A Sob Story: Or, The Deconstruction of Macho
The mutation of the masculine, all talk of toxicity aside, has been a thing of wonder to behold.
My mother was worried.
I was the firstborn so no one to bounce this worry off of but she had noticed, apropos of not having previously held this concern, that while watching cartoons, I wasn’t laughing. Bugs Bunny is, hands down, funny, but I hadn’t figured out whatever meager social benefits accrued from displaying amusement, so I didn’t.
I mean in my head I registered humor and humorous intent, but like a comedian does I imagined, as a kid, I was appreciating and analyzing the humor but I just…, well I didn’t laugh. Out loud at least. This had started to eat at her. There were no spectrum-y words to describe this then, that is me just sitting watching Bugs and Daffy cut wild like I was reading a phone book.
“You know,” urged my mom, “these are funny.” Then a pause. “You know?”
Laughter, I’ve always believed, was involuntary. For example I didn’t decide to NOT laugh at the last few David Chappelle specials. I just didn’t laugh. Mostly because I thought they were lazy and not particularly funny. But back then, I understood what my mother was urging. I also understood, without being told, that people around you, generally, felt better in the face of your enjoyment of something. Dinner, gifts, and later sex, all seemed properly capped by an external show of appreciation.
Anything that was bad enough to cause me to cry I knew instinctively wouldn’t be improved by crying about it.
So now? Now, I laugh easily and comfortably in the face of the funny. It’s not forced. I’ve internalized what’s not even a skosh inconvenient: laughing out loud is like sneezing out loud. It just feels better, and is easy enough.
However, insofar as the flipside was concerned, it was very much materially different. That is, there was a point where I just stopped crying. And I came of age when football notable Rosey Grier was advising young boys that it was alright to cry. I didn’t keep myself from crying, almost like I wasn’t willing myself to not laugh. There just didn’t seem to be any point to it.
So, yeah: it was partly philosophical. Anything that was bad enough to cause me to cry I knew instinctively wouldn’t be improved by crying about it. This wasn’t some macho damping down of emotion. It just stopped being there for me. So much so that I have, in my memory, catalogued when I did cry and when I did not.
My great-grandfather died when I was five years old? No tears. My great-grandmother died when I was 10, and I loved her with as much brio as anyone was capable of, no tears.
However, they cut a tree down across from where we lived when I was eight…and for this tree, I cried. I also cried when it was widely televised, the murder of baby seals by seal hunters with baseball bats. I didn’t feel better after these episodes. The tree was still dead, as were the seals. So the subsequent times were even fewer and further between.
I cried once my Sophomore year of high school after an act of cruel disregard from a family member. Then…not a drop. For…well…decades.
I wasn’t bearing up. Or choosing to be “strong” or even, silent. It’s just the way it was.
Then I became a father, a curious turn of events especially as my plan had always been to get sterilized because…the toilet bowl Earth is no place to raise a kid. I slow walked the vasectomy though and knew then that I would probably breed and I sure enough did.
Nothing for years and then like Al Martino’s Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather, I’m sobbing at everything. Just without Brando as The Godfather slapping my face…
Three daughters in short order. Starting when I was 34, and then with daughter number four at 57. Life changing, sure, but the ramifications of those changes would play out in mysterious ways.
Like: in the middle of an OXBOW show at the Union Chapel in London. It was some version of the OXBOW Orchestra, at a very old church. I want to remember me singing from the pulpit though in all likelihood I was on the stage. And in the middle of a song, I started thinking of my daughters. I was missing them terribly then and then, in a moment, like getting swept away by a tidal wave, I was waist deep in an ineffable sadness at both being separate from them and also knowing that this separateness would grow and be eventually the inevitable outcome of life.
And I started sobbing. Unrelentingly.
I have a picture around here that someone took of the moment and I haven’t looked for it to put it right here in this piece because it’s a memory that’s a permanent reality. That is, it made me sad then, and it makes me sad now, and sobbing before getting this piece written is not what I want to have happen.
More (and most maybe) importantly is that one day everything was different, even if one thing was always the same: almost always about my kids.
Which means it wasn’t a one off. Taking my oldest to college? Lost it in the car before hand. When my second went off to her first gig post-college, I passed out in the front yard after waving goodbye. Sobbing like a grandmother to quote Brando from Apocalypse Now. Thinking of my third daughter’s face when I told them their Mom and I were getting divorced can still bring me to bone rattling sobs.
“Eugene…what are your secrets of machismo?”
The questioner was a friend of mine, also easily and heavily influenced by the cinema of anomie like I was. Taxi Driver on repeat, in other words. Dirty Harry. The aforementioned Apocalypse Now. I laughed at his question because it seemed laughable but he wasn’t laughing and so then neither was I.
“I don’t know, man,” I said. Later to be amended to “shouldering your burdens without complaint.” Which I still largely hold to be self-evident. I mean if you’re a man and you haven’t squared yourself with the fact that no one gives a fuck about your travails, except in a very general way (that is, how you feel), then you’ll be a whole lot better off.
But OXBOW plays the Caterwaul Festival in Minneapolis a few weeks ago and on the cusp of being about to say something in tribute to the late Steve Albini, I lose it. And Steve was not even one of my kids. But then two days AGO when describing to a friend how daughter number four will scream “I LOVE YOU DAD” from wherever she is in public and I always respond just as loudly “I LOVE YOU TOO KID” I lose it.
Nothing for years and then like Al Martino’s Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather, I’m sobbing at everything. Just without Brando as The Godfather slapping my face and admonishing me for not being “manly” enough.
Well, fuck that.
I’m totally OK with the sobbed state of being because, and mostly, there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s involuntary. And, oh yeah: I also carry a gun. So whether it’s a function of age or fatherhood, I am unsure, but I’m not unhappy about it. Just a product of life’s meandering crossroads and how things can change when you least expect them to.
So, now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to watch Meet Joe Black. Last time I watched this movie I was on an international flight and was so beset with tears that the flight attendant asked me if I needed help. I buried my face in my hand and waved her away with my other. The occasion had been Anthony Hopkins’ line to Brad Pitt, aka Joe Black, or Death Personified, when he realizes he is there to collect his daughter.
“I’ve loved her since the first time I saw her,” says Hopkins and I cried then, and I’m not doing so well at this point in writing this and remembering.
Yeah. Life can be a fucking killer for sure.
And I don’t think I’d have it any other way.
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Maybe doing this life thing right involves a long journey of finding the way back to ourselves. Sure, there's much to be understood that helps us navigate the world in whatever state it could be in, and the world just happens to be in a state that (I think) alienates us from a very early age. Understood in terms simple enough to be captured in language, allowing us to be educated and vaguely assessed. These things only potentiate life though. They are not life itself. Personally, my experience of life is all the better for feeling more, and not less. Somehow it seems to lead me to engage with what I value, and values aren't something I see being honestly discussed in broadly public settings. I'm fairly sure it's not in the interests of those who have the most control over public settings to do so. And so it goes.
I feel you on this one. Have you seen Interstellar? Not even that great of a movie. It's okay. It's cool. But, there are interactions between the father and daughter in that movie that made my fucking eyes start machine-gunning out fluids so freakishly, I had to turn the movie off the first time I watched it.