Read Online Stories for Boys: A Memoir by Gregory Martin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Gregory Martin
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say that I didn’t like attending three different high schools in three years in three different states is an understate - ment I wasn’t capable of then.
During that time, I perfected a skill I’d been learning all my life, a skill that had been modeled for me since the day I was born, a skill that I have to this day in all kinds of contexts and situations – the ability to maintain a veneer of equanimity, a surface polish, a detachment from my emotional life, that I no longer trust. Because, then and now, it is not an act, not a conscious one anyway. I have even myself fooled.
TWENTY YEARS LATER, after a mysterious suicide attempt, like a cold case detective presented with crucial new clues, I started piecing a few things together. I understood that my father might not have minded those months of separation. Not so much. That time he spent parenting us alone while my mother remained in D.C. – maybe that wasn’t so bad for him. I had always assumed it to be a tremendous hardship for him. It certainly was for me.
One summer night, I interrogated my father on this issue. What really happened is that I started shouting.
“Didn’t you want that to happen? Didn’t you engineer that to happen? Didn’t you want her to be halfway across the country? Didn’t you play the part of the martyr? Wasn’t that an act? Didn’t you love that you could come and go late at night without any chance of being caught out? Didn’t you feel responsible for pushing her away? Do you think that had anything to do with her losing her mind? Do you think that would have happened if we’d all been together?”
My father tried to respond, but I cut him off.
“Why won’t you just admit it? She was in your way . She was always in your way. Wasn’t it nice to finally get her out of the way?”
I had not shouted at my father once since his suicide attempt. I had not shouted at him since I was a teenager. But now I shouted these questions and accusations into the phone, delivering each with cold, relentless force, like clubhunting a seal on the ice.
My father yelled back at me once or twice, but halfheartedly, and eventually I wore him down. He couldn’t match my resolve. Finally, resigned, defeated, he said, “Yes. I knew what I was doing. I wanted it to happen. I looked forward to the time your mother would be gone.”
“I knew it,” I said, and hung up on him.
The Best Medicine
I STRUGGLED WITH MY SENSE OF HUMOR.
Just weeks after my father attempted suicide, in a daring stakeout and crackdown on depravity, Idaho Senator Larry Craig was arrested by a plainclothes policeman for lewd toe-tapping in a Minneapolis airport restroom stall. Craig’s righteous, indignant, “wide-stance” denial deserved to be ridiculed. When the story broke, responsible comedy outlets took up the cause. But I could not laugh about hardcore conservative, rabidly anti-gay, straight-identified but who-did-he-think-he-was-kidding Larry Craig. I just … couldn’t. I intellectually understood that acid mockery was a powerful weapon in the battle against the evil forces of bigotry, and that the more innocent, unsuspecting citizens who could be brought, however reluctantly, to laugh at homophobia, the more homophobics would be vanquished. I knew that the purpose of satire, as Mark Twain put it, was, “the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, and the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.”
But I could not bridge the gap between wanting to laugh about Larry Craig and laughing about Larry Craig. I could barely manage a sad smirk. David Letterman said,
Several prominent Republicans are calling on Senator Larry
Craig to resign. And a couple are asking for his phone number.
In an interview Larry Craig and his wife gave to The Today Show ’s Matt Lauer, Suzanne Craig said,
I knew immediately it was not the truth because the description he gave of Larry in some areas that only I might know about were wrong, on
During that time, I perfected a skill I’d been learning all my life, a skill that had been modeled for me since the day I was born, a skill that I have to this day in all kinds of contexts and situations – the ability to maintain a veneer of equanimity, a surface polish, a detachment from my emotional life, that I no longer trust. Because, then and now, it is not an act, not a conscious one anyway. I have even myself fooled.
TWENTY YEARS LATER, after a mysterious suicide attempt, like a cold case detective presented with crucial new clues, I started piecing a few things together. I understood that my father might not have minded those months of separation. Not so much. That time he spent parenting us alone while my mother remained in D.C. – maybe that wasn’t so bad for him. I had always assumed it to be a tremendous hardship for him. It certainly was for me.
One summer night, I interrogated my father on this issue. What really happened is that I started shouting.
“Didn’t you want that to happen? Didn’t you engineer that to happen? Didn’t you want her to be halfway across the country? Didn’t you play the part of the martyr? Wasn’t that an act? Didn’t you love that you could come and go late at night without any chance of being caught out? Didn’t you feel responsible for pushing her away? Do you think that had anything to do with her losing her mind? Do you think that would have happened if we’d all been together?”
My father tried to respond, but I cut him off.
“Why won’t you just admit it? She was in your way . She was always in your way. Wasn’t it nice to finally get her out of the way?”
I had not shouted at my father once since his suicide attempt. I had not shouted at him since I was a teenager. But now I shouted these questions and accusations into the phone, delivering each with cold, relentless force, like clubhunting a seal on the ice.
My father yelled back at me once or twice, but halfheartedly, and eventually I wore him down. He couldn’t match my resolve. Finally, resigned, defeated, he said, “Yes. I knew what I was doing. I wanted it to happen. I looked forward to the time your mother would be gone.”
“I knew it,” I said, and hung up on him.
The Best Medicine
I STRUGGLED WITH MY SENSE OF HUMOR.
Just weeks after my father attempted suicide, in a daring stakeout and crackdown on depravity, Idaho Senator Larry Craig was arrested by a plainclothes policeman for lewd toe-tapping in a Minneapolis airport restroom stall. Craig’s righteous, indignant, “wide-stance” denial deserved to be ridiculed. When the story broke, responsible comedy outlets took up the cause. But I could not laugh about hardcore conservative, rabidly anti-gay, straight-identified but who-did-he-think-he-was-kidding Larry Craig. I just … couldn’t. I intellectually understood that acid mockery was a powerful weapon in the battle against the evil forces of bigotry, and that the more innocent, unsuspecting citizens who could be brought, however reluctantly, to laugh at homophobia, the more homophobics would be vanquished. I knew that the purpose of satire, as Mark Twain put it, was, “the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, and the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.”
But I could not bridge the gap between wanting to laugh about Larry Craig and laughing about Larry Craig. I could barely manage a sad smirk. David Letterman said,
Several prominent Republicans are calling on Senator Larry
Craig to resign. And a couple are asking for his phone number.
In an interview Larry Craig and his wife gave to The Today Show ’s Matt Lauer, Suzanne Craig said,
I knew immediately it was not the truth because the description he gave of Larry in some areas that only I might know about were wrong, on
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