Just take it, man.
Oh, Man: Excerpts (Part 5)
Dear reader,
As always, thank you for being here. This essay is part of a larger series called Oh, Man, a masculinity memoir that I’m peeping here in the Courtyard for my paying subscribers.
For your reference:
Here’s an intro to the series.
Part 1: Strange Embrace (a remarkable encounter in Ireland)
Part 2: The Secret Language (on sexuality)
Part 3: How did I become a man? (on rites of passage)
Part 4: An Unexpected God (another remarkable encounter, this one in Brooklyn)
This one picks up where we left off (chronologically) in Part 3. Come back with me now to 15 years old…
Thank you for reading,
Andrew
The summer after eighth grade, I went on a guided canoe trip in the Algonquin wilderness of southeastern Ontario with six other teenagers. It was the next best thing to the cross-country bicycle trip I had wanted to do with my dad. I had that bike trip all planned out. We would cycle our way across the continent, father and son, camping on the side of the road. We’d do mountains, deserts, swamps, all of it, blast out of Erie, PA for vaster pastures. Why? Because my suburban home wasn’t big enough for who I was becoming. Who I wanted to be. The trickling spring of pre-pubescence had become the full-blown geyser of adolescence. All that power had to go somewhere, why not across America, with Dad?
But there was also something going on with him, something I thought a bike trip could fix. What was it? There were no outward signs of discontent, but the man was withdrawing, becoming like his own father was to me: inscrutable, unreadable, somewhere else. When I tried to locate him with the invisible feelers of my sensitivity, reaching out to make that connection you can feel but can’t quite describe, I kept missing him. Where, and what, and why, was he hiding?
I didn’t have words for any of this. Wasn’t aware that I knew something was wrong. I knew it in the way that children know things, that babies know everything. It was a feeling kind of knowing.
Then came that afternoon when our landline house phone rang a few times before going silent. I picked up the downstairs phone and overheard, for just a few seconds, a woman’s voice saying to my father, “You have to tell her.” I quickly hung up the phone. A while later Dad came down and I asked who it was, and he said oh just a student of mine, and I could feel something frightening suddenly present in the house, something I didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand. We talked around it, whatever it was, and went down to the basement to play ping-pong where we used to play for hours, where he always respected me enough to tell the truth by never letting me win just because I was a kid, but for the first time I didn’t care if I won or lost, just kept slamming the ball back at him, and somehow the ball kept landing on the table, and Dad was cheering me on because I was playing so well (or he was lying here, too, and just letting me win?), but I stayed silent, even when I won, because I knew something was happening here and whatever it was it was bad it was bad it was going to be really really bad.