The Atom Bomb in Me

Attempt #3, On Springtime

It takes a considerable effort to come out the other end of cold and nihilistic New England winters with your eyes, head, and heart in one piece. The first week of New England springtime doesn’t arrive with thundering fanfare, but like a whispered promise from an old friend—tender, sweet, and certain. The ice heaps, plowed into exhaust-black mountains at the corners of every road, melt into damp puddles and memory. Yellow-green baby weeds and grasses and daisies and daffodils and ivy and clover and bumblebees and butterflies rush to fill the absence.

The air, in one seeming instant, stops biting the skin and comes soft and warm with the scent of damp bark and earth. The old colonial houses and Georgian brick apartments shake off their wintry misanthropy and crack their windows to welcome the youthful breath of the new season's morning. Students in the square walk jacketless with their hair and skin in the breeze and the sun. There’s an unspoken carelessness, like the day might tip into a dream.

Yesterday morning, I found my buddy Adam sleeping on a park bench, right where I’d left him the night before. We got hammered at the Red Sox game—I stumbled home, he stayed put. I slapped him awake and he mumbled,

“Oh, hey.”
“Aren’t you cold? You could freeze like that.”
“I don’t freeze.”
I said, “I’m getting coffee and cigarettes. Do you want coffee and cigarettes?”
He said, “Hell yeah,” and went back to sleep.

I came back a few minutes later to him sitting up, arms stretched along the back bar of the bench and breathing in the placid blue-sky air. We drifted into a conversation about old forever-friends we’re no longer in contact with. He told me that it could be us someday. Sometimes the people you love retreat into memory like the echo of a song you can’t quite remember the melody to—that's just the way it is.

There were some boys playing baseball in the wide field in front of us.

They’ll get to be boys next spring too.
And the spring after that.
And then one day…

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Everything I think and feel is waking up. The proof is in the notebooks—pages and pages, scrawled late at night, like something in me’s coming unstuck. Spring always does that. It softens the seal, gets the juices flowing. Lately, I’ve found myself vicariously nostalgic for the coming-of-age of the Silent Generation.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house on Revere Beach. In the mid-1940s, my grandfather had the nickname “The Animal” because he wasn’t allowed in his house and was constantly getting into fights and trouble. He told me he would play basketball with the Coast Guard stationed on the beach after class got out in high school. He told me once he was late for class and told his teacher it was because he swore he saw a German sub off the coast, to which his teacher smacked him in the head and told him to take a seat. He told me that as a kid he worked at Wonderland Amusement Park, and late at night, when nobody else was out, he and his friends would sneak onto the roller coaster—half-invincible and completely hammered—to race each other.

This roller coaster.

On his deathbed, I remember an old man coming in and talking to him about their youth. My cousins and I were all sweaty and dirty from a pick-up football game we used to keep the grief back. The man was sitting by our grandfather, talking about the problems they caused and the girls they chased, and my grandfather weakly nodded and said, “Yes, yes, I remember.” My grandmother put her head in her hands and left the room to pray.

The man turned to us and said, “You should’ve seen the cans on this girl your grandfather used to go out with. I mean they were fucking huuuge. No, no—boys, you don’t understand. They were fucking huuuuuge.” And we laughed—God, we laughed—because we were thirteen, and he was ancient and obscene and wildly alive, embarrassing a gaunt, dying man in a way only a truly loving friend could. Who knows what happened to her?

In the last hour of his life, my grandfather—one foot on Earth—asked me to hold the ladder for him. His eyes were closed, his voice soft and gone. He needed to get up and nail down some shingles.

“Hold it still while I’m on it,” he told me.

“I’ve got it,” I said. “Don’t worry Pa, it’s still.”

My grandfather would have been my age in the mid 1950’s. He had been back from Korea for a minute, made his living in carpentry, had a wife, and owned his house.

Each year, as spring melts forward into the world, I find myself drawn—almost magnetically—to the culture of America’s old golden anxieties. There’s a strange comfort in the culture born of existential dread, in the garish pulp of the pre-war years and the distant fallout hum of the Atomic Age. I watch black-and-white science fiction movies, full of jerky dialogue and wide-eyed camp terror, where the end of the world comes with a theremin soundtrack and the promise that God, through science or community, will save us from them.

I tune in to baseball on the radio. I dig out my old Superman comics, still smelling of attic dust and old paper, and imagine how it all used to feel when the name of America was alien-born hope, strength, and social justice–the invulnerable terrorizer of wife beaters, corrupt politicians, nazis, and warmongers.

There’s no modern mythology for global warming. No charming googly-eyed monsters, no bright-red atomic ray gun beams that look good on technicolor film or iPhone screen. No Captain America punching out Hitler’s bitch teeth at the price of 10¢. Just the slow boil of a world complicitly falling apart and everyone rotting online like old fruit in the sun. When will the Earth-spanning American culture war end? When will our prophets stop selling masculine caricatures and skinny pills?

There is no more counter culture. No James Baldwins, No James Deans. We have counterculture-branded content. Whatever you think is sticking it to The Man is being sold to you and funneling gold into The Man’s pocket. Social rebellion, yours for $19.95/mo.

The existential crises of the modern American are not so different from those of the atomic American—though perhaps less cinematic, and infinitely more slow-burning. How lucky were they, in those technicolor days, to fear only the singular violence of the bomb? It was a clean terror—instantaneous and decisive. Not this slow unraveling of seasons and coastlines, this quiet vanishing of clean air, flowers, and animals. Do you ever think about how the lungs we’ve evolved are not directly suited for the air we breathe?

And how strange it feels to envy them right now—not for their cars or their suburbs or their space-age optimism–these are the paper-thin facade of something intensely deeper and darker infesting the post-war culture–but for the clarity of it all. They got their Craftsman homes and paper thin facades, we get 70*F Februarys and girl bosses in space. How strange it is to envy the American with a president who sent the National Guard not to control, but to defend—to walk black students into schools with rifles shouldered not in menace but in protective mandate.

Of course, none of this belongs to the true sensibility of its time. The image of the past, like the image of anything we love, is a dream—cherry-picked from a pool of gold and garbage. But beneath the glitter, the rot is as clear as it is here and now.

My grandfather shouted at his wife and smacked his children and spent his singular, irreplaceable life growing older and fatter on vanilla ice cream and war documentaries. The Ku Klux Klan held positions of real civic power. Those monster movies, more often than not, were cautionary tales warning that queerness and otherness would unravel the seams of decent society. The bully, coward, victim Roy Cohn had the Rosenbergs murdered—and here began feeding a machine that would go on strangling the law deep into a century he never lived to see. Housewives, stranded in their quiet suburban prisons with men broken by the Third Reich and the rising sun, floated through the days geeked out on valium planning weird gelatin salads studded with hard-boiled eggs. Europe was reduced and cut into two great piles of rubble.

And somewhere in Massachusetts, they took a girl named Rosemary Kennedy, cut into her brain with a long piece of steel, and left her there gone—silent and forgotten—so the American illusion could go on.

This is all to say that I miss people sometimes often.

This time of year has a way of pressing memories up against the brain. The light comes back, the trees remember themselves and burst only for that, and suddenly it’s all too easy to imagine old friends like they’re watching TV in the other room, or your grandfather there—sitting in his leather seat in the sun, half-whistling half a tune, the scent of grass and saltwater in the air. You forget the hard parts for a moment. You remember the smile, the radio static, the chewing of ice leftover in the glass. But nostalgia is exactly like staring into the sun.

The first week of spring reminds me that most of life exists outside of me—within and beyond my reach, by and before my birth, before and after my end. And that implies a serious responsibility doesn’t it? To be reminded that you’re just one one heartbeat in a long, continuing song.

Sometimes I hope God, or That Unknowable Thing, or Whatever might lift that weight and meet me there in the silence of an April morning, with a friend, hungover from a Red Sox game, and say: See? You never had to hold any of this alone.