I have never been mistaken for nice.
As a child, growing up in a home—a tenement apartment, actually, which bore more than a passing resemblance to the standing set on the HONEYMOONERS—I lived in a state of constant fear, surrounded by the most domestic of terrorisms, where actual violence, in joyful infernal partnership with the verbal sort, was a day-to-day affair.
My parents fought each other constantly, taking their mutual loathing out on their sons. They whaled on us with whatever implement was at hand, wooden hangers preferred, but of course wire was just fine when necessary.
I can still recall the thwip of those hangers scything through the air. Ah, the good old days.
As easy as it might be to blame them, and as much as I have no love for my parents, the actions I took, my life, my choices were and are my own. My mother who birthed me, my adoptive father who took me as his own when I was three, my biological father, whose existence was unknown to me until I learned of this, quite by accident, well after my mother’s death—and you wonder why I’m not a mama’s boy?—did a dreadful job, but it was on me to do otherwise, despite the rank and dank shittiness of my upbringing.
I was an inarticulate little boy. (I know, I know, I’m flattered, but bear with me and trust me on this, really.) My only sources of happiness, my means of escaping from the ever-present storm of rage and sudden outbursts of physical violence that was my home life were comic books, television, movies and food, my sole resources of solace in those years.
I was more creep than asshole in what was an unabashedly asshole era, and a physical coward besides. I managed to navigate my daily life among others than my immediate family ineptly at best. It’s a wonder and a miracle I didn’t get my ass kicked more than I did.
And just to be clear, I got my ass kicked but good and plenty, thank you very much.
What little ability I had to express myself came out in bursts of terrified hostility, perversely reversed megalomania, and blind rage, pushing people away whenever possible. Utterly asocial, and as noted a complete creep, I came to understand decades later that I was a beta test variation on that recurring theme of a piece of shit the world revolves around, a secret sense of impostor self and self-loathing familiar to all too many of us as adults, in all too many walks of life.
One single party invitation in Junior high—one—was enough to wear out what little welcome I deserved with my schoolmates. For years I justified this isolation from my classmates by the fact of my being younger than the other kids, having started school early in the first place, and skipped a grade, too—and thus less mature. Blah, blah, blah.
This was, to be sure, completely self-serving bullshit. I may have been brilliant, and well read, and well informed, and believe you me I was, but I was also raised by wolves, insufferable, and unbearable, too.
Until mid-August of 1967, that is. I was sixteen, having barely graduated from high school, and I smoked my first number. Suddenly the world was transformed before my very eyes. Whereas my high school yearbook photo looked like a thumbprint with glasses startled by headlights, the times were a changing. And fast.
It was that introduction to marijuana, which served as a more than welcome, fuck it, let’s call it delightful, gateway drug to alcohol, that rearranged all these factors into a brand-new template, a pattern that would evolve and metastasize over the next twenty-five years.
This experience, this transformation, genuinely shocking in the speed with which it overtook and consumed my nature, seemed to indicate that what had preceded it had been a prelude, a training exercise, a cautionary tale and fount of experience to remind me that to look back was to fall into the abyss alone.
Within barely a year, that inarticulateness would vanish, eradicated by daily dope smoking and drinking. Out of nowhere, I was able to express myself in ways that I had only dared to pray for mere months earlier. And I do mean out of nowhere.
I can’t say where it came from, or for that matter where it had been hiding, but there was suddenly a gift of gab, a cruel and insistent clarity to accommodate and manifest the sharpness of tongue, previously mangled into incoherence, now transformed from blunt instrument to all too often bloodied dagger.
I cannot begin to affirm my gratitude for the transformation wrought on me by simply being permanently high, from mildly buzzed to full on fucked up, for what would eventually turn out to be a quarter of a century, for good and ill.
In remarkably short order, I came to understand that one of the delightful results of this dismissal and denial of reality via drugs and alcohol was the traversing, or maybe better said dynamiting, of the bridge crossing the chasm from creep to asshole. And in this regard, take an old man’s word, after a lifetime of experience. It is a far, far better thing to be an asshole than a creep.
And I remained an asshole, to a profound, humiliating and ultimately humbling degree, for that quarter century. To be clear, this is neither a justification, nor a rationalization, nor even an apology, although I’ve delivered a slew of the latter, and probably owe more of these than I can ever provide.
Rather, it’s a statement of the simple fact that had I not become that person, at that time, it’s likely I would never have had the career, let alone the life, that I have had. I am deeply grateful for that career, this despite the fact that I had to actually learn to be as good as I was, and that, more often than I care to examine or admit, I have had to frequently reinvent myself in order to accommodate whatever confounding new professional mischegas materialized before me.
And as for that life, I became, as a result of those newfound gifts of expression, a seducer. I married early and often, and was treacherous, guilt ridden, shame ridden, a liar, a cheat and a thief. My presentation propped up a façade that made relationships seem possible. My innate inability to actually have relationships left wreckage wherever l landed.
Perhaps significantly, and in regard to the career mentioned above, I was never able then, and to this day cannot, apply that seductive nature to my professional life. When I’ve tried, it comes off, at least for me, as genuine, as real, as convincing as, say, Tony Danza assaying the role of Tevye in a dinner theater production of FIDDLER ON THE ROOF.
All this, while working in the comic book business, an enterprise where entire franchises, entire careers have been built on transparently comical bullshit self-mythologizing that should, in a just and fair world, be laughed out of existence, as opposed to embraced and encouraged by an audience of grown men and women who really should know better.
Much of that self-mythologizing is, to be sure, all about the presentation of a persona of nice, a performance whose function is to imply the existence of merit and value as resident behind a well-crafted smile and engaging manner.
So no, to my great regret, I’ve never been able to apply my grasp of romantic politics to the political navigation demanded of business. Of course, this might be a good thing, because as good as I was at the sales aspect of seduction, I was lousy at follow through. You know, the permanence of intimacy thing.
As noted above, I was treacherous, casually cruel, undependable, unkind. I defined happiness as pleasure-based narcissism. Although I couldn’t have done it alone, I was the major problem that killed three marriages. To put it bluntly, I was not a good man.
The collapse of that third marriage put an end to this quarter century long phase in my life, and started the arc in which I find myself today, an arc committed to living a life that is both good, and in which good is done. None of this happened overnight. It took applied effort, self-analysis, self-abnegation, and self-appraisal.
We’re talking years here. Unlike what was a nearly overnight transformation from inarticulate creep to exquisitely demonstrative asshole—let’s face it, drugs and alcohol made that a fucking breeze—this was a process, ending with the ultimate understanding that whatever self-esteem I might ever deserve derived entirely from estimable behavior. How I felt, or for that matter what I felt, had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
So, with concerted effort, I became good. Honorable. Trustworthy. Content. Dependable. A good husband. A worthy friend. And again, it didn’t just happen. This required work. If you’ll allow me a moment of all too guileful self-regard, I became a stand-up guy.
All this notwithstanding, I will still never be mistaken for nice.
Modern culture, in its dismissal of detached curiosity and critical thinking in lieu of fatuous credulity and ridiculous overconfidence in its discernment, has thoroughly upended Leo Durocher’s once famous remark, “Nice guys finish last.” I can just imagine with gusto and delight the shitstorm this unfiltered verbal brawler might generate at large today.
And it’s worth noting I couldn’t give a shit about baseball, and know even less about it. It was his frequent nuptials that interested me in Durocher’s regard. Four for four. I can definitely relate.
Of course, what Leo—AKA “The Lip—” meant was that from his perspective, it took a genuine bastard to get ahead, let alone survive, in the dog-eat-dog world in which he lived. By “nice,” to be clear, he meant “good.”
The upending to which I refer above, naturally, is that in our modern world, all too often when we say “good” we mean “nice.”
And for those willing consumers of nice, there’s something sad, and enlightening too, about the ubiquity of “Likes” in the context of social media. In this day and age, as nice has been alarmingly successful in driving out good, those likes are a perfect reflection of performance, intention and presentation all too often applauded, appreciated and willfully mistaken for action.
Just as “honesty” has been supplanted by its apparently low-cal version, “authenticity,” which is to say the performance and presentation of honesty without any of the unpleasantly honest and uncomfortably truthful parts—see, for example, “My Truth—” “nice” now means, for all too many men and women, “good.” This despite the all too frequent and embarrassingly obvious incidences of those nice sorts perpetrating a big bamboozle on those who buy, and continue to buy, into this bullshit.
to be sure, I am, and have been for three decades, entirely socialized, and more than capable of charm, pleasantry and engagement.
I fuck up as much as any of us do. A saint I ain’t.
I am situationally kind.
I treat children with respect, gravity and fun, but as children, not as friends. This includes relatives.
I treat strangers with the same respect, until such respect is presumed upon. Over familiarity is a pretty good example of such a presumption.
“Don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you” seems like sound thinking. I will never fire the first shot. My goal in such a situation is to fire the last.
I treat those men and women I’m blessed to call friends with admiration, love, joy, and gratitude. And plenty of leeway. And occasional mischief.
But never pranks. That bullshit is the province of passive aggressive creeps who lack the courage to be bullies.
As much as I’d love to be liked, I don’t have it in me to do anything about it other than show up and hope for the best.
All of which means I have to accept that I’m as likely to be disliked as not.
Oh well.
And once again, as noted above, I have never been mistaken for nice.
Good is good enough for me.
Do with that as you will.