Dog Years
12 years ago, my mother had a manic breakdown. She was found in Molokai, Hawaii after disappearing for several days. The fugue state—in which she turned into a nightmare version of herself, eyes afire, flagellating her loved ones with a stream of deranged insults and delusions—lasted about 6 months until someone finally got her on lithium.
Returning to herself, I pressured her to get a dog. She lived alone, so it would help her get a grip on reality. She said she liked whippets, so I found a local breeder. I wanted to name him Knut after Knut Hamsun but she decided on Eliot after T.S.
When the fugue began, I was finishing law school. When it ended I’d taken the bar and moved to Los Angeles. I’d already experienced my parents’ terrible divorce as an only child at 17, but this year, 27, was the toughest and most isolating of my life. The safety net had ripped open and I’d fallen through. Everything was most definitely not going to be okay.
After hitting the ground and dusting yourself off, making sure you aren’t dead, there is a sense of relief. “That happened.” There on the ground, you see the world as most people on earth do, all victims of abandonment or neglect or abuse or poverty or other societal failure, just not the upper middle class American suburban milieu I’d been comfortably incubated within. And when you hit the earth, you suddenly want to tell the truth. You don’t want to “win” anymore. You want to help other people figure this thing out.
I was always edgy, but a good boy politically. In fact, I thought if myself as edgy for a good cause, that cause being “equality.” I’d dutifully campaigned for Obama, and my diverse group of friends had tearfully celebrated when he won in 2008.
But now it was 2012 and I worked for a gay Hollywood agent with 6 other young men all of whom were gay besides me. The time came to vote for Obama again, but this time, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt phony; a little numb spot where my righteousness had once curled. What the hell did this guy know about anything? He certainly wasn’t talking to me. I told my co-workers this, and they were deeply offended. Didn’t I understand their rights were at stake? I already didn’t fit in, but this made it terminal. I was out within 3 months.
And thus began a decade of professional, personal, and familial torment as I slowly came out of closet as a political bad boy, just as much to myself as to the world. I was, and still am, a liberal—it’s not possible to completely erase my deracinated bohemian upbringing. But it became increasingly clear to me that the good guys were in fact a mask covering a barely perceptible leviathan pulsing under the surface, rapidly reaching its tentacles across the earth.
As Eliot grew and my mother healed, I lost many jobs, many friends, many family members, all of whom called me problematic crazy fringe incel bigot weirdo resentful loser failure. But I just couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t not see the lie.
In LA, I became a lone Trump supporter. I had zero MAGA friends, zero contacts to celebrate with when he won, maybe 1-2 even in 2020 to lament the loss. On Tuesday, I celebrated with 100 friends, all culture kids and almost all recent converts who, like me, just couldn’t bring themselves to lie anymore.
The thing we share in common? A breaking. Some loss, failure, death—the cozy cloak of a bourgeois upbringing ripped off, however fleetingly. All men used to be broken by war, now far fewer are. But everyone in that room had gotten a glimpse. Tuesday, a decade of pain vindicated in a single night.
Wednesday morning after the all-nighter, I drove down to San Diego to put Eliot to sleep. He had a tennis ball sized sarcoma dangling off his arm and typical whippet heart issues, it was time. Two guys came to the house and did it—it took 20 minutes. A decade transcended in a few quiet moments.
Mom is doing better now, but she still hates my politics.
Isaac... With a post like yours, which I read twice, just to be sure I absorbed your transformation, comes the urge to respond "in kind." I have two binders full of letters exchanged between my father and me when I was in my 30s and living in a 12x12 cabin in Montana... and he was in his 60s. The following is his voice...
I was paralyzed by your mother's scathing criticism and verbal abuse. I never learned how to play in that jungle. Marge's weaponry far outclassed mine. She had all the right instincts for survival, the rage, the frothing, the slap in the face. She wanted me to produce the abundance and splendor for which she believed she was born. Most of the time I was between a shit and a sweat.
My mother Alma told me point blank that if I left Portsmouth, she would disinherit me. I was chickenshit. I stayed. For twenty-two years, animosity ran rampant, with bad faith its constant companion. I became an alcoholic.
I am a product of middle-class values. Before I married Marge, my privileged world seemed warm and genuine. I believed in the world that had been manufactured by my mother Alma. I just received a long letter from Alma. It is dripping with honey-coated memories, all of them true. She wants her life to be remembered as the perfect effort. She will soon face her Maker, but she is not about to admit that she has ever been wrong. My mother Alma is a strong woman, the matriarch of the family, but she will never comprehend the extent to which her strength became diabolical. Nobody would have been good enough to be the wife of her son.
I am shocked and appalled at how our failures, Marge's and mine, have affected you. I never knew that our three kids were so tormented by our weaknesses. Please try to forgive us, if only for your own sake.
With your most recent letter, a burden has been lifted from Marge and me. You are going to make the climb out of the black hole. You are now able to admit, to yourself and to the world, that your swagger toward self-destruction was a wrong turn. From here on out, do what you feel is best, do it with care and consideration for yourself and for others, and do it with our blessing and our love. -Dad
Great writing