a father high and tight,
a father reservoir of poses
— Farid Matuk, “A Daughter Having Been of the Type”
On her first day of kindergarten, A. is unusually quiet in the back seat. Leaning forward in her booster, swallowing her words, she tells me she’s a little nervous. “So am I,” I reply, too quickly. Jolted back into character, her retort is even faster, “Daddy, are you nervous for me or for you?”
Most everyone who’s lived in this country has a gun story though they may hesitate to tell it, not knowing in whose company it’s prudent to click off the safety, to let the words burst from their dark chambers. This is a gun story. Or, it’s the story of a gun story’s ripple effects, a story of being struck by the blast fragments of a massacre.
A few months into her kindergarten year, A. begins asking a nightly question of me or S., whoever’s singing her bedtime songs. Just after the medley ends and I wish her a good sleep, she pleads, “Can you check on me in the middle of the night and in five minutes?”
Most everyone who’s lived in Brooklyn and isn’t filthy rich has a landlord story, and they rarely hesitate to tell it. This is a landlord story, its outlines coming into focus half a decade later. Or, it’s the story of a super, B., the son of our absentee landlord, the story of a live-in super who broke into our apartment at 2am the night after Newtown demanding that we produce A.’s three-month old body. Like any Brooklyn story, it’s haunted by elsewheres: Connecticut, Hollywood, Virginia, South Carolina. It’s less a story about good guys and bad than of sickness and eruption. Most of all, it’s a story of father acts for the end of the world.
“Filthy rich” was uttered regularly when I was growing up in the eighties. Its stench isn’t much in the air anymore. I still can’t tell if it drags or flatters. Or, like a participation trophy, both. No matter, the landlord story makes roommates of rich and filthy.
“In the middle of the night and in five minutes.” A.’s phrasing transposes time. Why does middle of the night precede five minutes? Had my anxiety encoded her syntax?
By the time A. starts kindergarten, we’re living in a modest-for-South-Carolina bungalow. When she was born on a sunny September 11, we were living in a shabby but spacious apartment on a leafy block in Boerum Hill. From the time S. was growing A. inside her to A.’s first day in kindergarten, we’d lived in five places: three in Brooklyn, one in Connecticut, one in South Carolina. Ours weren’t the moves required of the poor, nor the real-estate portfolio of the filthy rich. Our handful of shitty landlords was academic.
Though A. posed “Daddy, are you nervous for me or for you” as a question, her giggle betrayed the assertion haunting her deference, just as my laughter conveyed allegiance to her authority.
S. was seven months pregnant when we lost out on a huge-for-Brooklyn-apartment. We’d put up the arm and the leg for the first and last months’ rent and security deposit. Then we’d asked the landlord to certify that the bed bugs were in fact eradicated. It’d be great, too, if they’d deal with the lead paint on the windows. All giveaways of S.’s pregnancy, which we had whitely failed to hide. The landlord balked, not bothering to couch his reason in euphemism.
Our previous landlord was a self-proclaimed philosopher, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who’d drop by unannounced with his PowerPoint slides. Neither shitty landlord story endures beyond these paragraphs. We didn’t know this then, so I created on my laptop the folder “Prospect Heights Lawsuit.” I never opened it again, until I sat down to write this story.
After dropping A. at kindergarten one morning, I trail a bumper sticker: GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, ABORTION CLINICS DO.
Two months into kindergarten, we receive an email from A.’s teacher: “Today,” she reports, “we had our first school-wide Active Threat Drill.” After “locking doors, turning off lights, covering the window of our door, and moving to a hidden spot,” she writes, “we joined in a huddle in the back corner of the room.”
B. was the live-in super of the shabby apartment we’d lucked into after rejection by the landlord of bed bugs and lead windows. B.’s floor was our ceiling, his pacing footsteps the heartbeat of our brownstone. Unusually responsive to our calls and complaints, he’d occasionally show up at the door shirtless. So odd, we thought, though he was hot, S. would report, and it was a sweltering August that month when we were settling in before A.’s birth.
“Chill out, Daddy,” A. begins saying, with some regularity, during her kindergarten year. Her mother’s cipher, her loyal mouthpiece, A.’s trochaic feet trample over my chest, grinding their gears inside the grooves of my iambic insistence to myself: relax, relax, relax.
B. was an aspiring twenty-something filmmaker. His mother had been in the movies, even costarring in a Robert Redford feature in the eighties. His father had grown up in the building in the seventies, and the film producer had apparently inherited it from his parents. We sent our rent checks to an address in Malibu.
“I truly believe that my job is to keep your children safe as well as keep them feeling safe,” A.’s teacher explains of their “hidden spot” and “huddle.” “We do not discuss any ‘what if’ scenarios.”
Does aspiring, that telling qualifier, cede to film’s ability to hold us captive to its worldmaking sensorium, the mangle and remand of its technicolor dreaming, its dearth of offramps and pop-up gardens, the Hollywood sign buckshot with ten-million cinematic shoot-outs?
My mother tells the story of psychologists at Virginia Tech calling her conducting a study of local parents. It must’ve been 1982, I would’ve been in kindergarten, my brother in preschool. Her story is hard to believe but so are so many we know to be true. The researcher asked if she could save only one of her children, which she would keep. She protested, she insists, then she answered. Still she won’t say how, only that she complied. I suspect my mother’s shame isn’t in the choice but in having chosen.
Another South Carolina bumper sticker: THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO DIE, NEITHER ONE IS TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS. Icon of Bible. Icon of Gun. The demented epigram cracking the code to the country.
Soon after I moved to Brooklyn, my hometown was ripped apart by the mass shooting. I hadn’t grown up with guns, but I’d grown up gun adjacent. With high school friends, I’d shot a .38 and a .45 in the woods and at abandoned mining sites, redneck style. When Virginia Tech went down, when my alma mater whose professors had put my mother to the test entered the litany of cursed names, my panic for family and friends took an uncanny form: I was back in the woods, reeling from the recoil and the horrible ringing in my ears, adrenaline setting the trees aflame.
If B. had been seeing the world clearly—that is, as his father’s super—he would’ve rejected the expecting couple. The middle-of-the-night crying, the strollers in stairwells, the vigilant parents. He would’ve picked instead the younger couple we passed on the stoop after our Craig’s List call. Had he missed S.’s obvious belly? Or had his kindness outstripped his owner’s reason? B. defied the super-landlord stereotypes and not always in these good ways. He couldn’t fix a thing. He hired his buddies, who couldn’t either. He disappeared for days on film shoots, or so he said, the knockout twenty-somethings bounding up and down the stairs coy on his whereabouts.
Another sticker on the cab window of a neighborhood truck: BODY PIERCING BY GLOCK.
From the jump, A. was an intense child. In early photos her eyes resemble dark lasers. The parenting books called her a “lark,” the early riser who chirps at dawn. An Australian friend deemed her a “ripper,” the child whose engine purrs deep and runs long. I became my-daughter-the-ripper’s father as my-worried-mother’s son, but my reservoir of father poses, from freaking-out to play-it-cool, ran dry the night after Newtown, the December night the red tide of paranoia surged into the loud, filthy, leafy-windowed apartment that was not ours, yet still our sanctuary.
The night after Newtown, around 2am, our apartment door started rattling. We bolted upright in our too-small bed, A. between us, sated from nursing, the door clear in our line of sight.
Fuck, fuck, someone’s breaking in. What, what the…? With a key.
Then B. burst in, eyes throbbing, casing the rooms like wobbly flashlights. My first thought gunman in the building, then fire, in seconds S. asking, “B., what’s wrong, what’s wrong, WHAT’S WRONG, what is it, what IS it?” S. growing frantic, B. and S. mirrors of each other, panicked invader, panicked victim under his glare.
In the sleepless first month of A.’s life, I’d driven with my visiting father to the slammed Red Hook IKEA to replace our too-small bed with a queen. We assembled the bed before realizing Oh shit, it’s a standard. Later, wondering about the other obvious things I’d missed.
The night after Newtown, at 2am, S. and I thunderstruck in bed, B. searching the apartment, heading straight for A.’s room, which she hadn’t yet slept in, still in a bassinet beside our bed or between us in ours. Saying loudly, urgently, as if grinding into gear, yet not quite shouting, “Where is the baby, where is the baby, WHERE IS THE BABY? I need to touch the baby.” The word need hard as tempered steel, urgent as a gushing neck wound. “She’s RIGHT here,” S. pleading, nodding to A. between us in the bed.
The night after Newtown, the night after the white gunman killed twenty kindergartners in a Connecticut public elementary school, the night after, about 2am, S. had just finished nursing, and a filmmaker-super was racing around our apartment, demanding we bring him our child.
Connecticut, the state of the Sandy Hook tragedy and its bone-chilling hoaxers, the state with the nation’s worst inequality, the state the New York Times calls “a cradle of the American gun industry,” the state of myriad empires of menace and masculinity: Colt, ESPN, Ruger, insurance, hedge funds. Between Connecticut and South Carolina all unitedstatesians live.
Soon our super stood at the foot of our IKEA bed, A. wedged between us, as far as we could tell, asleep. His eyes pinpricks of carnival light, his hands shaking the bars of an imaginary cage, “I need to touch the baby,” spurting three rapid-fire times, “I need to touch the baby, I need to touch the baby,” that word need a coil of barbed wire ripping through his pretty lips.
I followed this morning a sedan: GUNS SAVE LIVES. Ergo, Landlords save renters.
Then that night after Newtown, B. reached into our bed, our stunned silence tacit permission, touching A. on the belly. He touched her ribs, felt her toes through her footed pajamas. Then he cackled and turned. I remember my exposed knees and elbows, my boxers and undershirt. That laugh, though, it lodged inside my left eardrum, the one closest to his beautiful mouth, lodged there like existential tinnitus. Our initial thought, super fucked up on some bad shit, extinguished by the recognition of psychosis. Held in for years, that laugh, held in and let go.
Was this the moment the gunrunners relentlessly promote? Just wait until your time comes, until you have to protect your family. Testimonial after testimonial, all with the same scripted ending: a gun saved my life. For a hot minute, I wished I’d had a gun; afterward, relief that I hadn’t. Maybe in my father bones I finally felt it, the NRA’s silver marketing bullet. Yet it’s not about a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun. In that perverse duel, only the duel itself is preserved. It’s about power and race and money. The old story of white innocence.
I think constantly about these ripples. I don’t equate the Sandy Hook families, the Virginia Tech families, the Charleston families, the many-more-places families, with my family’s story. Consider the work being done in my about: I think about it. Not: I live it every minute. Not: I feel it every second. In my bones. In my coffee. In my aching toenails. In the softness of my pillow.
In bemoaning “the poetic inflation around prepositions,” the poet C.D. Wright would’ve said that my about is a flimsy doorstop. It gets in the way just enough to prevent the light from coming in. Still it’s easily kicked aside. “The verb works the hardest,” Wright concluded. “It should be the best paid.” This verb then: Stand. If I stand my ground against the gunrunners and landlords, Fed-Up Reader, will you join me?
I replay the what-ifs. Our super breaks into our apartment, gun at his side, demanding to touch our baby. Or I meet him at the door, adrenaline like a jackhammer, Glock at his temple. Does my gun defuse the delusions gripping his body? Or does it push him further? In B.’s mind, I’m the threat to the baby. What if, steel to his earlobe, he doesn’t turn and leave? What if, gun between his shoulder blades, I amplify his agitation, pushing his delusions all the way into the no-way-back horizon of menace?
Possible tabloid headline: ASPIRING FILMMAKER, A RECENT COLUMBIA GRAD, SHOT IN ALLEGED BREAK-IN ON LEAFY BROOKLYN BLOCK, DETAILS HAZY.
A few years after the break-in, during our two years living in Connecticut, A. started asking at bedtime: “Tell me about your bad guys.” At first we were floored. Then, “My bad guys wear suits,” S. began, “they hurt the earth, they poison the air, they sell guns like candy.”
Alternative headline: HUNTER COLLEGE PROFESSOR, A NEW FATHER, SHOT IN SUPER BREAK-IN ON LEAFY BROOKLYN BLOCK, DETAILS HAZY.
That winter, in Connecticut, I began honing my own story, minding A.’s demand that my bad guys must be different than S.’s. I thought of landlords and gunrunners. I thought of CEOs. I never once thought of B. Then, commuting into the city, who my bad guys were hit me. When the train stopped on the platform in filthy rich Darien, I spotted the advertisement for WWW.MYHOMEPAY.COM. Against a white background, a billboard-large baby cried: THAT FEELING YOU GET WHEN THE IRS AUDITS YOUR NANNY TAXES. I knew that the ad’s “you” was another father, that my bad guys were other fathers, fathers who flaunt their plunder, fathers whose children cry over their spilled millions.
Because B.’s break came the night after the Sandy Hook shooting, we surmised that he was “triggered” by the news. Perhaps he wanted to ensure A.’s safety. Perhaps the story of another “troubled” white kid losing his shit made him lose his, their sickness the country’s and so utterly their own. Yet I’m unnerved by the form of this supposition. Used this way, “trigger” penetrates the language, lodging gun culture deeper in its shared body. The “trigger warning” draws its own blood, as does the attribution of gun violence to mental illness. As a father high and tight, when A.’s engine cools and the ripper sleeps hard and deep, I burn hot into the red night. Here, like anywhere in the country, there is no “hidden spot.” Here, as anywhere, metaphors can be deadly.
Sometimes a story like this one and a billboard like Darien’s reveals exactly who your enemies are. You wonder how you could’ve gone for so long without seeing them clearly. The story exposes the false identifications that pierce your body and bleed it dry and then blame you for going into battle unarmed. The story reminds you of the men in menace, of the at her in father. I struggled to say to A. that my bad guys are other fathers with their own sometimes tender panics for a son or a daughter, with their fidelity to property and progeny explosive as loaded double barrels. So I began simply, “My bad guys wear suits, they don’t share with others.”
Two days after Newtown, on a crisp December morning hours after the break-in, hours after we’d barred the door with our kitchen table, we watched from our third-floor window B. getting into a black car, stoop-side, with a man and a woman we’d later learn were his parents. There were suitcases. It appeared to be an airport trip.
Another sticker: ASSAULT LIFE. The full-size rifle transforms the logo for the clothing company SALT LIFE. Mass murder as lifestyle, as branding exercise, as a day at the beach.
B. was a sick kid, but he didn’t medicate with a gun. This says something about him, where he came from, about the city and block we shared. About our luck. About the second chances he’d get. So, too, it’s telling, my calling him a kid. “Nervous breakdown,” his parents said by phone from their huddle in Malibu. That tabloid euphemism off limits for the black and brown.
“THAT night?” his parents gasped, “We were with him in the apartment.” They’d come to bring him home, to get him treatment. Said by phone he’s not coming back, “New York isn’t good for him, thanks for telling us, thanks for not calling the cops.” “Of course,” they said, “whatever you need.”
Most nights in the six years since the break-in, the urge creeps up my arches, nails my hamstrings, churns in my stomach, spins my head like a poltergeist, that urge to jiggle A.’s door, to see her, to palm her belly, my hand moving up and down with her breath. Each time I turn that knob, B., I am you, you are rattling inside my brain, I too need to touch the baby.
A month after the break-in, B. returned despite the sworn promise from his landlord-filmmaker parents. The catch: his father came with him. “Just in case,” his father the landlord deadpanned, “he’s better but…” Those words of many a gunrunner, just in case. In this scenario, I can’t figure which is the gun and which the safety: the landlord-father or the super-son? Which our protector, which the son’s? “Sometimes,” the landlord-father pronounced, “bad things happen between good people.”
I’ll spare you, Patient Reader, the details of our scrambling departure, of B.’s father’s turn to type—the landlord who cares first for his property, then for his wayward progeny, the landlord who sees little daylight between the two. Of him grudgingly letting us out of our lease, given the “inconvenience” we were causing him. Of the landlord’s visits to our apartment to scope out repairs for the next tenant, the father haunting the landlord’s body bragging about B.’s newest films for product X and brand Y. Of the price we paid for the high-rise doorman building, the only apartment available immediately and with seeming safety in its corporate anonymity. In the months to come, of the father’s withholding of, and chipping away so pettily and obliviously at, our security deposit. Mostly against the force of our own renter-parent bodies, of the way we began to feel that B. was the real victim, the super-son abused by his landlord-father.
The next tenant, I dread to report, was a young couple with a baby. Some stories cannot be passed on, no matter the effort to form a huddle on the landlord’s property for the passing.
Another: IF JESUS HAD A GUN HE WOULD HAVE LIVED. Not the savior who dies for the sins of others, the savior who massacres the sinners. From the crucifix, Jesus flexes, Assault Life-style.
The night after Newtown, that night which would bring out the grotesque-even-for-America Sandy Hook hoaxers, the night B. touched our three-month old on her breath-heaving belly, he laughed and turned away. Frozen in a mixture of terror and bewilderment, by this point we’d become at least as concerned for his safety as we were for A. and ourselves.
For just after he giggled with an otherworldly calm, B. stared into my eyes and then into S.’s and said, “You all are lovely people have a great life.” Spinning on his heels, he walked to the door, opened and closed it, and locked it from the outside.
I remain a father high and tight, head in the tempest, panic bones clanging in their bag of skin, spine wound around the exposed nerves of each pending apocalypse. I come by it honestly, my mother a worrier by trade. Unlike her, I parent a single child. No false choice to deny, no interlocutor to disappoint. Unlike her, I pour into my only child’s gas tank the high-octane of all my words and poses of worry, a vast reservoir of love ever on the verge of rupture.
After B. returned, we studiously avoided him, as he surely skirted us. I crossed paths with him only once before we left. On the building’s stoop, when he tried to apologize, I cut him off. “B.,” I stammered, “we forgive you, it’s okay, it’s really okay, but I can’t talk about it.” Then I turned down the block, shaken and lanced with renter’s guilt, and he ducked into his father’s building.
A., we haven’t yet told you of B., and I’m not sure we will. I’m even less sure that this story I’m telling is the best way to tell you of your country. But we do tell you, at bedtime, when you ask about your latest bad guys, that you’re safe in your bed. What else, at that hour, could we say?
Yes, Gentle Reader, B. locked the door behind him. The good super returned, just in time. So far, nearing the end of A.’s kindergarten year, his farewell blessing has come good.
