A Better Man Read online

  A Better Man

  A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son

  Michael Ian Black

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2020

  For tomorrow’s boys

  [I]t was with a little surprise, and a little shame, that I realized my eldest son was only a summer away from leaving home for college, and I hadn’t taught him, or the other kids, how to cook.

  —Cal Peternell, Twelve Recipes

  Macho, macho man

  I’ve got to be a macho man

  —Village People

  Contents

  Introduction: The Wilds of Connecticut

  1. Some Guy: Now You’re Home

  2. Rosary: Tell Your Kids You Love Them

  3. Skate or Die: You’re Not Toxic

  4. A Useful Engine: You’re a Real Man

  5. No Sissy Stuff: Be Yourself

  6. Do You Even Lift, Bro?: Share the Load

  7. Beer from a Leg: Respect the Service of Others

  8. Smoke Signals: Violence Is (Almost) Never the Answer

  9. Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner: Take Pride, but Not Too Much

  10. Gunslinger: You Can’t Do It Alone

  11. Lucky Charms: Choose Happiness

  12. It’s Just Plumbing: Communicate with Your Partner (and Pick Up the Check)

  13. Everything and Nothing: Be Humane

  14. Here I Am: Do Something Positive

  15. A Better Man: Breathe

  16. One Guy: Turn Around and Wave Goodbye

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  The Wilds of Connecticut

  We moved to our little Connecticut town when you were two. Mom was pregnant with Ruthie, and we’d outgrown our first home, a little Dutch Colonial in Peekskill, New York. We wanted a place with better schools, maybe a little more outdoor space. A friend had just moved here with his family, and he suggested we take a look. One bright autumn day as the holidays approached, we strapped you into your car seat and came to see for ourselves. The town seemed lovely and safe, the area schools all highly rated.

  The thing that really got me, though, were the Christmas lights. Back in Peekskill, people decorated their homes like used car lots, gaudy red and green flashing lights wrapped in loose bunches around window frames and light posts. Inflatable Santas, plastic reindeer tipping drunkenly on roofs. I have always been a humbug when it comes to Christmas, and the rowdy Peekskill aesthetic only made me humbuggier. Here, in the demure Constitution State, it looked as if Martha Stewart had personally strung each home’s holiday lights.

  We bought a house and settled into it with our two-year-old son and new baby girl. We put some chairs on the front porch and watched the seasons change. I jokingly began calling our new town “the wilds of Connecticut” because, although we really do live in the woods, it felt like a Disney wilderness. The creatures, abundant though they may be, all seemed adorable: deer and foxes and wild turkeys and a lazy black bear the townsfolk nicknamed Bobbi. Sometimes though, late at night, we would hear an eerie music coming from the woods. A wild chorus of high-pitched keening. Coyotes after a kill. Mom and I would lie in bed and listen and, after a few minutes, it would stop.

  One morning, several years after moving, I woke you guys up for school. It was December, the sun late to rise. By this point in your school careers, the routine felt automatic, familiar to every parent. “Time to wake up.” Mumbles. Breakfast cereal and orange juice. Shoes, jackets, backpacks. Lunches in lunchboxes. Peanut butter and jelly. Carrot sticks. An Oreo. Walk with you to the end of the driveway to wait for the bus, watch our breath in the cold morning air. Wave goodbye as the bus pulls away.

  I came back into the house and sprawled on the living room couch. Mom was still in bed. I opened my laptop, did some work, glanced at Twitter, and there it was: gunshots at the elementary school next to ours. Sandy Hook.

  The first reports didn’t seem too bad, which sounds absurd even to say. One injury, a ricocheted bullet into the foot of a student. Police and ambulances arriving on the scene. I turned on the TV, flipped to the local news station. Nothing. Mom came down in her pajamas. I told her what I’d seen online, but the TV networks weren’t covering it.

  Maybe it was a false alarm? An Internet hoax?

  A few minutes later, CNN broke into its morning programming: active shooter situation, teachers and children. Children. They may have given some initial, low estimate of the number of dead and wounded, I don’t remember, but I do recall one of the reporters warning viewers that things were about to get “much, much worse.”

  Did they already know about Classroom 8, where fourteen first graders and two teachers were killed?

  Did they know yet about Classroom 10, where four children and two teachers lay dead? (A fifth child would later be pronounced dead at the hospital.) One of the teachers, Anne Marie Murphy, was found trying to shield a child’s body with her own.

  A few miles away, your school went into lockdown. “Lockdown.” When I was in school, that word didn’t exist outside of prisons. School administrators activated the emergency phone system and sent out emails: “Your children are safe.”

  We waited. We watched TV. State troopers and SWAT teams and kids being led from the building, hands on the shoulders of the child in front of them. Empty ambulances waiting for wounded that never came.

  We got another email from your school explaining they weren’t going to tell the kids what had happened because parents may wish to explain it in their own way. How do you explain mass murder to children whose only experience with death was a dead hamster laid to rest, with proper funeral rites, in the backyard? How do you explain to your kids that a young man could march into their school with a Bushmaster .223-caliber semiautomatic rifle and start firing at will? The email didn’t say.

  Mom and I watched TV off and on until the school buses brought you both home. We went out to the end of the driveway to meet you and walked, hand in hand, back to the house. “Was it really windy out today?” Ruthie asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Why?”

  “They said we couldn’t have recess outside today because it was too windy.”

  When we got inside, we gathered you both together and told you. I don’t even know what we said: Something awful had happened. A bad man, but he was gone now. A lot of kids got hurt, but you didn’t need to worry because you were both safe. Even as the words came out of my mouth, they felt like a lie. How could I promise your safety? I couldn’t. My tongue felt slick, as if it were covered in gun oil.

  When we finished, we asked if you understood. Yes, you both said. Did you have any questions? No. Were you okay? Yes, you were both okay. Could you go play now? Yes. You ran off separately, Ruthie to play with her American Girl dolls, you to finish the intricate wooden train track you were building in the playroom.

  We had dinner. We put you to bed. We kept the TV off. Mom and I lay in bed and talked about keeping you home the next day, but decided against it. You would go to school tomorrow like always. We would place you back into the world and hope. That night, we listened to the woods and heard nothing.

  When morning came, Mom and I got up together. “Time for school,” breakfast, packed lunches: turkey sandwiches, raisins. Extra Oreos. We walked you to the bus and waved goodbye.

  Parents know they can only do so much to protect their kids. We strap you into car seats, give you swim lessons. We offer advice, bundle you against the cold. But we can’t do everything. Every parent knows this and accepts it. We do what we can and hope for the best. But this felt different. It felt like a tornado touching down, mindless and cruel. But also predictable. Infuriatingly predictable.

  Everybody knew something like this would happen. Here, in Ameri
ca, it happens regularly. Mass shootings are as common as sunsets. Three shot, one dead at an apartment complex parking lot in Tulsa. Four dead at a Waffle House in Nashville. One sailor murdering two others before killing himself near a military hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia. Domestic violence. Suicide. Stories that barely get a mention on the local news before the sports report. People getting shot just isn’t much of a story in America. We’re used to it. This time, though, was different. This was children, twenty of them, and six adults.

  The nation responded to Sandy Hook the way it always does when sensational acts of violence take place. People gathered. They held hands and lit candles and sang. News trucks rolled into town. Politicians laid out solemn offerings of “thoughts and prayers” like cold cuts at a wake. One by one, parents lowered their children into the ground. One after the other after the other. The president came. “We can’t tolerate this anymore,” he said. “These tragedies have to end.”

  He spoke beautifully about the need for change.

  Nothing changed.

  As I write these words in mid 2019, it’s happened 2,135 more times. I’m only including mass shootings, defined as “events in which four or more people, excluding the shooter, were shot but not necessarily killed at the same general time and location.” By the time you read this, that number will almost certainly be over 2,500.

  No statistic recognizes that each death is a tornado, spinning countless lives into chaos. Six years after the shooting, one of the Sandy Hook fathers, who’d spent the intervening years researching brain disorders that can be related to violence, took his own life. Unexpectedly losing a loved one ends your world. That’s what these bullets are, world enders.

  Like a lot of people, I’ve been paying attention to the phenomenon of school shootings since two white teenage boys shot up their high school in Columbine, Colorado, in 1999. At the time, there wasn’t even a term for these events. Headlines called it a “high school massacre,” a “school attack,” a “gun spree.” When Columbine happened, we stupidly thought it was an aberration.

  Then came all the others: schools in Georgia, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Michigan, Florida, Louisiana, California, New York . . . nearly every state, often multiple times. Then came Parkland, the deadliest high school shooting in American history. Seventeen high school students killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida on Valentine’s Day, 2018. Once again, we went through our national ablutions: the news crews, the thoughts and prayers, the resolutions to change. The failure to change.

  You can go online and watch the interrogation of the Parkland shooter. It’s ten hours long. The most striking thing about him is how young he looks. He’s nineteen but looks younger. He sits in a plastic chair, his ankle shackled to a metal ring in the floor. He wears a hospital gown, his back exposed, his skinny frame visible when he moves. In the beginning of the interrogation, alone in the room, he shouts, “Kill me!” He bites at his arm.

  Later, his brother comes in, a brother who apologizes for pushing the shooter away during their childhoods, blaming his own insecurities for the distance between them. At one point, he asks the interrogating officer if he can give his brother a hug. Yes. When he does, the shooter breaks down, sobbing.

  “They’re saying you’re a monster,” the brother says at one point.

  “A monster?” the shooter responds, almost in disbelief.

  If I hadn’t known what he had just done, I would have had the same reaction. He doesn’t look like a monster. To me, he just looks like some kid. Somebody’s son. You can go through the list of mass shooters and you’ll find the same thing in all of them: it’s always somebody’s son because it’s always a boy. Girls aren’t usually pulling the triggers in these massacres. It’s boys.

  I’m not going to pretend to understand gun violence, but I think I understand at least a couple components of it. The first is easy access to guns. You’ve heard me rail against the gun industry and its bloody mouthpiece, the NRA. I’ve called the NRA a terrorist organization because I believe that they not only know that easy access to guns will induce more slaughter, but, on some level, they want those killings to take place because gun sales skyrocket each time one happens. If we wanted to reduce shootings, all shootings, the first thing we would do is reduce access to guns.

  The other component I think I understand, at least a little, is the way traditional masculinity can nudge a teetering psyche toward violence. Mass shootings are only the most sensational manifestation of our peculiar male dilemma: traditional manhood funnels the full range of male emotion into two channels, anger and withdrawal. Thankfully, most boys are resilient enough to resist these pressures and make positive contributions to the world. But some are not. Some will curl toward themselves like ingrown toenails. We’ve seen what those boys can do.

  Traditional masculinity encourages strength, independence, fortitude. All good qualities. At the same time, though, it provides no useful outlets for our vulnerability. If we cannot allow ourselves vulnerability, how are we supposed to experience wonder, fear, tenderness? If we cannot turn to others for help, what do we do with bewilderment and frustration? How do we even express something as elemental as joy?

  It’s why the caricature of men is that we’re simple creatures. George Carlin has a great joke: “Here’s all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.”

  Women aren’t crazy and men aren’t stupid, but the joke speaks to the limited ways we see each other and the frustrations that women, in particular, have with men. There’s nothing wrong with our brains. Our brains are intact, fully functioning, nicely wrinkled. The problem is our emotional intelligence. And the reason our emotional intelligence is so low is that too many men only allow themselves those two basic modes of expression, anger and withdrawal.

  For years, I was one of those guys. I cultivated an entire comedic persona based on withdrawal. If you ever want to see what that looks like, go watch me on one of those VH1 “I Love the . . .” shows in which talking heads reminisce about decades gone by. My segments are all totally deadpan, unsmiling, sarcastic. They were funny (if I do say so myself), but sarcasm is a form of withdrawal. I was good at it because by that point in my life, I had invested years learning how to act as if I didn’t care about anything. What you see on TV is an exaggeration of the way I lived my life, but only a little. I had so much anger back then that I didn’t know what to do with, so I clamped down. My release was jokes. They escaped like occasional steam puffs shaking the lid from a boiling pot.

  The more successful I became doing that, the less satisfied I felt because I knew there was something fundamentally dishonest about it. That stone-faced person wasn’t me anymore. I was recently married. I had a newborn son. Within a couple years, I would have a daughter. The person I saw onscreen, the one who never cracked a smile, didn’t seem like he was ready to be a husband and a father. Maybe he wasn’t ready. I began feeling a conflict between the person I found myself portraying on television and the man I was trying to become in real life. Maybe that shouldn’t have mattered; after all, actors and comedians pretend. That’s the job. But it mattered to me.

  I wanted to be more open and honest in my life and in my work, which meant I had to change. Which meant I had to start asking myself some hard questions about who I was and what I valued. I had to pry apart the careful persona I’d constructed. I wanted to be a better husband and father. I wanted to be a better man.

  For years, I thought there was something wrong with me (and don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty wrong with me), without considering the idea that some of the stuff screwing me up might be doing to the same to boys and men in general.

  After Parkland, I began reconsidering. Why are boys committing these acts of violence? Why are boys falling behind girls in school? How do we teach young men to be respectful toward women? Why are men, and in particular white men, killing themselves in ever greater numbers? Is there rea
lly something “toxic” about masculinity? If so, what do we do about it? Is the role of men changing, and what does that mean for you?

  You’re eighteen and about to leave home for college. I wanted to give you something useful before you go. But what?

  “Cash,” you said, when I asked.

  Fair enough, but I also wanted to offer something a little longer lasting. That’s how I came to write this. Look, I’m not a sociologist, historian, psychologist, philosopher, or gender theorist. I have no qualifications to write this aside from one: I’m your dad.

  I’ve spent the last year and a half doing a lot of reading and thinking about this topic. Now I’m trying put my thoughts down for you, and for parents like me who want to understand boys and men a little bit better. Take from it what you want. Discard what you don’t. Some of the personal stories in here you’ve heard, some you’ve heard only in part. Some you’ve never heard at all. It’s advice, a memoir, ideas, a primer. Or maybe I’m just having the conversation I wish my father could have had with me when I was starting out in the world. Maybe it’s partially me talking to him now, man to man. Mostly, though, this is for you as you walk out the door. One father’s love letter to his son.

  one

  Some Guy

  Now You’re Home

  Dear Elijah,

  If you ever want to feel useless, I recommend attending the birth of your child. Mom and I had signed up for birthing classes together in anticipation of your arrival, but that preparation mostly involved learning how to count to ten over and over again in short breathy bursts. If you think that sounds like it would be a waste of time in the maelstrom of a delivery room, let me assure you, it is.

  Mom’s labor lasted almost a day. It was awful. At least it looked awful. Mom was in so much pain. I didn’t know what to do. It’s such a helpless feeling knowing that your partner is exhausted and in terrible pain and, in that moment, almost certainly hates you.