Guilt For Fleeing America? Well...Just a Bit
When the going gets tough aren't the tough SUPPOSED to quit?
He had been a mob enforcer, and really when you’re six feet tall and 265 pounds with no real penchant for permanent employment (and can’t catch a ball), what little is left by way of gainful employment? That would also leave him time to both body build and take the steroids that had gotten him to 265, as well as having guaranteed him the very specific employ that paid for them?
He stood on a raised wall about four feet from the 16-year-old me and he was waving a 100-hundred-pound plate. “One more PEEP out of you and I will crack your fucking skull.”
Now I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what’s colloquially known as a “'roid rage” but seeing a man in the full-flowered grips of it was, no other word for it: impressive. But it was my skull that was being discussed and despite my ill-timed wise guy desire to say “PEEP”, I played the better part of valor and dummied up.
After the moment, and not me, had died, and the enforcer had stormed out, my training partner asked “why didn’t you say anything?”
“Why didn’t YOU?” I responded, chagrined that anyone thought there was any other play here. Even if there most definitely was.
“He wasn’t talking to ME.”
And right he was. Which didn’t make me wrong. But it didn’t make me right either. Over the years it’s eaten away at me, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve written about it here, there and everywhere. Though I know, as I said in the FIGHT book that it would have been almost better to take the beating than to maunder over it, year after year after wearisome year, it’s the word “almost” that makes the most difference here.
Making it over the intervening years sans the inevitable head wound he was offering me has been just fine, and in the end hurt feelings are qualitatively better than hurt skulls. I just can’t shake all of that true American, Vince Lombardi grit shit and never more at any time than this one as I stand poised to leave the USA this June.
It would be easy to blame this on the diaper-wearing Commander in Chief. But I’ve hated past presidents as well and this has not been a casus belli for retreat. In fact it’s been a call to action, mostly on account of this idea that having built this country, why in heaven’s name, would I relinquish it to those who don’t deserve it?
And if my continued presence here serves as a bulwark against the forces that might minimize and challenge that contribution, well bring it on. But that was then, and this is now.
“Hey Dad…I know you’re excited about your move to Spain but it kinda makes me feel bad so maybe you could think about that, especially since the rest of us have to stay here.”
Take away those first two words and I totally don’t care about the rest. But when Daughter Number 1 speaks, it bears being listened to. Mostly because I never saw this coming. I’m not moving to an 8000-square-foot house in Spain to NOT have my family come and stay with me. I always imagined that it would be understood that this was for US.
After explaining that very thing to her, and her being mollified, I imagined that I wouldn’t think of it again. But I do and have. It’s nice to be able to make it over the wall but what about those that don’t? Or can’t? And whatever did happen to all of that fighting for what you believe in stuff?
Sure, this type of surrender is partially caused by aging, but that’s not it. That’s very far from it.
This last week though, two things started to drill down into the brain pan. The Gene Hackman death reveal where it was shown that the elderly actor had died a week after his wife had died from the hantavirus. Hackman, apparently, suffering from dementia, then just lived with the corpse of his dead wife. Until he did not. This, despite having a family that he had admitted he had done poorly by given his career choice, as well as about $80 mil in the bank.
Hackman was, in fact, in his 90s so yeah, maybe that’s just the lay of that land. But the other story came out of the town next to where I now live. A 16-year-old high school student, took their backpack off, laid it down next to the tracks that they sat on with their back to a speeding train, exiting the planet in an explosion of locomotive finality.
The kid, my later reporting revealed, was well liked, came from a great family, had friends but also mental health issues.
The horror of these two issues, twin engines, served to remind me of that which should never be forgotten here: misery is like weather. It’s with us forever and it’s all over the place.
So, if in some small measure you can stack the decks in your favor, you should do so with a quickness. And at all and any costs. To resist this for political reasons, no matter how well meaning, is a fool’s game. But we are such fools and history is full of examples of people who chose valiant misery over cowardly comfort. I’d ask them if they felt that that was a worthy sacrifice but I can’t. Because they’re dead.
We’re not though. What I am, however, is finished with unnecessary struggle. Remembering that there is a difference between surrendering and giving up. I’m not surrendering. I’m just giving up trying to save those committed to the cause of misery. Like an amoeba, or some other single-cell creature, I am just making the move away from too much heat, too much light, too many predators for a focus on what is not nasty nor brutish.
How much time do we have left? No one knows but we know this: it’s finite. Hippies used to intone, “what if they gave a war and no one came?” but while the struggle for civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights have all been worthy and borne worthy fruit, never forget that people died in all of those struggles. They died so we could live, however.
So, without another PEEP out of you, get after it. And you’re goddamned right…this is a[nother] pep talk.
Returning to LONDON, despite Brexit hassles, at the end of August this year, BUNUEL returns. Get your tickets NOW.
ALSO if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do this one…the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Bring them along to LONDON…I will sign them. Gladly.
