A Long Day at the End of the World Read online

  * * *

  When my parents moved us to our Atlanta suburb, they decided to repent of their fallen Presbyterianism and attend a nearby church on Sunday. They had never been big believers—in fact I don’t recall a single act of Christian instruction in the home—but I think they felt the need to ease the dislocation of our constant movement, to provide some stable ground for themselves and their children.

  I remember the day well. Decked out in our new Sunday clothes, my sister and I groaned as we buckled in to our red Toyota wagon and headed off to the local Presbyterian church. Located in a renovated brick building, this house of worship was successfully making its way from an old country church to a more affluent suburban one. A brand-new fancy mall, Perimeter Mall (where my sister and I had bought our new clothes), had recently sprung up nearby. My parents no doubt expected a bland sermon from the New South, with little or no dogmatic fire. And yet, as we sat together in the crowded pews, the minister declaimed the same segregationist doctrine of African American inferiority that had been the mainstay of the Southern Baptists. In fact, at a moment of emphatic crescendo, this emissary of Jesus actually used the n-word.

  My parents flinched. My soon-to-be-hippie sister turned red with anger. And we marched straight out of that church and never went back. On that day, the Shit Fairy smiled with Shit Fairy glee. And the turbulent ground my parents had hoped to steady, tamed by Jesus, shook with a vengeance.

  * * *

  Traveling northward along Highway 69, I passed the Windham Springs Baptist Church, one of scores of Baptist churches I knew I’d encounter on my short trip. Suddenly, on the western side of the road, toward Mississippi, a wave of flags appeared against the trees. Eight Confederate Battle Flags strapped to eight different poles. They flew brilliantly above an encampment of mobile homes and beat-up trucks and cars where a few regular-looking guys (one in fatigues and one with a University of Alabama ball cap) leaned over the popped hood of a full-size pickup.

  I wanted to slow down, to take it all in, to study the faces of these modern-day Confederates. I wanted to stop and ask them exactly what they believed they were doing, whom they were fighting for and fighting against. I wanted to be sure. Nearly 150 years after the war, why were these guys still playing army? And yet I knew that inside their decrepit homes, these men had most likely amassed a very real Confederate arsenal. Probably shotguns and semiautomatic handguns, a good old-fashioned assault rifle or two. I wasn’t black or Mexican, but with my citified looks as well as my poorly folded American flag in the front seat of my Swedish car, I didn’t suppose I’d be too welcome. And anyway, didn’t I know what they were fighting for and what that flag was all about? Hadn’t the modern racists entirely co-opted the meaning of the flag during the civil rights era? Hadn’t the old lines of power been sanctioned and affirmed not so long ago?

  I sped on. That band of Confederate irregulars never glanced up. And soon their image faded into a row of oakleaf hydrangea, the ragged state wildflower of Alabama that grew in all types of ground (disturbed and nondisturbed areas). In the month of May, these sprawling bushes bloomed spiky white flowers that later turned a deep rose. This particular state flower, my field guide explained, was a shade plant that couldn’t handle much direct sun.

  10

  I PASSED A PAIR of blue-lettered Ten Commandments tablets displayed prominently like FOR SALE signs in an ugly yard. Honor thy father, I said to myself, picturing the Shit Fairy straddling two heavy chloroplast tablets.

  Born of dirt-poor parents during the heart of the Great Depression, my father was the youngest of five brothers—thirteen years younger than his nearest brother, making him a “mistake” by his own admission. (As a child, I spent some time wondering exactly what this mistake was.) When his father finally got an oil field job, a decent union job, his family moved around northeast Oklahoma following the rigs. Yet the only other detail I recall was the one about the lake—how the Army Corps of Engineers flooded the farm he’d lived on for the first years of his life.

  Once my mother came along, so came the stories and a clearer picture of his life. When my father moved to town, as my mother tells it, she quickly claimed him as her own, and the two were sweethearts by age sixteen. I have some old photographs of them from that time, one printed in the local newspaper in 1948.

  In this particular photograph, my father, a star end on the high school football team, lies sprawled on the sidelines after a touchdown. A kid trainer in a letter jacket leans over him, holding a rag against his broken nose, as my father’s only visible eye rolls high into his knocked-out brain. And with gloved hands on her thick skirt, my mother kneels down to him, her pretty face so rapt as to be expressionless. On this cold football night, however, my father rises from the ground at the call of the coach—rises right out of this photograph because he’s the kicker and has to kick off. He rises right out of the sports pages and wanders onto the wrong side of the field. When his teammates finally catch up to him, he’s led away, disoriented and dazed, relegated to the sidelines for the rest of the game.

  Though his own father had completed only the eighth grade, and his older brothers only high school, he worked hard to put himself through Oklahoma State University. He even became the Lucky Strike distributor on campus, a showy sales job with the bonus of free cigarettes. And in a practice common during the period, my parents married after my mother’s sophomore year, and she dropped out to support his career. In the end my father proved worthy of the sacrifice: He was ROTC, president of his fraternity, and eventually president of the student body. He also got good grades, and the door swung open.

  Before beginning a job at IBM, however, my father had to complete his stint in the service. In 1954 he was sent to Forbes Air Force Base in Topeka. Forbes was a new arm of the Strategic Air Command, the military structure designated to deliver a first-strike nuclear knockout of the Soviet Union. Assigned to the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, my father and the other airmen wore a uniform patch boasting WE SEE ALL. And, commensurate with their motto, they did their best to see all. A few times a week my father flew his B-47 Stratojet—a converted high-performance bomber known for its precarious landings—all the way to the edge of the Soviet Empire and back. In the reconnaissance planes, the bomb bay, designed to hold a single nuclear explosive, was remade to house an intelligence officer who operated the extensive system of cameras in the plane’s nose. On flying days, my pilot father shepherded his plane over the Arctic to the Baltic coast, where the radar and telescopic cameras diligently tracked the nuclear activity of the Communist enemy.

  My father was scared to death on those flights. He hated them. Though not terrified of flying, he was terrified of piloting those big jets. And yet in an assertion backed up by my mother to this day, my father proudly claimed he occasionally carried nuclear bombs on board.

  “The Big One,” he told me once. “I carried the Big One.”

  And yet from my research, I really don’t think his nuclear recollection was true—there seemed to have been no crossover between the bomber and reconnaissance wings even on the same base. Was it possible he didn’t know, some sort of military double trick?

  Or maybe the first burst of honesty about his fear allowed him the less-honest boast about bombs, as if he were keeping a rough moral ledger in his head somewhere. And regardless, it’s not as if a white lie—even one with potentially blinding light—violated any particular commandment. More important to me, the image connected the larger picture of my father to my incipient notion of the ultimate doomsday machinery, to the end that might one day arrive from the sky.

  * * *

  After the Air Force, and the birth of that little white lie concerning nuclear bombs, objectively my father’s experience was all about IBM. He worked there for thirty years, moving his family to five corporate destinations and five bigger houses by the time I entered the seventh grade.

  And as with the subject of his childhood, he didn’t talk about the details of his job. He left fo
r work at seven in the morning and returned twelve hours later. Though he wanted to do so, he never grew a mustache because it was against corporate policy. He worked hard and made pretty good money. And when he turned forty, he suddenly realized he would not be president of IBM because he didn’t have an MBA; he realized (most likely the last to know) that he would not ascend the corporate ladder beyond upper-level management in his huge division. After that he hated his job, just like he hated flying those dangerous planes, but he kept doing it. That was that, a life behind a veil.

  And yet in his practice of photography, according to my own narrative of his life, he did reveal more about the forces that moved him. The hobby started early on, when he began his corporate job with its bigger paycheck. Very quickly my father became a fanatic, purchasing multiple cameras and multiple lenses, multiple tripods and multiple flashes. Multiple everything in a rush of high-powered consumerism. On a Saturday, it was not uncommon for him to be tromping around the house with three camera bags strapped to his back, hunting for an angle of me shooting baskets or my sister practicing her various cheers. There was so much jumbling and focusing and clicking we grew accustomed to the stagelike atmosphere: We thought everyone lived the life of pictures.

  As a smaller child, I especially liked the attention. Being photographed was just another way to spend some time with my father. Despite his busy job and furious weekend projects (mowing and planting, tuning his sports car, hammering—I remember a lot of hammering), he always seemed to have enough hours for me. In spring and summer we tossed baseballs back and forth across the yard, in summer we threw footballs, and in winter we arced basketballs into the colder air. We kept the ritual of the seasons as well as any earthly gods might do. And honestly, I never felt neglected by a lack of interest. With his enormous energy, his restlessness and can-do attitude, he always managed to fit me in. And he liked it, too, he liked me and he liked showing me how to do things. And of course he was at all my kid games, clicking away.

  But as I got older, those same father-son activities evolved into pressurized lessons regarding proper form and, especially, the correct “mental mind-set” of a winner. His go-getter insistence shifted playtime into a test and expectation of high performance. And when it turned out I excelled at all that athletic stuff, my father became even more serious about my “training.” On the weekends or in the half dark after dinner, I endured detailed lessons regarding my batting stance, the angle of my throwing arm, my inadequate and trembling will.

  I recall the particular day our sessions turned from play to work, or at least the day I realized things had changed. On a Saturday, in springtime, my father put his glittering cameras and lenses on the couch—he would return to these soon enough—and asked me to grab my bat and our bag of scuffed baseballs. I noticed my sister doing something in the shade behind the house as my father and I lined up in our usual positions. An old oak tree acted as our backstop, the only big tree left standing in our corner of the newly flattened Missouri subdivision. I was nine years old.

  The night before, it seems, I had made a great mistake. For some reason I’d been placed on a team with older kids and under the lights I had embarrassed my father. When I came up to bat for the first time in the last inning, the bases loaded and the game tied, the Jolly Rogers’ pitcher suddenly loomed too tall against the night’s glare and the mound looked too close. The ball made an electric whizzing, and a terrible thud broke behind me when it crossed the plate.

  And I—faced with the wild heat of that big kid, his arm born of speed and lightning—I started to shake. My father stopped shooting and I began to cry. The clattering of our game died away. And eventually my manager tried to console me, the umpire tried to console me, and that Jolly Rogers giant, discomposed by all the commotion, walked me in for the winning run. But when I slunk back toward the dugout, I could see my father smoldering behind the screen.

  In the sharp light of the next spring day, however, my father appeared to have forgotten the event. As usual—though it sounds so bizarre today—he asked me about the difference between a hurt and an injury, to which I replied, “An injury leaves a scar.” It was what I was told to say. It was all part of the litany, part of the ritual. But when I stepped into my small batter’s box made out of sticks, he added, “Well, Brent, it’s time you learned to hold your ground.”

  I don’t know how long I stood there. Or how many pitches struck me in the back, as I spun, or on my legs. But I stood there awhile. And my father, his voice now disconnected from his body, yelled not to step out of the batter’s box or he’d throw even harder. He said not to cry because these were only “hurts” that would go away.

  But I did begin to cry, and the balls kept pounding me in my little box. I did cry as the balls flew faster in the morning sun.

  Ultimately, it was my eleven-year-old sister who sprang to the rescue. She began screaming at my father to leave me alone, her voice mixing with his in the air above our heads, and my mother ran out to stop the game. Later, perhaps prodded by my mother, my father did offer a degree of conciliation—he bought me a new glove and took my picture.

  Today, of course, parents are more informed about the dangers of overinvolvement and overidentification with their kids, but not so long ago it was different. My father didn’t especially know it might be a mistake to turn a sports-minded child into an object of performance. And I don’t mean to suggest he was the worst example of that, either—he had too much social sense to embarrass either of us by some public haranguing. Instead, after the ball-throwing episode, on the postgame car rides home it was always the deep analysis and criticism of my play first and then some compliment about the better things. The successful things. The bad always took precedence over the good, as if hitting a baseball were some type of a career for a little kid. And later in Atlanta, when I turned to junior tennis and became one of the best players in the South, the heavy-handed guidance blossomed into an identifiable obsession on my father’s part. He now had two obsessions: his photography and me. I felt the pressure of his constant critique and voracious judgment.

  * * *

  Beginning with that makeshift baseball field in the backyard, a hard ground grew between me and my father, a distance that lengthened to unhappy proportions. Though damaging in its own right, this distance did have the benefit of forestalling the father-son altercations so common during the teenage years. No fists or bruises, as several of my close friends reported. No yelling contests. No pointed dinnertime glares. Instead, my revolt—and my father’s response—understandably reflected the political reality of our more nuanced, cold war strategic theater.

  Rather than bombs, then, the struggle for boundaries and spheres of influence took on a psychodramatic character. In short, following the dictates of mutually assured destruction (MAD, a term every newspaper-reading thirteen-year-old understood), we needed each other to sustain existence.

  On his side of the war, each weekend my father poured a bath of chemicals in his darkroom and lifted my face to air—an image strikingly resembling his own—and in doing so re-created himself in the thin red atmosphere of our planet. No longer was he simply a paper-pushing manager at IBM, stuck in a lifeless Georgia suburb defined solely by material consumption, but an agent of intimacy always creating a new self, a form that conveniently looked a lot like him. And dependent as he was on me for his very identity, this overidentification required that no traditional father-son bombings take place. With our selves so commingled and confused, any open confrontation remained too risky.

  My strategy—following the same MAD principle—was seemingly to go along with it all. At school I was the model student (best grades, best attitude). After school I was the burgeoning tennis champion, doing hours of drills and practice matches at the local tennis academy. In the early evening I’d report back to my liaison, providing detailed information about my subject’s comings and goings. And though a double agent who reported extensively on his own activities, I was something else. I was als
o an agent who worked for the other other side: the teenager’s side.

  In the dark, I’d slip away to smoke pot in the cul-de-sac or make out with a girlfriend. On weekends, I’d often drink too many tall boys, and as I vomited my secrets out the window, a friend would drive me home through the twisted roads of kudzu and pines. I began listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. I began listening to the Grateful Dead.

  And ironically, the years-long war of surveillance and shifting identities took its toll on my father’s most prized investment: my tennis career. I could never develop my own player’s identity to suit my talents. On consecutive days I’d try to be, not just copy, Ilie Nastase (my favorite with his artful nonchalance), Björn Borg (the stoic warrior with implacable footwork), and Guillermo Vilas (the long-haired poet with the heavy one-handed topspin backhand). Though I had some success, eventually ranked #1 in Georgia and #2 in the South, my coaches grew increasingly frustrated. I just couldn’t sustain a consistent self-image as a performer. With so many conflicting pictures floating around inside my head, I developed a chronic and incurable version of tennis player’s multiple personality disorder.

  The worst part of my privileged story—the part that added fuel to my proliferation of selves—was that my father appeared to be the best father. He was the father my friends all wanted to have! From the outside, he seemed neither despot nor disciplinarian—he never grounded me for missing curfew, for example; he never bullied me about school. He didn’t create arbitrary rules to test my allegiance. No, our entanglement was much more sophisticated. Who needed silly rules when you’d already put into place a panopticon-like surveillance system in which your subject routinely informed on himself? And to aggravate matters—beyond the apparent freedom I enjoyed—my father was a cool guy. He might offer my friends a Michelob. He might let them drive his Porsche around the block, snap a shot with the Hasselblad, tinker with his superadvanced Pioneer stereo system.