Love and Fury

by Richard Hoffman

  Damion looked past me, and Robert behind me, to Veronica on the stairs. “How do I fix this? Veronica? I’m sorry. How do I fix this?”

  “You can’t. You can’t fix it. You broke it.”

  “Wait. You get mad at me and now you want to throw me under the bus? I see. I see how it is.” He turned to me, nodded to Kathi. “I got nothing but respect for you and Kathi. And Rob. You’re the closest thing I’ve had to a real family. I don’t know what to do right now.”

  “Right now? Right now you can go.” I felt no satisfaction saying it, and I hoped that Damion heard both meanings of right now: that he should go immediately, and that this was what he should do right now but, perhaps, not later. Maybe we all needed time to think.

  Damion’s mother agreed that Damion should visit D only at our house or hers. That plan was in place until a few weeks later on a Friday morning, the day before Veronica’s baccalaureate assembly, when Damion went to the lawyer’s office to meet about his trial, set for Monday. The attorney told him, “We’re all done here. I suggest you go home, pack your bags, and make your good-byes. You’re going away.” He had worked out a plea with the prosecutor. Damion was to spend a year in the Middlesex House of Correction.

  That same afternoon, Veronica called me at my office. “Daddy, he’s scaring me. He says he’s coming to get his son. He says I can’t keep his son away from him.”

  I told her to go to a friend’s house, and I went home to wait for Damion, hoping I’d be able to calm him down. He never showed up.

  That night he was arrested with three friends and charged, again, with possession of drugs and firearms.

  Now, on this visit, pulling myself together in the parking lot as the last of the guards are starting their cars and heading home, what I really want from Damion is the story of that evening. I have heard a number of accounts, all secondhand. I want to hear his recollections of that evening.

  As I enter the building I notice for the first time that there are marked parking spaces just outside the door. One says Warden. One says State Police Commander. One says District Attorney. The ascending chain of command. I have never seen it more clearly: I had tried to help, but I made things worse.

  Sometimes, if I’m talking with friends about our families or grandkids, I’ll take out my phone with the photos of my grandson. If the friends are white, they stare a moment, say how beautiful he is, and then remark, “Ah, he’s biracial.” If they are friends of color, they say, “Oh, your grandson’s black.” I once asked about this and a friend I would have called biracial set me straight from his perspective: my grandson’s black because history has defined him as such, because the white world will call him black, because he can only understand who he is in the eyes of the world by being black and because, alas, the police will call him black. I wonder if my friends who call him beautiful will still think so in a dozen years or if they will see him as dangerous until he can prove otherwise.

  At any rate, often, after questions of proximity (“You’re so lucky! My grandchildren are on the other coast!”) and grade in school, white friends will ask, “Is the father still in the picture?” It is a strange, strained, locution. “The father”—not his father, or the child’s or the boy’s father, but the father, an abstraction, and I already sniff a bit of moralizing in the air. I don’t try to dodge what’s next; I say it: “Yes. But things are hard right now because the boy’s father, Damion, is in prison.”

  The questions stop. No one asks why or what for. And I believe I know what they think because it is not really their thought, or mine—although I can almost reach out and touch it in the air between us—as much as it is a page from the American book of class and caste. It is as if a column of integers has been added, tallied, totaled, summed up: white trash. I don’t want to own the thought, and I don’t require anyone else to own it. I only wish that in these situations we could acknowledge the psycho/social/political chord that has just been played, that I hear as it fades, diminuendo, into a generalized discomfort as I put my phone back in my pocket. Would that this chord would fade into history as well.

  It doesn’t seem likely. Recently Veronica told me that when she was six or seven months pregnant, she visited the welfare office to see if she qualified for food stamps or any other assistance. The woman who took down her information asked her how much education she had. “Junior year in college.” The woman gave her a condescending look and asked again.

  “I’ve finished my junior year in college.”

  “No, dear. That’s high school. You mean you finished your junior year in high school.”

  Veronica stood and left without signing up. White trash is not so much a group of people as the name of the category she, my beautiful and shamed daughter, felt she’d been consigned to as the hot tears welled in her eyes, her cheeks burned, and she gathered her things and left that office.

  It’s a slur. I don’t allow my writing students to use the term. When I come upon it in a manuscript we’re discussing, I call out the author: what do you mean? “You know,” they say. But it turns out that they mean poor people, as we already knew. I try to ask my follow-up questions gently, without betraying my anger: do you mean my mother working in the sweater factory? My father laid off again? Are you talking about my aunt waitressing at the Uptown Diner? My next-door neighbor’s mother working the Woolworth’s lunch counter? Are you referring to my mother’s stinky shoes she cut holes in to ease her corns while she worked on her feet eight hours a day? Or my father’s brogans with the eye-sized hole in the bottom he patched by cutting a piece of linoleum for an insole?

  They mean the people I grew up with, who lived in “the wards,” in the lower street numbers, near the river and the slaughterhouse and the breweries, in neighborhoods with few detached houses and dogs that were not for petting but protection. They mean my cousin Joanne, “gone to live with the coloreds.” They mean all those who have not ascended the class ladder, who either failed or never tried in the first place, perhaps for very good reasons the students would not understand.

  They mean, it has turned out again and again, these students of mine, they mean the people they are leaving behind, distanced by ridicule, the people who raised them.

  White trash is a term related historically to the establishment of race as a political designation and justification for atrocity. In his two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, historian Theodore Allen traces the origins of the American class/race dynamic to 1676 Chesapeake, in the Virginia Colony that Allen calls “our society’s first living cell,” the site of what came to be known as Bacon’s Rebellion, an uprising that threatened to overthrow an agricultural system in which 5 percent of the planters owned the land and therefore the labor of all who lived on it, no matter what continent they had come from. Allen says that the significance of that uprising is that “a century and a half before Nat Turner led his rebellion, and William Lloyd Garrison began the Liberator, the armed laboring class, black and white side by side, fought for the abolition of slavery.”

  In the decades that followed, laws were enacted that meted out certain small privileges to those from Europe to ensure their loyalty. So-called “miscegenation” was criminalized, as were nearly all easy relations between European, African, and native groups of the laboring class. These laws came to govern the entire plantation system on which the nation was built. Once these laws became established, the traffic in Africans became easier to justify. What’s more, they served as the template for the legal framework of apartheid in South Africa and Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws concerning “racial purity.”

  I am only recounting what I have learned, what is easily available to all who want to know, in order to make my point here: the air, the atmosphere of a conversation about my grandson, about his parents, his future, is tainted still, poisoned by the particulate of history, of the crime of trading in human flesh, human labor, human lives.

  I asked a friend of mine once how I, a white man, ought best to deal with this history
now, in my own life. An African American poet and professor, one who has given a great deal of thought to all this, he replied, “Try not to be an asshole.”

  But white trash or not, what class am I? And how has that played out in the lives of my children?

  “I think it was my hair,” Veronica says. We’ve been looking at a folder of D’s preschool homework, sitting at the kitchen table; I had asked her why she never hung around with the white kids growing up. “It probably sounds really stupid but I think it was my hair. Everybody just assumed I was mixed. They didn’t see me as a white girl with this kinky hair. And Alyssa was my best friend.” Alyssa’s parents are African American and Japanese American.

  “So you felt more comfortable with friends of color?”

  “Well, it wasn’t like I fit in with the white kids! I wasn’t coming back from school vacations in Aruba or the south of France.”

  “Yeah, but they probably never got to go to Allentown.” I made a face at her.

  Must I say how sad this conversation made me? How close to despair it brings me to think that we are all required to live in this continuing absurdist tragedy where race and class intersect?

  And what about this ache that I keep pushing away, this need to know if my daughter, in always choosing black boyfriends, is rejecting me? I am ashamed of this concern. I understand how elementally racist it is, and I resist it and feel angry at myself for my inability to escape my upbringing. The ghost of my Uncle Francis? Did he feel rejected by my cousin Joanne? Spurned and defied without the benefit I’ve had of all that’s changed since then, without the education I’ve received, without the habit—a luxury, really—of weighing and wondering at the way things are?

  We have not come very far.

  In more than twenty-five years of AA meetings, I have never heard a better description of the alcoholic’s predicament than I heard from my son, Robert, in his first shaky weeks of abstinence, trying not only not to drink but to understand how he had gotten so lost in the first place.

  “I’d start drinking with my friends and after a couple of drinks I could see how loose and easy everyone was. Everyone but me. So I had another, and then another. But I could never get there where everybody else seemed to be. I’d keep trying, but I always ended up passed out someplace. I’d wake up and wonder: what the fuck?”

  It was my own experience when I was his age. My companions always seemed to be “lit”; their pleasure in one another, or the music, or the activity, was enhanced by a few drinks. I couldn’t seem to get the light to go on, but I could see it flickering: if only I would try a little harder, have just one more.

  But before long, it was precisely that unconsciousness I was seeking. By the time Robert was born, I was a solitary drinker. I had a satchel of papers to grade every night, and I would hole up in my study, in my father’s old recliner, a rocks glass and a bottle next to me on the table, inching my way to oblivion as I corrected my high school students’ grammar and usage and penciled occasionally legible comments in the margins. In the summers, and on school vacations, I was “working on my novel” in that same black hand-me-down chair.

  I used to drive past a liquor store on the way home from the school where I was teaching. I would have finished the bottle of bourbon the night before—or worse, I would have fallen asleep with only an inch or two left in the bottom of the bottle, and I’d be behind the wheel, talking to myself. If I hit the red light at that corner, I would glare at the neon signs in the windows, jaw set, breathing hard through flared nostrils. You’re not going to get me this time! I would tell myself that if I made it past the store without pulling into the parking lot, then I wasn’t an alcoholic. After all, I was going home to a house where there was no alcohol. An alcoholic wouldn’t do that! An alcoholic would be sure to have a bottle at the ready, maybe even a backup. A great relief washed over me as the light changed and I passed the store and soon after turned onto the highway. Then, maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, I’d pull into the parking lot of the liquor store in my own neighborhood and buy a quart of Jack Daniel’s, with no memory, none at all, of the fearsome battle I had just fought with myself only moments before.

  It goes without saying that Kathi and I were unhappy. She was unhappy with me, and I was unhappy with her unhappiness with me, so I raged at her. I was creating a distance between us, then accusing her of withdrawing. I was afraid: of intimacy, of responsibility, of the truth. I was afraid I would have to stop drinking.

  One day, when Robert was about to turn four, we were at a dinner party given by a friend. After dinner the three adult couples were sitting in the living room around a glass coffee table filled with desserts when Robert came reeling into the room, knocking against the walls, with a plastic cup in his hand, pretending to be drunk. He staggered over to me, presented me the cup, and in his clear, high, three-year-old’s voice said, “Here, Daddy! This is for you! It’s whiskey!” I took the cup from him, threw back my head, and laughed. What a clever kid!

  Everyone else, silent, was looking at the floor. Three months later, I walked into my first AA meeting.

  Soon after we moved to Massachusetts, I met a guy I’ll call Charlie, a psychologist, the father of two sons who seemed to adore him. As a young father myself, I saw him as a guide. Charlie knew where to rent boats to go out on the flats after flounder. He knew when the bluefish were running and what they were biting and the best spots to surf-cast. “See that rocky point there? The blues drive the baitfish toward that shelf, and they have no choice but to turn toward shore, so the blues only need to swim in an inverted V to corral them. Then it’s a bloodbath. They’re pack hunters, like wolves.”

  I was more of a freshwater guy myself, not having seen the ocean until I was eighteen. One day we were heading to the North Shore to fish and, being a new father, I was having a hard time with my dad—with him, with my memory of him, and with my idea of him. I was determined to be what I thought of as a better father—not more loving, my father’s affection was never in doubt, but more discerning about the influences my son would contend with, more critical of the masculine culture that I felt had crippled me in ways I was only beginning to understand. I thought that if my father would only be more forthcoming, talk about his boyhood, his time as a paratrooper in World War II, his marriage to my mother, I might get to know him as a man, not just Dad, or now, Poppop. I might come to appreciate his complexity and find a way to love him as complexly. Charlie seemed to enjoy being a father, and besides, he was a psychologist, so I thought I’d talk with him.

  “Your father doesn’t want you to know him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What’s not to understand? He doesn’t want you to get to know him.”

  “I mean know who he really is.”

  “He doesn’t want you to know who he really is! Come on, that’s obvious!”

  “You think he’s hiding something?”

  “He’s hiding who he is.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? Look, you are grown up, gone away, married, you have a kid. The guy doesn’t owe you anything. He raised you. That’s enough. Be grateful and leave the poor bastard alone.”

  “I’d just like to get to know him better.”

  “Tough shit.”

  That conversation shook me. I don’t remember much else about that fishing trip. I spent the whole afternoon and evening trying to accept what Charlie had said. It wasn’t until a dozen years later, however, that I understood. One day, Charlie’s wife got a call from an irate husband. Turns out Charlie’d been a tomcat the whole marriage. It was, of course, shattering for his wife and worse, if that’s possible, for his two sons, both young men now.

  “The guy doesn’t owe you anything. He raised you. That’s enough.”

  Going through my father’s things, I come upon a folder marked “army stuff” that contains a photo he sent home to his parents, and a number of flimsy and yellowing documents.

  SAVE THIS FORM.

  IT WILL NO
T BE REPLACED IF LOST.

  These words are from my father’s “Separation Qualification Record,” dated January 31, 1946, from which I learn that my father spent three months in basic training, two months training as a “Rifleman 745,” four months as an “Automatic Rifleman 746,” a month in paratrooper training (“Student Parachute 629”), and finally sixteen months as a “Rifleman 7745.” Under “Summary of Military Occupations,” it says:

  TITLE—DESCRIPTION—RELATED CIVILIAN OCCUPATION

  RIFLEMAN 7745—Jumped from airplane by parachute. Loaded, aimed and fired a rifle to destroy enemy personnel and to assist in capturing and holding enemy positions. Placed fire upon designated targets or distributed fire upon positions as situation demanded. Trained in use of hand weapons including rifle, automatic rifle, rocked [sic] launcher, rifle grenade launcher, bayonet, trench knife and hand grenades. Advantage of camouflage, cover and concealment, intrenching, recognition and following arm and hand signals, recognition of enemy personnel, vehicles and aircraft. Familiar with hand to hand fighting techniques.

  That’s it, the text fills the box. No room, I suppose, for “Related Civilian Occupation.” It makes me sad. And angry on my father’s behalf: what could he have possibly taken, this young man, into civilian life from such a curriculum? When he was drafted, my father was an engineering student at the Virginia Military Institute. I suspect that he was there in the hope that he would be perceived, at least potentially, as an engineer, as too valuable to the war effort to become cannon fodder, trying to demonstrate he had some brains. After the war, my father never returned to school. I don’t know why.

  Once discharged, he never again flew in an airplane. Not even later in his life when air travel had become commonplace. When driving six or seven hours became too much for him, we encouraged him to fly. No way. I’d try to joke with him about it, cajoling him with the reassurance that no jumpmaster would require him to “Sta-a-a-nd up! A-a-a-n-n-d, HOOK up!” His lip curled and he tucked his chin for just a moment like a dog about to snap, just before he recovered with a grin, not quite a smile. “Yeah, I never did LAND in one of the damn things.” And I knew, again, there was still a tender spot there, some unhealed lesion of his spirit. Seeing him flinch and nearly growl, I felt my own untreated injuries, still raw and alert to his mood. Both of us had learned—I learning mostly from him—the advantage of camouflage, cover, and concealment.