My first night in Texas, in January of last year, I was taught to shoot a pistol by the father of the ex-boyfriend of my fiance outside a tiny home in the middle of a mostly abandoned ranch in the farm country outside Gainesville. Coyotes weren’t baying outside, but only because it was too early in the evening; they would bay later. There were no feral pigs in the traps by the barn, but the people from the Department of Agriculture would eventually end up trapping and killing more than 70 of them, dumping the carcasses in a nearby field for the buzzards to eat. There were also two dead armadillos up the road that Larry, the ex’s father, had shot earlier in the day. Later that night, we stayed up watching TV a bit later than we probably would have otherwise because we wanted to make sure, from the news reports, that we wouldn’t have to drive away from the grass fires which had already killed a few people in the neighboring counties.
We were there, on the last night before our arrival in Austin, Texas, because Jessica, my fiancee, wanted to visit Nan, her “adopted grandmother”—a wonderfully compassionate white-haired old lady who started out as Jess’s boyfriend’s grandmother but had become, over time, her own grandmother. Jess and Nan had grown to love each other, and so when Jess and the boyfriend broke up, no one saw any reason for the break-up to break up Nan and Jess too. Larry was there that day because he was taking his four-year-old granddaughter, Davin, to visit Nan, her great-grandmother.
So I was there, like everyone else in the room, for love. I was away from my home and family in western Massachusetts. Away from the northeast, where I’d spent all my life except for a dissipated semester in Edinburgh, Scotland (which looks and feels like a city in the northeast). And, though I would continue for a few months writing for the newspaper from Texas, I was gone from the home office, which I had relied on, among other things, for the affirmation of seeing and talking to people who (I’m pretty sure) liked me and thought highly of me.
I was away, in other words, from everything and everyone I knew except the woman who was bringing me to Texas, where she’d lived for most of the past six years—where she’d moved in the first place to be with the guy whose grandmother’s house I was staying with tonight whose father was taking me out to his car to see his guns. So when I say that I was anxious, I assure you it had nothing to do with the man with the guns who could conceivably be holding a grudge.
The guns, actually, were a relief. They were something for Larry and me to do with ourselves while the womenfolk caught up. And as it turned out, I could shoot holes in a coffee can pretty well for someone who’d never touched a pistol before, and I believe that Larry, who volunteers to teach the safety courses that Texas requires before one of its citizens can obtain a concealed weapons permit, enjoyed teaching me. I think he liked showing an overly civilized Yankee like me that people who love guns can be civilized too.
Not that I ever doubted that we’d get along (though the murdered armadillos did give me pause). There are many things wrong with me—I’m discovering new flaws at a rate of about three a month—but resting in the delusion that people in rural Texas are very different from people in urban Massachusetts isn’t one of them. Among the things that’s the same, all over this land from the redwood forest to the New York Island, is that everywhere you go, middle-aged men who have trouble emotionally connecting with their grown-up sons like teaching things to other young men, with whom they share no baggage, who are eager to listen.
So Larry and I shot his guns, and we got to talking politics, and I wasn’t too surprised, when it came to it, that he wasn’t too happy with George W. Bush. He’d voted for him twice, and probably would again if he were up against someone like Gore or Kerry again. But he thought that he and his whole crew were corrupt, as most politicians were. And he felt that the war in Iraq, like the war in Vietnam in which he’d fought, was also a bad idea. It probably had something to do with money and oil.
After we riddled the coffee can with about as many holes as it could take and still remain, in some Platonic sense, a coffee can, we went back inside for Nan’s authentic Southern dinner of enormous amounts of food I like to eat but usually don’t eat for fear of getting fat. Then Larry and Davin left south for Gainesville.
Jess and Nan and I stayed up late playing dominoes, and the next day Jess and I headed south to Austin. On the way out the door, Nan gave me a hug and told me that I’d been adopted too. It felt really good.
I got on the cell phone early the next morning and called my parents. “You’ll never guess what I did,” I said, and told them about shooting a gun. Considering that when I was a kid we’d battled for years before they would even buy me a pair of toy six-shooters as a birthday present (and even then they weren’t the kind with the exploding caps), they took the news well. They laughed and wished me good luck on the final, four-hour push to Austin.
When I’d gotten in the car the week before, in Easthampton, Massachusetts and headed southwest for Texas, I didn’t have very clear expectations of what I wanted out of my sojourn in Texas other than to be with Jess, and to repay her for moving up north, eight months before, to give New England a try. That evening outside Gainesville, however, suggested a story—A Massachusetts Yankee in King George’s Court—that maybe I could work with. In that story, I would dedicate my northeastern intellect, my overdeveloped sense of irony, and my general compassion for the human condition to understanding the Marlboro Man, the Alamo, George W. Bush, and whatever other outsized symbol of Texas masculinity got in my way. I would take my blueness to the citadel of redness and penetrate to the chewy purple center of our nation.
That fantasy lasted about two weeks, until I had my first anxiety attack. It came around two in the morning, lying in bed next to Jess, who was asleep. I was too juiced to lie still because I’d just finished an opinion piece—which I should have written earlier in the day—about Al Gore’s speech, delivered on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, attacking the Bush administration for its abuses of power. I wrote
Only the new, natural, unafraid Al Gore could see so clearly, and say so clearly, how much the Bush administration’s policies are constructed not only to exploit our fears, but to try to allay their own. Their fear has given them a frenetic, preening monkey kind of strength and viciousness, but it’s also made them ridiculous, and vulnerable.
I was particularly happy with the phrase “preening monkey kind of strength,” which seemed both accurate and fairly original, but I wasn’t able to let the excitement go and go to sleep. I started imagining books I would write on the subject, and speeches I would give, and the role that I would play in the revitalization of the Democratic party. But it was two in the morning, and Jess was asleep, and I didn’t want to wake her, so I tried to relax, but I couldn’t, and then I started worrying about that. I got angry at myself for being unable to sleep. Then I got angry at Jess because if she wasn’t such a light sleeper than I wouldn’t have to worry about my restlessness waking her up, and I could relax and go to sleep. Then I blamed myself, for resenting Jessica for, well, sleeping in our bed, and then I blamed her again, for failing to pre-emptively take my tendency to blame her into account. And so on. Eventually, I got up and slept on the couch.
Things got better from there, and also worse. There were more restless nights, and there was the occasional daytime freakout over a trivial problem that only a month or two before would have barely bothered me. I suddenly discovered that I really, really like (need) a routine, and that in the absence of an office to go to, I felt lost. I had to force myself into a schedule.
Every day I’d go to the computer lab at the undergraduate library, where I blended with, and envied, all the students and their leviathan backpacks. In the evenings Jessica and I would drive around Austin, which is a big, sprawling, growing city, and follow the idiosyncratic map laid out for us by the coupon book that Jess’s mother had given us as a going-away present. Buy one entree/get one free wasn’t a bad mantra for city which has too few bookstores but a surplus of wonderful, reasonably priced restaurants.
I started going to a therapist, once and then twice a week (I think there was a week where we met thrice). He was a brilliant, slightly eccentric, charismatic man in his late 50s or early 60s who looked a lot like Rip Torn and had the wonderfully Freudian name of Dr. Dickey. He spent a lot of time in our first few sessions reassuring me that …. well, just reassuring me. That I was a decent guy. That it was okay to be a mess sometimes. That it was okay to have some anxieties about getting married. That it was okay to feel bad. That it was okay that I’d misremembered the time of our appointment and was now an hour late.
I was aware, I think, of the irony that as my ego was collapsing around me, my political writing tended more and more to be about the need for the Democrats to fight back against the Republican campaign to emasculate them. I wrote an essay in which I argued that Charles Barkley’s attitude could be a model for how the Democrats could go about getting their manly man groove back.
In a culture of straight white men who have profound anxieties about their place in our increasingly feminized, colorized, hispanicized and homosexualized culture, the macho posing of the GOP is understandably appealing. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld can’t seem to screw in a lightbulb without outsourcing the job to lobbyists—who then screw it up—but they really know how to sound and swagger like Patton, and at this moment in the history of the fragile male ego, that’s more reassuring than the fumblings of Al Gore and John Kerry, who, perhaps because they know more than their counterparts do about being a man, are much less effective at playing a man.
The implication, of course, was that I was one of those Gore-Kerry types who’s basically got the man thing down but not all the stylistic touches. Two weeks after that article came out, Dr. Dickey informed me that I was probably suffering from “depersonalization,” which, if it became a chronic condition—which it didn’t—would be defined by Section 300.6 of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders like this:
1. Persistent, recurring feeling of being detached from one’s mental processes or body; as if an observer.
2. During depersonalization, reality testing is intact
3. Depersonalization causes significant distress, and impairment in social, occupational, or other functioning,
Insofar as I can remember what the experience was like, that nails it. I told people that I felt like I was about six inches to the left of my body. I wasn’t incapacitated, but it was scary. The scariest thing was that I didn’t feel natural anymore when I was interacting with other people, and my ability to relate naturally to people is one of the things I like best about myself. I was a beat off. I had to think about it, and as any athlete knows, once you’re thinking about it, you’re lost. I started worrying that people thought I was strange. I was strange.
