The summer of 1976, after my freshman year at Swarthmore College, I got a job as a laborer for a construction company. 

I am naturally gifted in construction and the use of tools, and so I soon went from pushing a wheelbarrow to doing carpentry. The foreman, his name was Gino, took an immediate and palpable dislike to me. I assumed it was because I was in college and clearly had the talent, if I wished to, to be his boss one day.

In the mid 1970s no one thought about skin cancer and so, when I worked outside, I often worked shirtless. I’m Greek and Armenian and therefore I’m brown and get dark in the sun. One day, out of the blue, Gino said to me: “You get dark just like a nigger.” 

Every day at lunchtime the entire crew would gather and eat together. Gino had diabetes and did not eat sweets, but every day in his lunch pail he had a pastry that his wife had packed for him. And everyday Gino offered that pastry to everybody in the crew except me and then, if none of the other men accepted the pastry, Gino tossed it in the trash.

One day I mentioned all this to my father. My father didn’t miss a beat. “He’s a small man, Phil. You will meet many in your life.” He went on to tell me that in Greek there is a word “andropaki” which means “small man.” 

As my father pulled away from the construction site, he continued: “Andro, from andros, means ‘man’. ‘Paki’ is a diminutive suffix.”

*****

In 1988 I moved-in with my girlfriend, a brilliant young attorney a few years my junior. We had met a few months before, on a beautiful fall day, in Union Square Park in Manhattan.

I do not remember why I was in the park that day, or where I was going, but in the park I noticed a pretty woman lying on a blanket. She was studying a test-prep book and had a dog lying at her side. 

“What’s this?” I asked her “A Norman Rockwell painting?”

She laughed and we began conversing. As we talked she began playing with her dog. After a few minutes she threw a stick that the dog caught in its mouth. 

“Just like Raphael,” she said.

“The painter?” I asked, genuinely confused.

“No, the shortstop. The shortstop for the Mets.”

“Oh” I said. “I don’t pay any attention to sports. I was confused because I couldn’t understand why a painter would catch a stick in his mouth.”

A few months later I moved into her apartment one block west of Union Square Park.

We were, to look at us, entirely mismatched. Rachel had been raised on Long Island, NY by very observant Jews; and I had been raised on both coasts and overseas by atheists. Rachel had majored in political science to prepare for law school. I had majored in comparative religions because that was my interest. Rachel kept kosher and had lived a sheltered life. I had rejected shelter and had traveled tens of thousands of miles by thumb in the US, Europe and the mideast.

When I met Rachel she was in the final stages of a divorce from what had essentially been a forced marriage. When Rachel was an undergraduate her mother discovered Rachel’s birth control and a document from an abortion clinic. Her mother and father accused her of breaking both the commandment not to kill and the laws against premarital sex, and forced her to marry her then boyfriend. Her husband squandered their “marriage gelt” on a wardrobe and, after only a few years of marriage, left Rachel for a man.

But, like some who are raised in an oppressive environment, Rachel was anxious to ‘bust-out” and saw her divorce as her opportunity. Years later she admitted to me that when she first looked up at me from her blanket she thought to herself: “there’s my hot shegitz.”

Rachel’s sheltering belied her very big spirit. When her husband had squandered their bank account–the better part of $100,000–she took herself to illegal horse-betting parlors in Harlem and made back the money.

Our entirely different backgrounds notwithstanding, Rachel and I, for lack of a better term, recognized each other. We saw the other’s nature, not the other’s so-to-say acquired skin. 

Being with me was not easy for Rachel. Not because I was particularly difficult, but because so many of our informing symbols were in conflict. 

One Friday after work I said: “Rachel, I’m Greek and Armenian, I want lamb chops.” And so we walked to the now-defunct Jefferson Market, an upscale butcher in Greenwich Village. I purchased the lamb chops I wanted and we headed back to Rachel’s apartment. 

Suddenly, as we walked north on Sixth Avenue, Rachel made a pronouncement. “I’ll just make a few pans, a plate and a few utensils treif so that you can have your non-kosher food.”

I froze on the sidewalk and, without any prior thought, said: “You and I can’t eat on separate plates. Either we eat on the same plates with the same utensils, or I can’t live with you, much less sleep with you.” Rachel thought about this for maybe 30 seconds and then said: “OK, I don’t need to keep the kitchen kosher.”

At the time I did not fully appreciate the depth of Rachel’s concession but, in time, I’ve come to be in awe of her truly brave about-face on the sidewalk. Few people are made of stuff strong enough to face-down, in an unexpected climactic moment, a lifetime of indoctrination that conflates identity itself with diet or some other imposed orthodoxy or outward form.

Rachel and I lived together for 6 years. I took her to all of our family’s gatherings and my parents loved her. She came to my family’s funerals. She helped trim my parent’s Christmas tree, an act she confessed she had longed to do for decades. When she asked her parents for leave to invite me to her family’s Passover her parents flatly refused. Rachel, between sobs, told me that she had never felt so betrayed.

Not long after I had been disinvited to Rachel’s parent’s Passover I purchased a used pick-up truck. Rachel used it one weekend to drive to her parent’s home on Long Island. A few weeks later Rachel invited her father to her apartment so that he could meet me informally over cake and coffee. I hoped that we’d find some way to connect as two men who both loved Rachel. 

After lunch the three of us went out to see Rachel’s father off. Once on the street he pointed to my pick-up truck parked on the block and said: “Your pick-up truck has saddle tanks. Very dangerous. They could blow-up.” I replied that perhaps in a T-bone collision the tanks might rupture, but that I had never heard of pick-up truck tanks exploding. I went on to say that the Ford Pinto had had that problem in rear end collisions, a fact covered-up by Ford, but that I didn’t think that concern applied to my truck.

Rachel’s father was adamant: “No,” he said “saddle tanks can explode. They are very dangerous. I think you should get rid of that truck.”

I didn’t pay any attention at that moment, but Rachel’s father was setting me up.

A week or two later Rachel again used my truck to drive to her parent’s home in the Five Towns. In the mid-afternoon Rachel called me. “Your truck won’t start,” she said. I replied that I’d jump on a train and go see what the problem was. I asked Rachel for the address and got off the phone.

I took the Long Island Railroad train to Woodmere, grabbed a cab, and found myself in front of Rachel’s parent’s very large home in a very tony neighborhood. My pick-up was parked directly across the street from the house, but I went straight to the front door and knocked.

Rachel answered and let me in. Her parents were awkward and cold, at once outwardly polite and quite obviously uncomfortable with my presence.

Rachel’s father again admonished me that I should get rid of the truck because saddle tanks can blow-up. I made some small talk, asked Rachel for the keys, and then excused myself to take a look at the truck.

I tried to start the truck, but it didn’t start, although it cranked just fine. I got out and opened the hood and immediately smelled gas. When I looked more closely I saw that the gas line had been cut with a knife so that gas would spray on the exhaust manifold. My heart skipped a beat because gas spraying onto a hot exhaust manifold can indeed make a truck, or any gas-powered vehicle, explode. 

I immediately understood what had happened: Rachel’s father had warned me–in front of his daughter–that my truck could explode. He had cut the gas line so that if I had started the truck and driven away the truck would have exploded a few miles down the road when the exhaust manifold got hot. The sabotage would have been invisible because the fire would destroy the evidence of the cut rubber gas line.

But, obviously, Rachel’s father would not have had Rachel drive a car rigged to explode, so I looked more deeply. I soon saw that the dust on the cable from the coil to the distributor had been rubbed off: someone had obviously handled that cable. I then fully realized what had happened.

Rachel’s father had pulled the distributor cable from the coil, rendering the truck impossible to start. Rachel couldn’t start the car and called me. Then Rachel’s father reattached the cable from the coil to the distributor and cut the gas line. Luckily for me he cut so deeply that not enough gas got to the cylinders to start the car. 

Rachel’s father had obviously planned for the truck to start when I turned the key; had planned to refuse to let Rachel ride in the dangerous truck; and had planned to watch me drive-off in a truck that would explode 10 minutes later. Rachel’s father had concieved, and fully implemented, a plan to murder the shagitz his daughter loved. Me. 

I walked to the back door and knocked. Rachel’s father let me in.

“You live in a hell of a neighborhood, Mr. Levin. Someone vandalized my truck so that it could explode. Do you have any tools?”

Rachel’s father’s body made a kind of odd jerking motion. His feet did not move but his torso jerked back two or three inches as if he had been punched in the chest, and then his body immediately jerked back, it looked almost as if an electric shock had run through him and caused him to spasm.

“I need a screwdriver, a razor knife or regular knife, and maybe a pair of pliers.”

Levin went to his basement and returned with a few near useless tools. 

I went to the truck and, because the gas line was cut so near to one end, I was able to shorten the line and still reattach it. 

When I returned to his house Levin launched into a word salad discourse as if to present a different explanation, but I cut him off. “No. The truck was vandalized. If whoever cut the gas line had cut less deeply the truck would have started but also sprayed gas all over the exhaust manifold. When the manifold got hot, the truck would have exploded,”

I looked Levin in the eye. He was, as the saying goes, “white as a sheet.” He knew that I knew.

I drove back to the city alone. Rachel took the train. 

*****

Not long after I survived Rachel’s father’s murder attempt, I broke-up with Rachel. 

Rachel went on to marry a college friend of mine who had, for a few years, been jealous of my relationship with Rachel. I stopped speaking to him when he invited Rachel to a date the day after I told him that Rachel and I had broken-up. 

Over the thirty years since we split Rachel has called me from time to time. About twenty years after her father tried to kill me I told Rachel what really happened with the truck.

Rachel’s voice turned to a whisper: “My father tried to murder you. I wish I did not believe it.”

*****

I kept the story of my close encounter with death, at the hands of my girlfriend’s father, to myself for many years. Eventually, around the time that I told Rachel, I also told some close friends.

Most asked me why I did not go to the police. Why I had kept it all to myself. Why I had, by my silence, in effect protected Levin after he had tried to kill me.

And I always explained my silence the same way. Levin was so terrified that his daughter was about to marry a non-Jew that he went mad. He wasn’t a menace to society, he was only a menace to a non-Jew who might marry his daughter. Levin was, I explained to my friends, an andropaki. There are many of them.

_____________________

With the exception of Gino, I have changed the names of the people described in this memoir. 

My mother grew-up in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts, a working class town bordering Springfield. 

Both her parents were, essentially, the sole survivors in thier families of the massacres of the Armenians in Turkey. When my grandmother was 14, in 1913, her entire family was butchered. She was rescued by Canadian missionaries who smuggled her, over 8 days by donkey, from Marash to the coast city of Mercin and onto a ship to Alexandria, Egypt. My grandfather, who would not meet my grandmother until eight years later in the US, escaped with his parents and sister to Alexandria. After a few months in Alexandria my grandfather emigrated to the US, and his parents, having heard that Turkey was now safe for Armenians, returned to their hometown: Marash. 

A few days after their return home, while my grandfather’s sister was in the market, my grandfather’s parents, my great grandparents, were disemboweled in their home. When my grandfather’s sister, my great aunt, returned home two soldiers tasked with murdering Armenian families were waiting. At the last moment a neighbor bribed the soldiers to spare my great aunt’s life. And that day, with nothing but the clothes on her back, she walked out of town. She walked south to Syria; across the Syrian desert to Lebanon; and eventually to Beirut, where she settled and raised a family. She never saw her brother, my grandfather, again.

In 1936, about 20 years after my grandparent’s escape from Turkey, my mother was born in Ludlow, a tiny town adjoining Indian Orchard. She was the fourth of 6 sisters.

Her mother, my grandmother, was a homemaker. Her father was a shoemaker and the first man to put a zipper in a shoe. He tried to patent his invention but never made a penny from it because he didn’t trust attorneys. The details of that sad saga is another story.

In the 1940s Armenian girls from Indian Orchard did not go to college. This was partly because this was the general fate of America’s first generation immigrants; but also because many Armenian men at the time, including my grandfather, believed that women should not get higher educations. My mother quoted him as saying: “women are long on hair, short on brains.”

But my mother was not short on brains. She was brilliant. And she wanted to go to college.

Just after World War II Springfield, Massachsettes launched the “Springfield Plan.” The Springfield Plan established four high schools: Trade, Commerce, Tech and Classical. Students, at the end of ninth grade, chose a high school and, if they had the prerequisites and grades, they went where they wished. My mother chose and was admitted to Classical, the college preparatory high school.

One day at dinner, towards the end of the school year, my mother announced that she was going to Classical the following September. Her father said: “No. You are going to Commerce and will become a bookkeeper.” To which my mother replied: “I’m going to Classical and I’m going to be a doctor.”

A struggle ensued. My grandfather drank his homebrew arak and got madder as he got drunker. And after dinner he beat her. This is how my mother spent her entire summer between junior high school and high school: with an argument at dinner followed by a beating.

The first day of public school classes in September of 1949 my mother got up, dressed, ate breakfast, and went to Classical.

At the end of her tenth grade year my mother secured a job assembling fan motors at a nearby Westinghouse factory. The work week was fifty hours: five ten-hour days. In order to secure overtime pay, one and a half times the regular pay, my mother worked six twelve hour days, seventy two hours. She saved her pay for college tuition.

The following summer, between eleventh grade and twelfth grade, she did the same.

In her twelfth grade year my mother applied to and was accepted to the University of Massachusetts main campus. And, during her summer between high school and college, she again worked seventy two hour weeks in the Westinghouse factory.

By the end of the summer she knew her assigned dorm room and her roommate’s name. My mother and her soon-to-be roommate exchanged letters in anticipation of meeting and sharing a room.

Two weeks before classes started my grandfather, my mother’s father, was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He had no insurance so my mother went to the bank, took out all of her savings, and paid for her father’s surgeries. My mother cancelled her college matriculation.

My mother went back to work but, I understood many years later, her spirit had been broken and she stopped dreaming of becoming a doctor.

*****

In 1952, at a Greek-Armenian picnic in an Indian Orchard park, my parents met and, for lack of a better term, recognized each other. 

My father, a first generation Greek whose parents had come to the US to escape grinding poverty on Crete, was working on his PhD at Yale.

How it happened that my two parents, both children of uneducated peasant immigrants, had such different trajectories, is yet another story. But behind their different trajectories was a profound sameness: each of their families came to the US at about the same time. Each father had a little storefront business and each had founded a church for their community. Neither family spoke English at home. And the two family’s foods were very similar: the Greeks ate dolmades and baklava; the Armenians ate dolma and paklava. 

On December 26, 1955 my mother and father were married. 

A year and a half later, in June of 1957, my father successfully defended his dissertation. When he came home my mother had made a special plate of appetizers and had purchased a bottle wine. In the days that followed my mother told my father: “Phil, it’s my turn. I want to go to college.” My father brushed-off the notion and said, I learned many years later: “My role is to make money for the family; yours is to raise the kids and keep the house.” My mother seethed inside, but never said anything until she told me the story when I was in college.

In March of 1957, in New Haven, I was my parent’s first born.  Two years later my sister was born. And six months after that we moved to California where my father had secured a tenure track job as a professor of Spanish at Mills College in Oakland, California.

How it happened that a son of Cretan immigrants became a professor of Spanish literature is yet another story for another day. But how my father paid for Dartmouth is a story that needs telling.

My father was that most sought-after Ivy League ideal: the student athlete. He was a top student at Classical High school (he graduated the year before my mother began) and also the captain of the football team. So my father had his choice of football scholarships to the Ivy League. The Dartmouth coach went to my grandfather’s store and shook my grandfather’s hand. My father, very impressed with this show of respect, decided to attend Dartmouth.

In my father’s freshman year, before the season had even begun, in a scrimmage against Army, my father was cheap-shotted by a cadet. The injury was devastating: torn ligaments, torn cartilage, bone chips off of the femur. My father was carried off of the field with a career-ending injury.

My dad’s blown knee was also a scholarship-ending injury. 

When Dartmouth cancelled my father’s scholarship my grandfather said to my father: “Phil, I can’t afford an Ivy League tuition, but you will go. I will keep my store open later on Friday and Saturday, and I will open on Sunday and skip church, except on Easter. You will eat breakfast and dinner. Skip lunch. Eat a big breakfast. Put a doughnut in your pocket. Between me working more hours, and you eating twice a day, we’ll get you through Dartmouth.”

Of course my father could not afford the surgeries he needed to rebuild his knee. So he limped and did not complain.

At the end of his first semester teaching at Mills my father had the knee surgery he needed, eight years after his devastating injury. Some of my earliest memories are of lying next to my father while he did leg-lifts in bed post surgery.

*****

At Mills my father was an up-and-coming professor, and an “infant terrible.” 

My mother, meanwhile, had managed to escape Indian Orchard, but found herself bereft of the education she longed for. She was deeply pained and suffering. I did not, as a young boy, understand this, but I felt–how to put this?–that she was somehow disconnected. She never did anything overtly cruel to me, but I didn’t trust her.

When I was in the earliest grades of elementary school I would play a kind of Russian roulette whenever I took a glass from the cupboard. Instead of just grabbing the glass most at hand I imagined that my mother had set a booby trap. I imagined that she had put poison in a couple of the glasses so that she could get rid of me. So, when I needed a glass, I would tell myself silently: “mom won’t get me today” and I would pick through the glasses and select one a few rows back. Then, to be sure I was safe, I’d rinse out the glass. 

When my sister was in first grade she came home with a drawing she had made in school. The picture was of a large woman with crazy red hair and a broom. Next to her was a second but smaller female figure. The caption read “My mother hitting me with a broom.”

My mother occasionally slapped us and spanked us, but she never used an implement. When she saw the drawing my mother, to use a common turn of phrase, “flipped-out.” She excoriated my sister and told her that now her teacher would think her an abuser. The next day my mother called the teacher and told her that she had no idea how my sister could have ever imagined such a horror.

Years later I understood where that horror came from. When my sister and I appeared we were the final nails in the coffin that held my mother’s dreams of attaining a formal education. My mother, for decades, carried gnawing resentments: against her father, against my father, and against her children who, by coming into the world against her wishes, forever enjoined her dream of acquiring a formal education. 

My mother kept her silence but her frustrations and anger and resentments, I realized years later, were like a cancer in her. The unease and fear I felt as a child was not imagined, it was the result of my mother’s so-to-say discordant vibrations: motherly love mixed with the resentment of her children’s existence.

In November of 2006 my son Luke was born in New York City. Eleven months before, in a hospice on Cape Cod, my mother died with my father, my partner Ruth and me at her bedside. When Luke was born many commented that my mother died only two months before her grandson Luke was conceived, with the result that my mother died not knowing that I would become a father, and she a grandmother, by both of her two children.

For a long time, somewhere buried, I carried the question: “How did it happen that Ruth and I began trying to conceive a baby just after my mom died? When an answer first appeared I turned away from it. But the same answer kept appearing, again and again, like a light getting brighter as a dimmer is turned up. And the answer, I admit and now reduce to writing, is this: as long as my mother lived I had no impulse to father a child.

*****

Mathematical analysis requires parentheses. The parentheses indicate which terms act on which terms, and how the results of the parenthetical operations relate with the whole. And as I write this story I’m confronted with the question of where to put the parentheses.

If I put parentheses around the relationship of my grandfather and mother, I see monstrous violence and abuse. But, if include in that parentheses, my grandfather’s escape from Turkey, his parents brutal murders, his sister’s narrow escape and 400 kilometer trek across the Syrian desert, and that my grandfather never saw his sister after he departed Egypt in 1914, I see a yet larger horror. I see in my grandfather an unfathomable suffering and scaring, and see his violence toward my mother as a mechanical result of his having endured unspeakable violence and pain. If you drop a bomb in the ocean you don’t just kill the proximate fish, the resultant wave kills children on a beach miles away. 

If I put parentheses around my father’s dismissal of my mother’s dreams I see terrible insensitivity, egomania, and stupidity. But, if I include in those parentheses that fact my father’s parents had second-grade educations; accepted gender roles as natural absolutes; and note that my father was the product of Dartmouth and Yale–schools that did not admit women–I can see how in 1960 my father never imagined that his wife had need of a college education. And then, if I note that in 1960 my father had begun teaching at the most respected all women’s college on the west coast, the picture gets grayer. 

And, if I put parentheses around the untold number of microaggressions that I now see my mother directed at me for decades, I could pronounce her a monster. But if I include in the parentheses the suffering that my mother endured as she worked so hard to achieve dreams that were wrenched from her, I see her abuse as waves propagating through her from a bomb she did not drop.

*****

Is my family’s sad story the rule or the exception?

Open any history book and we have the answer: in the main human history is a chronology of crime and violence and horror. In fact, we can say without exaggeration, that human history is mainly the chronology of war and the convalescences that follow. Generations removed from any war can, and have, discovered in their family histories what I have found in mine. All of us carry, if we have eyes brave enough to see, the accumulated pain of our ancestors in our souls.

Would seven year old Philip Metzidakis have worried that his mother was trying to poison him if his grandparents, 50 years before, had not escaped the massacres that obliterated most of their generation: my great grandparents, great aunts, great uncles, cousins and others whose names are lost to time? I think not.

Mankind, I am quite certain, will not get more civilized: wars and violence and corruption and abuse will remain humanity’s center of gravity and, taken together, the one constant.

Nevertheless, I believe in individual transformation. A man or woman is not obliged to trust their basest impulses and thus pass-on, like a virus, their anger and suffering to their children specifically and the world generally. We can be large enough not to ascribe blame without consideration of context. I affirm that individuals can, with consciousness, interrupt in themselves the waves of horror that propagate through the world’s peoples, collectively and individually. 

My son Luke has never been afraid to drink from a glass in our family’s kitchen cupboard.

In September of 1976 I was scheduled to begin my sophomore year at Swarthmore College. Instead, I decided to take the semester off and travel aimlessly, mostly by thumb, around North America.

By mid December I was lounging on Playa Langosta, a lovely beach a couple of kilometers north of the center of Acapulco.

Two months before arriving in Acapulco I was sleeping, with hobos, in a compartmentalized cargo box, perched on top of a stack of loading pallets in New Orleans’ freight rail yard.

When you sleep in a cargo box the one thing you miss above all else is a shower. In 1976 a shower could be had for fifty cents in the New Orleans Amtrak station. Also in the station were two overstuffed black chairs placed, I have no idea why, on the main concourse.

So, every few days, I would get a shower and then sit in one of the chairs. Road life has few creature comforts, so sitting freshly bathed, in a comfortable chair and with a front-row seat to the comings and goings of a major train station, felt luxurious.

One day, while sitting and watching the crowds wax and wane as trains arrived and departed, a very pretty woman, about my age and carrying a knapsack, walked across the concourse, maybe 25 yards from me. I got-up, walked to her, and began a conversation.

She had, a few days before in Michigan, purchased a 30-day train ticket and had just arrived on an overnight train. She was headed to a youth hostel in the French Quarter. I told her that I’d stop-in that evening to say hello and see how she was doing.

About 7:00 I found Judy, I remember her name, in the hostel. She had on a tank top and her upper arm had three or four deep red scratches that ran from just below her shoulder to her elbow.

“Judy, what the hell happened?”

“Some guy tried to drag me into an ally. I got away.”

It was mid November and I had been “on the road” for nearly three months. I offered to hang-out with her and show her how not to attract trouble. She accepted my offer and I moved from the railyard to the youth hostel. 

Judy was exceptionally beautiful. She had a lovely shape, moved gracefully, had long flowing honey brown hair, an open pretty face and a tendency to smile. And somehow, although I was far from a virgin and we zipped our sleeping bags together at night, I didn’t have the impulse to have sex with her. She seemed–how to put this?–innocent and lost and not yet ready for sex.

We became inseparable and spent three or four days together. We listened to jazz, we took walks, we talked. And then, on the fourth day, she announced that that afternoon she would take a train to Tucson, about 1,400 miles west.

I walked Judy to the train station and hugged her goodbye. Then I went and sat on one of the big black overstuffed chairs. And I began to think. And as I sat there I could not believe that Judy and I had not had sex. I decided to catch-up to her in Tucson and, at dusk, walked to Interstate 10 and stuck-out my thumb.

I had an excellent hitchhiking kit: a tent and a sleeping bag, an air mattress, a collapsible bow saw, flashlight and extra bulbs and batteries, rope, ground cloth, canteen, a cheap plastic raincoat coat that stuffed into a pouch just a little larger than my fist and an aluminum tube holding fishing rods tied to my pack’s frame. Passersby joked that my knapsack had a smokestack.

I also carried a cafeteria tray that I had stolen from Swarthmore’s cafeteria as well as a roll of black tape. I used the tape and tray as my hitchhiking sign. I also used the tray as my table when I made one of my staples: open face peanut butter sandwiches. 

My tray read WEST, ARIZONA and when I held it at a certain angle I could hear, reflected off of the sign, the echo of the trucks that had past me.

Two hours later I was standing on the shoulder of Interstate 10 about 50 miles west of New Orleans. The temperature had dropped and a hard rain had begun. My raincoat was in poor shape. The seam that held the right sleeve to the shoulder was splitting apart further each time I raised my arm to show my sign to an approaching car or truck. 

It was cold, I’m guessing around 40 degrees. The rain was driving and the wind was howling and there was no shelter in sight. I was in a miserable spot.

Then, as if to punctuate my situation, the right sleeve of my plastic raincoat caught the wind and blew off of my arm. I watched it blow west down the interstate until I lost sight of it in the dark. It almost felt as if that tumbling end-over-end piece of plastic, vanishing into the dark, was an omen.

A few minutes later a large white van flashed its lights and honked its horn as it passed eastbound on the other side of the Interstate.

If you have never hitchhiked maybe you cannot imagine how scary a moment like this is. The van’s driver, who is driving in the opposite direction, is letting you know that he or she sees you and is thinking about you. Any you, cold and alone on the side of the road in the dark driving rain are utterly exposed and helpless. There is nothing to do but try to stay vigilant. 

A few minutes later the van was stopping for me. 

The sliding door opened and a guy with rotten teeth said: “We couldn’t leave you here in the rain. We’ll take you to Houston and let you out under a bridge.”

I was on guard but, for some reason, not afraid. I got in the van.

The same guy continued. “I’m Mark. This is my partner Pete. We’ve been on the road together for 11 years. We just couldn’t leave you there.”

Houston was one hundred miles west. I had no idea what to make of this generosity and I was grateful, incredulous and apprehensive.

Conversation came easily. We talked about the road. About itinerant work. About which state has the nastiest police.

After about an hour I looked up and, to my surprise and concern, saw that we were no longer on Interstate 10 but on US 90, the highway that Interstate 10 parallels and replaced as the main east-west artery across the deep south. I asked what was up and one of my hosts said: “We need gas.”

We stopped in a gas station. Pete got out, walked to the back of the van, opened the rear door, and took-out an armload of miscellaneous things. I had no idea what was happening.

Pete returned, put gas in the van, and we headed west again.

“What was that about? Why did you grab that stuff?”

Pete answered as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened: “We sold some stuff to buy gas.”

“Wait, what? You sold stuff to buy gas to take me one hundred miles west? I can chip-in.”

“No ya can’t. You are our guest. Just help someone else out when you can. Road people gotta stick together.”

Two hours after Pete and Mark picked me up they did exactly what they said they were going to do: they dropped me off under a bridge just outside of Houston.

The next day, a few hours after dawn and somewhere in central Texas, I got picked-up by a couple of poets. We got off the road, went to the driver’s house, and read each other our poems. I felt compelled to keep moving and asked for a lift back to the highway. We got back in the car. As one of the two lifted my knapsack out of his trunk my copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling fell out. 

“Jesus Christ” he said. “You pick-up a hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere Texas and he’s reading fucking Kierkegaard.” We shook hands and I made my way up the ramp to the highway.

A few hours later I had made it almost to the New Mexico border, 950 miles west of Louisiana. It was raining hard and my ride, I no longer remember the particulars, had left me off under a bridge.

I didn’t wait long before a guy, he must have been in his mid 70s, stopped to give me a lift. He had a brand new pick-up truck and said, in a heavy Texas drawl, “Careful with the upholstery with that bag ya got there.” I immediately noticed his face. He had deep crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, deep creases in his grey cheeks, and he was smoking a non-filter cigarette.

As he pulled the truck into the right lane he said: “I don’t norm’ly pick-up hitch-hikers, but you look like a drowned rat. What the hell you doin’ under a bridge in a west Texas rain sturm fer?”

I started to tell him about Judy. That she had a train ticket. That I couldn’t afford one…

He held up his hand to stop me. Then he let-out a huge puff of smoke, crushed his cigarette and said: “Son, never do something like this for a pussy. Every gal’s got one.”

That evening I got picked-up by a guy doing 90 MPH. In Deming, New Mexico he got too tired to drive and got a hotel room. He invited me into his room to get a few hours of sleep. At dawn we were off.

Around 2:00 that afternoon I walked down an exit ramp from Interstate 10 into Tucson. At the bottom of the ramp, to my disbelief, was the youth hostel to which Judy had been headed.

I stopped walking and looked at the hostel, 30 yards away and across a street. As I stood there I realized that my time with Judy was over. I turned and walked to the University of Arizona campus, found the student center, and ordered a quesadilla.

Coda:

Six months later I was back at Swarthmore College. One Saturday I picked-up my phone, called directory assistance and asked for the numbers of all the Andersons in the little town in Michigan that I knew Judy was from. In under a half hour I was talking to Judy’s mother. She told me that Judy was in San Francisco and was working at a bakery. I told her to tell Judy that Phil had called, was delighted that she was fine and wished her well.

Note: I’ve changed the names of the people in this story.

On July 9, 1978 I rode a bus from Philadelphia to Washington DC to participate in the march in favor of adding the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the constitution.

I was surprised and disheartened to see that only 3-5% of the marchers were men.

In the years since I have lost none of my outrage that the Equal Rights Amendment has not been adopted.

But at the same time I have found the trajectory of modern feminism deeply disturbing.

There is a term in English: “An ah-ha moment,” when all of a sudden something or things that until that moment had been unexplained become clear based on insight. I’ve had several moments like this in my life.

Here are a few:

I grew-up in an academic family and lived in college housing until I went to college. I was steeped in liberal politics, big vocabularies, literary references, multilingualism, and world travel.

I was taught that, when it comes to US politics, there are democrats and evil people.

When I was eleven I joined a Boy Scout troop.

The leaders were all businessmen of one sort or another. The weekly scout meeting was held in the community room of a church whose property bordered the college campus where my father taught. There were no college people associated with the troop’s leadership. In fact, I was the only “faculty brat” in the troop.

The troop leaders, who mostly worked long hours and had two weeks of vacation a year, attended every weekly meeting and spent one week of their annual vacation camping with the scouts.

The leaders loved the boys and did their damndest to help them (us).

I came to love my scout leaders.

Then I learned that they were all Republicans.

This was difficult to digest because my scout leaders were fine men and I had learned growing-up that Republicans are evil.

At eleven I learned that it is impossible to measure people by grouping them into simple categories. This is a lesson I’ve learned again and again in my life.

When I turned sixteen I joined the volunteer fire company in my small town. I thought that, since I was able-bodied, it was the “right thing” to do.

The first bad fire I fought was in a modest three-bedroom home that housed a family. When we arrived at the “fire-ground” flames were coming out of a second-floor window.

Some jackass, not the owner, was standing on the sidewalk and screaming at us: “put water on it, put water on it…”

I was in the “jump-seat” on the attack pumper which meant that I had an air-pack on before we arrived at the fire, and that I was the closest firefighter to the two inch-and-a half-“pre-connects.” I grabbed one and dragged it to the front door. Other guys behind me pulled the rest of the hose from its bed. A second guy backed me up on the hose, the engineer charged our line, and the two of us, once we saw that the ground floor was “not involved,” went upstairs and fought the fire. The inch and a half hose was inadequate and we fought in vain until other guys brought in a two and half inch hose.

I had no idea who owned that house but I busted my ass to save it. At one point the ceiling just above and in front of me was orange.

When I ran out of air I went out of the house and back to the truck to get another air tank.

The chief told me to take a breather and get a cup of coffee. Some women from the neighborhood had set up a table for the firemen: coffee, juice, milk, some snacks; whatever they could pull together fast.

At the next monthly meeting the chief engineer announced some research: the guy who had been screaming “to put water on it” owned a home down the block and had never donated to the fire company. The women who set-up the coffee table had all donated. “It’s always like that” he said, “the people who yell the most never help.”

A few years ago I was in my country home awaiting the arrival of a friend. The phone rang. She had crashed about 3 miles away, and was hurt. I told her to call 911 and that I was on my way. (I couldn’t call 911 because if I had used the house phone the call would have slowed me down. I couldn’t use my cell because I had no cell service at my home.)

My partner and I grabbed a couple of sheets, scissors and tape and I drove like hell.

When we got to the crash site a volunteer paramedic was already there. His pick-up truck had a big NRA decal in the rear window and, on the bumper, a sticker that said: “Man’s humanity to man: a fire truck.”

When I was in college, once a semester, there was an event to raise money for Oxfam, an organization that feeds the starving.

To participate in the event undergraduates would agree to forgo dinner. The on-campus food contractor would donate $0.90 to Oxfam for every student who signed-up to skip dinner.

I did some research. The food contractor billed $1.15 for ever dinner served. $0.25 profit for not serving a meal was their most lucrative day of the semester.

And students, anxious to “be in solidarity with the starving,” felt very self-righteous not eating for an evening.

I was appalled. I donated $2.00 to Oxfam and went to dinner.

I was attacked by my fellow undergraduates. I explained the economics. They were unmoved, even though I had actively donated $2.00 and they had passively donated $0.90 of their parent’s money.

When I said that skipping one dinner at Swarthmore to “be in solidarity with the starving” was an obscene mockery of millions of starving human beings I lost friends.

The night of the “fast” I noticed that pizza delivery men were swarming the dorms.

A few days later I went to the most popular local pizza delivery joint and asked about the rush on Oxfam night. “Oh,” they said “the Oxfam fast is our biggest night. We hire extra delivery men for that night.”

So I was vilified by a parade of undergraduates for eating and donating $2.00. These guys skipped dinner, their parents “donated” $0.90 to Oxfam, and these same kids, in “solidarity with the starving,” spent $6-10 on pizza and grinders. Oxfam night was not about helping the hungry, it was a fashion statement. And, like all fashion statements, it was a cheap way to rat-pack the unfashionable.

In spite of the fact that I am atheist, or maybe because of it, I have a deep interest in things so-to-say “spiritual.” Besides acquiring a degree in comparative religion I have spent time in both Buddhist and Christian monasteries. I was never called to be a monk, but I saw that while some monks become quite completely nuts, others acquire a rare kind of ability to see. If you have not spent time among nuns and monks, you cannot possibly understand this, so take my word for it, or not.

In any event, as a result of repeated trips, I have made several friends among the monks on Mount Athos in northern Greece.

The first time I went to Athos I was deeply struck that, because there were no women in the monastery, there was no freely-circulating sex energy. In contrast with my experience “in the world,” where sex-energy is woven into everything, this was a great relief. In this artificial environment, free of the dynamics associated with the interactions of men and women, I found a deep relaxation and a sharpened ability to focus.

But the second time I went to Athos I felt a lack in the life there and also in the understanding of the monks. I saw that by excluding women the monks had effectively amputated half of human intelligence from their lives.

In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment there is a socialist character who rails about worldly injustice, but is shiftless and idle. The narrator, which is Dostoevsky’s voice, describes the socialist as follows:

“He was one of that innumerable motley legion of half-baked vulgarians and meddling know-it-alls who immediately attach themselves to the most fashionable idea current, only to vulgarize it and immediately caricature everything they serve, often with the greatest sincerity.” (Sidney Monas translation)

When I read that passage I had a huge ah-ha moment. Just as I read that passage the co-eds at Swarthmore, a school that was founded as a co-educational institution with equal numbers of male and female students and whose faculty is approximately 50% female, were in the middle of a tirade about “gender-specific language.” I found the theme stupid. I pointed-out that sentences like: “the jockey demonstrated excellent horsepersonship,” and “the oblivious pedestrian fell into an open personhole” are as stupid as they are awkward.

The notion that the female students at Swarthmore College were somehow oppressed was not only ridiculous, the suggestion insulted the untold millions of women who are, and who have been, oppressed.

I made this point and was anathematized. But I had read Dostoevsky and therefore knew who these young women were: they were part of “that innumerable motley legion of half-baked vulgarians and meddling know-it-alls who immediately attach themselves to the most fashionable idea current, only to vulgarize it and immediately caricature everything they serve, often with the greatest sincerity.”

Their screams of “oppression under patriarchy” were as hollow as the contention of their fellows that, as they stuffed themselves with pizza, they were in “solidarity with the world’s starving.”

Today no one but a pedant uses, as an impersonal pronoun, the tortured s/he.

I have come to distrust and, frankly, openly mock, all isms: socialism, feminism, vegetarianism when political, fascism, communism, Catholicism, Judaism, libertarianism, etc.

I mock feminism at the same time that I embrace the suffragette’s struggle to get women the vote. I embrace the fact that it is now, among the enlightened, a universally accepted premise that women’s thoughts are as valuable as men’s. I applaud the increase in the number of women in the highest echelons of our society at the same time that I lament the slowness of the change. I reject, in every aspect, the notion that women are somehow less valuable than men. I celebrate as positive the integration of the sexes in our society. I view all this as part of a larger movement towards enlightenment and understanding.

I celebrate all of this because, obviously, there are terrible injustices directed at women both historically and, more importantly, in the present. The fact that women are paid $0.78 for every $1.00 a man is paid in the same position is an outrage. Our society is filled with these outrages. The fact that men get more jail time than women for the same crime is an outrage. And the fact that black men get 20% more jail time than white men for the same crime is an outrage.

Feminism is now into its “fourth wave,” and some feminist writers are talking about the emerging “fifth wave.” To me nothing spells “lost and looking for footing” more than a movement, a few decades old, reinventing itself into four or five “waves.” Every time I hear talk about which wave of feminism is which, I think of the now defunct Soviet Union and its famous “five-year plans.”

I’ve lost track of which wave is which, but there are tenured feminist professors of “gender studies,” teaching in venerated institutions, who have floated the question: “absent sperm, are men really necessary?” This is utterly bankrupt, and as debilitating a notion as the Athonite monk’s rejection of all things female; as small-minded as my father’s “intellectual” colleagues who thought all Republicans vile; and as ridiculous as the liberal’s notion that any member of the NRA must be a sociopath.

But this kind of small and corrosive thinking is ubiquitous. Stephen Marche, a writer of books about the sexes and their interactions wrote this in the NYT on September 25, 2017:

“…male mechanisms of desire are inherently brutal.”

He argued that: “the nature of men in general…” is that beyond ideology or class or profession men are “bound together, solely, by the grotesquerie of their sexuality.”

Of course Marche is not the first to suggest that somehow the male is baser than the female.

Andrea Dworkin, the famous radical feminist, argued in 1976 that heterosexual sex is, of its nature, violent; and that accordingly “men will have to give-up their precious erections.”

Forget that Dworkin and Marche are obviously idiots. The deeper observation is that their classification of maleness as brutish and violent and in need of subjugation is in no way different from Alexander Steven’s argument in his famous “Cornerstone Speech” given in Savanna, Georgia in 1861.

Stevens wrote about the new society he foresaw: “Our new government is founded… its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”

Feminism, which began as the unassailably just insistence that women are, in every respect, as fully human as men, has devolved into something as base and as socially destructive as racism.

The very undergraduates who cut their teeth railing against “gender-specific language” in the 1970s are today railing against “micro-aggressions” and “mansplaining.” It’s really hard not to laugh, except that under the silly jargon is a very corrosive current.

And that current is that the ills of the planet, from war to social injustice, to the wholesale plunder of natural resources, to election-fixing is the work of men.

The danger with this sort of thinking is that it’s half-true. Yes, wars are fought mostly by men. And yes, the social structures that favor the wealthy few are jealously protected, most often by powerful men. The majority of the CEOs of aggressive polluters are men. And the techies who are hired to hack elections, if Russia’s efforts are any indication, are men.

Is this because men are evil, or because women have not yet achieved parity? Or are there other much more subtle factors?

You don’t see the wives and daughters of warriors protesting the war their husbands and fathers make. On the contrary you see them venerating their “brave” husbands and fathers and doing obeisance to warriors “for their service.”

You rarely see anyone who is enriched by the firms that abuse the planet—men or women—complain.

You don’t hear the rich and comfortable—men or women–in their suburban homes complaining that the law exists mostly to protect their uber-comfortable lives. “Black Lives Matter” is a result of this.

The very people, men and women, who complain the loudest about all the evils that men do are the very men and women who go quiet when they are on the gravy train that those evils bestow. This is how people are always and everywhere. Not just men; not just women…

The fact is human kind thinks dualistically, and is therefore stupid. Ridiculous comments like “men have the power, therefore they promote patriarchy,” illustrate this. Actually the powerful are loath to cede power because they like their power. It has nothing to do with “patriarchy” or “chauvinism” or “gender oppression” or any other buzz-word that reduces a complex system to a single cause or feature.

In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that men are sacrificed for women. Men take about 98% of US war casualties. Men suffer about 95% of workplace deaths. And if a ship is sinking “women and children” are rescued first. This is all worth thinking about.

But the larger fact is that feminism, as it is often promoted today, leads women, especially young women, inexorably to vilifying men. This leads, naturally, to fermenting anger which in turn becomes a baseline, a default setting, of anger and outrage. All men in the educated classes, even if they are deeply sympathetic to the long and rightful struggle of women for parity, have been down-stream of the vituperation of feminists and their practiced outrage. What started as a demand for rightful equality has decayed, in time, into a lexicon of buzzwords and, worse, the transformation of a great struggle into a tedious caricature of itself.

Recently a woman asked me: “I wonder if you are thinking that there is a war on men going on?”

I answered: “I do, and there is.”

A particularly awful result of feminism is that maleness is itself now derided. The manly virtues of self-reliance, protection of the weaker, providing for the family, competing relentlessly, and self-sacrifice are reduced in the feminist lexicon to sociopathy, territoriality, aggression and nihilism.

This is a disaster for our culture, not only because it devalues the basis on which so much has been built. It is a disaster because boys today are taught that their essential nature, their boyness, is unacceptable. If a boy persists in climbing trees and hunting frogs and taking apart engines to see how they work that kid will be medicated.

It is not an exaggeration to say that millions and millions of boys are today filled with Ritalin because of feminism. The long term effects of this crime are not yet known, but the suicide rate among boys has skyrocketed. Boys under 13 are about ten times more likely to kill themselves than girls. Perhaps this is not too surprising in a culture that teaches boys self-loathing.

There is no doubt that women have gotten a raw deal for centuries. This is not the result of an insidious patriarchy designed to oppress women. It is the result of centuries of cultural evolution driven by many, many forces. The explanation is not in the dualistic explanation that men oppress women, but in a deeper understanding of human nature and history. And the resolution is certainly not in the dualistic anger of one side (the women) against the other side, (the men). This approach leads to the absurd situation we have now.Another insidious result of feminism is that it is embraced, as all isms are, as being a unifying theory of everything existing.

When Hillary Clinton lost many feminists said that the reason was “misogyny.” When it was pointed-out that Clinton lost white women by more than 10 points, these same feminists argued that because of “the culture of patriarchy” many women are “unconsciously misogynists.”

This sort of “thinking” derives from being attached to an all-embracing “ism.” When evangelicals blame hurricane Katrina on a “culture of sodomy” in New Orleans, or the 9-11 attacks on the “godlessness of New Yorkers,” they are being every bit as stupid and in the thrall off of their ism as the feminists are when they say that Hillary lost women because women are unconsciously misogynists.

In short, I abhor all movements of the day. And I especially abhor the dualistic and debased thinking that movements, of their nature, propagate. I hate the guys who, when someone else’s house is burning, stand on the corner and scream for someone else to put water on it. Women of the Ivy League, screaming about patriarchy, are no different than the jackass on the sidewalk outside the burning building. Yes, the house is burning. No, you are not helping.

The Oxfam “fasters” are not in solidarity with the starving but are instead making a mockery of the hungry with their fashion statement. In exactly this way the patchwork of buzzwords that comprise the current rhetoric of feminism—“patriarchy,” “micro-aggression,” “man-spreading” “toxic masculinity”—is just fashion babble and, unintentionally but actually, a mockery of real oppression. If anyone points-out the moral bankruptcy of this situation, they will be rat-packed by the fashionably righteous.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of feminism is that it has infected the educated class. We can all roll our eyes when the evangelicals suggest that sodomy caused Katrina. But when a man innocently suggests that some women is unqualified for a position, or lacks judgment, he is told that he cannot see the situation clearly because he is either consciously or unconsciously a misogynist. This kind of baloney strikes at the heart of our society. It propagates the absurd notion that men, because they are men, cannot comment with any authority on matters that touch upon women. The inverse, that women cannot comment with authority on matters that touch upon men, is summarily rejected. Ironically and insidiously, our culture has come to believe that women, and feminists particularly, have understood that men as a sex are at the core of all that is bad in the world. Should a man, God forbid, express how absurd this is, there is a ready dismissal: “He is just mansplaining.”