I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (4 page)

“What if al-Qaeda has a bunch of Pakistani nukes?”

“If al-Qaeda wants nukes, that’s their fucking problem. People are gonna have nukes. People are not gonna like America. People are gonna have different forms of government. Does that mean we have to go over there and destroy them? No. That’s un-American.

“But you keep sending guys like me over there? Without knowing what we go through? We may start fucking your shit up. First over there, then back here.”

He drinks his beer to foam in three gulps. “To be honest with you, I really hope some
Red Dawn
shit goes down. Because I’ll be ready. I’ll pick the family up in the pickup, start handing out guns.”

“Stark and uncomplicated,” I say. “Can’t wait.”

“Some Chinese higher-up is gonna have a really hard fucking time with Manati Avenue.”

“That little white house, third on the left.”

“Going out in a blaze of glory while costing some general his stars? Hallelujah.”

I’ve always had to be light-footed when discussing World War II with Papa. I never knew where I could take the conversation, or when I might overstep my bounds and set something off. Past times, I’ve asked the wrong question and sent him hurrying out of the room. He and Ryan, though, they’re on the same wavelength.

Sitting on the lawn after Christmas dinner, they speak to each other in a kind of clipped army Morse.

“Cold where you were?” Papa asks.

“Yessir. Paktika Province, Hindu Kush mountains. Waited up there for bad guys to cross from Pakistan. At night you had to huddle naked with three guys to stay alive.”

“In the woods, the wind was worse than the Germans,” Papa agrees.

“Socks. It’s about keeping your feet dry.”

Ryan has on a hooded sweatshirt, my grandfather an old gray windbreaker. Both wear long pants and closed-toe shoes. The temperature is above eighty.

The conversation switches to lighter things. My grandfather remembers emancipating a cottage’s silver, and throwing its owner off a bridge when he objected. “We was the victors,” Papa explains.

The three of us are lined up in rattan chairs—my grandfather, myself, Ryan, all facing forward—and the veterans’ voices are meeting over me. I feel snug.
At liberty,
like a boy who can swagger into a place because Dad or big brother’s right behind him.

This bantam privilege—knowing you’ve been given leave to see without fear of being seen—it’s the absolute best feeling in the world. Until the day it’s not.

“They use IEDs because otherwise it’s not fair,” Ryan says. “You get rich Saudi teenagers coming to the mountains, thinking it’s an adventure. I’d flank them, and they’d still be firing one-handed over a rock. Just kids, you know?” Papa nods, and levels his gaze on his hands on his knees. “At night at the fire base sometimes I’d look through my nods—night vision—and see these fuckers—pardon.” Ryan stands up and pantomimes a blind person stepping tentatively. “See these guys coming up the mountain for us.” Now he pantomimes holding a rifle. “We got an infrared beam that only we can see in our nods, and I’m painting these blind bastards right in the face.” He laughs a little, and so do Papa and I, because he pantomimes the sightless Taliban again. “So I’d let them do a little of this before I put the steel to ’em. Pink mist, you call it.”

I leave them to it and walk into the house to get another beer for Ryan and another whiskey soda for Papa. My dad turns from the dishes and admits, “What Ryan’s seen, I can’t even imagine. I’m just so relieved I didn’t get him killed.”

I’ve taken off work to fly out and visit Dad in San Francisco. Yeshiva University, where I am employed under the table as a factotum-cum-Shabbos goy. Not literally under the table, of course, but kind of: the subbasement, where I fix copiers, clean labs, and answer lost students’ questions about the way to the mail room or going unmarried past twenty-five. I found this gig postcollegiately, after thinking long and hard about Officer Candidate School. I could do the push-ups and sit-ups, no problem; it was running two miles in twenty minutes that gummed me up. I didn’t think the army would let me do it on an elliptical machine.

I applied to roughly thirty thousand NYC-based jobs via Craigslist. The fact that no one stole my identity made me feel worse about myself. I was turned down by the likes of the Central Park Zoo (maintenance man), a blind Iranian scientist (orator), and a tour company (pizza cicerone). YU were the only ones to call back. They treat me kindly enough. I get to emerge every couple of hours to wash toner off my hands and see the sun.

I told the faculty that there’d been a minor family emergency, which was not untrue. Dad was dying, according to Dad. Again. Still.

“What is living but dying?” Dad says, and has said, for as long as I myself have been breathing.

He insists that this is it, though. The big one. I know it is not. Cannot be. He will be released from this coil only when taking the lot of us out with him, we’ve decided, my sisters and I. That’s the only time he’s fancy-free—behind the wheel, with his babies on board. Then, everyone and no one is safe. It’s both terrifying and not, having him as your ferryman. I can certainly think of worse ways to go out than: wheels on air, Russells a-scream, the Taurus chassis leveling into parabolic free fall.

I’d be inconsolable were he to actually die without me, however. That is a future I can’t even begin to fathom. Talk about your wide-ass gyre. Though I take heart from the fact that, like all your small, skittering, chitinous creatures, he is hard to kill. Always have. Have, in fact, watched the man: walk through a sliding-glass door; unwittingly barehand a copperhead; set his commemorative Donkey Kong shirt on fire while stirring a pot of Hoppin’ John in the bright a.m. I was in the vehicle when he got T-boned by a cerulean F-150. I was not when he did likewise, loaded, to a cocaine cowboy’s yellow Lamborghini. I have seen him close a door on his own face.

After every injury, physical or otherwise, he yelps a “
Shit!
” and is fazed, but he does not accept help or consolation. There
is no
help or consolation. Suffering itself is the point. Shame is medicine, and to drink enough will cure you of anything.

It’s the kind of worldview a mental-health professional could dine out on, a lot, at expensive brasseries. But he will never go to a mental-health professional. Mental-health professionals are the black helicopters of the self, dangerous interlopers to take cover from and bust back at. Suggestions that he “talk to someone” come across like grenades rolled into the officer’s tent.

No, in this family we shit on the talking cure. We consider
psychology to be the hero’s grave. We rub dirt into what pains us, and then we walk it off.

As a result, I have come to fetishize opaque brutes. Adventurers, gunfighters, all the dumb rollicking killers. Dudes for whom torment and doubt are inconceivable (or at least incommunicable). Homer’s sublime dolts, gloved in blood and not wanting to talk about it.

“Nostalgia” is a dirty word, I know. Sentimental, retrograde. It’s the sound ignoramuses make when mewling after what was false in the first place. A blank check issued to weak minds, the cashing of which ends up bankrolling bad history. Total duh.

But fuck, man. Consider any guy who captured your attention, who gave you the (metaphoric) dick tingles. Likely, there was something in him that was unhinged to his advantage. Likely, he was in some way opposed to the kind of man we’re supposed to be now: the kind who understands himself, explains himself, acquits himself—the kind who, ultimately, never makes memorable gesture numero uno.

Doesn’t that guy sound like a dildo? Aren’t legends forged (
forged,
not recorded) by the kind of man who lives in the world in such a manner that, unbeknownst to him—and, really, he couldn’t give a good goddamn either way—his days become his credentials?

Because me, personally—I have had it with all these stories about anemic ephebes and their disquiet. I do not want to make a reasonable being my object of adoration.

Which is why I polished off yet another Daniel Boone biography prior to whipping out my laptop on this red-eye flight. (Dad having suggested the seat, 36F, after doing his research on Seatreviews.com. “You get a lot of legroom, but you gotta be the guy who opens the emergency door. You’re strong enough to do that?”)

In his lifetime, which spanned from 1734 to 1820, Daniel
Boone blazed the first trail into the West through the Cumberland Gap, explored the territories of Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, defended frontier towns during the Revolution, hunted game on the level of an extinction event, and spurred hundreds of thousands of Americans to settle in Kentucky and, later, Missouri. At one point, 358 monuments to the man existed in this country. The number of us who have claimed his descendancy—staggering.

Whatever instinct it is that attracts you to what encourages you—an instinct that comes from feeling at home in the world—Boone didn’t have it. Short and powerful, pony-built, he ran away from home after killing one of his father’s horses in a jumping accident. His father had beaten him then, in the Quaker fashion, beaten him until Boone asked forgiveness.
Canst thou beg?
his father huffed between strokes. Boone was silent, leaving his father free to close the matter at his leisure. Once his father had exhausted himself, Boone lit out for the wilderness.

Semiliterate, Boone could hold a long rifle in one hand and take the head off a nail from distance. He won renown for his marksmanship, as well as his ability to track game like an Indian. He cared little for himself and took ill-advised risks. In so doing, he bungled into history. He served as George Washington’s teamster during a campaign that saw the future president twice shot off his horse. Boone ignored every warning and became the first to chance an unauthorized American settlement west of the Appalachians, getting one of his sons killed by Indians in the process. Another he would bury in a mass grave following the 1782 Battle of Blue Licks, and this after reproving him, “I did not hear your name when they were beating up for volunteers.… I am sorry to think I have raised a timid son.”

Boone was a frontiersman, which is a latter-day euphemism for “unrelenting opportunist.” He tramped around the native
element looking for unclaimed resources, things to exploit before moving on. He bushwhacked, schemed, and hustled—mapping land, running a tavern, harvesting ginseng—but really he was something of a loser. By middle age, he was a bankrupt deadbeat on the run from the law.

The one thing he was truly good at was pushing farther into the woods to kill for flesh and fur. Boone spent almost all of his borrowed time doing this, hunting peregrine. It kept his family decent while simultaneously keeping
him
away from
them
for months at a time. There was something salvific in it: the separation, the descent into a more primitive state, the regeneration through violence. He was still hunting and trapping well into his seventies.

If you read the few primary sources, you start to get why. Boone feared something. It’s the same something feared by any ass-kicker who finds himself in medias res, hacking through the thick of it, knee-deep in the dead. He feared that, were he ever to stop, the mind he needed to keep trained on a target might instead turn on him. So, Boone came and went on his hunting trips. His shirt and shoes were always blood-soaked, and he’d have a nice present for the kiddies upon his return. But he never did stay for long.

I took a break from journalizing to use the in-flight Internet to confab with Lauren. As always, she is oracular. Our middle-sibling keystone.