Massive

Our father's justice gets closer
How could you fuck us all over
Rape, steal and murder
God bless the almighty dollar -- Ozzy Osbourne

Clever entrepreneurs in Campbell in California's Santa Clara Valley must have been drinking all night when they stumbled on the brilliant notion of opening up a shop with the name Psycho Donuts. I can imagine them sitting in the garage, passing a beer bong between them on a couch, the stuffing bursting from a worn cushion, when one of them explodes to his feet, the idea flaring like a cartoon image of an early Edison bulb, filaments sizzling. The owners deserve cheap caricature, since that's what they're about.

They opened the place not too long ago, investing who knows how much, branding it with delight in selling their boiled fat and sugar concoctions with decorative names such as Psycho, the Bipolar, Massive Head Trauma, and the Cracker Attacker. Hilarious. A belly buster.

Inside, they built a small platform, the size of an old telephone booth, into which they erected a stark chair and called the stall "The Padded Cell", where they entice young children to pose for photos while adorned in a straight jacket. When you belly up to the counter at Psycho Donuts, women in nurses' uniforms and sharp white hats take your order.

It's clever, right? Ask any soldier with Massive Head Trauma.

For the first time, soldiers in record numbers are returning from combat with massive head trauma. In previous wars, their armor could not spare them from fatal head wounds, but today, they survive explosions from insurgent devices rigged--like so many glazed donuts--in some Baghdad garage. Head trauma affects vision, hearing, and cognitive faculties--often for life. They experience fatigue, impaired memory, depression, lack of focus, emotional outbursts, loss of libido, faulty judgment. Facing redeployment, many commit suicide. More American soldiers than in any previous era are committing suicide in the comfort of our neighborhoods and mini-malls stocked with all-too-many donut shops.

Psycho Donuts' brilliant entrepreneurs, according to their website, have "taken the neighborhood donut and put it on medication, and given it shock treatment." Sounds like a baker's dozen of glazed and nutty confections are just the thing to cure the aftertaste of whatever truths you see behind the veil of mercantile insanity and prisoners of war in our own homes.

In 2004 I took a freelance job editing the website for NAMI California. It's the state's chapter of a national organization devoted to fighting the stigma associated with mental illness. When soldiers fear harassment or demotions for admitting PTSD, they eschew reporting their condition out of shame and resort to eating a bullet. And they're not alone. In a culture that hands out anti-depressants like candy to help people who have mild depression or who are trying to quit smoking, what's truly insane is that so much stigma is attached to individuals who suffer from grave mental illness. We think of these people as twittering imbeciles, foaming at the mouth, sitting on the eaves of their roofs in aluminum foil hats, channeling alien broadcasts.

They're not. Nor are they violent, as the media and film industry would have you believe (for box office revenue). Most are victims of violence done to them on the streets, where they're often homeless and looking for hope in tobacco or a bottle, products sold over-the-counter with clever names and colorful packages. They're among us everywhere. And so are the members of their families who fight a valiant struggle for normalcy in their daily affairs. I lost a grandfather to suicide--before I was born. My own father was only 17 when it happened. And last year, my uncle took his own life the day before my father's 89th birthday.

Excuse me for not laughing. Our father's justice gets closer, and I'm on a sugar-free diet.

Axminister and Esplanade

The first telephone number that my mother had me memorize began with the word Axminster. In Brooklyn, phone numbers belonged to a number of exchanges, and ours was Axminster, shortened to AX when you added the last five numerals that combined to make our home number. Axminster is a town in Devon, England. After our family moved from New York to California, our exchange was Esplanade, shorted by the telephone company to ES.

In those days, there were no such contrivances as call waiting, voice-mail, or text messaging. If you weren't home, the telephone rang until the caller hung up. Our rule was if we were eating dinner, you let the phone ring its brains out. If it was an important call, my mother would say, the party would call back. The other rule was that if the phone rang, my father would wait for someone else to get it.

We had one phone and it sat on a counter-top in the kitchen. Later, when the phone company offered a slender rotary model that offered revolutionary back-lighting on the dial, my mother put one on the nightstand in her bedroom. Now we had twice the number of phones that my father would let ring themselves out.

The technology was screwy: sometimes you could pick up the phone when it was idle and listen to the nearby country western radio station. In those days, the San Fernando Valley still had horse ranches and orchards scattered between the creeping subdivisions, and a listening audience that preferred Gene Autry to Gene Pitney. I'd listen long enough to recognize that the announced was ethnically and aesthetically as far flung from my Russian-Jewish roots as a Martian, then hang up the phone.

Sometimes the phone would ring but no one would be on the other end. Or, when you were lucky, you could pick up the receiver and eavesdrop on the private conversations of unknowing parties. When I lucked into those, I hung on as long as I could, turning the handset to the side in case they could hear my breathing.

When the man from the phone company came out and installed our first push-button phone, it took a while to get used to it. But you were less likely to dial a wrong number with it. I hated when you were dialing a number on the rotary model and your finger slipped out on the last digit, forcing you to have to re-dial the entire sequence again.

Those days, you made every call away from home at a public phone. I hated it. In my youth, you actually went into a Plexiglas booth, closed the door, and the light went on inside. It gave you a false sense of privacy as traffic sped around you and people walked to and fro on the sidewalk. But the booths smelled of urine or vomit and the mouthpiece reeked. You hated to imagine who had used the phone before you. There was always a half-empty soda bottle crawling with ants on the counter or a crumpled cigarette box.

More than half the time, the phone was out of order, left dangling on its metal cord by the previous user. Sometimes the connection was lousy and you'd reach your party and try to understand what they were saying between the static hiss or pop, shouting atop your lungs to be heard.

Phones had no slots for credit cards in the day, so you had to walk around with a pocketful of change, or visit a shop or gas station attendant to cash out paper money. Often, the phone would gobble up your coins and refuse to connect to your number. If that was all the money you had, you were screwed. The booths had white and yellow-page phone directories, but someone had always ripped out the page you needed to find your number. And men--for women would in no way do this--drew profane expressions or near-anatomic renderings on the glass. It was tough to take refuge of a phone booth in a rain storm.

When I was in Italy, you went into an office, gave the receptionist your long-distance number, and then sat in a quiet, clean, comfortable booth--in which no one had apparently urinated--until the phone rang with your call home.

Later, in Los Angeles, the booths gave way to half-booths, plastic kiosks that covered the phone but provided no shelter for the user. You often found a handset missing one part or another, having been slammed in rage by a previous caller. Sometimes you'd pass by the kiosk and the phone would ring. I could never let it go. Usually it was the operator asking for more money and you'd explain you had just picked up the phone, that you were not the guy who tried dialing Romania on a quarter.

The first cell-phone call I ever received came from Bobby Dubois in 1991. He was sitting in his four-wheeler truck, idling outside my home, yakking into a phone the size of a walkie-talkie. It made his day.

I held out, long after cell phones were in-vogue. I had a recorder on my home phone and if anyone needed to talk with me, they could leave a message. If I was late for an appointment or broke down on the highway, I'd find a phone at the gas station or convenience store. But my employer--a trendy web consulting firm--required that I have one, and they bought a cell phone for me to carry in my car. I hated it.

When I finally bought my own, I still hated it. I was pretty sure I had a small number of friends, but the damn thing rang day and night. For a while I was getting calls at 2 am from a woman in China. She kept calling until I asked a friend how to say "Wrong Number" in Chinese (Dwei Bu Chi , Ni Da Tswuo Le). Later, when I moved to the mountains, I found a cabin out of range of service and was forced to pay the company $200 to get out of my contract.

Last year my niece, Jess, graduated from college. I sat in the rows of well-wishers with my brother, his wife, and their two boys. Jess was in the long line to receive her diploma. My brother swapped text messages with her throughout the entire ceremony. The two boys swapped text messages with their pals. I was sitting in a row of constant typists.

Recently, my friend Joey advised me to sign up for a social networking website where people publish their sudden thoughts to hundreds of followers. Say you're in your car at a stoplight and suddenly understand the String Theory. You text your brainstorm into your phone and it instantly sends it to a website and the telephone's of your buddies. The entire world is texting the quality and frequency of its bowel movements to minions of foot soldiers in the army of insignificance.

Count me out. Many days I leave my cell phone home when I go out. If it's important, they'll leave a message or call back.

Today, when I call my parents at the old number, I can imagine the same phone they've had all along, hanging on the wall in the kitchen. It's a few steps from the sink and the mini-greenhouse window where my mother tends the houseplants she's collected over the years. If my father answers the phone--a rare occurrence--he can't waste more than a sentence or two before he hands it over to my mother.

Every so often my mother calls to alert me that I haven't been calling. She says the same thing even when I do call. So I tell her then, "This is me. This is me calling right now."

You want the honest-to-god truth? I have never, ever answered my own phone and heard the voice of my father calling.

A Man's World

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days and cry over what is happening. Have you noticed: The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out! See who will answer! -- Robert Bly

"The world needs a man's heart" -- Joseph Jastrab

Men do not yearn for talk about men, for we have heard abundantly on this subject most of our lives from women, and we're quick to wince, quick to blame. While mothers, daughters and wives have a determinate angle on us, they do not know the beast from the inside. We work hard, die much too young, or continue to die slowly inside, unappreciated, banishing ourselves to the sofa or, worse, we suddenly find ourselves out in the yard sharpening our blades for war.

(This is the point in the writing where real dudes or the homophobic log off the website, shred the book, set fire to bad news. But read this entire sentence before you roll your dulled, dry eyes: The reason you won't or can't participate in this discussion is because, up till now, you've never been asked by another man to have a true heart-to-heart, man-to-man. This is a different thing than slamming down your shot glass, turning to the other guy, and blaming "the bitch" for your self-inflicted misery.)

You were raised by a loving mother who supported your earliest campaigns and a father who destroyed his body to lay bread on the sideboard. Perhaps even back then, as it certainly is now, your mother worked, too. Mine built periscopes during World War II. In the fifties and sixties it all looked fine from where you sat quietly at your end of the dinner table. Dad went to the shop or office, your mother attended to the care and feeding of your body and soul and -- under best circumstances -- she tried to listen to your exploits, adventures, triumphs and early sorrows. She knew all about empathy, about love... but she did not know YOU. Dad might have known, but he wasn't saying. What you heard growing up was from women and all about your shortcomings: we're not intuitive, we're violent, we smell funny, we're strange, we're slobs, we live to screw, we're snakes and snails and puppy dog's tails.

Even among those boys who were loved and recognized in youth, there isn't a man I know today who doesn't occasionally act like an asshole. It's our nature. It's theirs, too, by the way. But women have felt our savagery historically and paid dearly, so don't ask them to concede the darker part of themselves--or suffer ours gladly. But when men won't talk to each other about our sudden melancholy, our shadowy fears, our loss of financial, spiritual or emotional security, about how it is to live for the two week golf trip, the ownership of the remote control, the ability to find a quiet place where we don't have to respond on cue to feelings we have yet to identify, we let women do our defining for us--and we end up torching the house.

Today there are thousands of decent, angry men in my life, co-heads of households who have lost the generational means of sustaining themselves and their loved ones. They sold cars or fished deep waters. They invested in training for life in a cubicle that folded up on them as when a circus leaves town forever. When I worked as a Fortune 500 web consultant, my firm hired a man to fire half the staff. A professional butcher. He was a scary fellow of innuendo, deflections, and the ability to smile to your face while he locked you out and took your badge.

There are fathers and sons, too, throughout the country, who have lost their land and found themselves numbed as a conduit in a fast-food assembly line; and there are fatherless, inner-city youths who have never understood a thing about their rage except that it flows in torrents of a steady dance beat, boys and men who have watched the upper class accelerate away from them without notice, let alone justice or compassion, or men who have listened patiently for decades now to female rage and felt themselves grow fearful, ashamed, distant and unheard. A ruthless energy runs through the thoroughfares of our cities and towns. It even appears among the fortunate men for whom life is good, where security and friendships seemingly abound, but where talk is sterile and ideas have withered.

So, let us say here and now that YOU are decidedly invited to the discussion. In fact, it's your turn. I have found men who have opened their hearts, expressed their rage, their shame, their frustrations, speaking of and listening to our relative truth without giving into fear or the need to blunt it with drugs, or gambling, or hookers, or endless food buffets and a routine coma in front of talk shows each night. When we give voice to our secrets, we discover that most of us are alike at the most profound levels. We may be violent by nature, but are loving by opportunity, by good fortune, by magic.

We need not take all too seriously the women criticizing our love of sports, or yukking up our friendships, calling them "male bonding", or "doing the guy thing." They never question communion among themselves, and perhaps some are afraid of their men changing, despite their claims otherwise. For when that happens, women will receive the equality they more than deserve; they'll lose their identity as the sole care-takers of inner life. We've abdicated our half of the responsibility, walled ourselves off of our families, our children, our peers, and our wellspring of hope. Most women I know are sick and tired, anyway, of playing mom to grown men, and men, freed by our new connections to each other, can learn to define ourselves precisely as we are: bright, organized, creative, intuitive, fathering, funny, imperfect, growing, wounded or betrayed, grieving, angry, lonely, unfulfilled, or rudderless in a cold culture we helped create and sustain by our silence.

One place to start talking is with our friends and at home, fathers speaking their truths to sons, to their fathers. Another is in the workplace, and through our music, painting, acting, hiking, being men among men. In the 1990s I attended one of those heralded Days for Men conducted by Robert Bly. I entered a hall and passed down a welcome line of every man who had entered the room before me. The 600th man into the auditorium was greeted by 599 men. There were grandpas and sons, fathers and infant boys, gays, disabled veterans, twins, cousins, great-granddads in military uniforms, drumming young men in warpaint, whooping, thundering, applauding, loving men who met to see what it looks like from the inside.

And when a solitary janitor, a woman, entered the foyer for a split second with her broom and bucket, 600 voices died.

Undaunted, I spent the next few years at Men's Wisdom Councils in Seattle, where we drummed, formed talking circles, met in small groups to talk about relationships, right livelihood, being fathers or sons, how to take care of our minds and bodies, how to find our own native spirituality. I sat in sweat lodges with men of the S'Clallam tribe, pouring water and praying over rocks for the right relationship between men and the earth, our forebears, and with our families. I built a sweat lodge in my yard and invited men to invite their friends. I taught my father to hug me--or at least helped him to remember how its done--and I kiss him every time we meet.

There once had been powerful fraternal organizations for men, where they volunteered in service to others, raised money for men's scholarships, or built sanctuaries where they could be equals without relation to their jobs, backgrounds, or income. My dad's group of choice was the Knights of Pythias, an organization founded after the Civil War. Such an odd ring to its name! And when I visited their website recently I was astounded to my core to know that my own father had been a member. The order was founded on theories of Pythagoras. "It was a maxim of Pythagoras that the two most excellent things for man were "to speak the truth and to render benefits to each other." Here is more of what they say about themselves:

"The Fraternal Order of Knights of Pythias and its members are dedicated to the cause of universal peace. Pythians are pledged to the promotion of understanding among men of good will as the surest means of attaining Universal Peace. We believe that men, meeting in a spirit of goodwill, in an honest effort of understanding, can live together on this earth in peace and harmony. We seek those who agree with this belief, and have a belief in a personal Supreme Being, to join our ranks in an effort to reach 'Peace Through Understanding'. "

Many fraternal organizations are dying out today, unable to bring aboard newcomers or reach young males. I volunteered at a Shriners' Hospital for severely burned children and learned that the number of men who join up is shrinking, meaning less funding in the future for such noble endeavors. All along I had been laughing at their silly fez caps to take the time to learn what they were about.

When I had been eight or nine, my father took me to a Russian sweat bath (he called it a schvitz) in the Jewish section of Los Angeles. But I spent the better part of the evening in the company of men, young and old, who sweat in thick clouds of steam, whacked each other's backs with eucalyptus leaves, shared conversations about synagogue, school, work, and wives. I had no idea there was such a place, and I'm sure it's long gone now.

Greening up from our own spiritual ice age won't be easy and the opportunity--the absolute necessity of it--comes at a time when men are surely needed. The ice caps are melting. There's a plan for Iraq. Brothers or butchers, which shall we be?

Our work together is not some new self-help program, for "self" is isolated and isolating, and it needs no help. "Self" rather needs our restraint. Simply, we need men in our lives, to give to ourselves freely without strings. We simply must, because it's up to us.