The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History Read online

  I was conscious of the taste and shape of Mike’s name as it passed through my mouth.

  “Oh,” Pat said wearily. “OK.”

  Mike wouldn’t have been my mother’s type either, not one bit. I told Pat that the decision had been a very hard one, a really difficult choice, and that I was grateful that she’d come over and sorry that she and I weren’t going to be—

  “Well, good luck,” she said.

  After that, I got to make the fun call, the Yes-I’m-free-on-Friday-night call. Mike, at home, confided to me in a low voice, as if to keep her husband from hearing, “Jon, I knew you’d go with me. I felt the connection between us right away.” The only slight complication, she said, was that she had long-standing vacation plans with her husband and children. She was leaving town on Friday and wouldn’t be able to start showing the house until the very end of the month. “But don’t worry,” she said.

  I GREW UP in the middle of the country in the middle of the golden age of the American middle class. My parents were originally Minnesotan, moved south to Chicago, where I was born, and finally came to rest in Missouri, the country’s cartographic linchpin. As a child, I set great store by the fact that no American state shares a boundary with more states than Missouri does (it and Tennessee are tied with eight) and that its neighbors abut states as farflung as Georgia and Wyoming. The nation’s “population center”—whatever cornfield or county-road crossing the most recent census had identified as America’s demographic center of gravity—was never more than a few hours’ drive from where we lived. Our winters were better than Minnesota’s, our summers were better than Florida’s. And our town, Webster Groves, was in the middle of this middle. It wasn’t as wealthy a suburb as Ladue or Clayton; it wasn’t as close to the inner city as Maplewood or as far out as Des Peres; about seven percent of the population was both middle-class and black. Webster Groves was, my mother liked to say, echoing Goldilocks, “just right.”

  She and my father had met in an evening philosophy class at the University of Minnesota. My father was working for the Great Northern Railroad and auditing the class for fun. My mother was a full-time receptionist in a doctor’s office and was slowly accumulating credits for a degree in child development. She began one of her papers, called “My Philosophy,” by describing herself as “an average young American girl—average, I say, in that I have interests, doubts, emotions, and likes similar to those of a girl of my age in any American city.” But she then confessed to serious doubts about religion (“I believe firmly in the teachings of Christ, in all He represented, but I am not sure of supernaturalism”) which revealed her claim of being “average” as something closer to a wish. “I cannot see this doubting for the world as a whole,” she wrote. “There is a definite need for religion in the lives of man. I say it is right for humanity, but for myself I do not know.” Unable to sign on with God and Heaven and the Resurrection, and uncertain about an economic system that had produced the Great Depression, she concluded her paper by naming the one thing she didn’t doubt: “I am a firm believer in family life. I feel that the home is the foundation of true happiness in America—much more the foundation than the church or the school can ever be.”

  All her life, she hated not belonging. Anything that tended to divide us from the rest of the community (her unbelief, my father’s sense of superiority) had to be countered with some principle that would draw us back to the middle and help us to fit in. Whenever she talked to me about my future, she stressed that a person’s character mattered more than his or her achievements, and that the more abilities a person had, the more he or she owed society. People who impressed her were always “highly able,” never “smart” or “talented,” or even “hardworking,” because people who thought of themselves as “smart” might be vain or selfish or arrogant, whereas people who considered themselves “able” were constantly reminded of their debt to society.

  The American society of my childhood was shaped by similar ideals. Nationwide, the distribution of income had never been more equitable and never would be again; company presidents typically took home only forty times more than their lowest-paid worker. In 1965, near the peak of his career, my father was making $17,000 a year (just over twice the national median income) and had three boys in public school; we owned one mid-sized Dodge and one twenty-inch black-and-white TV; my weekly allowance was twenty-five cents, payable on Sunday mornings; a weekend’s excitement might consist of the rental of a steam machine to strip off old wallpaper. To liberals, the mid-century was an era of unexamined materialism at home, unabashed imperialism abroad, the denial of opportunity to women and minorities, the rape of the environment, and the malign hegemony of the military-industrial complex. To conservatives, it was an era of collapsing cultural traditions and bloated federal government and confiscatory tax rates and socialistic welfare and retirement schemes. In the middle of the middle, though, as I watched the old wallpaper come off in heavy, skinlike, pulp-smelling masses that reglued themselves to my father’s work boots, there was nothing but family and house and neighborhood and church and school and work. I was cocooned in cocoons that were themselves cocooned. I was the late-arriving son to whom my father, who read to me every weeknight, confided his love of the depressive donkey Eeyore in A. A. Milne, and to whom my mother, at bedtime, sang a private lullaby that she’d made up to celebrate my birth. My parents were adversaries and my brothers were rivals, and each of them complained to me about each of the others, but they were all united in finding me amusing, and there was nothing not to love in them.

  Need I add that it didn’t last? As my parents grew older and my brothers and I fled the center geographically, ending up on the coasts, so the country as a whole has fled the center economically, ending up with a system in which the wealthiest one percent of the population now takes in sixteen percent of total income (up from eight percent in 1975). This is a great time to be an American CEO, a tough time to be the CEO’s lowest-paid worker. A great time to be Wal-Mart, a tough time to be in Wal-Mart’s way, a great time to be an incumbent extremist, a tough time to be a moderate challenger. Fabulous to be a defense contractor, shitty to be a reservist, excellent to have tenure at Princeton, grueling to be an adjunct at Queens College; outstanding to manage a pension fund, lousy to rely on one; better than ever to be bestselling, harder than ever to be mid-list; phenomenal to win a Texas Hold ’Em tournament, a drag to be a video-poker addict.

  On an August afternoon six years after my mother died, while a major American city was being destroyed by a hurricane, I went golfing with my brother-in-law on a funky little mountain course in northern California. It was a tough time to be in New Orleans but a great time to be out West, where the weather was perfect and the Oakland A’s, an underpaid team I like to follow, were making their annual late-summer run at first place. My biggest worries of the day were whether I should feel bad about quitting work at three and whether my favorite organic grocery store would have Meyer lemons for the margaritas I wanted to make après golf. Unlike George Bush’s crony Michael Brown, who was thinking about his manicure and his dinner reservations that week, I had the excuse of not being the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. With every ball I hooked into the woods or topped into a water hazard, my brother-in-law joked, “At least you’re not sitting on a roof with no drinking water, waiting for a helicopter to pick you up.” Two days later, when I flew back to New York, I worried that Katrina’s aftermath might create unpleasant turbulence on my flight, but the ride was unusually smooth, and the weather in the East was warm and cloudless.

  Things had been going well for me in the years since my mother’s death. Instead of being in debt and living at the mercy of the city’s rent-control laws, I now owned a nice apartment on East Eighty-first Street. Walking in the door, after two months in California, I had the sensation of walking into somebody else’s apartment. The guy who lived here was apparently a prosperous middle-aged Manhattanite with the sort of life I’d spent my thirti
es envying from afar, vaguely disdaining, and finally being defeated in my attempts to imagine my way into. How odd that I now had keys to this guy’s apartment.

  My housesitter had left the place clean and neat. I’d always favored bare floors and minimal furniture—had had my fill of Traditional when I was growing up—and I’d taken very few things from my mother’s house after she died. Kitchenware, photo albums, some pillows. A tool chest that my great-grandfather had made. A painting of a ship that could have been the Dawn Treader. An assortment of small objects that I held on to out of loyalty to my mother: an onyx banana, a Wedgwood candy dish, a pewter candlesnuffer, a brass niello-handled letter opener, with matching scissors, in a green leather sheath.

  Because there were so few things in the apartment, it didn’t take me long to figure out that one of them—the pair of scissors from the sheath—had disappeared while I was in California. My reaction was like that of the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit, when Smaug realizes that a gold cup is missing from his mountain of precious objects. I flew around and around the apartment, smoke spewing from my nostrils. When I interrogated the housesitter, who said she hadn’t seen the scissors, I had to struggle not to bite her head off. I ransacked the place, went through every drawer and cabinet twice. It enraged me that, of all the things that could have disappeared, what I’d lost had been something of my mother’s.

  I was enraged about the aftermath of Katrina, too. For a while, that September, I couldn’t go online, open a newspaper, or even take cash from an ATM without encountering entreaties to aid the hurricane’s homeless victims. The fund-raising apparatus was so far-reaching and well orchestrated it seemed quasi-official, like the “Support Our Troops” ribbons that had shown up on half the country’s cars overnight. But it seemed to me that helping Katrina’s homeless victims ought to be the government’s job, not mine. I’d always voted for candidates who wanted to raise my taxes, because I thought paying taxes was patriotic and because my idea of how to be left alone—my libertarian ideal!—was a well-funded, well-managed central government that spared me from having to make a hundred different spending decisions every week. Like, was Katrina as bad as the Pakistan earthquake? As bad as breast cancer? As bad as AIDS in Africa? Not as bad? How much less bad? I wanted my government to figure these things out.

  It was true that the Bush tax cuts had put some extra money in my pocket, and that even those of us who hadn’t voted for a privatized America were still obliged to be good citizens. But with government abandoning so many of its former responsibilities, there were now hundreds of new causes to contribute to. Bush hadn’t just neglected emergency management and flood control; aside from Iraq, there wasn’t much he hadn’t neglected. Why should I pony up for this particular disaster? And why give political succor to people I believed were ruining the country? If the Republicans were so opposed to big government, let them ask their own donors to pony up! It was possible, moreover, that the antitax billionaires and antitax small-business owners who got antitax representatives elected to Congress were all giving generously to the relief effort, but it seemed equally likely that these people whose idea of injustice was getting to keep only $2 million of their $2.8 million annual income, rather than all of it, were secretly counting on the decency of ordinary Americans to help with Katrina: were playing us for suckers. When private donations replaced federal spending, you had no idea who was freeloading and who was pulling twice their weight.

  All of which was to say: my impulse toward charity was now fully subordinate to my political rage. And it wasn’t as if I was happy to feel so polarized. I wanted to be able to write a check, because I wanted to put Katrina’s victims out of my mind and get back to enjoying my life, because, as a New Yorker, I felt I had a right to enjoy my life, because I was living in the number-one terrorist target in the Western Hemisphere, the preferred destination of every future lunatic with a portable nuclear device or smallpox dispenser, and because life in New York was liable to go from great to ghastly even faster than it had in New Orleans. I was arguably already pulling my weight as a citizen simply by living with the many new bull’s-eyes that George Bush had painted on my back—and on the back of every other New Yorker—by starting his unwinnable war in Iraq, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent fighting real terrorists, galvanizing a new generation of America-hating jihadists, and deepening our dependence on foreign oil. The shame and the danger of being a citizen of a country that the rest of the world identified with Bush: wasn’t this enough of a burden?

  I’d been back in the city for two weeks, thinking thoughts like these, when I got a mass e-mailing from a Protestant minister named Chip Jahn. I’d known Jahn and his wife in the 1970s, and more recently I’d gone to visit them at their parsonage in rural southern Indiana, where he’d shown me his two churches and his wife had let me ride her horse. The subject header of his e-mail was “Louisiana Mission,” which led me to fear another plea for donations. But Jahn was simply reporting on the tractor-trailers that members of his churches had filled with supplies and driven down to Louisiana:

  A couple of women in the congregation said we ought to send a truck south to help with hurricane relief. The Foertschs were willing to donate a truck and Lynn Winkler and Winkler Foods were willing to help get food and water…

  Our plans grew as pledges came in. (Just over $35,000 in gifts and pledges. Over $12,000 was from St. Peter and Trinity.) We quickly began looking for another truck and drivers. It turned out to be no more difficult to find these than it was to raise the money. Larry and MaryAnn Wetzel were ready with their truck. Phil Liebering would be their second driver…

  Foertsch’s truck had the heavier but shorter trailer, which was loaded with water. Larry’s truck had the pallets of food and baby supplies. We bought $500 worth of towels and washcloths and 100 foam sleeping pads at the last minute, because of the great response of pledges. Both were on Thibodaux’s wish list. They were happy to see us. The unloading went quickly and they asked if they could use Wetzel’s semi-trailer to move the clothes to another warehouse, which meant they could move it with a forklift instead of by hand…

  Reading Jahn’s e-mail, I wished, as I would ordinarily never wish, that I belonged to a church in southern Indiana, so that I could have ridden in one of those trucks. It would have been awkward, of course, to sit in a church every Sunday and sing hymns to a God I didn’t believe in. And yet: wasn’t this exactly what my parents had done on every Sunday of their adult lives? I wondered how I’d got from their world into the apartment of a person I didn’t even recognize as myself. Throughout the autumn, whenever my eyes fell on the half-empty leather sheath, the absence of the scissors stabbed me afresh. I simply couldn’t believe they’d disappeared. Months after my return, I was still reransacking drawers and closet shelves I’d searched three times already.

  THE OTHER HOUSE of my childhood was a sprawling, glass-fronted, six-bedroom rich person’s retreat on a vast white-sand beach in the Florida Panhandle. In addition to its private Gulf frontage, the house came with free local golf and deep-sea fishing privileges and a refrigerated beer keg that guests were encouraged to make unlimited use of; there was a phone number to call if the keg ever ran dry. We were able to vacation in this house, living like rich people, for six consecutive Augusts, because the railroad my father worked for sometimes bought rail-maintenance equipment from the house’s owner. Without informing the owner, my parents also took the liberty of asking along our good friends Kirby and Ellie, their son David, and, one year, their nephew Paul. That there was something not quite right about these arrangements was evident in my parents’ annual reminders to Kirby and Ellie that it was extremely important that they not arrive at the house early, lest they run into the owner or the owner’s agent.

  In 1974, after we’d vacationed in the house for five straight years, my father decided that we had to stop accepting the owner’s hospitality. He was giving more and more of his business to one of the owner’s competitors,
an Austrian manufacturer whose equipment my father considered superior to anything being made in the United States. In the late sixties, he’d helped the Austrians break into the American market, and their gratitude to him had been immediate and total. In the fall of 1970, at the company’s invitation, he and my mother had taken their first-ever trip to Europe, visiting Austria and the Alps for a week and Sweden and England for another week. I never found out whether the company paid for absolutely everything, including airfare, or whether it paid only for their meals and their nights in top-drawer hotels like the Imperial in Vienna and the Ritz in Paris, and for the Lincoln Continental and its driver, Johann, who chauffeured my parents around three countries and helped them with their shopping, none of which they could have afforded on their own. Their companions for the trip were the company’s head of American operations and his wife, Ilse, who, beginning every day at noon, taught them how to eat and drink like Europeans. My mother was in heaven. She kept a diary of restaurants and hotels and scenic attractions—

  Lunch at Hotel Geiger “Berchtesgarden”—wonderful food & spectacular atmosphere—Schnapps, sausage (like raw bacon) & brown bread atop mountain—

  and if she was aware of certain historical facts behind the scenery, such as Hitler’s frequent visits to Berchtesgaden for recreational getaways, she didn’t mention it.

  My father had had serious qualms about accepting such lavish hospitality from the Austrians, but my mother had worn him down to the point where he agreed to ask his boss, Mr. German, whether he should decline the invitation. (Mr. German had answered, essentially, “Are you kidding me?”) In 1974, when my father voiced misgivings about returning to Florida, my mother again wore him down. She pointed out that Kirby and Ellie were expecting our invitation, and she kept repeating the phrase “Just this one last year,” until finally, reluctantly, my father signed off on the usual plan.