In Spite of Everything (7 page)

In our generation’s own, real-life
Star Wars
, though, the burning down of the Skywalker family farm was the Important Family Announcement. Ask anyone whose parents divorced, and they’ll cite the Important Family Announcement as being one of the most traumatic experiences of their childhoods. The Important Family Announcement was, essentially, the Genesis story for Generation X’s narcissistic wound. It’s like this: The family, pre-divorce, was its own sort of Eden—an imperfect and quotidian one, but an Eden nevertheless in its gestalt of permanence and predictability. And then came the Important Family Announcement. It began with the parents sitting the kids down in the den or family room. The dad, hollowed-out and remote—with the mom nearby, red-eyed and quivering—explained that “your mother and I do not love each other anymore” and “can’t live together as a family,” but that “we love you kids” and “feel that we’re all going to be happier in the long run.”

The eerie formality, compounded with the stunning disclosure that one’s parents not only had separate lives but were empowered to dissolve the indissoluble, made the Important Family Announcement hallucinatory. Parents’ postmortem to themselves, their friends, that “the kids seemed to take it well” was delusional. The kids were in a fugue state. For years.

With the nucleus of the family, once stable and prosaic, blown apart, the landscape became postapocalyptic. The father, heretofore a somewhat remote disciplinarian with whom you could occasionally roughhouse and be gross, was now trying to annihilate the mother with legal proceedings and character slander and was installed in some interim bachelor pad, absently spoiling the children with toys, junk food, and movies on the weekends. The mother, after about a year in depression during which she leaned terrifyingly on the children for emotional support, “reinvented” herself on a full-time career track, attending aerobics classes and dating a string of divorcés. Darth Vader, Princess Leia at war. There was no safe place to land.

My high school was littered with such sad-eyed, bruised nomads.
There were perennial migrant flocks of latchkey kids in the suburbs, wandering from used record shops, to behind the train station to get high, to the parks they used to play in as children; they trudged back and forth from their mothers’ houses during the week to their fathers’ apartments on the weekends. In one of the most egregious cases, the divorced parents of a teenage boy I knew installed him in his own apartment because neither wanted him at home post–Important Family Announcement. Naturally, we all descended on his place after school—sometimes during school—to drink and do drugs. He was always wasted no matter what time we arrived. A few years ago, a friend told me she had learned that he had drunk himself to death by age thirty. A very close friend of mine, at fifteen, managed both of her parents as they collapsed under the weight of their respective mental breakdowns in the wake of the Important Family Announcement, each of them clawing at her constantly; in the meantime, she did her best to keep her two younger siblings together. Now in her forties, she lives alone, ready to answer triage calls from her family.

In my own family’s case, the Important Family Announcement landed on my little brother’s birthday. His tenth birthday. At this point, Ian and I did not grasp that our parents were estranged, much less getting divorced. We knew that things seemed terrible in a general sense and that Dad had been “on a business trip” when our mother was away in England. On this day, what we understood was that, for some reason we did not understand, our father was not there on Ian’s birthday. Where was Dad? Mom didn’t know, but she reassured us that Dad was certainly on his way. Morning gave way to noon, then afternoon. My brother, my mother, and I wandered in and out of the house, sometimes intersecting. At some point in midafternoon, my wanderings had taken me into the kitchen, where I had just opened the freezer to reach for a Swanson’s chicken pot pie. Suddenly, Dad was there.

“Howdy, old pal,” he said. He was wearing a jeans jacket. A
jeans jacket
. He clapped me on the shoulder like a man, strode into the pantry, and poured himself a scotch.

“Well, Suze,” he said, “as you’ve probably surmised, your mother and I are splitting.” He oriented his empty tumbler on the rippled tile counter, sauntered around the kitchen table, and stopped at the window to regard the vegetable garden he had planted. “The basic idea is this: I’ve reached a point in my life where I realize that I’ve done nothing for
me
, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m not going to do it.” He went on to explain that he was sick and tired of doing things for “the kids” and “your goddamned mother”—it was time for
Dugal
to do what
Dugal
wanted to do. Life here was just plain shitty. Why should he have to put up with “all kinds of ingratitude” as his reward for working “for those cocksuckers”? He was
done
. He poured himself another scotch and spat out details about the unsatisfactory complexion of my mother’s and his sexual relations. He then announced that he had met “just a terrific woman” who he was sure I’d think was terrific, too, and he leaned back and ruminated rosily about the woman’s virtues and the quality of the connection that he had with her. He put down his drink.

“So, that’s the story, old Suze,” he said, thumping me on the back. “It’ll take some getting used to, but you’ll be fine. You’re tough.” And he left.

Recently, my brother and I were on the phone, talking about Ian’s newly born second child and my newly born third. We started talking about Dad, and that moment came up. “Yeah,” he said, in a prolonged drawl. “Did you know that Dad never even said hello to me that day—my
birthday
?” I had not. I don’t know which was worse.

M
any of the years following the Important Family Announcement are best left forgotten. Which is why it is impossible to do so. Our mother was feral in her grief, which often found an outlet in cursing me and cosseting Ian. My defensive maneuver was either to fight
back or to flee in operatic style; Ian’s was to withdraw, either in paralysis or in fury. Ian and I rarely saw our father after that; were it not for my parents’ divorce agreement specifying four visits annually, we probably would not have seen him at all. When we visited him in Massachusetts, he was either not there or passed out. His wife, a clenching fury, never seemed to sleep. Terrible things happened.

Ian tried. There was still the idea of mountain climbing, and every so often, it would seem to take form. Once, when Ian was in high school, Dad told him he would take him on a weekend expedition in the Adirondacks. With the climbing and camping gear packed up in the trunk, Dad drove them to a motel in the foothills. He left as soon as they opened the door to the room and returned with a case of vodka. Ian watched television while Dad drank. “When are we going to go climbing, Dad?” Ian would ask. Dad didn’t respond. They never left the motel room. After two days of Dad drinking straight from the bottle and Ian watching TV, Dad drove Ian back to boarding school.

When I was a teenager, I received a bunch of giant boxes in the mail. They were filled with polar camping equipment: sleeping bags, parkas, boots, pitons, crampons. There was a note: “Get ready.—Dad.” The Ellesmere Island trip—it was
on
. Noodle-in-chief and deputy noodler. Then, without a word, he took his wife’s daughter. He sent me a hand-carved Inuit statue of a howling golem: half man, half monster.

“There was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces it’s gone now and I’m sick,” said Caddy Compson in
The Sound and the Fury
. In my senior year of high school, I was put in a psychiatric ward. After a battery of tests and medications produced no diagnosable results, my mother pled with the head psychiatrist to offer some pathology that would supply explanation. “Your daughter,” he said, “is suffering from deep terror.”

A
fter my parents divorced, one of the sad, weird things that happened was that I completely lost my bearings in the night sky. As a kid, I was the undisputed Pleiades and Little Dipper finder. I can still find them, but it takes me forever. I can’t see Orion unless it is pointed out to me.

O
ne of the books in the
Star Wars
prequel series is called
Rogue Planet
. The plot runs something like this: The rogue, or orphan, planet where the action takes place is actually sentient and can travel anywhere it wants to in space. There is a vibe of Neoplatonism on the planet, because its earliest inhabitants believed that the Force is inherently light; ergo, there is no Dark Side, but only twisted, selfish practitioners who manipulate the Force for ill—a philosophy known in
Star Wars
terms as “Potentium.” In the story, Obi-Wan Kenobi and the future Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, go to the rogue planet to track down a missing Jedi knight who turns out, in spite of her adherence to Potentium, to sacrifice herself to save the “good” guys. But ultimately the bad guys attack the rogue
planet anyway, which consequently hoofs it to what the
Star Wars
lexicon calls “Unknown Regions”—parts of space that are unnavigable to all but those who are supersensitive to the Force.

Although the narrative, like many of the
Star Wars
prequels, is pretty thin and crappy, I find the themes presented in
Rogue Planet
irresistibly suited to X metaphors. There is something very moving to me about the way in which the
Star Wars
ontology recasts an orphan planet as a rogue entity that is not only the master of its own mind and destiny, but also maintains a very clear-eyed, karmic perspective on all the hyperbolic goings-on in its warring universe. And when it all gets too hostile and confusing, the rogue planet retreats to uncharted territory. There is something fundamentally Xish about this rogue planet’s configuration—or at least the way in which X has often been depicted, and has depicted itself, in popular culture.

Think, for example, of the 1980s hard-core punk song “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies (immortalized via the soundtrack of the 1984 X movie classic
Repo Man)
, in which the protagonist recounts that his efforts to sit quietly and meditate on his decisions and goals are relentlessly interrupted by shrill and ultimately malevolent authority figures who misinterpret his introspective affect as dangerously unhinged and corral him into a psych ward, over his objection that all he “wanted was a Pepsi,” rendering the song itself his retreat. Fast-forward to Eminem’s X anthem and the title of his 2008 autobiography,
The Way I Am
, partly a diatribe against the opposing sociological characterizations of him as either a bigoted hatemonger (conservative blabbermouth Bill O’Reilly declared that Eminem was “as harmful to America as any al-Qaeda fanatic”) or the messenger of a lost generation (as a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution wrote in an article entitled “Eminem Is Right,” “If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandon
ment
”) and partly a Zen-like acquiescence to it: “I am whatever you say I am.” Potentium, in a nutshell.

But really, take your pick. From the Circle Jerks to
The Breakfast Club
and everything in between, virtually every X hero is drawn as a
maverick who sees through society’s machinations and therefore refuses to conform: We never
wanted
to be in your orbit anyway, assholes! Like the Star Wars rogue planet, X makes a virtue of rejection. And actually we can be pretty funny about it. Indeed, some of the most gut-splitting exchanges I’ve ever had have been series of one-upmanship about bad incidents from parental-abandonment, split-family, latchkey childhood. If you’re not of this generation, it sounds sick. It
is
a little sick. But it’s funny. One friend told me that once, at a boozy seventies family party, she and the other parents’ kids were jumping on a bed when she catapulted off and suffered a bleeding head wound. She ran to her mother, who, with one hand swirling a glass of Chablis, reached into her purse with the free one, yanked out a Maxi pad, stuck it on her daughter’s head, and said: “You’re fine—now, go back and play!” Another friend (call her Emily) recounts stories of her single mother doing all manner of inappropriate things in front of her children: going out on dates in miniskirts and stilettos; drinking an entire bottle of wine herself as she recalled all the good times she’d had with her many boyfriends in high school; flirting with Emily’s own high-school boyfriends. Whenever Emily and her siblings bring these stories up with their mother now, she will sigh, shake her head, and simply say: “Well, that was a very difficult period for me.” This begs for sketch comedy. “Hey, Mom—remember the time you smoked crack, put on pasties, and did a lap dance for my tenth-grade AP chemistry teacher on parents’ night?” “Yes, well, honey, that was a very difficult period for me.”