“Now’s the Time,” from my just released collection This Kind of Man, was inspired by a growing exasperation. After yet another predictable and preventable gun-related massacre, the rhetorical questions made their obligatory rounds: Who could have known, what should we have done, what can we do?
Seeing people one day snap and commit appalling acts of violence leads to fingers pointed (particularly by the media and those in the political arena) everywhere but at the root causes: a system that sets many up to fail, a mental health crisis that is woefully—and actively—underfunded, and our Made in America access to guns that’s at once appalling and embarrassing. If our country has become a sociopolitical powder keg, there are many parties indirectly (and in some cases, directly) lighting matches.
Like most of us, I’ve read more than my fair share of increasingly urgent if equally unsatisfactory features about why everyone is so angry. A decade ago, many of these discussions would occur in classrooms, pubs, or at the proverbial workplace water cooler. Today, the internet allows the aggrieved to opine at top volume, social media keeping score in a game no one can win. Somehow, despite these digital bullhorns, many people still claim to feel unheard, unacknowledged, or lost in the mass of info and entertainment overload. As discordant as it seems, even as we have unprecedented access to other people, too many human beings feel more alone than ever.
There are countless reasons and/or symptoms, and they are situated more in myth than reality. For instance, while America does not have the rigid and stratified class systems that still plague Europe, we do have a collective addiction to the white-washed fantasy also known as the American Dream. The proposition that any of us, regardless of who we are and whatever our initial station in life can, with the correct combination of industry, initiative, and luck, ascend to a status of wealth festers as one of the more powerful if poisonous fictions our country has produced. More, it is not merely promulgated but actively inculcated: history books and sentimental movies tend to tout the exceedingly rare rags-to-riches allegory while ignoring, denying, or conveniently dismissing the typical reality, which is that the working poor are likely to remain exactly where they are. In fact, as we’ve seen in the last few decades, this is more—not less—the case in a political and cultural system that has steadily ensured that those who have more will get more, usually directly at the expense of those who have little. And if the aforementioned media and political parties can keep people more focused on fighting than organizing, all the better—and thus our dysfunctions perpetuate themselves.
To prevent tragedies we need to understand them, or least make a genuine attempt to do so. Throughout human history, influential and wealthy forces have either ignored or exacerbated systemic crises to consolidate more power and money. Art is forever interested in the human stories that put faces on statistics and attempt to shake us out of our torpor; art forces us to look in the mirror and experience the shock of recognition. Until we see the problem clearly and realize it’s us, why should we expect anything to change?
Now’s The Time
By Sean Murphy
From This Kind of Man (May 7)
If not now, when?
He knows the answer. It’s all in his head: every reason, every word, every retort, all the things he might have said, or should have said. Or never had the right words to say. He always would, after, in his head, when it was too late. That’s the story of his life, he thinks. Every time the wrong decision or even worse, the inability to make one.
He’s still not certain now’s the time to do what he’s doing. Walking, outside, in this weather? He’d already passed the familiar fire warning sign, a big Smokey the Bear, (hat and pants but inexplicably topless; if you’re going for the anthropomorphic vibe, why not go all the way?), holding his shovel and announcing that the danger today was VERY HIGH. Usually, if not always, it was low and occasionally moderate; a straightforward, stark HIGH could be considered a big deal. Very High? Unprecedented, and he hasn’t missed a summer here in more than two decades. Maybe they were making a point, a little scare tactic going a long way for irresponsible smokers or potential arsonists who might let off a firecracker at the wrong time in the wrong place. No one could deny it was hot: above ninety in a town that still treated air conditioning as a luxury. Hell, most houses didn’t get cable TV until the turn of the century. Of course, all the new houses had AC and every other modern luxury—but this was a new class of people, the ones who were turning this formerly obscure destination into the worst kind of poser’s paradise.
If not today, when?
Need to get those steps in, he thinks sardonically, looking down at how tight his t-shirt is, keeping his beer gut strapped in like a hyperactive toddler in a car seat. Beer gut? It was also a pizza, chips, fast food, not enough fruit & veggies, healthy living is for faggots gut (Oops, can’t say that word anymore, of course. Even though he’d said it all his life, had been called it so often it was like taking a piss or brushing his teeth—just part of another boring and predictable day. He wasn’t even bullied, back in the day, because the bigger and brighter boys suspected he was anything less than straight, he knew they regarded him, not incorrectly, as another pockmarked loser lusting after girls who’d be offended if you asked them out, would be nauseated if they thought you ever jerked off thinking about them. He didn’t wear the word so much as a badge of honor as proof he was safely anonymous: not the antelope in the front or rear of the herd, not the first one the tigers would target when it was dinner time.)
Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
How many times had he heard his father say this? Before he split, that is. Who knew what his old man was looking like these days? Was he still jogging, putting in that roadwork, as he used to call it, or had he let the law of gravity do what it does to just about everyone, eventually? It occurs to him that he hasn’t cared about what his old man was doing or where he was, much less how he looked, in long enough that he could almost kid himself he wasn’t still nurturing all sorts of hostility about how his father had left him and his mother, cashed in for newer models with less issues, upshifting to the second act of his life. Maybe he’d gone in an entirely different direction; maybe he was a priest or about to run for president. Mostly, he thinks: fuck him, wherever and whatever he was.
Cars keep passing him at a steady clip in both directions: all headed someplace or back to where they left. So many cars, so many individual lives, all with stories. His old man had a story. He had a story. It’s his awareness of this fact that has caused him unreasonable agitation, especially lately. The idea that he can (or should, or shouldn’t) take charge of his own narrative, the things he can change, or else accept having no power to influence. To acknowledge all these potential scenarios are, in theory, possible, and if you don’t have faith in a higher power or your own ability to do anything that matters, it leaves you in a sort of desperate paralysis. You’re nowhere, nothing. And then what do you do?
Count the cars.
He counts the cars that pass him. Every other one an SUV or something north of $50K per model. These machines less a means of transportation than passports; tokens of the same lifestyles that made white fences (repainted each season) and grass even cows couldn’t eat routine, obligatory. Fake toys for fake people leading fake existences, all made possible by a fake system that rewarded fakeness. The kind of world no one ever asked his permission to be a part of.
Almost time until the sun explodes.
It’s hotter than he’d ever remembered it being. If you listened to the lunatics on the news, all of a sudden the earth was unlivable and man had caused all this heat and drought, accelerating some apocalypse or implosion. Was it in fact hotter than it had been when he was a kid, or even a few years ago? It seemed like it, but how many things seemed different than when he was younger? Maybe kids don’t notice these things because if they get hot, they jump in a pool or a lake, or the splash of a fire hydrant, whatever. You get sunburned and bitten by mosquitoes and don’t get to eat all the ice cream you want or your favorite team never wins and none of it matters because it’s all play and no worries. Maybe, he thinks, that’s the true reason retards seem so happy: eternally in the child’s mind, no bills or dates or jobs or friends or global warming to worry about. (Can’t say that word either, but that was another in a long list of insults he’d grown accustomed to, once upon a time.)
A horn blasts, disrupting his reflections, and he looks up, already too late to tell if it’s someone honking at him, or at another driver, or just some asshole letting the world know he’s there (because, he’s certain, it’s definitely a he). That’s something his father would do—an alpha male move, since men can’t trumpet like elephants or roar like lions. A way of making sure everyone (anyone) is aware: I’m here. To do something like this would require either a confidence or obliviousness he can’t fathom. To genuinely not care what anyone else thinks? Even wealthy people don’t have that privilege. Especially wealthy people. And he knew from wealthy people, having lived as a decidedly non-wealthy person in this town, a place that had become more popular, more expensive, less hospitable to those without means (stupid money, his father used to say) at a seemingly ridiculous pace. It did, he figures, mirror what was happening in the rest of the country (the rest of the world?)—not just the haves taking more and pissing on the heads of the have-nots , but a general acknowledgment that this was the way it was, and always had been; that America was finally catching up with what happens, inevitably, with all empires. The only people working hard, day after day, were the underemployed trying to stay afloat and the one-percenters making sure they kept a stranglehold on everything they could (and couldn’t yet) afford. The worst part, he figured, was that it wasn’t even personal; this was the world people voted and fought wars to preserve.
“On your left!”
He half-freezes and watches the two women pass him, obvious tourists on rented bikes, taking in the sights and working up a sweat. So they could cool off in their private pools before firing up the blender for margaritas, maybe before they showered and got dressed up for a night on the town, or else some catered affair, all a business expense or tax write-off. The restaurant he used to work for made most of their profits with this kind of clientele, people who had the resources to outsource everything, including the preparation and clean-up; their only job to eat, drink, and be perfect. Or miserable. Either way, strictly business. His mother had told him that was the gig to pursue—being the one shuttling the food or packing it up after, the kind of job that didn’t oblige heavy lifting (literally or figuratively) and often came with huge cash tips under the table (strictly business). But there was one reason—aside from the fact that he didn’t want, under any circumstances, to be around these people—that he understood he’d never be seriously considered for that job: he was, once again, trapped in the middle, a native speaker who had neither the education or the looks to put this class of people at peace, and not poor enough (e.g., white) to be fully exploited. The foreigners, here for seasons at a time because living year-round was financially out of the question, arguably had it best. They came in hot, and left before it got cold (figuratively but especially literally). Not necessarily the ones who worked in the hotels—that was shit work to be sure, but all those lucky or attractive enough to gain employment in the hospitality industry, being in the presence of this plastic fantasy.
If you can’t beat them…
He thinks about the girl at the store, the one that could have been, but probably not. The one he had gotten to know in that unique way when you see someone often enough to “know” them without knowing the first thing about them. How many times a week did he see her and exchange pleasantries as he checked out, his beer or snacks tiding him over for a day or two? She was younger, part of the new wave of worker (Lithuanian? Portuguese?). That one time, having rung him up and nodded goodbye too many times to count, she eyeballed his 12 pack and said “Nice choice.” Suddenly there were countless ways he could play this. “Too bad I have to drink them alone,” he might have said. No, too forceful, also kind of admitting he didn’t have anyone (female or male) to hang out with. “I’ll save a few for you,” he might have tried, but would she have understood the humor, could he have managed to quickly follow up his comment with an invite? “What’s your brand?” he should have attempted; anyone could pull that off. Easy, a lay-up. He could have gone harder with “What kind does your boyfriend like?”, something that bold requiring a definitive response, opening up a whole history of possibilities. Instead, he’d weakly nodded his head and held out his hand for change.
And after that he had to replay how he’d blown it every time he checked out, because he always had less than eight items, and she was always working the quick check-out aisle, too new or dumb to have been promoted to the regular lanes, waiting on grumpy housewives or Ivy League nannies or semi-aliens, like her, who were combining odd jobs and under the counter wages, inevitably for wealthy, wasp-y bitches, the kind of people who played croquet in their manicured fortresses.
Time to water the grass.
There were exactly two types of lawn on this island: withered crab grass that needed more rain and man-made hydration than were on offer or affordable, and the expansive lawns so green they looked like carpets that were more science experiment than actual color. The types of lawns adjoining properties belonging to people for whom no expense was an obstacle. The kind of people who made (or, more likely, inherited) the kind of money that made these fabricated lifestyles their own kind of scientific experiment.
He watches the two girls approach: late teens, cheerleaders or class clowns biding time before college or marriage or whatever fill-in-the-blank fairy tale their parents had already paid for. They might have been daughters of the girls who’d alternately tormented and ignored him when he was their age.
“Excuse me,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“What time is it?”
They look at him, then at each other.
“You’ve got a watch on,” one of them says.
“That’s my whole point,” he replies, grinning.
They give him a look he’s familiar with: confusion tinged with, well, no other word for it: disgust. They walk on and he pauses, adjusts his backpack, then keeps going in the opposite direction, very much still the main character in the story he’s writing about himself.
No time to whine.
Speaking of which, maybe it actually tasted good, he thinks. The stuff he used to bring by the tub-load to the recycling bin the summer he bussed tables at the country club. Fancy pants. Five-hundred-dollar dinners for a family of four, featuring a round or two of cocktails, apps all around, usually shrimp cocktail or clam chowder, salads, entrees, a bottle or three of wine, desserts for the kids, after-dinner drinks, usually something undrinkable (he knew, from sampling too many floaters, the swill warming like sewage in a snifter). Bottles of vino, even the cheapest shit at least $50 a pop, usually upward of one-to-two hundred. And the big timers, five car families with friends and no worries in the world, ordering like they had to spend their money before it burned holes in their bank accounts. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll burn your house down,” he thinks, recalling all those faceless monsters, the unquenchable hatred he felt for them, for his co-workers, especially the wait staff, the girls in particular, all slumming it for the summer before heading back to school taking classes to learn how to take over the world. God how he despised them, not able to fathom how they lived enough to envy them.
Time for a wild card?
He thinks about hitch-hiking. Speaking of old-fashioned ideas. He remembers his father saying: this whole island used to be a haven for hitchhikers. To and from the beach, to the grocery store, the package store, name it. It was a much different world then. A whiter world (facts are facts no matter how out of fashion). That was one thing he had figured out: yes, back in the bad old days that seemed so good now it was whites who worked the unthinkable jobs, being condescended to without shame or exception. But there was a type of understanding; it was out in the open and the possibility, however illusory, still seemed conceivable: someday you too could join the ranks of these elite stiffs. That’s what he realized made him kindred spirits with the displaced ditch diggers and fresh out of luck farmers: there were now people not only willing to do that work, but do it cheaper and with enthusiasm. How can we expect to ever change that pattern? Not happening. The world keeps turning and finds new ways to make things suck more for people like him. He sticks up his thumb and makes a bet with himself: if anyone picks me up I’ll tell him (obviously it will be a him) to take me to the water. Maybe I’ll even jump in, fully clothed. It’ll be a plot twist, a revision to the work in progress.
Time to get real.
“There’s college,” his mother had said. Often. Out of the question, he’d responded a few times, and then never said or felt the need to say anything further. Too expensive. Too different. Too much of it, too little of me. Every excuse in the book, especially the good ones. “Heck, there’s junior college. We called it JUCO when I was your age,” she laughed. He never laughed back, not one time.
Time to lose your mind.
Sure, he’d gone down the rabbit hole. How could he not? It was all right there, just waiting for anyone to find it. Online, all the too-easy explanations for why everything seemed forever out of reach. Especially the stuff served up like a free buffet for people like, well, like him. Angry, alienated, alone. He looked for—and at first, found—something like solidarity. Not understanding or even companionship (these people were not easy on the eyes, and that was just the dudes), but a feeling, proof he wasn’t alone. That other people also saw this lame joke for what it was, that they understood the fix was in and the sissies in places of power spent all their time making sure it stayed that way, and every day it became less reasonable to assume (much less hope) anything would ever change. Unless, you know, revolution, but that’s the kind of game where your own life is collateral damage, and, he knew (and came to see, in the lower depths of his rabbit hole) that not many of these weekend warriors, these wannabe insurrectionists, were going to pony up if and when shit got real. These chumps, he knew, were very willing and able to fuck around, but very few of them wanted to find out.
Time to tell the truth.
“Let me tell you the secret,” he imagines his old man saying, checking in maybe from the west coast, or somewhere across the sea, or right here in this town ruled by people from different zip codes. “You want to know what’s out there? You’ve got to cut the cord and jump in.” Yeah, if you say so, he fancies replying, smirk frozen on his face. “I’m serious,” the man who’d ceased to be his father would insist. “You have to be willing to do anything and leave anything—even your family.” Like you did, he’d say, and his old man would look at him as though he had the solution to every secret ever conceived, but simply wasn’t sure he could trust the young man not following in his footsteps to grasp. “Here’s the good news or bad news, depending on what you’re made of,” his father would say, a parting shot masquerading as parental concern. “The better life is a members-only club, and only one person can keep you out if it. If you’re willing to do whatever it takes, you might surprise them all. You might even surprise yourself.” No, that’s another thing he had come to a certain, painful peace with: there were no surprises in this life.
Time to talk to God.
What about it, God, what do you have to say for yourself, he doesn’t say and had never said, because as stupid as he knows he is, he isn’t clueless enough to think there’s a friendly old ghost handing out cards, like a dealer for the fanciest spot on the strip. He’s seen enough during his short life to remain mostly content staying in his corner, playing the nickel slots, knowing it was all rigged. What else was he supposed to do, punch the sky or jump off a bridge?
Time’s up.
He’s arrived, finally. At the store: all the beer in the world waiting for him, perfectly chilled, all the bottles of wine he’d never had sufficient curiosity, or nerve, to sample. The protein on display, priced by the pound: bleached chicken breasts and steaks sprayed red to attain that fake freshness. Every kind of junk food imaginable: baked or light or full-on fat boy, with dips and salsas, everything packaged and canned and sponsored by some type of movie or mascot, all of it an assembly line that let you measure how you were living. All arranged to keep you from thinking about dying.
Time to tell everyone what time it is.
He walks in, his work boots wet (with sweat? Blood?), reminding him how far he’s come to get here. It’s the mid-to-late afternoon lull, either those customers who’d gotten a late start on their day and were running behind, against the clock, or the ones ahead of the game, getting their chores done, taking care of business so they could relax and enjoy the spoils of all the hard, meaningless work they’d been doing all their lives. And right there, on Register One, is his girl. Right as rain, he thinks. Not enough seniority to work one of the slower registers; seemingly trapped for life—or at least this summer—at Eight Items or Less, which meant serving the simpletons with half-full carts thinking they were putting one over on the system, knowing they’d never be called out. Getting back at the Man or whatever it was that motivated them to cheat or assume their time was more important than anyone else’s.
“Now’s the time,” he says, mostly to himself.
She looks up and gives him her usual greeting: the half nod, a kind of half gesture—less or more than business cordial, depending on the day. Today it’s tough to tell: her eyes don’t linger for that extra half-second, which would signify a good day, she was in a good mood. On a day that was definitively bad, there would be the briefest of looks, an embarrassment to call it actual eye contact. Today, though, it’s impossible to discern, so he takes it for exactly what it is: the look someone on the clock gives someone else when their shift is half-over, the kind of day where it’s not yet clear if it was trending toward good or bad. Too soon to tell.
And, he thinks, too soon to tell what kind of day it was, not to mention how the night would go. Or the rest of the week. Or the rest of her life. Any of our lives. Works in progress, out of our hands no matter how much we wish or pray or pretend to care either way. All these people holding on for the one thing no one was guaranteed, no matter how often they went to church or how many people they managed, no matter how big their houses or small their waistline: time. No one but God, assuming he existed, could tell anyone, in advance, exactly how much time we have. Unless someone was willing to get in the way, pre-empt God’s bigger plan. Someone, for instance, exactly like him.
Now’s the time.
He repeats the words, loud enough that even she might hear them. Or could, if not for the sound of the bullet leaving the gun, hot to his touch, having baked inside his backpack on a High Alert Day. There’s AC in the store, of course, but it would take a long time for his piece to cool down, especially after it’s been fired. Most especially after it had been used until the clip was empty. He realizes he has one final choice to make. (You’re fired, he thinks—head shot confirming this is the last time she’d ever sort of look at him, at anything—almost his last thoughts, his suicide note exploding in real time and living color. Something to remember me by, he thinks.) Actually, a few choices still need to be made: there are more people than he has bullets (he could have brought more ammo; he certainly had plenty, but that would have been too heavy to carry, and he’d never gone the extra mile at any point in his life, so why try impressing anyone, least of all himself, at this late stage?). He has to choose: who’s in, who’s out. He starts toward the produce aisle, all the way to the right, and realizes that’s how everyone entered the store, where everyone begins. But this is a story about endings (The End, he thinks), so he heads in the opposite direction: cleaning supplies. Clean up in Cleaning Supplies, he thinks, smiling inwardly. He walks quickly, unable to hear the gasps and screams, because the gun’s still in his hand, and it’s simply not possible to hear human voices over the sound of hot lead exploding from steel, heading toward whatever luck or fate or random nothingness determined. He fires off a few rounds, mostly clean hits, but he won’t be around to tally up his stats. There’s only one thing left on his mind at this point, as the seconds count down the end of so many stories: Make sure to save at least one for yourself.
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Order THIS KIND OF MAN!
THIS KIND OF MAN offers an unvarnished look at life in 21st Century America, excavating the complicated, tender, wild truth of what it is to be a man across generations and relationships. These stories interrogate the pressures and tensions of contemporary life, and the ways men grapple with them, often without success. Issues such as marriage, fatherhood, aggression, alcoholism, gender expectations, generational backlash, and the inexorable dread of death, abound.
Many of these stories live within a slow implosion of coping, and often failing, as well as those who refuse to succumb, addressing concerns oft-discussed, or not discussed enough, in mainstream print: gun violence, the recent history of coal country Appalachia, sports-related concussions, illegal immigration (and the jobs many of these ostensibly unwelcome folks are obliged to do), homelessness, and the inability of men to honestly connect or communicate.
Far from excusing or exonerating toxic males, this collection locates their violence (toward others, against themselves) in the context of a deadening culture and the false narratives that prevail in an exploitative, zero-sum game capitalist model, where those without are encouraged to quarrel with similarly overworked and underpaid, mostly blue-collar workers. We see that our received notions of manhood and masculinity are inculcated-from the beginning and by design-to ensure willing participation in a system where the overwhelming majority are excluded from the start. We witness the way these dysfunctions are handed down like inheritance, and how every cliché, from fighting to drinking to intolerance of dissent and distrust of others, is a carefully constructed trap, preventing solidarity, empathy, and love (for others, for one’s self).
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