THE DISSEMBLING NATURE OF IDENTITY AND ITS COST
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 10, 2013
Strangers are likely to ask young students when they first meet: where they come from, where they go to school, what is their major, or if already graduated, what is their profession, where do they work? Variations of these questions follow when they are older: are you married, how did you meet, have you any children, how many, what are their names, where do you live, what do you do, do you play golf, what clubs do you belong to, what church do you go to? Hobbies take on increased significance when you are of retirement age, which are always included, as well as a variation of the other questions. Strangers like to get a fix on us so that they can put us into a stereotypical box. It is a form of breaking the ice, and deciding if we want to know you better.
Strangers complement this code through their eyes studying the way we dress, the manner of our responses, the educational level of our voice and how we express our thoughts, and if we have any strange tics in the use of humor that tells them to be a bit weary.
In my case, strangers might see me as a professor they have had at the university, which was not far off having been an adjunct at several universities, or a psychiatrist as one nurse asked me recently, who was acting as a cashier at Wal-Mart. When I explained to her, I was a psychologist, she beamed with approval, only to have the smile fad when I told her I was an industrial psychologist. I’ve also been taken to be an actor more than once, which surprises me. This may because of the way I dress, which is the same way I’ve always dressed with the style certain to come back to make me look, again, in style.
The temptation is there to please strangers with answers fitting presuppositions about you. This finds men often asked how tall they are, and women how slim they are. Men add a couple inches, and women shed a few pounds in their answers to bring smiles of envy.
* * *
Author James T. Farrell once wrote a delightful story about a middle age couple returning home on the train after a shopping day trip to Chicago. Asked where they lived, the man told the stranger in a suburb where they owned a block of apartments and lived in one of them. The woman turned her head aside as they rented one of the apartments, and didn't even own an automobile. Asked what he did for a living, the man said he owned an engineering company, when he was actually a plumber’s assistant for a licensed plumbing company; when asked where he went to school, having only finished grammar school, he mentioned an upscale high school he never attended. Finally, the man asked the stranger what he did. The stranger answered he was unemployed and wonder if the man could spare him a fiver or two. The comeuppance worked with the man putting a ten-dollar bill into the stranger’s hands.
WHO ARE YOU RIGHT NOW?
In meeting a new person, there is a strong need to please, to make an impression. Should that impression be negative, it is immediately discernible on the other person’s countenance long with an unconscious posture withdrawal. To combat this, we feel we have no other option than to lie. We justify the lie saying it is not a lie but just a harmless exaggeration, besides, what damage does it do?
My da often corrected strangers we met while traveling across the length and breadth of the country on a two-week summer vacation pass for The Chicago & North Western Railway. Strangers would ask him where he worked, and he would tell them. “You’re a conductor, are you?” “No,” he would answer, “I’m a brakeman; I worked for conductors.”
“Oh,” they would say, looking at him askance. Then he seemed to delight in giving them more information than they asked for, saying, “I’m not even a regular brakeman, but on the extra board which I’ve been on for more than ten years, as there is a waiting list for regular brakeman jobs.”
On one trip from Clinton, Iowa to California, I asked him when we had a rest stop in Nevada, “Why did you not say you were a conductor; you took the exam; why all that about the extra board?”
He looked me in the eye and said, “Jimmy, what I am is an extra board brakeman. Yes, I took the conductor’s examination, but didn’t pass it. Did you want me to tell the stranger that?”
“No!” I said emphatically.
“Jimmy, I love working on the railroad. It is the best job I’ve ever had. I am proud of what I am, and comfortable with what I do. You are the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad. That is who you are right now. The day you deny that, you won’t know who you are, and everyone else will own you.
“Your father completed seven grades at St. Patrick’s the same school you attended. That’s who your father is. Your mother graduated from high school, but she has a tendency to exaggerate who she is, and about you kids, especially about you.
“She’s filled your head so full of BS that it is a wonder your feet ever touch the ground.”
Angered, I asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?” I was twelve years old at the time.
“It means you’re full of malarkey, Jimmy,” adding, “thanks to your mother.”
I went to sit in an empty seat a few rows away I was so mad at him, tears rolled down my cheeks, clouding my vision of the passing beauty of the countryside. How could he be so cruel, I thought. I never had a follow up conversation with him on the subject.
* * *
A couple of years later, I was complaining to my mother about a coach in high school. He rose out of his chair in the living room where he was reading The Clinton Herald, and looked at us in the kitchen. “Jimmy, got a minute?” I then followed him into the living room and sat down on the sofa facing him in his favorite chair.
“Have you told the coach how you feel?”
“Of course not.”
“You think he’s an asshole, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he won’t know how big an asshole he is if you don’t tell him to his face.”
“But ..”
“But what? Are you afraid he won’t play you, kick you off the team, what?”
I pushed my chest out, and smiled, “He won’t do that. I’m too good. He needs me,” then less confidently, “he doesn’t need to know how I feel.”
“Jimmy, he already does.”
“He does?”
“Of course he does. You are as obvious as a naked man at mass. That’s not the point. The point is to take responsibility for the way you feel.”
“How?”
“Imagine the person you’re talking about is standing right behind your shoulder. If you do, you won’t say anything or think anything you wouldn’t say to his face.”
He wasn’t through. “If you don’t like the man, fine. Show him the respect that you’re a person of sincerity, have the courage not to be two faced. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong about him. He’s in charge and your job is to play for him or get off the team. You don’t want to become a sniveling gossipmonger.”
The result of that advice is that I tend to be direct to the extreme. It has gotten me into a lot of trouble. People ask me how I feel about something, and I tell them, which is not often what they expect to hear.
In my defense, I ask, “What about when guys spread gossip about me that is not true, what about that, what am I supposed to do about that?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Shouldn’t I confront them?”
“What good would that do? They’ll deny it. Guys on the road talk about you, some of it gets back to me.”
“About me? Why?”
“Oh, for a lot of reasons, because coaches play you rather than their kid, because you’re always getting your name in the paper for this or that. I suppose because you’re a cocky SOB.”
“Thanks for that. What do you do when they talk about you?”
“Nothing. I just listen, which gets their dander up more than if I did something.”
“Da, why do people do that?”
“You’d have to ask them.” He lit a cigarette on the end of his butt. “Men are far worse gossips than women. You know this when they start talking about whoever isn’t there. Sure as the Pope is Catholic, they’ll be talking about me when I’m not there.”
“That’s sick.”
“No, sick is when they try to knock you to your face using humor to hide their true colors. That is not only cowardly it shows you have an advantage over them you never understood you had.”
“Guys do that to me,” I said, “they mock me.”
“I’m sure they do.”
“But why? What do they get out of it?”
“They think they’re being funny. Don’t react to it; let them think they have you where they want you. It is there way to have a sense of superiority.”
“I totally disagree. When somebody does that to me, I want to knock their lights out, but I don’t, but I’m in their face.”
He shakes his head. “Does it make you feel any better?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact it does.”
“Then they’ve won.”
With that, I started to moon over what he had said. “Mom doesn’t gossip.”
“No, but she doesn’t hear very well. She dominates the conversation talking about you kids, always with exaggeration.”
“Have you told her that?”
“Oh, Jimmy, how often I do.”
“Does it do any good?”
“Of course, not. You are the light of her eyes. You justify her life. You are her calling and she’s determine you will be somebody.”
“How is she going to do that?”
“Beats hell out of me.”
“Da, how do you feel about that?”
“No opinion.”
* * *
A few years later, we had another conversation. I was near graduation from college and was feeling especially giddy. “Remember, da, when I was a sophomore in high school, and you wanted me to quit school to take a job on the railroad?”
“So?”
“Then a couple of years ago when a professor wanted me drop out of chemistry, and take a position in the humanities honor program, you asked me if I was a fag.”
“Where is this going?”
“Da, why have you never believed in me?”
“Why have I never believed in you? That is not how I see it. My problem is knowing all the hurt, conniving and backstabbing you will encounter rising above your father.”
“You don’t think I'm equal to that?”
“I don’t think any of us are. No, I don’t think you are. Now, your mother has an unbelievable capacity for risk, for putting you into her fantasy world and standing tall. She is bound and determined for you to reach her brother’s level since you were a little boy.” My uncle earned two Ph.D.’s at Iowa in psychology and economics, was head of the department of commerce at the University of Detroit, and an international consultant, rising out of South Clinton on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.
“Well, she wasn’t wrong!” I said with finality.
He didn’t say anything.
* * *
A few years later, home on emergency leave from Europe where I was a hospital corpsman on the USS Salem (CA-139), the flagship of the Sixth Fleet, operating in the Mediterranean Sea. My da was dying of multiple myeloma, a form of leukemia, a few weeks from his fiftieth birthday.
From his hospital bed in our home, still able to talk, he said, “Remember when you asked me how I felt about all this pressure your mother put on you?”
“Yes.”
“I want to tell you something now. I talked to your brother and two sisters. I’m going to die soon.” He would die three weeks later, January 3, 1958, three days after his fiftieth birthday. “Your mother says you want to be a writer. That is hard for me to see as you don’t even write a good letter.”
“Why then did a professor want me to be in the honors program at Iowa, an internationally recognized humanities program?”
“No idea.”
“That’s when you asked me if I was a fag.”
“Yes, do you know why?” I waited. “You and reality have always had a mixed relationship, and you didn’t even have a girlfriend, what was I to think? You were always with your head in a book. There is a big word to describe how I felt.”
“Ambivalent. You felt ambivalent about me.”
“Whatever. I have no idea what that word means. Anyway, you played this game with yourself, and so did your mother. Somebody had to show some sense. That’s what I’m talking about. Of you four kids, I’m most worried about you. You’ve got your head so far in the clouds you can’t even see the ground. That’s dangerous, Jimmy. It’s a cruel world out there. It’s a world that likes to cut people like us up and have us for breakfast, people too big for their britches.”
I started to cry. I was a man in my twenties, a man who had already had seen a good bit of the world, a man who had a wife and a son, a man who had a professional job to return to after his active duty in the navy, a man who had one success after another, and my da saw me as a loser.
“Tears aren’t going to change anything, Jimmy.” My crying turned to sobs, shaking with emotions. “Here, take this.” He gave me a tissue from a box beside his bed. He was dying and he was tending to me. He weighed only about sixty pounds at the time on his five-seven frame normally weighing about one-fifty. He had bed soars on his back so bad that I had to medicate them twice daily. Since I was a hospital corpsman, the doctor allowed me to give him morphine shots for pain whenever he needed them. I cannot exaggerate how brave a man he was in face of death, although he could not mask the pain in his eyes. “Blow your nose!” he said to me, as mucous covered my lips. “You look disgusting.”
Then he said something that hit me hard. “Tears keep in the vault. If you don’t, people will have you for lunch.” It only made me continue to sob. Then he closed his eyes and went to sleep. Sitting on a chair reside his bed, I cried myself to sleep leaning my head against his cold clammy hand.
* * *
The rest of the story is that on January 3, 1958 my mother sent me to the store for some food. We took turns monitoring him on a twenty-four hour basis. When I returned, my mother was crying. “What is going on, Jimmy, what is happening?”
My da was in his death rattle. He looked at me raised his head off his pillow, and then the rattle stopped with his eyes still staring at me. My mother was hysterical, clinging to me to do something. I held her until she became limp with emotions, went over and closed my da’s eyes, and rested his head on the pillow, and called Dr. O’Donnell.
He was so right about me. My mother was a disaster. We were in our little house alone and I had dry eyes, thinking some day I’ll write about this. I promised myself I would live the life that he did not have. I was angry with God, but totally functional. I organized his funeral with Johnny Dalton’s Funeral Parlor, Johnny a boyhood friend, and called Dr. Carey, another boyhood friend. The Irish stuck together no matter their station in life.
Mass donations poured in from his railroad buddies and others. I gave Father McInerny half of them, and the other half to my mother to live on. Father suspected something as he expected far more than I gave him. I found I could take his insinuations without comment. My mother never knew that for many months she was living off Catholic Mass money. I checked the Chicago & North Western Railway for my mother’s survivor benefits, and learned for the first time how little my da made per year over the years, and how little compensation my mother was going to get. Those in the railroad retirement system didn’t contribute or participate in social security benefits. She was forty-four years old. My da only made a fraction of what I made as a novice chemist in R&D at Standard Brands, Inc. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.
Life is always a collection of what ifs. In my case, my da’s early death spurred me on to harness my anger to some purpose using lessons he taught me along the way. My children, even my grandchildren don’t like to think that their roots are so common, but that is their legacy and their greatest strength. They don’t need to dissemble, don’t need to pretend, don’t need to look life in the face and turn away. They are real. They have the freedom to see what they are right now, right this minute, and not apologize to anyone about it, for they are not trying to be anyone else.
* * *
