Vacationland

by John Hodgman

  There was an old red barn in the back with unused milking stations on the first floor and on the second, a strange little three-quarter-sized tennis court, its painted green surface dotted with bat guano. And the kitchen in the main house had an Aga oven: a red and black hunk of English enameled cast iron that is on all the time, whether in use or not, regardless of the temperature. The owners offered to turn it off completely for the hot summer weeks we rented the house, but we refused because the Aga was wasteful and beautiful, and this was our summer of waste and beauty. The house was much bigger than we needed and cost more than could be justified by clear-eyed reason. But I was still sitting on some television commercial money, and I was willing to throw it all at this house because the first time my wife saw it, she cried.

  Once a week, as part of the rental, a woman and her daughter and her daughter’s friend came to clean the Kingdom Property. One early evening we came back from a drive from some other part of Maine where we had been doing nothing all day. The woman and her daughter and her daughter’s friend weren’t quite finished cleaning the kitchen yet. My children and I waited in the dining room, and my children were mad about it. To be honest, so was I. I didn’t want to be there with the sounds of actual work surrounding us, reminding me that the Kingdom Property did not clean itself, but that I was paying other human beings to deal with the food waste and dank towels I had littered behind me. But I knew to push this feeling deep, deep down into a shame compartment to revisit later. My children did not. They were little. They did not want to wait for dinner. And no, they did not want to go out again to the clam and burger stand to eat one third of another twelve-dollar clam roll and then throw the rest away because they were lying about being hungry in the first place, they just wanted ice cream.

  “Why can’t the cleaning people just leave?” they said out loud, right there, as we realized that the daughter or the daughter’s friend had just walked into the hall behind us. She had heard it all. She was holding my children’s clean sheets, which she had washed.

  She couldn’t have been much older than sixteen. Less than a decade separated her and my oldest, but also, as we stood there, much more. The daughter or daughter’s friend’s eyes met mine for a flicker, then looked away. I guessed she was busy shoving feelings of her own away, shames and angers that I could not fathom across that sudden, nauseating chasm of class and privilege. We’re not what you think! I wanted to tell her. I’m not fancy! I only went on television by accident! But I knew what I was: the villain in a Stephen King novel. I wanted to die. Specifically, I wanted to be murdered by a sentient antique car being driven by a rabid Saint Bernard, because that is what I deserved.

  Even among the summer people there are tensions. When you put enough affluent white people into a closed system, they will turn on each other eventually. That same summer, my wife signed up both of our children for lessons at the nearby yacht club—sailing for our daughter, rowing for our son. She did this because she had taken sailing lessons there herself as a child, and she hated it. She felt out of place and under-rich and scared, and I guess she wanted our children to have similar trauma. It worked: my son got bullied.

  I had never been in a yacht club before. The boathouse itself was open to the water: all sun and air in the big open doors and glossy dark wood paneling within. It was handsome, comfortable, and shabby, as were the members of the club, including the young people who ran the summer sailing school. I remember going to California for the first time and being struck not merely by how casually vain and superficial and mellow everyone was, but more how well and comfortably they wore these clichés. They lived a life without a single second guess, and I goggled at it. To live that way, without constant self-interrogation and panicky doubt, filled me with envy.

  The preppies of the yacht club were the same way. They wore scuffed boat shoes and popped collars and deep tans that advertised their casual confidence that cancer was for other people. I don’t even want to call them “preppies” because it’s such a trite and ancient term. But they would probably call themselves preppies, and if melanoma can’t win an argument with them, what chance would I have? They scared me. Growing up, I would spend winter vacations reading Alpha Flight on the floor of John Lin’s bedroom. The preppier kids would go away and come back with lift tickets still pinned to their parkas like little merit badges of assholism. You know my story and what I look like: I was no child of the streets. But even so, I didn’t know what a lift ticket was until I was in my thirties. I didn’t know why these boys had these negative raccoon masks around their eyes where the snow-amplified sun could not reach them through their goggles. And they were fine not telling me, as I did not exist in their world. I was a ghost to them, shimmering in from another dimension in a too-tight Opus the Penguin T-shirt and carrying an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons manual that, I can confess now, I could not really follow. Now in the yacht club I was reminded of how I felt that time some friend of a friend dressed in all Polo somehow got invited over to my house for a group VHS screening of The Evil Dead.

  “His parents must have money,” he apparently confided later to our mutual Deadite friend. “Why doesn’t he get some better clothes?”

  One of the moms in my son’s rowing class had a long blond ponytail. The day we dropped my son off, she introduced herself to me. She pointed out her son, whose own blond hair had been bleached impossibly even blonder by the sun. She explained he and the other two boys in the rowing class who were not my son had essentially grown up together every summer here in Maine. She also mentioned she had two older blond kids who are twins, a brother and a sister. She told me the town she lived in in Massachusetts—an even more affluent and suburby suburb than Brookline. She told me that her husband managed a hedge fund and could only get to Maine on the weekends. “It’s so great that you can be here all the time with your kids,” she said. “What do you do?”

  She had other questions. She wanted to know: Where were we staying? Did we rent? Or did we own? How long had we been coming up? How well did we know the town? I knew what was happening: it was a standard status/wealth scan, to determine if I was sufficiently human. I knew I would not pass. In the past I could rely on my appearances on public radio to excuse my lack of wealth: being on This American Life is like being a monk—you may have to sleep on straw and wear the same tattered robe made of tote bags every day, but you are acceptable in polite society because you are sacrificing for a greater cause.

  But now, as she asked her questions, I realized something surprising. I had answers. Answers that might actually be meaningful to her. In fact, I was a recognizably famous minor television personality. True, I probably didn’t have the kind of money a hedge fund husband would find impressive, but I did have enough for once not to give a feces about her opinion of me. I simply said that I was an unspecified self-employed person who happened to be renting the fanciest house in fancy town, and then I stopped saying anything. I delighted in the darting panic behind her smiling eyes as she tried to solve the puzzle. Let someone else tolerate ambiguity for once.

  For this reason, the yacht club was a wonderful experience until the bullying started, which was the end of that first day. Was it bullying? It’s hard to say. Eight-year-olds are unreliable narrators, and it was not surprising that my son would feel excluded among a group of boys who had been summering together since birth. Maybe it was just some light picking-on. But the result was the same: tears at the end of the day, and at the end of the next day too, and the next, and me gripped with powerless rage.

  Whereas with Ponytail Mom I had all the answers, now I had none of them. My experience with bullying was so minimal. As earlier recounted, I was mostly left alone when I was a prime bully target. My one flirtation with being a bully was when I would make fun of Elliott Kalan, a sweet movie and comic book obsessive at The Daily Show. I would routinely knock over the piles of comic books on his desk. Or I would walk by and pick up a souvenir Iron Man mask from his
desk and declare that it was mine now, and then casually drop it in the hallway as soon as I left his office. It was a lot of fun, my geek-on-geek bullying. It was so much fun that it escalated. One time I threw my sneakers at him in the hallway, barking at him, “Get lost, nerd!” It felt great. But as my Saucony hit the apex of its arc, I saw Elliott’s eyes, and I understood something: this game was a lot of fun, but only for me. Because I was on-camera talent and Elliott was not, he had to go along with my hilarious meta-commentary on bullying as performance art whether he liked it or not. That’s what made it, you know, actual bullying. The second half of that sneaker throw was horrible, even more so because the pleasure of the first half was so electric, addictive, and unpunishable.

  That is not something that is easy to explain to an eight-year-old: that there is no fighting back. There are no words or fists that can undo the pain caused by teasing, because their power lies in numbers, initiates allied against a lone outsider. And also fighting is terrible and scary and would make my son look crazy, and I don’t know how to even form a fist that would hurt someone other than me on contact. Even though I wanted to punch every face in the world right then.

  So the bullying went on, and I asked him to endure it. I spoke to the instructors, but they were barely out of their teens, and their eyes would drift. They were ill-equipped and uninterested and entrenched in the yacht club world; my son was also a ghost to them. It did not get better.

  As the second week of rowing began I had to beg my son to keep going and see it through. If your children are not in physical danger, if something is just unpleasant, you can’t give them permission to quit. First of all, not everything in life is unpleasant, but most of it is, and certainly all of the things that lead to real and lasting pleasure are. Second, if you give your child permission to quit, then later they will give themselves permission to quit. And we all know those people.

  So I encouraged him to endure. “But today,” I said, “I think you should wear this shirt.”

  I handed him the T-shirt he got at his last birthday party at the indoor rock-climbing gym in Brooklyn. He got the shirt because he was the only one to climb to the top of the wall.

  I said to my son, “Before I say what I have to say, I have to ask you: do you mind if I say one swear word in front of you?”

  He said he did not mind.

  So I said, “You have to remember that those three boys all know each other very well. But they don’t know you at all. They know nothing about your world or what you can do. Their lives are small. You can tell by how they act. But you live in the largest city in North America. So I think you should wear this shirt. And if they pick on you today, just tell them your name. Tell them you live in Brooklyn, New York, and you got this shirt for climbing a wall when no one else could, so you don’t need to take any shit from them.”

  As I laid out my advice for him, as my own confidence crested, so did his. A smile began on his face and had just reached his eyes for the first time in days. And then I said the word “shit.” And it all turned to shit. Yes, my son had technically given me permission to say a swear word, but only because all little kids want to say yes to their dads. In fact, I bullied him into it. The accurate answer would have been, Please don’t say “shit” in front of me, Dad, because dads are not supposed to say “shit” to their eight-year-old sons. Not unless they are slamming their hand in a door. And when you say “shit,” it means there are no rules anymore. Anything can happen. I used to think they were just mean, but now maybe those kids will murder me today.

  After I swore, my son’s face grew ashen with terror and then resignation. “I don’t want to wear that shirt,” he said. And he went and sat silently in the car, accepting his fate. I had forever deranged his internal life with a thoughtless few words. The legacy of Dump Jail continues.

  On the last day of rowing lessons at the yacht club, I went to pick up my son. He was not particularly happy it was the last day. He had stopped crying days ago, and he now climbed into the car with the dead, thousand-yard stare that kids get when they decide that this is just how life is going to be forever. That they are just going to survive.

  Before we drove away, Ponytail Mom walked up. Smiling. She had figured out my Daily Show connection by then, and while Hedge Fund Husband probably had a few things to say about how mean the show was to the poor billionaires who had ruined the world economy a few years before, she was reliably blue-statey enough to want to be friends.

  She said, “I just wanted to say good-bye!”

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  And that would have been it. I promise you now, as I told my wife later, that I would have said nothing more. But she asked. “Did your son have a good time?”

  “Well,” I said, “since you asked.”

  I told her my son did not have a good time. I acknowledged that eight-year-olds are unreliable narrators, so who knows what really happened. But apparently her son and the other boys in the rowing class ganged up on him a few times and excluded him a few other times, and it made him feel terrible. And the instructors didn’t help, and we all ended up feeling really powerless and bad. So even if I was wrong about the details of what happened, I thought we were all glad it was over.

  She said, “Oh no. There must be some mistake. My son would never do something like that.”

  I said, “I understand, and maybe he didn’t. But on another note, I feel I should tell you that I saw your older kids, the twins, in the parking lot yesterday. They were having a full-on fistfight. I watched your twin son kick his twin sister directly in the center of her chest, causing her to fall flat on her back in the dirt of the driveway. Then he stood on top of her. That’s when I suggested that they break it up.”

  She said, “Oh no! The twins are so physical with each other. I’m always telling them to go easy, go easy! But my husband says it’s just normal!”

  I said, “Well, your husband is not around very much. It would be easy for him to miss this. He also works in hedge funds, the most self-congratulatory, macho sector of investing that nonetheless underperforms the S&P 500 and which nearly destroyed the world by driving demand for bad mortgage derivatives in pursuit of more wealth for the super rich. (I read a magazine.) The point is: villains never think of themselves as villains, and white dudes always think of themselves as heroes. I myself once threw my sneakers at Elliott Kalan and thought it was brilliant meta-humor. But then I saw the hurt and helplessness in Elliott’s eyes as my sneakers thunked against his shoulder, and I realized that physically and emotionally attacking people is not normal. At all. Ever. Good-bye.”

  I did not say that last part about her husband. But I did say the rest.

  We no longer rent the Kingdom Property. The retired surgeon and his wife put it up for sale a couple of summers later, and there was no way we could afford it. The time in our lives and bank accounts for beautiful waste at the top of the hills and town society had come to a close. It had been inevitable. The television commercials were over. Even if they had continued I would never have made the kind of generation-spanning wealth that accrued to hedge fund husbands and ponytail moms. Sometimes, not knowing what my next job will be, I lie awake at night. I always find it comforting to know that maybe, in that suburb of Boston, that woman also lies awake, because a person from television knows that her children are mean. Then I fall into petty slumber.

  The IT Guy for Duck Dynasty

  But recently we did buy a house in Maine. It is a less fancy house in a less fancy town, a boatbuilding community farther out on the peninsula’s jagged coast. My wife emailed me a listing she found for a three-bedroom house on a flat, muddy bay. It looked pretty good. We went out and saw it. It looked pretty good in person too. So we bought it, with about as much deliberation as you put into the snap decision to buy a lump of fool’s gold at the Perry’s Nut House cash register.

  Buying a home is always an impulse buy. It’s an impossible
thing for your brain to absorb fully: to warp your whole emotional and financial life around the shape of this absurd physical thing, this new collection of problems and regrets, ants and undiscovered mold, bad drainage, and cracked foundations that will be your burden until you sell it or it kills you. A thirty-year mortgage is hilarious when you are young and you don’t even remember what day it is; it’s a grim thing when you are older and see that this debt is a bright, un-ignorable line from the now of your life to its addled decline.

  There is that moment at the closing meeting with the various attorneys where you realize: I don’t need to do this. I don’t need anything. I can run out of this office and go live in an old hollow tree stump. But you do not walk away because if you’ve gotten this far there is only forward. You’ve given up your apartment and gotten the loan and now you are going to trade this check with “ALL YOUR MONEY” written on it for some vague sense of progress in your life. Or else you know that your wife wants to die in a house in Maine, and you are definitely going along for that ride, and if it does not start now it will start next year, and this place looks pretty good, so sure, throw that house in the Perry’s Nut House bag and let’s get out of here. I don’t need a receipt.

  This is the reason that we have been letting the garbage rot in rural western Massachusetts. Because we don’t go there. We go to our house in Maine. Thus we come to the central conflict of my life and this book, which is this: I OWN TWO SUMMER HOMES.

  Are you enjoying my very relatable book of essays and reflections?

  When I first started telling these stories onstage, my friend John Roderick back-announced my performance by saying to the audience, “Ladies and gentlemen, the white privilege comedy of John Hodgman.” It was a painful but fair assessment. Our summer home dilemma is not a problem by any reasonable human definition of that word. But it is still an untenable, unaffordable situation, and the solution is obvious and inevitable: sell the house in Massachusetts. But so far I have not done it, because it is hard. It is hard to say good-bye to a landscape I love, to this last connection to my mom, to a place where we raised young children and were young ourselves. It is hard to clean out a house, to go down into the basement where all the old toys are boxed away. I imagine just opening a box of toys will cause me to double over in tears. I cannot imagine taking them to the dump and adding them to that sad altar along the low wall by the garbage hole. If I did it, I think I would then just walk into the hole and fall forever. And so all that hoard of our kids’ past and our past and my mom’s past remains hidden there, in an empty house, which I am hoarding as well, waiting for a time when I am braver.