Manhood for Amateurs

  We tend, through films, novels, and television programs, to view the seventies as the decade when the wheels came off the cart, when, to quote an anthem of the time, “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls,” when America fell from her pedestal of God-fearing rectitude or was replaced gradually by an Imagineered simulacrum of itself, when moms wore kaftans and dads wore huge sideburns and they both did Quaaludes and went to key parties, when the comforting if rigid old Puritan-Victorian rules of social conduct, shaken in the sixties, finally gave way altogether like a mudslide in a California canyon, when New York City tottered like a bellwether toward the apocalypse, and the blockbuster-film mentality that has spread and cheapened pretty much everything was born. Or else—as on That 70s Show—we view the time, compared to the present, as having been a kind of paradoxical stasis of nuclear-family stability and cheesy normality.

  Neither of these views is correct. What happened in the seventies was that, as at no other time before or since in our history, Americans—especially American women—were, for better and worse, free. Liberated, we cast aside the laws and limitations of the old familiar system to sail like Voyager out into the interstellar medium beyond. You can see it on the album covers of every band of meaty bohunks from Cleveland or Sheffield—the Raspberries, the Sweet, Aerosmith—who ever appeared with their hair piled high atop their heads and mascara on their eyes and their masculinity fully, if amusingly, intact. You can see it in a movie like the powerful documentary 51 Birch Street, which is a kind of bitter and glorious paean to the way the seventies blew open the doors of one ordinary suburban American marriage, briefly offering to a conventionally trapped husband and wife new ways of being a man, a woman, a couple. You can see it in the sad contrast that Elizabeth Isadora Gold drew, in an essay for The Believer, between today’s so-called chick lit and popular women’s novels of the seventies like Fear of Flying and The Women’s Room, in which women appeared, for the first time in all of modern literature, as genuine adventurers, sailing out into the blue as the heroes of their own sexual and intellectual quests, finding freedom and fulfillment and making fools of themselves.

  The seventies were, finally, about Voyager, loopiness and all: about expanding consciousness by making contact, about translating yourself in all your particulars to a kind of universal message of love and desire and willingness to explore. They were about consciousness and self-consciousness (and sometimes loss of consciousness) and all the sense of genuine liberation, however goofy or naive or short-lived or untenable, that those things can impart. We can accept the invitation extended by those years to laugh at them, but in doing so, we are only getting in on the joke.

  And God knows we have nothing in the line of liberation to make as counteroffer. Where women were once trapped inside a single narrative of child-rearing and housekeeping, the introduction of a second narrative of fulfillment through work and intellectual accomplishment has left them trapped in a kind of permanent ongoing guest role in both, able to star or to shine in neither. As for the supposed liberation of men, if all the socially viable ways of being a man (not counting those afforded and tolerated in gay culture) were languages or species of plants or animals, we would be living in a virtual monoculture. A dozen years from now, sometime around 2020 or so, when the atomic power plants carried on board the two Voyagers give out, all transmissions from the edge of things will cease, and the record that those two probes carry, of a moment’s giddy will to expand the bright tiny circle of its consciousness, will drift on, in silence and darkness, waiting.

  One June night in 1972, an early hurricane named Agnes rolled up the East Coast, raising rivers and drowning railroads and knocking out power all over the D.C. area. My family was living at my grandparents’ house in Silver Spring that summer while we waited for construction to finish on a new house. My parents and grandfather were out for the evening, and my brother and I were left in the care of our grandmother, who seemed not to know what to do with us at seven o’clock on a Saturday night when the lights winked out and the television blacked over and she found herselfalone with two bored boys only too eager to get busy in the darkness with the candles and the matches.

  So she sent us to bed down in the basement, and though I remember being put out at the injustice of this decision, she was a grandmother in the quietly adamantine style, and there was no appeal and nothing to be done. My brother and I climbed into the convertible sofa bed we shared, and there was a clap of thunder, and I shut my eyes. A moment later I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder, his voice soft and taut as if some unpleasant business was at hand.

  “It’s time to get up,” he said. Somehow, as though in an instant, the entire night had passed—the only time in my life I remember having experienced such a passage—and it was morning. “But be careful.”

  My brother and I lowered our skinny legs over the sides of the sofa bed and plunged to our knees in cold rainwater. In the night, our basement room had been transformed, like Max’s bedroom in Where the Wild Things Are, into a swimming pool, a rippled lake, a midnight sea. It was like magic, in all the delight and fearsomeness of the word. We might have been drowned or washed away. We might have paddled on sofa-cushion rafts to the far-off shores of our parents’ bedroom. Magic, at both ends of the spectrum, is what happens in the basements of houses.

  My grandfather had finished the basement sometime during the late 1950s in grooved plywood paneling and glossy black linoleum that, even on the hottest day of the summer, was as cold and hard as the frozen seas of Triton. With his tools, wiry arms, and pragmatic imagination, he had wrested four rooms and a bathroom out of a dank, dark hole under his house. There were two parlors furnished with cast-off and outmoded living room sets of the premodern era, the chairs creaky and stuffed with horsehair. In one parlor a neglected piano incrementally untuned itself, and in the other, on a small table designed expressly for the purpose, sat a great black piano of a telephone. It had a clacking iron dial that sprained your fingers, and when it rang like a firehouse alarm, you expected to find Alfalfa or Spanky on the other end of the line. The drawers of the end tables cataloged the entropy of board games, the history of typing supplies, the morphology of swizzle sticks and coasters. The basement bedroom in which my parents spent that hurricane summer had sheltered my mother’s younger brother in the latter days of his adolescence and was decorated with a large black-and-white poster, popular during the late-sixties “nostalgia revival” (which no one then suspected would turn out to be permanent), of W. C. Fields playing a poker hand very close to the vest. Fields wore a sour expression, and there was always some residue of sourness in the bedroom, some discontent in the recollection of my uncle’s time there, as if his tenure had carried an element of exile. Exile, too—the estrangement of the dungeon dweller, of the narrator of Richard Matheson’s classic story “Born of Man and Woman”—is part of the enchantment of basements. At night my mother and father, only a few years away from separation and eventual divorce, would shut the door that did not quite shut and consider with growing discontentment the hand they had been dealt.

  There were long-standing, sometimes bitter tensions in the other marriage under the roof that summer, and whenever my grandfather wanted to partake of the magic of exile, he would retreat to his underground workshop. It was dominated by a massive workbench built from pine and pegboard and fitted with a formidable screw vise. He had a table saw and a table drill, an extensive library of hand tools for working wood, metal, and leather, and a small laundry area, nominally my grandmother’s territory but equipped with a sink and a stopcock to which you could attach the hose of a Bunsen burner. My grandfather, a patent lawyer, was an inventor in his own right, the holder of U.S. patent number 3826667 for something he called “magnetite paint.” He was also an amateur photographer and maintained an improvised darkroom, with developing pans ranged alongside the steel laundry sink and a wooden photo enlarger of his own construction hunched like a big plywood mantis in a corner.

  In those d
ays the pages of comic books were frequently home to cutaway diagrams of secret lairs and headquarters, each with careful arrows pointing to the Sleeping Quarters, the Recreation Area, and—of course—the Research Laboratory. A couple of years after the night of the hurricane (and far sooner than my judgment or trustworthiness merited), my grandfather gave me the run of his Batcave. As soon as we arrived for a visit, I would go down there and begin to decoct, construct, rummage, demolish, assemble, snoop, waste time, get into trouble. I took apart broken machines and appliances and, in the name of my research, broke things that had nothing wrong with them. I spoiled splendid plans and managed to turn worthless junk into faithful scale models of things that no one had ever seen. I smashed my fingers with hammers, cut them with saws and chisels, burned them on the tips of soldering irons. I bled. I wept furtive tears over my injuries, which, like a wounded gangster, I was obliged to treat secretly lest I be banned from the basement forever. I went spelunking in deep closets and cabinets and picked out atonal versions of the theme from Mission: Impossible on the piano. Mostly, I lay around for hours on the musty sofa, utterly bored with myself and the universe, flooded as by a passing hurricane by the kind of tedium a child can feel only at his grandparents’ house, wondering what it would be like to be somebody, somewhere, doing something, anything.

  All of those activities, it seems to me now, helped form the basis for my life as a writer, a denizen of the basement of my soul. I suppose it is no accident that basements, hidden lairs, and underground settings have featured so routinely in my fiction: the gang rape of Happy the collie in the basement of the Bellwethers’ house in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the macabre hideout of James Leer in Wonder Boys, the numerous hiding places and fortresses of solitude in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the mysterious subterranean Untershtot of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, accessible by hole from the archetypical basement of the Hotel Zamenhof. In almost everything I’ve written, you can find buried treasuries, Batcaves and hidey-holes, half-forgotten underground worlds that perhaps encode the rapture and the bitterness of my own isolation.

  The house that we eventually moved into after that summer at my grandparents’ had a fine dank basement of its own, not so well finished but spectacularly equipped with a couple of earthen crawl spaces worthy of Montresor and Fortunato and a mysterious deep hole at its heart that was the burrow of a strange, rumbling creature known as the Sump Pump. As my parents’ marriage fell apart, I took to spending more and more of my time down there, making stop-motion science-fiction epics with my Super 8 camera, curating and organizing and hiding inside the boxes of my comic book collection, listening to Casey Kasem count them down. It was a new basement, but it had the necessary residue of exile and mystery, and when you returned from a session down there, you could feel something following you, its hand at the back of your neck, racing you up to the light at the top of the stairs.

  Now I live in Northern California, where, as if in obedience to some doctrine of spiritual health and equilibrium, houses do not, as a rule, have basements. My own children are reduced to the expedient—surely not to be disdained—of creating impromptu clubhouses from blankets, cushions, and chairs, or of seeking inspiration in the daylight quotidian fastness of their bedrooms. I wonder where it settles, the dark tide of magical boredom that was the source of all my own inspiration, in a house without a basement to catch and hold it like a cistern. I have often found myself wishing my kids had somewhere they could go to get away, get lost, feel frightened and safe at the same time. Someplace deep and buried, unsuspected by and inaccessible to any parent, and right underfoot.

  Anyway, we built them a little tree house in the California buck-eye in the backyard. It’s bright, open, sky-bound, a crow’s nest for the brigantine of their play. I worry that it is insufficiently dank, gloomy, remote, mysterious, but as they have filled it with random things, randomly broken and repaired, I have had reason to hope: hope that when they shut its bright green door, the world with all its puzzling business feels muffled and distant. Hope that they lie up there on their backs for hours, feeling tragic, and happy, and terribly, terribly bored.

  I swear I was twelve years old before my grandmother let me go into a men’s room alone. If we were hanging around downtown Washington—and she was a great one for hanging around downtown, a flaneur in White Shoulders and a black sweater set—she used to smuggle me into the ladies’ lounge at Garfinckel’s department store when I had to go to the bathroom, even if getting there required a twenty-block walk, and when I say smuggled, I mean pushed me like a dollyload of bricks while loudly exhorting me to cut in front of the blind woman with the oxygen tank. It had to be Garfinckel’s, no matter how long a schlep that meant, because only there, amid the caged parakeets and the splendor of the ladies’ lounge, did the standard of hygiene come even remotely close to her own. The truth is that even Garfinckel’s fell short. Before I was permitted to touch my flesh to the Garfinckel’s toilet, she had to enter the stall like a fireman shouldering his way into a burning house, face grim and set, taking minimal sips of air through her nostrils, and wipe down the seat with a paper towel and the Lysol that at all times she kept in a small spray bottle in her handbag. When I was finished with my business, I was expected to summon her so that she could, with a single furious kick of her tiny foot, deploy the flush handle, flush handles being widely known to medical science as festering vectors of disease. Her spray bottle of Lysol came out on buses, too, to render the Naugahyde seats fit for contact, and she whipped it out whenever we went to sit on a bench in Dupont Circle for a session of her favorite pastime in that era: scowling at the “hippies” who gathered there and, in an undertone that was not especially low, mocking them. When she washed the dishes, she would encase each plate and fork in plastic wrap before returning it to the cabinet or drawer. She washed Dixie cups fresh from the package in soap and hot water. She had survived pogrom and transatlantic crossing and Depression and war, and she was not afraid of anything, least of all her son, my father, but she was terrified beyond reason of germs and bacteria.

  When I was a kid I found this behavior fascinating, and as I got older, it was good for a laugh, but now I see that the poor woman was suffering from a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder: OCD, or XO9, as my younger son used to believe it was known. He was hearing a lot about XO9 and about my grandmother, because for a while my older son started believing that anything that happened to him on one side of his body—a pinch, a tickle, his mother’s taking hold of his hand to cross a busy street—needed to happen right away on the other side of his body, too, or else he would feel “like I’m going to die.” This particular form of the disorder, it turned out, meant he had symmetry issues, and there were other ones, including a brief but intense inability to get through five minutes of consciousness without mentioning cows at least once. These things mostly came and went, ramifying wildly, foliating like creepers through the kid’s thoughts and, to some degree, the discourse of our family before fading with the help—help that my grandmother never received—of some fairly simple cognitive-therapy techniques and his grateful eagerness to try them. He was so relieved to learn that this thing could be named, could be talked about, that he began to feel better simply through the act of discussing it (which I think is why he consented immediately when I asked his permission to write about it).

  This thing runs in families, and I can’t help also seeing its signs in my father, an obsessively completist collector of stamps, coins, bubblegum cards, tobacco cards, autographs, Big Little Books, Ovaltine premiums, magazines, books, classical recordings—all kinds of stuff—the collections proliferating, branching off, some running their course, some enduring for decades. He’s a man who cannot enter a room without aligning, or suppressing an overwhelming urge to align, the corners of books with the corners of tables they lie upon; a man whose neckties hang in a closet as neatly as the pipes of a church organ and whose desk drawers look like aerial photographs of a secret weapons facilit
y in the Nevada desert.

  My grandmother, my father, my son, and me. My few collections are incomplete, I have braved hellish shitholes without benefit or need of Lysol, and I have never experienced any bodily compulsions beyond those of my animal appetites. But I have this thing where I can’t stop trying to fix something that’s broken, some lock that won’t open even with the right combination, some computer program that won’t run or channel that won’t TiVo—even if I have to stay up till four o’clock in the morning or miss out on the party in the next room to figure out what’s wrong and how to repair it. Even if you resort to physically removing me from the vicinity of the problem, I will not be fully present in conversation or be able to sleep or find any savor in life whatsoever until I have solved it or, at long last, conceded defeat. Over the years certain random words or phrases, such as Lampedusa, weasels, and Ted Kennedy, have gotten trapped like flies in the casements of my brain and buzzed in fits for months or even years until some unknown hand threw up an invisible sash and they flew out. I must have said the word monkeys at least once a day for the past ten years, not counting references to actual simians or my children. And—this is not a boast—I rock. Davening, my wife calls it: steady, rapid, rhythmic rocking, sometimes fitful, sometimes continuous, from foot to foot when I’m standing, and from front to back when I’m sitting down. Rocking like a junkie who needs a fix, a madman on the subway, a devout Jew at prayer, a kid who really needs to pee.