Silverback Daddy

You'll never guess what happens at the end!!!! (the undignified clickbaity subtitle is worth it, read on)

I might not have gone full silverback gorilla, as in, back-off-now-or-I-am-for real real-going-to-destroy-you mode, if the other guy hadn’t screamed first.

“No!” he goes, out of nowhere.

Huh? I think, yanked out of the reverie in which Tana and I were singing, no joke, a song we just learned called, “Every One of These People Are Ours,”

Every one, oh every one, oh every one
of these people are ours,
just like we are theirs.
We belong to them
and they belong to us...

in a round, hitting the harmonies, feeling good, gay even, our Irish setter, Rose, trotting alongside us and our chubby baby babbling in the stroller and all the icebergs in the Androscoggin melted at last, the ospreys and eagles returning, circling like old gods above watching over the good folks of Bay Bridge Estates still quiet in their mobile homes on this glorious Saturday morn as we roll merrily by like an off-Broadway musical, the people, sleeping in perhaps after a hard week of building warships at the ironworks five minutes drive north or slinging burgers at Five Guys five minutes south or maybe some of these people are low-key millionaires flying under the radar, you never know, bias is real, or not real, I guess, but one thing we do know, one thing we can be absolutely sure of this morning is that they, the people, belong, to us, and we to them, in harmony, even that guy about my age a few trailers back with the Confederate flag filling the entirety of the only living room window he’s got, dimming out whatever meager sunlight would’ve been able to sneak in there otherwise, yes he, even he, even though we heard him yelling at his wife that one time, and his wife, certainly, who never makes eye contact with us, and certainly, too, their little baby daughter in the pink cowboy boots, every one, oh every one of these people are ours, until one of them screams, “No!” and now suddenly, but in slow motion, you’re not so sure.

---

Valor’s been hyped on a book called, “I Love My Daddy Because…” It starts out with a human dad and his kiddo playing with puppet animals (“I love my daddy because he plays with me”) and then it takes you into the world of the animals themselves. The penguins: “He keeps me safe and warm.” The eagles: “He is big and strong.” The lions: “He takes naps with me,” and so on.

Tana has noted that I, as daddy, am checking all the boxes. I’ve got wolf down: “He sings me songs.” Chimpanzee: “He makes me laugh.” Everything, she pointed out, except beaver daddy’s expertise—“He can build a house”—which I humbly acknowledge is not a part of my paternal repertoire. Where’s the hermit crab daddy who teaches you how to rent?

I’ll admit, I’ve had some insecurities, reading this book. Do I measure up? Am I really checking all the boxes of being Dad? Not so much about the housebuilding stuff, I’ve pretty much come to accept that I’ll never be that guy, will never “work with my hands,” as they say. “Hard skills,” I think they call them. I’m a soft skills man and that’s just how it is. No, my concerns come up when I read about the reindeer daddy (“He watches over me at night”) who sleeps with one eye open, and musk ox daddy (“He protects our family”) who’s squared himself, head-lowered, in front of the wife and kids, mega horns ready to rumble. See, I don’t sleep with one eye open, so am I really watching over my baby at night? Is it irresponsible of me as a father to just, you know, sleep, like actually sleep? I’ve wondered this. And also: Are my soft skills enough to protect my family? Are my horns big enough? Do I even have horns? Am I a hornless musk ox dad?

Granted, these guys are up against a fairly unique set of challenges, namely: the unhappy prospect of being eaten alive alongside their loved ones. The book doesn’t go into that part. It’s not something I worry about much, so I’m unpracticed, untested. But what if, right? What if? And what then? Would I? If push did come to shove, and you’re the big buck with whom the buck is supposed to stop…I just wonder, sometimes, if I would be enough.

I know, I know, the whole “I am not enough” thing is a wound we all get from empire or whatever, but I mean it, I worry it, quite literally: Would I be enough to keep my family alive?

---

“Come back!” is what I hear the guy shout after that first, “No!” I see him up ahead now, coming down from his stoop, black hoodie, scraggly beard, running toward us.

“Get back here!”

In the same moment I see the man, I see his pit bull charging, nay, surging like a raging pit bull river right at us, unleashed. Big pit bull head. Thick pit bull shoulders. Sharp pit bull teeth bared in the humorless grin of all killer dogs. Everything a pit bull was bred to be. Everything you don’t want it to be on a gay Saturday morning with your chubby baby and wife and Irish setter and the good people sleeping in all around you and damn it now you’re about to kill a dog with your bare hands whether or not every one, oh every one of these people are ours matters not at all anymore that shit is ancient history let’s do this thing, dog, let’s fucking go.

---

I am an animal. Like you. Like all of us. I, probably like you, forget this sometimes, most times. Most times, I think I’m a “human,” as if a human is somehow other than, higher than, presumably, the animals. We have reason, we think. We have laws. We have language and institutions and technology. Yes, we do, but all the better to eat you with, my dear. We are the big bad wolf, maybe not the biggest but definitely the baddest animal of them all.

Being an animal is no joke. Animals do not fuck around. Depending on who you are and what they want, they will, as I’ve already noted, eat you alive. But we do that, too. With racism. With gerrymandering. With, you know, bombs and such. Concepts like private land ownership and “you do not belong to us, certainty not to me.” We think the animals are savage brutes. Classic projection. Take a look in the mirror, y’all. No, we do not have knives growing out of our feet like the bard owl, nor swords growing out of our heads like the stag, but damn we’ve got a woof. The whole empire is a woof. Maybe you’ve got a woof, too. Yes, you. Progressive, inclusive, shutdown-the-military-industrial-complex you. Prison abolitionist you. Vegetarian you. Pasture-raised-grass-fed-non-GMO-organic-only you. What would you do if push came to shove? I always wonder about the Gandhis, the Kings. Where does love draw the line? Does it? Would the Buddha just let his son die? How far out did that guy get with the whole non-attachment thing? I mean, he did leave his wife and son to pursue enlightenment. Now that I’m a dad, I’m like, the Buddha had some serious blind spots.

Where’s your woof, Buddha? Gimme your woof. Sure, you are the godhead, yes, you are awareness aware of being aware, I get it, but you’re also an animal, dog, let’s be real about that, now lemme hear you howl.

---

I move in front of the stroller right before the pit bull gets to us. It’s pleasing to the dog in me—a husky, maybe, or maybe I’m a pit bull, too—to watch how my roar changes things. How the pit bull and I both simultaneously understand who has the edge here. That although I do not have the throat-chomping jaw or the tearing claws (I am in fact quite soft, quite chewable), what I do have is my wife and child and Irish setter, or more specifically I have what that makes me, is what I am realizing as it’s happening, as it’s transmogrifying my understanding of who I am, which is to say that I am the fucking man of this pack. That’s how it slaps in my body. Those precise words. What does it feel like? Feels like the taut surface of every blood cell coursing through me is the gore-stained skin of a battle drum booming out, “I am the fucking man and I am going to fucking kill you,” which is indeed precisely what I am saying in my Saturday-morning-not-even-8AM-folks-haven’t-had-their-coffee-yet-yawp. Walt Whitman on the mountaintop never yawped like this, unless maybe he was secretly juicing steroids and hitting the cocaine hard.

The pit bull believes me, but he (or she?) doesn’t turn away so I roar on, caring not at all that everyone in the Estates is now awake and aware that someone is about to die.

---

There’s another page in the book that shows a silverback gorilla daddy happily thumping his chest with his little ape baby. “He teaches me to be brave.” Tana was reading this page once and tapped her chest with a fist while she said the words. The next time she read it, Valor did the same, beat his little chest with his little fist. Soon it got to where she could just say, even without the book, “Daddy teaches me to be brave,” and Valor would bring his fist to his chest and tap a few times. Astonishing, truly. And super cute. But again, it made me wonder. Do I? Am I you teaching you to be brave?

Sure, I understand the bravery of holding down a 9-to-5 to support your family, leaving behind the wild and bending the knee to The Way It Is for most men in the empire, the compromises and sacrifices we make to be sure our little gorilla babies have health insurance, etc. There’s bravery to that, I guess, yeah, but it lacks a certain oomph, a certain gravitas. Because the danger isn’t what it used to be. It won’t rip your throat out, eat you alive. The danger is stealthier now, for many of us. For me. It comes in the form of am-I-gonna-be-able-to-afford-a-new-or-let’s-be-honest-it’ll-have-to-be-used-car-now-that-the-Honda-has-died-and-what-about-all-the-other-bills anxiety. The predator is screen-time and villagelessness and depression. A different kind of bravery is needed these days because it’s not a big scary animal with fangs coming to get you anymore. Until it is.

---

“Waffles!”

I hear it as if from a great distance.

“Waffles! Dang it, Waffles, come back!”

I look again at the dog before me, ears flattened, rump shaking back and forth…is that playfully?

Is this not…? I think. Are we not…?

The pit bull feels me waver, sees me start to understand what’s actually happening here, and immediately blows through the soft spot in my boundary, tail wagging, body arcing sideways into a big C just like Rose does when she’s overwhelmed with the desire to say hello to you and tell you how lovable you are.

“Waffles, no! Not everybody wants to be your friend!”

Waffles, turns out, is the sweetest li’l pit bull you ever saw.

“Sorry about that,” I say, disoriented, the silverback of me shrinking down into the guy with the soft skills who works for the public health department and moonlights as an interfaith chaplain. Meanwhile, our dogs become insta-besties. “I heard you shout,” I said, “and I thought Waffles was coming at us.”

“No, no,” the guy says, “you responded totally appropriately based on how I was yelling. It’s a command thing, I’m sorry.”

“I’m just glad we’re all okay,” I say, reaching out to shake his hand. “So, this is Waffles?”

“Yeah, Waffles. Real friendly dog. Too friendly sometimes.”

And then three more dogs are suddenly out in this friendly fray, two of them quite large and scary-looking, so that’s three possible killer dogs if you count Waffles (plus one little lapdog hype man) but they’re all wagging their tails. The guy’s wife catches up to them. My guess is she released the hounds when she heard me roaring and had her own woof come up.

“No!” the guy barks, “now why would you let them all out?” I, too, would be upset if it wasn’t so hilarious, all these terrifying predators all tail waggy and whining to play.

---

We bid farewell to our neighbor, who does belong to us after all, as does Waffles, though we still would have belonged to each other even if Waffles had been a killer, which is what makes that song such a deep track, the deepest track really, because can you still sing it when the bad thing does happen? Can you still hit those harmonies, still remember that you belong to them, and they to you, and now what do you do? For a song so beautiful, it’s really quite gnarly.

They talk about how having a kid unlocks new levels of love in your heart, and that’s true. But the weird thing is, in some of these new levels you would do things that don’t seem like what love would do. Hulk Smash type shit. All the conflict transformation work you’ve ever done, all the restorative justice practices, all the forgiveness you’ve achieved, your hard-earned mercy and compassion, your high EQ score, all the healing ceremonies, all the songs about we belong to each other, all the prayers for humanity to awaken to our true nature as love incarnate, none of it changes the fact that you, or I guess I, would indeed kick something as hard as I can in it’s softest, most vulnerable spot, as many times as necessary, if it was threatening the safety of my child, my family. And I don’t think that’s not love. I think love is wilder than I realized before we had a baby.

And this isn’t even the hard part. What I am now preparing myself for, what I can’t fathom from where I currently stand as a father, is the level of love I haven’t unlocked yet, the one I can’t avoid, in which the pit bull of this universe does intend harm (or has plans beyond my understanding, if we want to put it that way) and I’m not there to stop it, or worse, I am there and I don’t have what it takes.

I am remembering a funeral I attended on the cusp of my twenties. I remember the father especially, muscling through the impossible task of delivering his son’s eulogy. Kid was a college friend of mine, truly the best of us, sucked out by a riptide. The father had just about made it through, and the room began to relax a bit—well, not “relax” because that kind of grief works you hard for a while, the abdominals, the throat, the face—so maybe it was just a slight untensing in the crowd as we anticipated the end of his speech, because we were all rooting for him to get through it without disaggregating into a million tiny particles and he was on the five yard line, almost done, when suddenly he sobbed, went off script, looked upward even though his son’s body lay below him in the open casket, and in a breaking voice shouted out, “Pascha, I’m so sorry I didn’t have the strength to save you.”

What will I do, not if but when my baby encounters this world? I am steeling myself for whatever attack dogs lie in wait, the riptides. The instinct is strong, to brace against the inevitable wounding, to whiteknuckle my way through this impossibly vulnerable dad thing. But I don’t think that’s the way of it, for the father of me. The call to practice isn’t fear, the call to arms isn’t control. I think it’s: love on. Be with it, all of it, as it comes for me, and for him, for us. Be with it. Stay with it. However it changes, as it morphs into a pit bull and turns you into a silverback, meet it. Fully. In all its forms. All your forms. Meet it, and keep meeting it, going with it, even when that means going against it, and if, no, when, love calls you up against loveself, remember, if you can, who it is you’re up against, basically that this, too, is love moving you, and moving the dog, and the riptide, and the sobs of course are love, and the roaring, the unabashed, unembarrassed roaring that’s more like the ocean surf than a silverback or any animal because this roaring doesn’t stop, is simply the sound of who I am now that he’s here, but really who I’ve always been, this unceasing resistless roaring love.

And to think, I didn’t even realize at the time that my wife was, is, pregnant. We found out later that night. Two solid pink bars on the take-home test. Surprise. It was the day Waffles came for us, that’s how I’ll remember it, the day we found out you were coming, my love, the day I felt you first roar into my heart, our second baby second to none, my son, or are you my daughter, whoever you are I am ready and will never be ready for what’s about to happen but I know, I vow, I will meet it, be with it, stay with it, the love that will be, that already is, your great gift to the world.

Shout out to Laurel Porter-Gaylord and Ashley Wolff for the beautiful book.