Turn Around Bright Eyes

by Rob Sheffield

  But if I’m being honest, the things that bring couples together will always terrify me more than the things that tear us apart. They will always be harder to explain. They will always keep me up later. Love gone wrong has inspired so many great songs, but somehow, love going right is what’s bizarre. It exposes deep freakcraft in the universe. As far as I’m concerned, “some people are very kind” is the scariest line Bob Dylan ever wrote. Compared to that, his breakup songs are kid stuff. Some people are very kind and there’s nothing in the universe to explain why.

  It’s a mystery how people lose each other—but to me, it’s an even stranger mystery we manage to stay together, or to collide together at all. And that’s the part I’m always more curious about.

  I WAS TELLING A BUNCH of my Rolling Stone editors about my personal stash of Welcome Back, Kotter episodes. I know, right? Take a moment to swallow your jealousy. Yes, my hoard of Kotter reruns from the seventies, lovingly preserved on VHS, taken along every time I move. (They just don’t look right on DVD.) I worship the sweathogs and that sassy Vice Principal Woodman. I particularly prize my copy of the Nick at Nite Kotter marathon from 1999, when they were doing “Marathons to the Millennium,” and showed six solid hours of Kotter reruns, including the classic where Vinnie Barbarino runs for student council president, with the badass Juan Epstein on the ticket as Secretary of Fear. Juan’s campaign slogan: “Vote for Vinnie . . . And Nobody Gets Hurt.”

  I assumed my editors were laughing out of jealousy at my outlandish good fortune in still having these cultural treasures in my possession. Instead, my editor Will Dana said, “I can’t believe you have Welcome Back, Kotter tapes in your apartment—and you still got someone to marry you!”

  Okay. I deserve that. I’ll wear that crown of fools proudly. But don’t we all have Kotter tapes in our closet? Or their spiritual equivalents?

  My wife does not share my sweathog fetish, so I don’t watch them when she’s in the apartment, just as I don’t play Cat Power or vacuum while we’re both home. But the important thing isn’t that we’re freakazoidal about the same things—it’s that she’s as freakazoidal about her stuff as I am about mine, and that enthusiasm can’t help but unite us, even if the object thereof doesn’t. If two people are twisted enough to connect on a deep level, it’s only natural there will be lots of angles where they don’t connect at all. Yet in some abstract way, all that enthusiasm just feeds into the connection between us.

  When you come into a relationship as a full-fledged adult, you bring your lifelong enthusiasms. Ally is a woman of many enthusiasms, some on the earth and some in the cosmos. (One of the first things she said when we got engaged was “I’m going to have the same initials as the American Astronomical Society!”) Her enthusiasms are part of our bond, whether I share them or not.

  It seems like that’s part of the overall pattern of adult love, one of the things that make it different from the kid version. When you fall in love as an adult, you’re less embarrassed about how hard you have to try. You’re not as hobbled by trying to hold on to that youthful cool. There’s no pressure to pretend it’s all happening according to some cute sequences of rom-com coincidences. You’re not so shy about getting exposed as calculating and crafty in your effort to make good things keep happening. If you find an emotional connection with somebody, you want to find the sources for that connection, and you want to keep those sources strong. You can’t plan around random attacks of good luck; you want to make patterns where lucky things can happen regularly. If you want hotness in your life, you learn to build a fire and keep it going. You don’t run around with a pack of matches in your pocket, chasing clouds and hoping you get struck by lightning.

  As Yeats wrote, to fall in love is to enter “into the labyrinth of another’s being,” and that also requires you to tough out your way past any doubt and confusion that follow you around. There is always a minotaur in a labyrinth. And the labyrinth can get scary, which is why it’s easy to get hung up on a fantasy, or a memory, to avoid the complications of a real-life lover. I’ve always loved how in that same poem, “The Tower,” he asks, “Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or woman lost?” Yeats immediately answers his own question by saying that if it’s the woman lost, that just means you were too much of a chicken to deal with a real woman. You missed your chance to brave the labyrinth.

  So you get less shy about how hard you have to try. And you don’t bother hiding your Kotter tapes. Sure, they expose some of my appalling deficiencies. But my appalling deficiencies are all I have to offer. Is there such a thing as romantic love that does not depend on somebody embracing my deficiencies? I hope I will never find out.

  TWENTY

  1:46 a.m.:

  Some Other Time

  I like being a husband. I found (against my will) that I could live alone, when forced to; I got competent at that, but not to the point where I really liked it. I hated dating and I don’t make that great a boyfriend. What I really enjoy is being a husband. When a conflict comes up, I do not like to sit up until dawn bickering about it or analyzing it; that’s what boyfriends and girlfriends do, and they can have it. If it makes her mad when I use her toothbrush, I do not need to discuss why. I just stop using her toothbrush.

  Finding problems interesting is for boyfriends and girlfriends. I prefer to avoid problems, because I am lazy. If I think a task might be annoying, I will avoid doing it while my wife is around. We both hate grocery shopping, so we stick to a strict policy of going to the grocery store alone. One of us shops, or the other does, but we don’t do it at the same time. The supermarket brings out the least attractive side of my personality, the side that gets flustered when people clog the frozen-foods aisle or park their carts in front of the peanut butter. Do I want my wife to see me like that? Not if I can help it. And I can help it. Whatever annoys me at the supermarket, I leave it there, so it doesn’t enter into our relationship at all.

  It was my wife who brilliantly proposed the “no housework together” rule, which means if one of us gets the urge to vacuum, the other goes for a walk. I’m sure we could learn to enjoy scrubbing the tub together. And we could also probably learn to have tedious discussions about the relationship. There are lots of annoying things we could do. We just don’t. We’re not rookies. We’re lifers.

  As the then-married singers in the punk rock band X sang in “Some Other Time,” one of the all-time most useful songs about how to be married, “We can draw the line some other time.” And being married means there will always be some other time.

  I am by no means endorsing this emotional toolbox, nor my apparently permanent inability to put a serious effort into changing. I’m just trying not to be coy about it. Problems that don’t get fixed, situations that neither get resolved nor go away, and annoyances you live with year by year—that’s the engine knock of a long-running relationship. Treating these situations as challenges to be faced, or mountains to be climbed, or projects to be completed—that’s what boyfriends and girlfriends live for, I guess.

  I have to be honest. I am not one of them.

  I AM (AS I MAY have mentioned) an Irish male. If you know anything about Irish males, you know there’s something we usually have in common: We don’t want to talk about it, whatever problem “it” may happen to mean at the moment. “Not talking about it” is one of our specialties, right up there with “talking about everything else except it.”

  We have been known to pride ourselves on not overreacting. We like to imagine that the women in our lives count on us to be dependable, resilient, cool in a crisis, yet that is partly why they can also find us exasperatingly cautious. We don’t ask for help. We like to ignore our problems, and hope they go away. They usually do. A few years ago, my uncle Dermot back in County Kerry got gangrene on his leg and didn’t see the doctor for six months. He just kept working the farm and waiting for the leg to get better. When it turned purple, he finally showed it to my cousin, who dragged him to the croakers. They mana
ged to save the leg. To Uncle Dermot, this proved he was right to put it off until the right time. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t relate.

  (That’s why I love Mad Men: Roger Sterling is the most authentic Irish guy I’ve ever seen on TV. Historically speaking, his character should be a WASP, but that’s not how John Slattery plays him, and the writers write for Slattery. He helps me understand myself a lot better, like when he accidentally blurts out a secret to Don Draper. “I was going to tell you. No, I wasn’t. I thought you knew. I’m sorry I told you, believe me.” Oh, damn right I believe him.)

  My grandfather had a cool head, and it’s one of the reasons the women in his life adored him. It’s also one of the reasons his grandson adored him. He tried telling me many times that I had the same Irish male pathology he did—the “Twomey temper,” where you stew in a silent rage, as opposed to the “Courtney temper,” which is where my grandmother came in, and did not involve silence at all. When she got mad, she blew up, but then she was done. She didn’t nurse a grudge. My grandparents held it together for sixty-two years, and they were always very different this way. My grandfather said I inherited his Twomey temper instead of my grandmother’s Courtney temper, which he warned was bad luck for me.

  The men in my family seemed to take pride in not losing their shit, and my early conception of what it meant to be a man as opposed to a boy had largely to do with managing your temper and handling your grievances one at a time. (Little boys—they’re petite rage queens, or at least that’s how they seemed back when I was one. When I try to remember the boys from elementary school, they blur into one long Real Housewives marathon.)

  When I was into my teen years, my grandfather had one of his buddies from the New Haven Railroad over for tea. When I came in to say hi, the railroad guy said something along the lines of “Your grandson is very tall.” My grandfather said, “Yes, and he doesn’t fight, either.” He nodded proudly. This was a very strange comment to me at the time. I guess I had never heard my grandfather boast about me to a stranger. (He never had to—my grandmother handled the bragging-about-her-grandson business like it was her life’s work.)

  This is the way old Irish men talked when they were bragging about their grandsons? These were two tough guys, born in the nineteenth century, on Irish farms where their families and neighbors routinely died of malnutrition or the flu. Guys who escaped to America, only to face the Depression and break their backs to build the twentieth century. He was proud of me for not getting into fights? I was under the vague impression that this was one of my more eccentric character quirks. He didn’t say “he doesn’t drink” or “he doesn’t smoke” or “he gets good grades,” he said “he doesn’t fight,” and that blew my mind at the time. In my grandfather’s eyes, that meant I was a man.

  The comment made more sense to me as I got older. These guys had seen hardship. They had seen weaker men snap. They had seen families turned to paupers because a male had failed to keep on keeping on. My grandfather valued steadiness and fortitude. And Lord knows he needed it, as he was married to my grandmother.

  Eventually, this was how I came to see husbandhood. Part of the job is keeping a cool head and not overreacting to temporary crises. Again, I’m not trying to defend this pathology. I’m just trying to be explicit about it. And I’m aware it’s a pathology that can make for a truly terrible boyfriend. It’s one of the reasons why I’d rather be a husband. Being a boyfriend is much, much harder for me than being a husband. There isn’t even much overlap in the skill set.

  I WAS WELL INTO MY thirties before I found out I made a mediocre boyfriend. It was a dismal lesson to learn.

  That’s when I decided to try couplehood again, even though I wasn’t sure I was ready yet. I’d been a widower on the shelf too long. The grief still clouded my heart, even after three years. But I met a really cool woman who lived across the country. On weekends I flew out to the Midwestern city where she resided (let’s call it “Minneapolis”), except we had this fundamental incompatibility (let’s call it “me being a bitch”). Was I out of practice, or just still hung up on the past? Either way, I had never experienced relationship troubles like this, and I was a total amateur trying to resolve them. She was a good person. I was a good person. We didn’t get along. It was a shock to me after years of being happily married: failing as a boyfriend. What a letdown. It must have been how Michael Jordan felt when he left the NBA for baseball, only to discover he couldn’t even hit the minor-league curve.

  On Sunday nights, I flew back to New York in a miserable mood. At the Minneapolis airport, before my flight, I would drift over to the game room with the South Park pinball machine. It became my regular Sunday night therapy session. It was always strangely comforting to drop my quarter in the slot and see the lights come on, put my fingers on the flippers and play. Now this was a challenge I could handle, one where I got better with practice. This I could get right. If I lost the ball too early, Chef’s voice would yell, “Stop draining your balls so fast!” At the end of the game, Kyle always piped up to say, “I learned something today.” It was soothing somehow.

  I began making excuses every Sunday so I could get to the airport earlier. I would spend hours at that South Park machine, with my carry-on bag and my boarding pass, and think, “Maybe this is who I am now. I used to be good at being somebody’s husband. I made a woman I loved smile for a few years. I had a nice run, but it’s over. This is me now. The guy who’s good at playing pinball in airports.”

  After we broke up, she mailed me a present for my birthday: a box of brownies. Not a baked batch of brownies—a box of Duncan Hines brownie mix. A strange gift, maybe, yet it was an incredibly kind gesture, and it made me really happy. I displayed the box on the kitchen counter in Apartment 7Q, where it brightened up the room for a few days. In a way, it was the ultimate compliment—a sign that someone saw unbaked potential in me. Even in my ramshackle emotional state, somebody had high hopes for me, to the point where she could picture me taking on a project like opening a box of brownie mix and shopping for eggs and finally turning on the oven I used to store cassettes. But it was not to be. When my birthday rolled around, I spent it at home alone, in front of the TV, watching Britney Spears and LL Cool J host the American Music Awards. Midnight came. I was thirty-five. I threw the brownie mix away.

  All the things I thought I had already learned about love? I didn’t know a thing. I was going to have to learn it all over from scratch.

  I SUCK AT FIGHTING. I have never really learned how to talk and be mad at the same time. If I have angry words to say, I need time to rehearse. I can’t improvise when my head’s dizzy with adrenaline; I have to cool down and then write out a script. I found this trait very difficult when I was trying to be a boyfriend, because in my experience, boyfriends and girlfriends often spend a lot of time fighting. Husbands and wives seem to spend a lot of time avoiding fights. This might be a bad thing, for all I know, but it seems to be part of why I like being a husband better. That’s just a limitation that comes with the mentality I got from my grandfather: If you freak out over trivial everyday grievances, how are you going to handle real problems? And being a husband means there will always be real problems.

  Why am I wired this way? Is it a good thing (I am patient, I am an oasis of peace, I dig in for the long haul and ride out the tough times) or do the negatives outweigh the positives (I’m emotionally lazy, I avoid conflict, I make problems worse by smoothing things over)? Did I get this way on purpose or was it something I was born with? Should I try to learn a different approach? I really don’t know. But these are central questions of my life, so naturally I keep seeking the answers through music.

  That X song might be my favorite song ever written about marriage, even if the married couple who wrote it ended up divorcing a few years later. John Doe and Exene Cervenka sing “Some Other Time” together on Wild Gift, the 1981 punk rock landmark by their band X, and though the song lasts barely two minutes, every second of it feels real. You can he
ar all the terror and desire in their gutter-poet voices. “Some Other Time” is still woefully obscure, despite all the years it’s been a source of comfort and sustenance and wisdom for me. In a perfect world, it would be universally acclaimed as a classic, but then, it’s a song about living in an imperfect world, as half of an imperfect couple. The couple in the song stay up all night talking each other out of breaking up. They have lots of good reasons to fall apart, but why waste tonight? There’s no rush. They’ll always get another chance to fall apart some other time.

  Sure, you could draw the line and say, “That’s it, enough is enough, I’m sleeping on the couch tonight.” But in this X song, the man and the woman decide to stop talking about their problems and just stick together for one more night. Who knows, they could be dead tomorrow. Maybe tonight they can just keep each other cool, until that panicky feeling subsides and in the morning all the anger just looks like another silly dream. The song tells you that there will always be good reasons to break up. Deciding to get married doesn’t make those go away; it just forces you to keep riding them out. But if you need to break up, don’t worry—tomorrow will be another chance to break up or stay together.

  Being a husband is scary. That should be obvious, it seems, but I guess sometimes it isn’t. We have everything to lose. We have made promises. We have given hostages to fortune and challenged fate to a dance-off. We have chosen a future full of loss. Husbands are always scared—a little, or a lot, or constantly, or sporadically. There’s a certain wariness built into the job description.