MAN vs. FEAR

I heard myself make my father’s teeth-sucking sound. I was in my mid-twenties, working as a furniture mover, and had just come home to my studio apartment. I didn’t know how often or when I’d started making the noise; only that, though my father died when I was a child, I had revived a ghost of his presence.

I scanned the bathroom mirror above the cracked pedestal sink. A toothpick rested in the corner of my mouth, another of his habits. My black hair swept backward and I wore a white t-shirt, two more traits of his. I saw it plainly: I was trying to look like him.

The bursts of anger I had been recently struggling to control appeared in a new light. I felt them linked to my failure to fully break from my father. I sensed I could no longer compromise about this.

After showering, I combed my hair forward, threw out the box of toothpicks in my junk drawer and pledged to stop with the teeth-sucking sounds. Though my love for my father remained, I cast aside any excuses for him. An emotional housecleaning set in motion, and I began a long process of clawing away the rage that infected me.

In my childhood, I didn’t begin believing violence and sexism to be defining traits of manhood. I witnessed them in the lives of my father and war-traumatized stepfather, who also provided me a blueprint on how to suppress my emotions. Today, young males can more readily learn about this destructive brand of masculinity online.

I learned it could be fatal then. It feels no less deadly now.

“You can’t go with me tonight,” my father told me decades ago, a few months after my ninth birthday.

“Why?” I asked.

I toed my slipper soles against the linoleum kitchen floor of the house we rented in Erie, Pa., trying to decide if his words were good or bad. Two days before Thanksgiving, it had been dark outside for hours, already late for us to visit his “friend” Cindy Torrance and her son Alex. Alex was a couple of years older than me but would go with me down to the cliffs above Lake Erie and its muddy blue mess, against orders from his mother and my father.

I had begun to feel something off about us visiting the Torrances. As an only child, I enjoyed the times Alex and I shot BB guns and set off firecrackers. But I didn’t like when my father put his hands on Cindy’s hips or told me that she could be my second mother. I loved my mother deeply and was unsettled by her eyes getting teary the last time I said goodbye to her when we left for Cindy’s house.

I was also worried about whatever was bothering my father. He’d been fast-walking from the hallway to the kitchen, from out the door to back inside again.

It was the same walk I’d seen him use in hurrying to fistfight a man outside our truck during a rainstorm. He came back to the cab with his t-shirt inked in raindrops and smelling of watered-down Old Spice. Or, when he was slamming the head of a bullying teenager against a flat rock until blood leaked through boy’s long, brown hair. Frightened for the teen, I backpedaled slowly from what was happening then, trying to rewind it like a cassette tape. It didn’t work.

If something else happened, I probably couldn’t stop it, either. But maybe I should be there to help keep my dad’s temper exploding again.

When he was getting ready to leave our house, I watched to see if he would reach on top of the refrigerator. That’s where I believed he put the gun I’d once glimpsed him slide out of a paper bag, though I never saw it again after that. I would stand on our step stool but still wasn’t tall enough to see the top of the fridge.

My father placed his palm on my head and tried to smile. Skin creased beneath his black pompadour—he worked as a barber but kept his own hairstyle basic. Dim light shadowed his beard stubble and the gold filling in his front tooth.

“I love you, with all my heart,” he said, hugging me. “I gotta go. You love me?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“As much as the whole world,” I said.

We said we loved each other every day, but lately he was asking how much. I made up answers that boosted my love for him but also sounded kind of corny to me.

His white T-shirt flashed under his unzipped jacket once or twice in the dark living room. My mother had already gone to bed. I caught his back going out the front door, his pivot as he reached back to shut it. That was the last time I saw him, the last day of his life.

Today, when I look at one of the black-and-white photos of my father that my aunt mailed me, I see a boy about the same age I was that night. He was the youngest child, his brothers five and thirteen years older than him. He grew up with his two sisters, born in the two years preceding him. In the yellowing photo, the sisters flank his sides with their arms around his shoulders, smiling proudly.

They are standing in front of a guard rail on a dirt road, immigrant children of subsistence farmers from Calabria, Italy, their older brothers born there. Their shoes are scuffed and badly worn. My father’s baggy knickers sag, rings of dirt around the knees and pockets. In a too-small, V-neck sweater and a collared white shirt, he puffs out his chest. His left arm flexes forward, ending in a fist. He looks like he’s trying to be a man, but the boy in him holds back a laugh.

It took me many years to discover that my family had withheld or revised details about the night of my father’s death. My love for him rendered me complicit, as well, afraid to dig too deeply. But I also came to understand that failing to admit what happened lessened my chance of healing from it.

My father drove to a bar close to the Torrance’s house. Cindy was drinking at a table with her date, twenty-five-year-old, next-door neighbor Jimmy Esplain. I culled details from newspaper stories and admissions that trickled from my mother over the years. Cindy and Jimmy likely did not expect to see my father. He perhaps didn’t believe he would find them together, until he saw them.

He set on them both and dragged them from the bar, tugging Cindy by the hair forcefully enough to pull sections of scalp from her head. He battered them both outside, but they escaped to their car. They sped back to their homes, their properties set along the same driveway. My father followed them in his pick-up. He caught Jimmie in the driveway and began punching him again, with Cindy screaming for him to stop. Though an acre or so away, her neighbors awoke and called the police.

Cindy ran to safety inside Jimmie’s house. Jimmie broke free and fled through the front door also. My father followed too closely in pursuit for them to have time to flip the locks and keep him out. He beat Jimmie more inside until Cindy reappeared with a shotgun and threatened to shoot. If my father had his revolver, he never produced it.

He exited the house and they shut the door behind him, but forced his way back in as they were attempting to lock it. He attacked Jimmie again and beat him more. How they got him back outside this time isn’t mentioned in the newspaper articles, but they were able to close the door and finally lock it. The newspaper’s summarized police account hints at an almost bizarre slapstick scene, a Laurel and Hardy turnstile of opening and closing doors.

My father moved to a side entrance on his third attempt to enter the house. Jimmie grabbed the twelve-gauge and exited out the front door. On the driveway, he approached behind my father, who was trying to force open the side door. Jimmie raised the shotgun and fired a buckshot load into the right side of my father’s head.

These were the details provided by my mother’s lawyer and the few reports I could gather over the years. Esplain “was in his own home and had suffered two beatings within thirty minutes of the fatal shooting,” one newspaper article concluded. “He said the shooting itself was an effort to keep the decedent out of the residence the third time.”

These accounts, however, never featured in the differing stories my family told about my father’s death. A separation took shape in the shadows of our grief—my mother’s family on one side, my father’s on the other. Though their spheres tilted next to each other, they never merged again.

We still visited my father’s parents nearly every weekend. But our families drifted farther apart in the year after my father’s death when my mother got engaged to Lon, my grade school basketball coach, followed by their marriage just before my eleventh birthday.

Perhaps their rush to marry sought to corral my behavior. Along with my best friend Walt, I’d taken to shoplifting regularly and had already been apprehended by the police for arson and causing an automobile accident. And I had never feared anyone more than Lon, including my father.

In retrospect, fear had always threatened love in our family. My grandfather cheated on my grandmother and the children were aware of it. During their more than six decades of marriage, he brought mistresses into their house on occasion, but no one dared question him. Perhaps it was from my frustration in missing them that I sometimes badly joked after they died that they were married for sixty-three years but weren’t close.

My father’s explosive rage proved tougher to frame than his philandering with women. As a child, I loved to laugh, joke, and playfully disregard authority, so I wanted to run from this side of him. But as I grew older I found it harder to constrain eruptions of my temper that followed me wherever I went.

When I began writing about my father and stepfather, it was to document what I learned from them about manhood, apart from the stories of my family over the years. I wanted to tell my story, as well as stand witness to all my mother endured in hers, and the silences she swallowed when the narrative of her abuse failed to find believers. But I began to see that the rage of my fathers had paved well-worn tracks in my life that I could not cover over.

I had weathered several arrests and near-fatal brushes with death. I abused alcohol and drugs to drown my sadness, shame, and rage. I reached thirty without paying taxes, but had lived in such indigency that I only owed the penalty fee when I finally filed.

Accepting an unpaid internship with a Denver newspaper, I lucked into an editorial position, my first job that was not manual labor. It allowed me to afford the insurance-covered therapy I desperately needed to shift my life in a positive direction. But, I still needed to recover the social skills I lost in the years with Lon.

As ten-year-old basketball players, Walt and I greatly favored hot-dog, “Pistol” Pete Maravich dribbling and occasional one-handed, three-quarter-court shots over passing the basketball. We wore our socks bunched down by our sneakers like Pistol Pete and attempted trick layups like our other hero, Dr. J., aka Julius Erving. Anything to do with the American Basketball Association, or ABA, we coveted, including the red-white-and-blue ABA basketball and accompanying wrist and head bands.

At that first team practice in fifth grade, however, our freewheeling, early ‘70s, “P-Funk”-ified, ABA style hit the wall of twenty-two-year-old Lon Bernhard. At six feet, three inches and 245 pounds, Lon would have been physically imposing even if he had just graduated from pastry-chef school instead of recently returned from two combat tours in Vietnam.

“Pass the ball!” Lon screamed. “Don’t you know how to pass the damn ball!?”

I never heard anyone shout that loud. Even the drill sergeants I had seen in movies didn’t have this kind of full volume. Their voices seemed to fill an area, while Lon’s flooded the gym corner to corner.

“Well? Answer the question!” he shouted.

“Huh?” I mumbled.

“I asked if you knew how to pass the ball!”

“Yes.”

“Then pass it!”

Sometimes when he screamed the plate of his front teeth would come loose or shoot out of his mouth altogether. We wondered if he lost the teeth in the war.

Unthinkingly, I passed the ball to Walt, who quickly jacked up a long shot.

“Wetzel!” Lon said, using Walt’s last name. “Same question!”

“What?” Walt said.

“Do you know how to pass the ball!?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then PASS IT!”

Lon seized a basketball from a rack and “passed” it at the green cinder-block wall so hard it sounded like a gunshot. When the ball finished ricocheting off the back of the bleachers and rolled to a stop in a corner, none of us moved or made a sound beyond our breathing. Lon blew the whistle hanging from his neck for us to resume play again.

Compared to his voice, the whistle sounded weak and Lon used it sparingly. It was as if it signaled a context tied too closely to basketball, when he was immersed in something else, something we didn’t understand.

I could never reconcile the Lon who was the screaming basketball coach with the brooding giant who lay on our living room floor watching basketball on TV, a bowl of ice cream at his side and his favorite “soft blankets” tucked around his neck like a pacifier, even in the heat of summers. He was my older brother plagued by fits of rage, and my silent, disapproving stepfather who locked my mother’s tennis racket in a room and hid the key, both roles sketched on the canvas of what I understood to be a man.

I believed Lon accepted my father’s masculinity of intimidation and invincibility over others, but, something else, the horror of war most likely, could not fit into this box. He was in his twenties. He was searching, like I was.

Though he could shout at the top of his lungs in a gym, Lon seldom had a word to say in the eight years I lived with him as my stepfather. We rarely spoke to each other. He assigned chores by writing notes on index cards and leaving them on the dining room table for me.

As a coach, Lon’s rage knew no compromise—good practices or bad practices, wins or losses—it could not relent any more than a battlefield could. Without the stage of sports to stand upon, however, he was lost. Haunted by his war trauma, he was rendered mute in daily life.

Though I’d been one of the class clowns and a talkative, popular student in grade school, I fell into silent isolation during high school. Rarely speaking unless spoken to first, I made peace with staying in my room with my books and headphone music. As years passed, socializing with others steadily slipped out of my reach.

My father and I had a close, loving relationship, but his rage brutalized anyone who challenged his will. Lon and I never expressed any emotion we felt for each other, good or bad. The sparse words we shared each passing year might have been lifted from an Army instruction manual.

• • •

In the early 2000s, my mother made a rare visit to my home in Denver. Never one for expensive tastes, she recommended we stop for lunch at a Black-eyed Pea for their cornbread and broccoli casserole on our drive from the airport. The vibrant six-lane boulevard crowding the parking lot vanished once we entered the vault of the restaurant.

The hostess seated us in a darkened nook. In our semi-quarantine from the other diners, we talked about the life-threatening health issues of relatives, many of them receiving public assistance.

“Do you ever wonder what would have happened if Dad didn’t die?” I asked.

“No.”

She looked back to her menu, expressionless. I had never pushed past her refusals and pressed her to talk about the past. But we were both getting older, me in my early forties, she in her mid-sixties. When would we discuss it?

“Why do you still not want to talk about what happened?”

“No, it’s the past. What good does talking about it do?”

“It would be helpful for me,” I said.

“I don’t want to relive those times,” she said.

“I don’t, either. I just want to talk about it. Sometimes, not often. It feels weird not to.”

“If you have to know why,” her tone suddenly sharpened, “my life was in danger, your father was violent, he was physical with me, he threatened to kill me—that’s why.”

I dropped my menu, stunned into silence. Her eyebrows lowered and she stared at the table.

“Almost every day after work,” she said, “I drove by the sheriff’s office downtown. I circled the building and I looked for parking spaces. But I never stopped. I was too frightened of what he would do if he found out.”

My ribcage felt collapsed from an invisible pressure. Had she withheld this for so long to allow me to keep what good memories I had of my father?

Too focused on myself, I had failed to see it, to infer it. For years, she had lived in captive fear of my father’s rage.

“I’m so sorry, Mom,” I said finally.

Several tables away, a woman about my mother’s age dined alone. She stared in front of her as she waited on her food. She did not occupy herself with her menu or purse. She appeared lost in thought. The way her eyes went blank and she set her mouth in an uncertain frown reminded me of how my mother could gaze ahead of her, face tight, stone lipped.

Maybe the woman was simply daydreaming. Or reviewing plans for the rest of her day. Or maybe a husband had abused her, too. For all I knew, maybe he’d threatened to kill her. But how would I know? I had failed to see it in my own mother.

• • •

Intimidating masculinity ruled my mother’s life. It smothered my relationship with her during those years, and we both had to work in our own ways to overcome having lived in fear. I saw how it destroyed men, also.

My years with Lon were more complicated to my sense of identity. Interacting with him felt like trying to remove an absence, a hole dug by the darkest horror men had invented for themselves, in war. I could not see this horror and Lon could not reveal it.

If loud noises sounded from a fireworks display or in a movie theater, he and my mother would flee the scene and go home. After they divorced, his trauma landed him in a VA mental ward. My recovery from the emotional suppression of our time together took years of cognitive behavioral therapy before I felt part of day-to-day society.

I had learned about being a man from two fathers during a former life that I still knew intimately. Having married and moved on, I did not think often about these years. But, in writing about them, I knew the experience was not unique to me. In some ways, it’s what we all are confronted with now. The ideal of manhood that my father and stepfather followed, much like the version currently trending in our country, was steeped in fear. Fear as a weapon, fear of weakness, fear of women, of others, of anything that challenges one’s will.

Fear wears so many masks that it rarely shows itself. It followed me long after my father and stepfather were out of my life. It ignited the anger I felt at my inability to shake free from what I learned, no matter how much I knew it as beyond unhealthy, as even perilous. But, I didn’t see it then.

I have always sensed that the past demands a reckoning from the present. It reflects back to us when we betray ourselves and those we love, the same way a yellowing, black-and-white photo still reveals the emotions on the faces pictured in it if we are willing to look closely. Destructive masculinity claimed my father’s life. It robbed Lon of his boyhood. Rationalizing this violent version of manhood means rejecting the obvious facts of their lives.

I could no longer accept that living with violence as a man was better than not being a man at all. No identity is worth losing one’s humanity. It took me years to make peace with that, until I could finally let it all go.

In the last decade, and for the first time in its over 130-year history, the American Psychological Association (APA) listed common characteristics of the most recent rise in destructive masculinity. These traits are not new, but perhaps they have finally been chronicled: power over women; intimate partner violence; aggressive behavior; emotional detachment. The ACA report stated men use anger to cover up more vulnerable emotions like shame and sadness. Anger certainly sourced the violence of my younger years. A tough demeanor, the study added, can save a soldier’s life in a war zone but destroy it at home with a wife or child.

I have seen where this destructive version of manhood can lead if we don’t question it. If we allow it. I hope we survive it.

During a recent visit with my cousins in upstate New York, I recalled the silence of our grandfather and how my father looked up to him. We were touring nine gardens of a famous mansion. Lagging behind the group, I kept searching for a bench, one I could imagine our grandfather, a farmer and a gardener, settling down on to gaze at the property, perhaps taking a nap as the mild sun splayed on his face and the brim of his straw fedora.

His silence embraced you, not unlike the quiet that rose from the grounds of the gardens. We never talked about his treatment of our grandmother, of his temper and infidelities, which then fueled my father’s rage and desire to take numerous mistresses.

In the summer after my father died, I stayed with my grandfather and grandmother for a few weeks and learned to work in their garden. He showed me how to core bell peppers, peel away the pulp, and prepare them to be canned. Then we’d drive them to small groceries and stock the jars on the shelves, direct-supply style.

I stood in the sun-soaked gardens and remembered how he held a pepper in his coarse hands and used a paring knife to empty its innards cleanly.

“Like-a dis,” he said.

I repeated his knife-work. Like so many boys did with their grandfathers and fathers, I copied his other traits, as well. Until I grew to realize I couldn’t any longer. Not without bringing others pain. Not without destroying myself.

Sam DeLeo’s writing has appeared in Glass Mountain, Hobart, Paste Magazine, Reckon Review, Storyhouse, Anti-Heroin Chic, Culture Matters, and Talking Soup, among others. For information on his forthcoming crime memoir, "The Only Thing I Have to Do Is Die," contact him at sam.deleo@gmail.com.