet the song that reached right down to the very core of me was the final tune of the evening, the only tune you need, Mickey Katz’s perfect, wordless one minute forty-eight second dance-band version of, God help me, “Sunrise, Sunset.”

  So, all right, swiftly fly the years, I get it. What a tiresome, empty observation, finally, when compared to You don’t have to watch Dynasty to have an attitude or Every time I see you falling / I get down on my knees and pray. Anyway, apart from that minute and forty-eight seconds of melancholy bliss with Katz and his clarinet, that’s not what I found myself thinking about yesterday: She is young and strong, and I am graying, have acid reflux, and my neck hurts, and soon I am going to be dead, true though all of those statements may be. First of all, I feel that I am in the prime of my life. I have never understood more (though still very few) of life’s mysteries than I do now, or trusted my instincts to a greater degree, or written better sentences than the ones I find myself writing sometimes these days. In spite of the creaky neck and the occasional needle of fire in my belly, my bones, joints, and organs remain more or less in good working order. Recently, I was reading the latest, last Nathan Zuckerman novel, and I felt nearly as distant from its protagonist’s physical decline and preoccupation with onrushing mortality as I might have twenty years ago.

  It’s not that I never find entertaining the cheery notion, for example, that my life is quite probably at least half over. That idea can be an instructive, and I don’t doubt that most of us benefit from thoughtfully confronting our mortality on a regular basis. But in the end, memento mori is only going to get you so far, and as a buzzkill at parties, it’s second only to breaking out pictures of your kid’s head coming out of your wife’s vagina.

  And looking at my fine half-grown daughter as she led the afternoon service, her slender neck arched like a feat of engineering, her alto steady, clear, and shining like the silver pointer that she clasped in her hand as it traced the path of the Hebrew letters on the parchment before her, I found myself considering not time’s passage but its unfathomable stillness, its immobility, the great universal fiction that there is such a thing as time. Your children’s childhoods as you watch them unscroll are always indexed to your own, visibly and invisibly, their incidents and episodes, pleasures, and calamities snarled with your own. Your childhood, or your memory of it, is present in every momen
t of theirs, answering it and prefiguring it and shadowing it like a continuo. And then every so often something happens to erase all sense of difference between you, as on one of those multigenerational Star Treks when the old Enterprise and the new both show up fifty years apart, at the same quantum singularity, a gateway through time, and Captains Kirk and Picard take each other’s measure. There is no future and no past, and they are both in the prime of their lives. There is only ever now, and they each inhabit it.

  Like gravitational wormholes in the fabric of the universe, children collapse time and space around themselves. I was standing just behind Sophie for part of the time that she spent reading from the Torah, and her silver yad, its tip formed in the shape of an effete little pointing hand, seemed to careen down the column of ancient text, to fly like the thirty-one years gone since the day that I had stood in a dusty-rose three-piece suit with white piping at the lapels, reading from that crazy old rolled-up book of lies, laws, and wonders. We hoisted our prayer shawl higher and swallowed, took a breath, then set off again down the column of Hebrew letters. For an instant, past and future perfectly coincided. She was not rising and I was not setting. Because the lives of a child and a parent are not a pair of counterweights, dragging the hands of a clock around its sorry dial, one rising and the other falling at exactly the same inexorable rate of gears and passing seconds. Or perhaps they are, but if so, it’s a process that is happening still, much too slowly for me to see it. All I could see that day for an hour or so, in that high sunny room with a blue-painted ceiling and everyone we love and care about around us, was my wife and my daughter and me, neither passing nor being passed but here together for a while, hanging out in the middle of life.