Dear reader,
This essay is part of a series called Oh, Man, excerpts from a memoir on masculinity that I’m sharing here in the Little Courtyard. Paying readers can scroll below the paywall to listen.
For your reference:
Here’s an intro to the series.
Part 3: How did I become a man?
In Part 7, we’re going to boarding school, and trying with all our might to forget that our parents just got divorced…
Thanks for reading,
Andrew
Throughout my childhood, Mom insisted on keeping our TV in the closet, to be rolled out on its little pushcart only for special occasions. No amount of whining, pleading, or sulking could move her. But Dad liked TV. In the year before their divorce, as they slowly drifted from each other, that lidless eye found its way into our living room more and more. During the last year we lived together as a family, the TV had established permanent residency out in the open among us, to my great delight.
Whenever Dad brought home a USA Today, I would seize the Entertainment section and study the broadcasting schedule. What’s on tonight? Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. America’s Funniest Home Videos. Survivor. Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe they’d let me watch.
We didn’t have cable, and public access television could only offer so much, so it was movies I really craved. Besides the Dairy Queen down the block, there was nowhere more exciting we could go as a family than to our neighborhood movie rental store—a local spot, not a Blockbuster. Dad was the one to take us, mostly. We would wander the silent, dimly lit aisles of the store in a temporal slipstream until we had been there for an hour and a decision simply had to be made about which movie we were going to bring back home. We’d get home. We’d pop the corn. We’d watch.
Still, my parents were strict about what they let me watch. Even after I turned 13, the PG-13 films were mostly off limits. The Rs were entirely out of the question. The Adults Only section in the back of the store, behind a conspicuous curtain, was something we all pretended didn’t exist.
However, when I got to boarding school the summer of my parents’ separation, the entire movie store was suddenly available at any time. The school library was stocked with DVDs, yes, but it was the black market of content on dorm that provided the good stuff. Word would spread about who had what: movies, porn, videogames, music.
Jay, one of the junior boys, was a black market movie rental kingpin. He had entire binders full of DVDs. He would loan you one for free, but his mini-fridge was stocked with cold sodas which he would sell for a profit. As first-year boys at this boarding school, the unofficial rule was that we were not to be seen walking the halls of the upperclassmen dorms. “Freshman on dorm!” one of them would yell if they spotted us trespassing. Hearing this, the rest of them would emerge from their rooms like angry bears out of a disrupted hibernation, pumped with testosterone, intent to grab us and beat us.
We loved it. My roommate Tolly and I would risk life and limb to get to Jay, who would give us sanctuary in his room, ignoring the fact that we weren’t supposed to be there. We would take our pick of films, buy a few sodas, and run for our lives back to the first-year dorm, taunting the upperclassmen with a few hoots if we were feeling brave and stupid.
We boys watched movies during free periods. We watched movies late into the night. We watched movies all weekend long, sneaking into each other’s rooms after lights-out, puppy-piling onto our Salvation Army couches in the dark. We were, most of us, young white men, and the casts of the films we watched were almost exclusively white and male. What did it mean to be a man? To be a white man? We watched. Studied. Absorbed. Became.
These were the stories of our people: Saving Private Ryan. Platoon. Gangs of New York. The glare of the laptop was our village fire. Our village storytellers were Quentin Tarantino and Francis Ford Coppola. They told us who we had been, and who we were apparently supposed to be. One wasn’t left wondering what it meant to be a man, a white man, watching these films.
It was cold and twisted, to be who we were. The Godfather. Silence of the Lambs.
It was brutal and bloody. The Patriot. Boondock Saints.
It was ruthless, and ruthless was so fucking cool. Pulp Fiction.
It was commanding, all-dominating. The Bourne Identity.
To be a man, a lead man, was to be a white savior in the face of the darkening hoards. The Last Samurai. The Lord of the Rings. 300.
Or it was to be an out-of-touch idiot, an emotionally disabled buffoon, a narcissistic manipulator who always got away with his abjectly disrespectful behavior. Dumb and Dumber. Old School. Wedding Crashers. The Hangover.
The list goes on. We devoured them all. We were like the guy in Clockwork Orange who is strapped down, has his eyelids pried open, and is forced to watch reels and reels of violent imagery. We just didn’t require the straps or the eyelid openers.
Who was telling these stories? What were the biases of the storytellers? What would a man have to believe (about himself, about others, about the world) to behave in the ways we watched men behave on-screen? None of my teachers were there late at night to ask me these questions while the images impressed themselves into my consciousness, and we didn’t bother asking each other. Even if we had deconstructed these films, even if there had been adults present to help us process the subliminal beliefs and assumptions in these audiovisual texts, I don’t think it would have mattered. The stories were too well told. There’s no way the young man of me could have watched those films without being influenced by them.
Once, lit up after watching Brad Pitt bludgeon and be bludgeoned in the dingy basements of Fight Club, my friend Lark and I went out into the woods to try it for ourselves. We each grabbed two heavy sticks and went at each other, really intending to mess each other up. There was a strange intimacy to it. Nervously, shyly, we made a few awkward slashes and parries, when suddenly something shifted in me. This was not some videogame bullshit. This was a fucking fight, and I was not going to lose this fight. I came at him with more power, cracking my stick hard against his, swinging again quickly before he could recover. My stick made contact with his right hand which he was using to hold his stick. He cried out, dropping the stick, laughing with fear. The sound of his pain broke the spell.
“Sorry,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” he said.
We decided it was a dumb game after all, left the woods and went back to the main building where boarding school life continued on as normal.
Normal was different now. I was living in a tribe of almost two hundred boys in an old American castle. I was surrounded by almost two hundred girls who lived in cottages surrounding this castle. I wore a coat and tie every day. I went to chapel on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. I could watch whatever I wanted to watch on Tolly’s laptop and go fight in the woods. It was easy to forget that Mom and Dad weren’t together anymore. Yeah, there was that, but what about the all-you-can-eat catered buffet brunches after chapel on Sundays! What about those classroom tables, big and oaken and round, where I too was now a battle angel sparring in the intellectual heavens! What about porn! What about girls! What about the endless stream of movies!
While my mother, sister, and brother lived in a single room in the garage attic of some family friends nearby, and while my father weathered panic attacks in his dorm apartment across the state, I basked in my new world. I had made it out. By the time boarding school began, it had only been six weeks since Dad’s date with Mom at the neighborhood Panera. Six weeks locked inside the Harry Potter broom-closet-under-the-stairs of my pain, but then my enchanted owl had come, bearing my letter of invitation to a magical school, an escape from my troubles. I had left the sorry Muggles behind. I lived in a castle now, not a broom closet. The broom closet was back there somewhere in Erie, or above the garage that was apparently now home. It certainly wasn’t here with me, in me.