I looked at the Yankees pennant I was bringing home for Bobby, and imagined telling him about the game. It was always tricky because while he seemed to like hearing about things I’d done, the places I went and what happened there, I often felt bad that he couldn’t come along, that he was always stuck at home in his wheelchair. I had to think about how to tell the story so it felt like we were sharing something and not that I was oblivious to his situation. I would give him the pennant and I would keep the small baseball bat that was a ballpoint pen.
“Now I know what they mean when they say it’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there,” my father said. His window was down and the little vent, the wing window, was open in such a way that he could flick the ash off his cigar by poking it out there. I thought that was pretty cool. “I mean, all those people on top of one another! How the hell do you figure out who to hate?” The player in the front passenger seat laughed, along with the two guys in back with me. “No. I’m serious!” my father went on. “How does a person know where he stands? I mean, people should get along, don’t get me wrong. I just mean that when push comes to shove you have to know who you’re for and who you’re against, don’t you?”
I’ve puzzled over that for a long time. The idea that when push comes to shove—not if push comes to shove—one must decide who one is for and against seems to have been the experience of many German Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. According to historian Daniel Okrent, in his Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition,
Iowa declared speaking German in public or on the telephone unlawful. German books were burned in Wisconsin, playing Beethoven in public was banned in Boston, and throughout the country foodstuffs and street names of German origin were denatured by benign Anglo-Saxonisms. Nearly ninety years before french fries became freedom fries during the Iraq War, sauerkraut became liberty cabbage and, in an odd homage to the president, Cincinnati’s Berlin Street became Woodrow Street. “Cotton Tom” Heflin of Alabama, who could always be counted on to transcend the limits of ordinary, everyday bias, said, “We must execute the Huns within our gates. The firing squad is the only solution for these perverts and renegades.”
Okrent goes on to quote from David M. Kennedy’s account of the lynching of a German man in St. Louis and the court that found his murderers innocent.
Perhaps because my grandfather fought for the United States in the First World War, there was little question in the Hoffman house that his sons would fight in the Second. Don, Edgar, Francis, and Richard all served at the same time. This assumption was not unanimous among German Americans in Pennsylvania. Other families, other communities remained, in both wars, understandably divided, if not in their loyalties, then at least in their affections. It was important therefore to know, and prove, “who you’re for and who you’re against.”
“My attitudes are my attitudes. They don’t hurt nobody,” my father insisted. Implicit in that statement was my father’s understanding that he was inconsequential, powerless, and therefore free to hold whatever ideas he found comfortable, no matter their provenance, validity, or potential impact. His racism didn’t matter so long as he treated individual people of color with respect. His misogyny didn’t matter so long as he was not abusive to women. He hated the French whom he’d experienced during the war (“No self-respect,” he judged of them), but had he met someone from France, I’m sure he would have been welcoming.
My father was born and died at Sacred Heart Hospital. He was baptized, confirmed, and married at Sacred Heart Church. He went to Sacred Heart School. In those days the parish was comprised of Irish, Italian, and German families with their attendant social clubs: the Hibernian club, St. Anthony’s Association, Liederkranz. They were the Micks, the Dagos, and the Krauts, all innocent enough to my innocent ears: Micks were called that because their last names began with Mc. Dagos I couldn’t figure, so I settled for inversion: since my father called spaghetti sauce “Dago sauce,” I figured that Italians were Dagos because they ate a lot of spaghetti, which I knew to be true, so that must be it. And Krauts likewise. We were German, after all, and we ate a lot of sauerkraut, happily. No harm, no foul, as we said on the playground.
I do not mean to suggest that it was an innocent time. It was more likely an ignorant time, but when you’re eight or nine years old, one often passes for the other. Things make sense in their own cockeyed way, shaped by the need to find the world benevolent or at least not poisonous. Later, as teens, maybe kick-started by hormones and disappointments, the whole view shifts, and every evidence of adult ignorance is taken for malice, every limitation of the adult world and the grown-ups in it seems willful, plotted, designed to deny us the fulfillment of our aspirations. An adult now, in need of more than a little understanding myself, I’m no longer so quick to condemn.
About the time he took a job laying railroad track for Bethlehem Steel, my father switched from cigars to cigarettes, which I suppose were easier to smoke on a short break from work. Outside in the cold you could put down your sledge, look down the track you’d laid, peel off your work gloves, shake out a Lucky, offer the pack around to the other guys, then spin the toothed wheel of your lighter, take that first drag, and exhale with something like a sigh.
My father was a smoke ring virtuoso. In the evening, at home, he entertained us with smoke rings through smoke rings, shapes we convinced ourselves, my brother Bobby and I, were animals, cars, trees, things made of breath that quickly broke apart and were gone.
But by the time I left for college, for New York City, my father had taken up a pipe. By then he was working in the office of the Recreation Department, overseeing the many sports leagues sponsored by the city, scheduling ball fields, courts, umpires, and referees. A pipe seemed right for a man who sat behind a desk, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled, the square Windsor knot of his tie loosened and the top button of his collar undone. I’d taken to smoking a pipe myself now that I was a college man, reading demanding books and writing carefully incomprehensible poems. I think we both had tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows.
It took me my freshman year to figure out I wasn’t getting much social traction from my man-of-letters get-up. My classmates and friends seemed at home in bell-bottom jeans and serapes, tie-dyed T-shirts, cowboy boots, leather jackets with rawhide fringe. By the fall of 1968, my sophomore year, I had the rudiments of a new self in place: a beard that grew mostly on my neck, hair down to my shoulders, a pair of secondhand boots from Goodwill, and the green canvas military bag designed to carry rounds of ammunition. I had not been home that whole summer. I told my parents I’d found a job in New York, which was true, though not the reason I stayed away.
I am being kind to my younger self when I say that I was in the throes of a confusing transformation and could not withstand just then the reminders my family would be of the adolescent I was: the high school quarterback, the altar boy, the healthy son they didn’t have to worry about. I was worried about myself: I was no longer who I’d been and not yet who I was becoming.
I felt that I couldn’t climb from the cauldron where I was being transmuted into some new person I hardly knew. It would be like showing up with one hand a claw, the other a fin; one foot webbed and the other a cloven hoof. My plan was to “get my shit together” as we said back then, and present them with the man I had become. They would have to accept or reject that person, and I knew I wasn’t him yet. I remember my mother’s sigh on the phone—I can still hear it, along with her generous refusal to protest—when I told her I would not be coming home for the summer.
For whatever reason, whether I could not bear to go home and be “Dickie,” whether I wanted to remain in the hashish-and-patchouli-scented new erotic freedom of the counterculture in Greenwich Village, or whether I preferred waiting tables to the pickax and shovel of the road crew job of the previous summer, I had abandoned her. I had abandoned all of them.
I was not returning to my role as emotional support
for my mother; I would not be sitting at the kitchen table with her, drinking our cans of beer and filling a large cut-glass ashtray with the butts of our hope: new research into muscular dystrophy, the promise of chiropractic for slowing muscular degeneration, an article she’d read about “atomic” medicine, and swapping the off-color jokes, my mother’s secret pleasure, that would lighten the mood for a moment.
I would not be helping my father lift my brothers Bob and Mike from wheelchair to commode and back again, would not be part of the care schedule that required him to come home from work several times a day.
I would give up at last trying to sustain a meaningful friendship with Bobby, declining in his wheelchair, the unselfconscious and once ferocious love we had for each other as boys eroded by his illness, by my relative health, my urgent youth.
My half-crazy youngest brother, Mikey, soothing himself with his continual drumming on the tray of his wheelchair, chanting nonsense syllables nonstop, rocking and banging his head, could become a comfortable memory I responded to with pity and affection.
And my brother Joe, five years my junior, could take up whatever slack I was leaving and I could assent with relief to his role in the family narrative as one who, like me, would be fine. That boy is all right.
And I would not have to return to a city where I breathed the shame and humiliation of boyhood rape. So long as I remained in New York, site of nearly infinite possibility for remaking myself, I could insist that what happened to me as a boy was of no consequence.
When I first arrived in New York, I lived in a boardinghouse in the Bronx. My roommate was a folksinger who played the banjo. Pete Seeger was his idol. Along with my tweed sport coat and khakis, I wore my hair in a flattop that I made stand up with a stick of wax in a retractable plastic container. Two of the other guys in the house had heard of a club downtown, at St. Mark’s Place, called the Electric Circus. Did I want to come?
Patchouli, incense, a strobe light at once disorienting and requiring a heightened alertness for its visual interruptions, the place was full of bodies undulating in sync with the strange music—no banjos here!—and the light show was continually changing both the color and contour of the walls and ceiling. Tommy, Brian, and I stood against one wall as if we were at a high school dance. The only dancing I’d ever even almost done was at the Y on Friday nights at a “hop” run by the CYO where, as a varsity athlete, my role was to stand along the wall with a toothpick and with a serious look on my face that I never seemed to manage to get right.
So I took up my position against the pulsing wall as if I were some kind of lifeguard minding the swimmers on a day of tricky currents. I was smoking my meerschaum pipe. I found that I was especially watching one young woman who seemed to be in masquerade, a pirate at a costume party: silk scarves that accentuated her every move, bangles on her arms, big gold hoops hanging from her ears. When I say that I found myself watching her, I mean just that—I’d been watching her, mesmerized, a long time before I was at all conscious of it. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I lost myself watching her.
All I am sure of is that I was lost.
I pushed off from the wall and into the throbbing room, moving through the dancers. Soon I was behind her. She was dipping down into a deep shimmy and moving as if she were trying to scratch her ears with first one shoulder then the other. I touched her, gently, to get her attention.
“Wanna dance?” I shouted over the music.
Maybe if I hadn’t been so disoriented by the whole scene I would have understood that when she said, “What?” she was not asking me to repeat the question louder. When I did, she said something I’d never heard from a woman’s lips: “Fuck off, asshole!”
This was not the CYO. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I wanted it. I wanted to know women who danced like that and were tough enough to flash that kind of rage. I wanted to grow my hair and swing it around like so many of these guys. I wanted to grow a beard. Mostly I wanted to understand what was going on because I had just discovered, my naiveté plundered by a pirate goddess, that I was deeply and dangerously bored. I was at the end of a chapter of my life and only now knew it, as if I had turned a page expecting more of the same and found it blank.
I headed back to Tommy and Brian, who were changing colors, disappearing and reappearing, and blinking in the strobe. “I gotta get outa here,” I said. I would come back, that I was sure of, but right now I wanted to head back to my room and begin changing.
I visited my family in August.
The bus from Port Authority was late arriving in Allentown, and my father was parked at the curb, the motor running. What a shock I must have been to him with my pubic beard under my chin, my hair in a ponytail, my torn jeans and clunky boots. I opened the door and threw my ammo bag in the back seat. The frown on his face was all puzzlement and perplexity. He offered his hand. I grasped it with my right and reached with my left arm to surround him and pull him to me, and I kissed him on his scratchy cheek. His foot must have slipped from the brake to the gas and next thing we know—boom!—we’ve lurched forward into the bumper of a taxi idling in front of us. “Jesus Christ!” The cabbie, black, was at the window pointing and yelling, my father apologizing. When the cab driver continued, offering his opinion of my father’s driving skills, I saw my father’s face change. “All right, that’s enough,” he said, “get back in your cab!” as if he were giving an order. I saw the cabbie’s face change, too. He huffed, flared his nostrils, shook his head slowly, but quickly returned to his cab.
“Goddamn it,” my father said, backing up, shifting, pulling out. After a block or two he nodded toward the back seat. “So when did you start carrying a purse?”
By the time we got to the house on Thirteenth Street, my father had turned this into a funny story. “Did you see the look on his face? Poor nigger’s just sitting there waiting for his next fare and—bam!—we’re up his ass!” We were out of the car, my bag slung over my shoulder. He looked at me, smirked, and shook his head. “Wait till your mother gets a load of you. She’s going to shit.”
The white wooden balustrade of the front porch, which had been missing a few balusters, had been replaced by two sections of black wrought iron. The railing up the front steps was made of pipes. The floor of the porch was green indoor/ outdoor carpet. Things were changing here, too, at home, as I still called it.
But even then, I knew that had I stayed I would have rotted in that house. That house of dying, of sorrow and anger, of violence and doomed love, of waiting, always, for death; that house of sighs and separate rooms and cases of beer and cartons of cigarettes, of phlegmy coughs and curses and apologies and the next day the same day, the same unchanging deadness, numbness all the pleasure one could expect, oblivion as relief and love reduced to duty, family ties reduced to staying the hell out of the way, becoming invisible, silent and reliable, no needs of your own, never mind desires. I never say that I left. I don’t even say I got out. I say I got the hell out, I got the fuck out. I spit the words, defying the old guilt at leaving. I curse in order to touch once again for a brief moment the rage that propelled me the hell out of there, the fuck out of there, the selfish fury that afforded me a life.
I was teaching at a boarding school where I had learned, by observing not only the other “masters,” but the students, how to pass for middle class, a matter of dress, carriage, kinds of mixed drinks, brands of imported beer. Half my wardrobe was from Goodwill, the other half from clothes that graduating seniors left behind. I was all becoming and striving, trying to bootstrap myself into something like middle-class respectability, play-acting the young schoolmaster. I was more certain who I was not: I was not the boy who had been raped, whose brothers had died, whose father had beat him, a boy made of coal and steel and violence and trucks and shame. I was not him.
I was again, or still, learning how to be, who to be, a project that required the refusal of who I was. I was a showman in the classroom, alternately dancing across the front of the room,
filling the blackboard, whirling to call on someone, or giving an assignment and then leaning by an open window, smoking my pipe. And in the evening, after dinner, I sat in the big, black leather recliner my father gave me when he bought a new one to put in the spot by the window, sat there as if strapped in it, the heavy rocks glass half empty of Tennessee sour mash, filling myself with dread.
Kathi and I, in an attic apartment above a boys’ dormitory, were as yet only precariously married, untested. One day I came back to the apartment during a free period. There was a note for me tacked to the doorjamb:
Gone to buy baby food. Love, Kathi
I shook with excitement, joy, fear. I let out a whoop, and then another, dancing and swirling in the living room. I was going to be a father! I poured myself a drink.
During Kathi’s pregnancy, I found myself revisiting every notion I ever had about being a man, asking what was worthwhile to bequeath to our son, and what I ought to uproot and discard, questioning everything, wondering on some level if my father was as good a man as I had always believed. More to the point, I questioned if I was a good man, or if I could become one, and I even wondered, at one point, if I was really my father’s son: how could I, with so many questions, be the son of a man who seemed to have none?
Veronica and I are having tea in the kitchen while D watches cartoons in the living room. I tell her I have been thinking about the long arc of my father’s life. I have a photo of him as a child before a 1928 Ford Model A with a horse and cart also in the picture. I mention how glad I am that he got to meet his great grandson.
“That was awesome, Dad. There was so much love in that house that weekend. It was just awesome. And you know what? I don’t care what you think. Wait, I don’t mean it like that, I mean I don’t know what you think, but I can’t help it; I feel like Poppop’s got my kid’s back. You know? He’s not going to let anything bad happen to him. This is his boy. Maybe you think this is stupid.”
Love and Fury Page 9