I am in the shitter. You may disdain my vulgarity when I say this, but you didn’t know my mom and dad, how much gravity they generated – these two crude, uneducated commoners.
They were the gods of the impressionable big bang of my psyche. Even now, in old age, I am astonished that my creators have disintegrated into obscurity, save my deification of them.
I am right to resist your disdain, instead embracing the mortifying deficiencies of the triad that launched me; and to claim the shitter, by which I mean not the literal toilet, but the general state of losing meaning in the world.
My dad was a brute. He is the only man I ever saw actually pound his chest while proclaiming his own nickname, which he deemed “Watash”. His watashiness was so evident to me that it took me decades to learn what the phrase meant. Until then, I assumed it was synonymous to Yeti or a similarly hairy creature with dangerous physical powers.
Turns out “watash” was a phrase used by Korean War soldiers meaning number-one best friend, a bastardization of the Japanese “watashi”: a polite first-person pronoun with a feminine twist in informal conversation. But I’m sure Dad didn’t know the specifics of this. Specifics were not his thing.
As a veteran of bulleted action in both WWII and Korea, he intended the name to identify his primacy, without the sense of best friend and certainly sans feminine connotation. Had I educated him about the implication of friendship in his moniker, he would have claimed it proudly. Had I identified the femininity of its origin, he might have told me to shut up or, “I will flat-ass ruin you.” He threatened much ruining.
My mother was smart and heartbreakingly frail in emotion. Her whole life was a surprising roller-coaster of compensation and denial.
It makes me cry to think about her at 27, then 10 years younger than my daughter (for God’s sake), learning that her father, then 15 years younger than I am now (for God’s sake), had blown his drunken brains out with a shotgun (for God’s sake).
Mom had no tools to process this reality. So, she would have spun – spun tales, spun concerns, spun priorities and spun the centrality of her only child, my three-year-old self – to the fabric of the universe. She would have been sewing for us a suit of narcissism aimed at self-protection and self-inflating care for others.
In her last months, I finally asked her about her father, politely suggesting it must have been the alcohol that occasioned his depression. But even this soft soap was unbearable and met false revision.
Oh, he was not an alcoholic. Yes, he drank, but it was not a problem. And my, no, he was not depressed. He was excited by big plans for a new horse farm.
As she fended causation, canceled explanation, all with such confidence of voice that it reminded me of her irresistible attractiveness in youth, I fantasized that she was made of paper so thin, its weight was immeasurable.
My parents were everything and nothing. Like a preacher, Watash spread his thick arms under the starry night and made a boy wonder, and I mean truly wonder, what the whole of existence, inside and out, what it all meant. Mom declared that every “poor devil” deserved a gift at Christmas, and so she muscled resources to throw generous, dignified parties for the lowest of the low.
They told me how worthless they were, and that I would be better than them. Yet, I was them, so I simultaneously believed there was nothing better than them, and yes there was, but I would not be it.
In this way, they gifted the poor devil in me with the greatest present of all: a fluid and limitless complexity and depth. A life without grounding. The physiology to live on exploration and contradiction alone.
This again brings me to the shitter I am in. I am old, but my best moment is ahead. I am going blind in one eye but can finally see. I am paralyzed from interaction with others, but rich as hell with money and ideas in crystal solitude. I have no personalized love but no longer need it. I am starting to have bad days, but can box well enough to fear no alleys. Boredom plagues me; at the same time, my possibilities are most limitless.
My parents are dead but speak to me daily, their ghosts wiser and more erudite than in life. Dad tells me to quit bellyaching. I am small potatoes. Go out and slip some deep six to every broad I see. What’s the worst that can happen, he asks. They can kill you but they can’t eat you, he reminds. Make something happen. We’re all living on borrowed time. And each of us suffers a fundamental sadness, he knows. My heartache is nothing special.
Mom reminds me I am handsome. Boy, if I wasn’t her son. And I am so youthful. I should see some of my high school classmates, why, they look older than her. If she had my brains, she’d run the whole show. And with all the money I have in the bank, I can do anything I want, and I should because, after all, Mom saw how hard I worked to earn it. And although she hates to say it, if my children disregard me, well, it’s just because they are spoiled brats who don’t care about anyone except themselves.
Most importantly, I am lucky to have a girl who loves me, and that 70-year-old girl indeed loves my like crazy, Mom will remind me, also half-joking she’s not sure why, which I do not regard as insult, because I know it merely underscores the native superiority of the woman I am not but might have been.
My current shitter has possibility. It may smell God-awful, but it is interesting. My shitter is a solitary confinement, but ghosts warm it. It is a depressing place but not shotgun worthy. It is a feeble environment inclusive of all universal magic. Every poor devil finds his seat here. I am nothing special, I imagine, but then again, this begs the question of every shitty life.