Here’s the Bad News, Son

After college, I take a newspaper gig as a rock critic. Most of the shows that come through town are heavy metal. The fans in front are young dudes with radiant hair and bleak prospects. They all drink too much and talk tough. They want to be like the glittering figures onstage—that macho, that powerful. At one of the first shows I cover, a couple of burly guys launch into a pattern of shoving predictive of a fight. Then they start swinging. I leap between the two and shout for them to calm down, but I’m not sure whether I’m trying to break up the fight or trying to put myself into the middle of it.

♦♦♦

A few years later I’m in Miami Beach, working for another newspaper. I make a right turn onto a main road, and within a few hundred yards a gold sports coupe cuts me off. I honk at the driver because I’m not going to let some dick do that to me. The driver responds by slamming on his brakes so that I’m forced to slam on my brakes. Then he does it again.

When we come to a red light, the guy glares at me in his rearview mirror, and I glare back. Then he gets out of his car—we’re in the middle of a busy street—and marches back to my car. He’s screaming about how I cut him off, evidently before he cut me off. I roll down my window, meaning to tell him, basically, Okay, calm down. I apologize.

But before I can say anything, the world swings out of focus, and then I’m staring at my car’s grubby carpet beneath the passenger seat, where, curiously, my glasses are lying. It takes a second to dawn on me: I’ve just been punched. Hard.

The guy hurries back to his car, jumps in, and burns rubber around the corner. Blood is tickling my cheek, from where the rim of my glasses cut into my skin. I pull up at the nearest shop, a pharmacy, and ask if they have ice. The girl at the register stares at me with her mouth open. I am bleeding onto the floor. “This guy sucker punched me,” I say. “Right in the middle of traffic. Can you believe that?”

I tell my friends that the cut on my face is from basketball. But I know the truth. I’m lucky the guy didn’t drag me out of my car, didn’t have a weapon, didn’t turn me into the sort of violent headline I might read about in the Metro section while imagining the victim as a pathetic wimp.

♦♦♦

For the next decade there’s always some guy I feel I should fight. The guy who throws elbows in our pickup hoops game at Flamingo Park. The guy who spends months baiting me in grad school. The guy who sells me a bag of fake pot and refuses to refund my money. I sit around for hours at a time, reliving our confrontations, wishing I had the courage to punch these dudes in the face.

♦♦♦

It’s tempting to blame all this on my father. That would be the safe move. Perhaps if he’d encouraged us to share our feelings rather than pummel each other, my brothers and I would have entered the world without fear and loathing. We would have become secure citizens, ready to talk things through. But that would miss the point, that masculinity has always been governed by aggression.

To put it more starkly: Aggression is the means by which boys learn to share their feelings. Not even the most loving father can protect his son from the playgrounds, the bars and parking lots where bullies lurk, where soft emotions are hunted down and targeted, where fear becomes rage, and rage becomes violence.

♦♦♦

My wife is downstairs with our daughter. I can hear them playing with the new paint set. I’m upstairs working on my novel. Except half the time, I’m not writing at all. I’m trolling YouTube for old boxing matches, street brawls, ultimate fighting—the pornography of the bullied. I watch these scenes with a scalding, masturbatory shame. My fists twitch and flex. I’m like a Catholic kid frisking myself for that forbidden rush of adrenaline.

♦♦♦

Or maybe I’m in my car, immersed in the molten wrath of Boston traffic. This is where I indulge my other secret vice: talk radio. Limbaugh. Hannity. Savage—our maestros of rage, each a Joe McCarthy Mini-Me. Grievance is their siren’s call. “You are all victims!” they sing. “Are you going to let these [fill in the blank] kick us around? Fight back!”

 

These guys represent everything I despise. They’re vampires of the soul, feeding on the psychic damage of their congregations. And yet listening to them is a kind of seduction. It’s like tuning in to an emotional oldies station. The louder they wail, the deeper I descend into that primordial realm where nobody ever admits he’s wrong or uncertain or frightened, where sadism is the chosen means of eradicating shame. Welcome to masculinity stunted at age five.

♦♦♦

And whom does history commemorate if not those men most effective at marshaling their aggression to shape the world? For every Gandhi, a hundred Hitlers. For every Enlightenment, a hundred Inquisitions. For every treaty, a hundred wars.

What I’m asking here is, Do we ever outgrow our savagery? Is there any way to strip from us the masculine pathologies acquired over millions of years of evolution?

Let me put all this in a more personal light: How am I to protect my son from a world that lives inside of me?

I have plenty of fancy ideas about how this might happen, about what it means to be a good man, and I’ve spent many years trying to publicize my own glowing empathy. But the truth is I remain a prisoner of terror and rage, one minute puffing out my chest, the next cowering, dreaming of a power that resides in valor, in the ability to inflict physical harm. It’s horrible who I am.

♦♦♦

So now you know why I feared having a son, and why, when I gaze down at my newborn boy sleeping—he is three days old as I write this—I am sometimes filled with dread. I offer no happy ending here, no eleventh-hour homily about the rescuing powers of forgiveness. A quick look at the state of the world should dispel such mush.

All I can say is that I’ll do my best with the love I have. I’ll hope my boy becomes someone different from his father, braver in the right ways, less frightened. This, it seems to me, is the only reasonable hope fathers can offer their sons.

This essay is excerpted from The Good Men Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern Manhood. When he's not writing for us, Steve is a rock critic; check out Steve's breakdown of Toto's "Africa" in Diversions.

On July 8, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Steve will debut Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: The Musical.

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