My dad absolutely hated working in the city, even though he'd beat the odds against poverty and a "lowly" ethnic background with a supposed "mixed birth" in his ancestry that plagued him wherever he went, because that's the reaction his last name elicits. He was been born in Rhode Island before moving to a farm in Maine with a little red schoolhouse down the road apiece, which lent an idyllic air to the surrounding countryside, if not his actual home rife with spats of violence and severe alcoholism. His family sold the farm and moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, which probably seems to you like the cruelest joke to be played against a young boy, and you'd be right.
He never really got over the change of pace they'd made to be closer to the family who'd help a single mother like my grandmother, even though every place he lived afterwards would never quite measure up to our fair city, because he retained a grudge against New York City from the strife he endured. I totally understood. I hated Rockland County as a kid, mostly because of the viciously competitive yentas of New City who liked to constantly remind us—through their spoiled brats at school—that we were considered lower than them, they who were destined to become doctors and layers, and failing that, dentists and chiropractors. They'd threaten to sue.
Unlike other typical "white" childhoods, we never really passed muster the way outsiders might think we did. Yeah, you had your definite skin tone and features that placed you squarely within a solid group of other "minorities" (and that status has always been highly suspect to me, though not the subsequent abuse and racism after many Americans emigrated, whether voluntary or not), because we still proudly carried our last names and distinctive features. It don't pass notice 'round the way, trust on that, and it always starts out the same way, too, albeit deceptively innocently: "Oh, is your last name 'French'?", in a pseudo-airy style. Of course, they don't really want to recognize European conquerors and other unwanted invaders to someone like me.
Then, they (my purposefully distracted audience) pretend that our real ethnic story is so hard to understand (or dull), that it's quickly followed by theirs. My dad had trouble from the very beginning in the city, because everything about him was wrong. He wasn't Italian, or Irish, or Puerto Rican, or black, which are much easier ethnics for average urban Americans to assimilate.
It became the first conversation that our attackers learned to avoid with us, which they would only signal when hard-pressed with something vague like, "there's something 'different' about you", becoming white code for "I know you're better than me and I'm a fuck-up, but I'm crazy, so if I admit you that to you, then you 'own' me". Well, yeah, kinda. By my rights. The thing is, me and my friends all had it rough, and we couldn't explain our parents crazy on just some po' oppressed n@gro story, feel me? We were all considered lowly downtrodden ethnics, be it a loud Dominican, or drunk Irish, or a greasy guinea (all those "dark" kids runnin' around yellin', ugh...Catholics), or Africans, or my "Half Breed" cousins.
It made him want to reinvent himself at every opportunity, and combined with his learning difficulties and sometimes serious cognitive impairments, it left him feeling extremely prone. He told me half-truths about joining the navy at 17 because his home life was "so bad", when in truth, his drunk dad had left many years ago, to be replaced by my loving, gentle Italian-American grandfather who stayed with my grandmother for the rest of her life. His cousin (also a serious drunk) told me he was on the reserve list before he was enlisted, and I knew what that meant. My dad doesn't make the cut right away, or sometimes at all, which he hides out of an embarrassment and fear that never seems to go away, no matter how much money he has.
He also told me that he was in a gang, and the way my dad gambles and works the pool table tells me the rest of the story about his greaser past as a small-time hood. Like his papa, his mama probably pushed him into the military, in yet another attempt to dry up one of her folk from dying, but unfortunately the military does cure disease. He said his "best friend" was electrocuted for murder as a teen, after a knife fight in an alley went wrong. Like most of his family, it was fucking crazy enough to be true, because we have/had hard-bitten convicts doing serious time in my family. It might be right.
And so, he did what millions of American men have done, since the start of our military: he flipped money from the G.I. Bill into an education, because he found a real mentor in his Naval C.O. He hated military life, but he loved the results, so he set out to remake himself into an American ideal, like the old black-and-white movies he used to escape a rough home life or the troubles he causes, preferring to sink into a dark movie theater cooled with air conditioning that he didn't have at home, so he could check out of reality for awhile. He always carries around this deep sense of need wherever he goes, you know what I mean? Like, a deep sadness settles over him and whatever evil he thinks he's done that he can't quite recover from in a really honest way. It may not even be real, the depth of his pain, but in his mind, it is.
It didn't really hit home for me until I saw the first few episodes of the t.v. show "Mad Men", a show about so many striving city people of his generation looking to ditch their identities for fake ones that Madison Avenue churned out for them in a siren song. It was alluring for them, escaping a reality that hated them for who they were. Everyone and everything had to change to suit some commercial sameness. After watching every episode, I felt an pit in my stomach that was backed up by my mom's impressions, too, and she totally sucks at media. "Yeah", she said to me, "that's exactly what it felt like back then." She paused, "G-d, what are horrible time it was." And it was. People hid anything that they thought was "bad", or less likely to sell in a corporate marketplace, like their homosexuality or their ethnic roots, to be white-washed with the latest lead-based paint or cosmetics that passed FDA approval.
I remembered it in bursts during my own bus commutes, battling homelessness and starvation; his pressing of hot spoons in the mornings to clear up sinuses he always complained were made worse with stress, his heating pad treatments and cookie binges that left him prone on the sofa while we attended church services with our mother. When he did attend, he never mouthed any of the words to our liturgical services, before he finally left the faith for an easier version that he was raised to believe was utter blasphemy in its creation against the church of Jesus Christ. Some protest.
That was just his "downtime". He'd take us into the office for weekends when my mother didn't want us around, so me and my brother could draw pictures on old office papers and eat sugar cubes from the kitchenette area for coffee breaks taken during the work week, after we'd done a thorough search of the office drawers for candy and gum. He got his suits custom-tailored at a Wallach's store in the old Nanuet Mall by this short Jewish guy with a measuring tape around his neck who had his measurements on an index card in the back of the store. I loved it, because it was like attending an exclusive gentleman's club, with expensively-tufted leather chairs and the smell of good fabric hanging on every rack.
He hated every minute of the weird head games and strange office politics, even as he was complicit in the same type of crimes against the public trust, through every deal he'd do that put him deeper into a moral hole that followed him before and after the city that gave him his first family. I felt (and still feel) sad for the lost boy he is, even as I hate(d) his abuses against us. May this weekend, and every weekend after, find him peace, as well as for all the sufferers of the unfair, the unjust, the sick, and the poor of spirit. May they inherit the earth through their humility. This mother knows it firsthand.
