I was recently out drinking with a young fellow. We have in common the fact that we have often been attacked and threatened by black men and men of other colored ethnic groups. He is a self-described ‘evil white racist.’ But, he befriended a fellow black writer at the mixed-race sports bar, so I know better than to take him at his negative word concerning his prejudices. After all his antipathy of the darker races is based in experience, not theory, not blind hate, and is not prejudice at all.
The fellow I’m speaking of calls himself ‘Mescaline’ Franklin and is a refugee from Camden New Jersey, a place overrun by black crime in his lifetime. He now lives in a better part of the Garden State. He drove to Baltimore to acquire the publishing rights to one of my books An Arabian Terror Tale for his fledgling gonzo publishing empire Forever Autumn Press and paid for the rights by the pitcher at the mixed-race sports bar, and later by the pint at the hipster micro-brew bar across the street.
As we spoke the barmaid—a pleasing example of Caucasian womanhood—overheard our science-fiction conversation and engaged us. As a writer who has travelled very little, when I meet such a person—who I think travelled extensively as a college student—my instinct is to ask about their travels, to try and imprint every word into my writer’s mind.
I was beginning to hope ‘Mescaline’ and her would hit it off. Then she began relating a tale about her travels in Islamic Indonesia, where she often sallied forth alone without an itinerary, like some victim in a Criminal Minds episode, armed with nothing but her American status. Mescaline immediately became angry at the idea of a white woman socializing with another race of men. I felt the tension in his shoulder, saw his muscular jaw jut forward as he snarled about how our decadent liberal society had set her up and put her in danger and how lucky she had been to escape intact.
She was retrieving a beer from a cooler as her mouth formed an ‘O’ of surprise, her eyes bugged out worriedly, and her body began shelling up into a fetal position. He was actually scaring her. So I put a staying hand on his broad shoulder and linked her interrupted account of her meeting with a group of male Islamists around a campfire, just after they had received their AK-47s from recruiters. Indeed she had been difficult to pry into an admittance of such a thing as she had apparently been harassed by U.S. officials on her return from Indonesia concerning this girl’s adventure of hers which had as its object nothing more than sightseeing around the isle of Flores. She was clearly an apolitical nerd of a cutie.
As I stayed him from his rant with a fatherly hand I encouraged her onward with her tale. “They treated you like a man didn’t they?”
“Yes, they did. How did you know?”
“Since the 19th Century Western women have commonly received tacit recognition among primitives as occupying an extra-gender demigoddess stature. It will be changing. But you benefitted from a legacy of empire; of U.S. Marine and French Foreign Legion intervention around the world. The Western woman is still something of a cargo cult image in parts.”
The lady then continued with her tale—first mentioning cargo cult reverence demonstrated by these so called Islamists of a plane flying overhead—with a wary eye on Mescaline, as if he might be expected to turn into a werewolf.
As Mescaline and I walked home to the plantation house after closing the bar it occurred to me, that although our lives had been colored by very similar violent interracial experiences, we had had very different fathers. Our fathers are not the only men who influence us. Indeed I have often thought that some of my uncles were more influential than my father—perhaps because they were more fun, cooler, more outrageous, or more physical.
Consider the similarities in mine and Mescaline’s relationships with our fathers. We were both estranged from our fathers at various times according to our own initiative—had both rejected our fathers. We now both live counter to the lessons taught by our fathers.
Mescaline’s dad—a tough guy—advocated kicking ass, hunting and womanizing. Yet Mescaline is militantly celibate, involved in the technology field, and a very ‘bohemian’ writer.
My father advocated success in business and devotion to the workplace, an avoidance of physical risk, and monogamous commitment to a stay-at-home wife. Yet I live as a loner, have turned my nose up at numerous high paying job offers, continue to compete in one of the most savage combat sports with men half my age, and remain a committed bachelor.
Mescaline and I live in a state of rejection of our fathers. Yet, when our buttons are pushed and our sensibilities disturbed, and even our lives threatened on the streets of our respective mid-sized American shit towns, we revert to our fathers’ examples. Mescaline girds for combat with men, or bristles in preparation to scold an out of place woman after the manner of his street-fighting father, whereas I default to use of pacifying body language and behavioral manipulation, after the manner of my salesman/self-help counselor father, who believed—naïvely I think—in the manageability of any situation.
To me, in my mind, having just interviewed Mescaline about his upbringing in savage Camden, this said something about the imprint our fathers make on our subconscious minds, and also why those who have so often chosen me as an enemy—and who so often grew to manhood in a fatherless state—seem to be making things up as they go along, with rarely a result in their favor.
The second of this three-part essay is about our Uncles.
