The Man from New York

The Story of my Grandfather

There was a time not long ago when a person telling you that they were from New York carried a certain kind of mystique. It felt something like a veteran telling you he’s seen combat and you’d have to nod your head, as if to say “I defer to you, sir. I know nothing of such events.” New York was fearsome in the imagination, well beyond lesser cities. It wasn’t only that big business happened there, but that the biggest business could not be conceived to happen anywhere else. I remember so many movies set in New York, each with an unspoken attitude that if any story could be imagined as significant then it could only happen in that one particular place. New York was a place for myth and reality to touch. A place for people to either make their fortune or be cast down into despair. It seemed that even the most common people in New York went to work every day in skyscrapers and met the challengers of the day with unimaginable grit.

Or at least it seemed that way to me for many years, if only because I am a country mouse by both habit and birth. For the first part of my life, New York was a terrifying specter of otherworldly ways of thinking, home to alien marvels, and an apotheosis of what people meant when they said the city. In my heart, if you went to New York for even for a few minutes you’d either be mugged or lose everything you owned in a game of three-card monte with some street-wise confidence man who existed both to satisfy his own selfish greed and to keep away unsophisticated people like me from the backwoods.

The first fact I ever knew about my grandfather was that he grew up in New York. When I was a child, you might as well have told me that he had sprung straight from the pits of hell, forged by the devil out of sulfur and burning rock. At least, my mother and father were visibly unsettled whenever his name was mentioned. I could often hear them whispering his name, either “Dad” or “George” and it was always a discussion on how best to avoid his displeasure. I was right to be terrified of him but it wasn’t New York that made him terrifying. It was the reverse. I can see that now. New York was terrifying because men like my grandfather had once lived there. And make no mistake, my grandfather was terrifying.

He never smiled. Never. I can’t stress that enough. Sometimes he’d lift the corners of his mouth up if you asked him why he never smiled, but it wasn’t the same thing. It was a wisecrack, but that’s not to say that a wisecrack is the same as joking or laughing. He was far too Brooklyn to wear his emotions so plainly. I only ever heard him laugh once, in a dark theater while watching Lethal Weapon 4, and as soon as the lights came back on he said he couldn’t believe I’d asked him to see such a dumb movie. He had an expression at all times that was so flinty it was like you could strike a match on his cheek.

He brought the same stony demeanor to the small business he operated to subsidize his retirement, which was taking youth sports photos for the county. Imagine being a grade schooler attempting to smile as the Irish answer to Clint Eastwood barked “Fuzzy Pickles!” from behind a camera at ten in the morning on a Saturday. That phrase being his idea of a joke. Still, I packaged a lot of photos of scared looking kids every year for both baseball and soccer. Some kids would take one look at him and start bawling without being able to explain why. Comforting terrified kids was one of my primary duties. I knew why they were so unsettled. When my grandfather looked at you with his ice-dagger eyes, it was like he knew every rotten secret in your heart.

I was his assistant from the time I could spell well enough to push the little plastic letters onto the sign board. A job I started at something like seven years old. It was easy enough work. The team name in the biggest font, right in the center, then the coach’s names somewhat smaller, then the date smallest of all. That way when people looked back on the picture years later they could remember all those details. I also took the order envelopes and prepped the kids in line, generally all older than myself, and offered a black plastic comb when necessary. At five dollars an hour, I could end up with fifty bucks over a weekend— which could buy a lot of fantasy novels and action figures. Plus lunch was free, a hamburger and a milkshake back when I was young enough to think that a strawberry milkshake was a valid form of hydration to get me through the day.

From this description, it might be hard to imagine that I loved him with a warm glow like the fire of a cozy well-tended hearth. Even his memory puts me at ease as I write this now. Or, maybe it is not so hard to see for some of you. My life was otherwise chaotic. I loved him because he was solid and unbeatable as iron. I loved him because you always knew where you stood with him. I loved him because he always made sure the rules were simple and known. He was a man who had himself handled and that meant he could handle anything. In the turbulence of my youth he was a fountain of order. His presence, to me, was like Gandalf holding a staff of light over his head charging down a hill to reinforce the men of Rohan at Helm’s Deep. Except that light was an unspoken but ever-present message to my mother, father, and later step-father. The message said, “calm down immediately and grow up… or there will be consequences!”

As an adult, I love him much more for the obvious sacrifices he made to bring that order to my young life. My grandmother as well, but she’ll need her own piece later on. There were nicer places to retire than my hometown. There are few places I can imagine that would be worse. But after he left the telephone company, he still dedicated the rest of his life to ensuring my mom didn’t do anything too crazy when it was clear she was losing the plot. I don’t think there was ever any question about looking after her in his mind. He was her father. It was his duty.

It wasn’t only my mother that he kept in line. He carried that same order with him everywhere. It was part of him. He couldn’t not be himself. That’s what I appreciate most. He was himself, and by being himself it forced problems to go away. In particular, I loved the quiet power in him that allowed him to casually slap a grown man upside the head with no consequences during sports picture day.

In the haze of childhood memory, I am certain only that he did this once but it feels as if he might have done it a dozen times. I remember some tired and probably hungover father, annoyed to be spending a Saturday at a tedious event like picture day with his disobedient son. I remember the son did something, but not exactly what. I remember that father’s raised voice and a too hard slap to that little child’s head. And I remember my grandfather pausing everything, without drama or announcement, leaving his expensive Nikon camera unattended on its tripod, so that he could casually slap that same father in the same way that man had just slapped his son. Hard, but quick, with no lead up or elaboration. It made a solid ”thwack” sound that inspired an immediately empathic “oof.” Children gasped. Moms gasped. Dads turned in confusion, wondering how my grandfather had responded so quickly and so decisively. Then, with that same decisiveness, my grandfather quietly walked away and resumed taking pictures.

I could not do this. I could slap that man. I would slap him, to be clear. The one thing that will cause me to immediately hurt a stranger without question is witnessing deliberate injury to a child. That part isn’t what I’m contesting. What I’m saying is that I could not strike that man without getting worked up or upset. I could not slap that man in front of his child and friends and not find myself in a fistfight with him moments later. Even if I managed to break the contact, it would escalate as soon as I walked back to the camera. I’d be too emotional. I’d leave too many dangling threads of myself for him to tug on to keep the conflict going.

When my grandfather struck that man, it was like he opened and closed a door behind himself. In one room was the place where an unruly adult had forgotten his duty and had to be reminded by force. In the other, the business of taking photographs. The hungover father could not have retaliated because my grandfather had already left the place where such retaliation could ever be seen as appropriate. The man had been struck without emotion other than annoyance. For him to become hysterical and strike back would be weak. Call that toxic masculinity or honor culture or whatever you want. My grandfather hit that man with a manliness so firm and secure that any act of retaliation would have been indistinguishable from humiliation. Something in my grandfather’s stance, or manner, or attitude, made that man understand that he had deserved to be hit like that. The French would call it a je ne sais quoi, but that is just a fancier way of saying “I don’t know what” in another language.

I sometimes think that what he had was the impossible to describe thing that conservatives feel like we lost in masculine identity. I also think I could have the same trait if not for the smallest part of my mind rebels that it should not work this way. The part that says it would be better if there was some holistic and official process involved. It’s a small voice, but it’s there. My grandfather’s way was purer. There was no false bravado in him. No moralizing speech. No presumption of an ethic outside of his own preference. His preference was simply trusted by himself to be healthy, self-contained, pro-civilization and family-oriented. He was in his mid-sixties. It was a risk to strike a man half his age or less. He could have found himself seriously hurt. Yet he took that risk because men should not strike children. He believed so instinctively that no man, regardless of size, should strike a child that no man could without directly insulting my grandfather’s honor. And so he’d responded according to his own preference. Having it written down and official would have somehow broken the magic of it.

I hope you will not judge me that I find that beautiful.

I can’t quite imagine him as a boy, only a smaller version of the steel-haired grandfather who picked me up to go take pictures on weekends. But once upon a time when he was a boy in Brooklyn some loudmouth Italian said something to make him angry. Probably about his dad taking off to go live with his second, secret family. Then my grandfather picked up that would-be shit-talker and threw him through the glass display case in a candy store. It was quite the drama and there was a racial angle to it that doesn’t quite translate to modern times. He was in trouble not only with that particular boy but with “the Italians” in general. When he got home his mom made him join the Navy. That was just how things used to be done in New York in those days.

He met my grandmother in the Navy. They were both a few years too late for WWII so there wasn’t much to do but go to dance halls. Korea was still some place no one had ever heard of. She was living with her sisters in Port Angeles, Washington and they all needed husbands. Military men were considered excellent candidates. My grandmother was seeing the chef on the USS Winona where my grandfather was also stationed. Then, and I swear that at minimum this was related to me as true, the chef fell off the deck into the ship’s propeller and was chopped into a million bloody pieces. Agreed to by all tellers to be a complete accident.

My grandfather was there to pick up the pieces of my grandmother’s broken heart. He was the ship’s electrician. A man with a future. He couldn’t cook to save his life, but he could save them an inestimable amount of money in household repair bills. He took her all over the country, including several years in Hawaii, as he worked his way up the ranks to chief petty officer.

He was remarkably good at making things work. He took every course offered by the Navy to build up his skills. Bought every tool you that would help him be useful, and I still have one of his original Wiggy volt testers. I’d like to think that I inherited his talent for fixing things. He certainly pushed me hard enough to develop it. Even today the idea of hiring another man to do work on my house strikes feels like a lifestyle change on the scale of polyamory. It never had to be said that part of what makes a man’s house his own, is that he sustains it with his own labor. We spent endless hours putting things all together in our heads and taking them apart again. He’d make me explain things to him like that before he let me touch any tool. He did it a lot when he made cabinets, and he almost never had to write anything down to keep track of the numbers. If you asked him where his designs were stored he would only tap his temple.

He told me once about checking the steam pipes on battleships, and how a sailor would move around with a broom handle looking for pin-hole leaks. You’d know you found one if the broom handle suddenly cut in half. Somehow, that is always the first image that comes to mind when I imagine what it is like to do maintenance on a battleship. He also used to tell me stories about throwing gas grenades into a bunker to train his men on how to properly wear a gas mask. I guess every once in a great while a guy would panic, get claustrophobic, and take off his own mask then end up puking everywhere for the next day and a half.

He left the Navy to work for AT&T back when it was still Bell Systems. He started working by climbing electrical poles and hanging wires. Doing home telephone line installations. By retirement, he had become a regional operations manager for the Pacific Northwest. It seemed to all of us that he was impossibly wealthy because he could go into Costco and buy literally anything he wanted without looking at the prices. Which, I’m proud to say, is a level of wealth I have also attained. I had the benefit of his advice once I wised up enough to finally take it but he had to figure it all out for himself.

Be the first man in and the last man out.

Be dependable.

Always do more than is asked.

Let people know you want to do more.

Then do it.

Everything he did, he did to be upstanding. He was a scoutmaster. He climbed mountains. He sent money to help support his mom. He both fostered and adopted children. He never thought particularly well of himself for any of those things. It was just what a man did.

The first time I ever remember meeting him I was in preschool and I tried to hide behind a teacher, before I realized his relation to me. I got my height from him but still being a child it seemed like he loomed over everyone else. Like I said, he was terrifying, even though he never raised his voice to any of us kids. During a game of hide and seek, after a teacher repeatedly insisted that he was my grandfather and he was there to take me home when class ended, I shyly asked if he could pick me up and put me in a tree with all the other kids.

Dear Reader, he refused.

Instead, he took the ever-present toothpick out of his mouth, which I would later learn had found its place there once my aunt convinced him to stop smoking, and said, “no, she’ll see you right away. Here, I’ve got a better idea.”

In the one minute before Ortensia Reynoso finished counting and transformed into the playground demon known to all children only as “it,” my grandfather walked me over to the tree. He got down on one knee. He pointed to Ortensia, the tree, and the three-fourths of my class that was hiding in its branches.

“When she comes to find you, just be on the opposite side of the tree. Keep walking in a circle. Trust me.”

Then he walked away.

I was so terrified that I almost didn’t understand him. It seemed impossible and surely it would be better if I was up in the bare-leaf tree with everyone else.

When Ortensia finished counting she ran over to the tree. Like a skittish horse, I side-stepped to stay on the opposite side from her. I was certain she would find me right away and I was equally certain that it would be humiliating. It seemed a miracle that she did not.

Of course, everyone in the tree was found in the first few seconds. Then, figuring she was done with the tree, Ortensia ran on to find the rest of the class. Then she found everyone else in short order. Hide and Seek games at that age don’t last very long.

Ortensia didn’t find me, though.

Even when the entire class started laughing, watching me walk around the tree out in the open, it was like she couldn’t imagine anyone hiding by the tree because in her mind she’d already found everyone there. She even walked all the way around it at one point. The reality and her picture of reality were broken and she couldn’t stitch them back together. I was part of a magic spell, cast by my grandfather, and all I had to do to maintain the enchantment was to keep walking in a circle around the tree.

Eventually, the game ended and I revealed myself. We all had a good laugh, but I remember it vividly because it set the tone for my entire relationship with my grandfather. Me wanting to “go with the flow” and “follow the herd” and my grandfather insisting that I move the opposite way. There was a near constant insistence that I step back, look up, look around, consider a different angle. Eventually, he just bought me one of those magic kits they make for kids. I guess he was trying to teach me that sometimes the difference between magic and a stupid bungling goof was about a half-inch of perspective. I remember him watching me practice, repeating, again and again, “No, think about what I’m thinking. You can see the scarf. What do I see?”

In second grade, I did a magic show for the whole school. By the time I left sixth grade, I had a collection of about a dozen fake thumbs.

He spent a good chunk of his retirement learning to carve. Sometimes we’d come across an interesting piece of wood and throw it into the trunk of the car. We made small figurines together from a book he bought called Little Whittled Ones. After a while, we would just carve whatever came to mind. All of mine were hideous two inch tall sea captains for some reason. Or gnomes, kind of. I didn’t have the hand strength to be very effective. By the time I was in second grade I had my run of the wood shop in his garage. I remember the first time he left me alone with the power tools asking why he trusted me so much and he asked, “Do I need to trust you to not want to cut your fingers off?”

When I was in junior high, he took as many of his grandkids as he could get ahold of on a summer trip across the western U.S. in his motorhome. To recount it all would be a whole other story but we saw all the biggest things you can imagine. Mount Rushmore. The Grand Canyon. Carlsbad Caverns. Too many other places to name. I remember we spent a day visiting one of my grandma’s cousins and I used the bathroom in the middle of the night. There in the dark, I found her wig, glasses, and false teeth all lined up on her bathroom counter like a decapitated head and almost screamed.

The motorhome’s engine died going up a hill and we spent a week outside Needles, California in a resort called the Avi while it was repaired. My cousin Timmy tried to eat a Subway sandwich for every meal and revealed that he’d brought an entire locked briefcase of Surge soda on the trip and claimed he’d been saving it for just such an occasion. The only channels were Country Music Television and some local access WWE professional wrestling knock-off filmed in someone’s backyard. Some guy in sweatpants named, I kid you not, “Gay Lord” would beat up his friends in an arena made of blue workout mats, folding chairs, and yellow nylon rope. Then another of his friends, a low energy and untalented announcer, would almost but not quite shout, “Man, look at Gay Lord eating his lunch!”

I still say that to my brother sometimes, whenever we see someone do something that’s almost impressive. “Man, look at Gay Lord eating his lunch!”

It cost him over fifteen thousand dollars for the repair and the hotel stay. This would have been in 1998, so a lot more by today’s value. He never even mentioned it. I don’t think he even thought much about it. Accidents happened. He’d saved his whole life to be able to afford to brush hem off.

Most of all, he was just there. There when my parents divorced. There when my mom married Mike. There when my half-sister and half-brother were born. No on had to ask him to come over and help, because he was always there to help. We were his grandchildren. He could see no better place for him to be.

I’ve got other stories about him that I love. One day some obnoxious kids honked their horn at him and he parked his car in the middle of the road so he could get out and go talk to them. And it didn’t escalate or anything like that, because he wasn’t angry. He might have been having a casual conversation with them about something else entirely, but they were all shaken by the confrontation and said “Sorry” and “sir” and all sorts of other things when he got back into the car. They were kids misbehaving and he’d spent a long career in the military making boys into men, so it wasn’t something he could just walk by without saying something.

Another of those early meetings with him, before he moved, was his discovery that my sister beat the shit out of me for fun. She did it in front of him on purpose to test his boundaries. She didn’t claw at my face with her fingernails and make me bleed as that would have been too much for an introduction. Instead, she pulled my hair as hard as she could and took a big chunk of it with her upstairs. Also, she took the candy bar he’d gotten for me as she’d already eaten hers and went upstairs to enjoy it in the privacy of her room.

He didn’t do anything but ask me a few questions.

Did I know I was bigger than her? Why didn’t I fight back? Did my parents know about this? How long had it been going on?

I tried explaining that I wasn’t allowed to hit back because she was a girl. That my father would scream at me for even thinking about doing that but somehow it didn’t seem to land with him. He knew what was right and wasn’t looking for anyone’s permission, even mine, to agree with his view.

He just said we were all alone that day and he was old and he probably wouldn’t hear anything if two kids were fighting in another part of the house.

In my memory, I almost killed my sister that day. But of course I was only a little kid so it wasn’t quite that bad. It was definitely, ugly though. I punched her repeatedly in the face, wrestled her all over her room, and took back my candy bar. She was totally stunned. I couldn’t even talk during or after doing it. I just shook and my grandfather made me an omelet. Then he went to make sure my sister okay, which of course she was.

I’d never been allowed to fight back before. When I’d tried I’d always been told I was evil for doing so.

Is that barbaric? Yes… kind of. So was my dad trying to overlay his issues with his mom on top of my relationship with my sister. He took this whole overly dramatic perspective about men not hurting women and placed it on little kids who were looking to him for guidance on right and wrong. And consider my grandfather’s perspective. What was he going to do if he lived four hours away? The notion of separating children from their parents hardly even existed as a concept. The only thing he could do beyond stopping her for that day was to make sure my sister understood that I could and would fight back. And now that I’m older I can see he did this for me and for my sister. What my dad was training her to be, unintentionally teaching her that it was okay to hurt people if you were mildly annoyed by them, was also terrible.

He met death stoically when I was in my sophomore year of high school. Liver cancer got him at seventy-three. Everyone else was much more upset about the whole thing than him. It’s easy to be tough and gruff when you’re putting on a show and there are now consequences. It’s a whole other thing when the grim reaper is breathing down your neck. It was who he was, though. He couldn’t be some other way. It wasn’t in him to panic just because he was dying.

Several times when he was in the hospital he was reading a newspaper to restrain himself from getting annoyed with my aunt for attempting to heal him with some Asian humming magic. He indulged it for her sake more than his own. She was too old to give up a belief in humming magic with the time he had left.

I took driver’s ed with the idea I’d be able to drive him to his cancer treatments. My grandma hardly ever drove anywhere and that was the tiny fear she latched onto amidst the greater fear of losing her partner of over fifty years. She hardly ever drove. Who would drive my grandfather to his appointments? He died before I had to a chance to get my license.

It happened right before gym class and my mother was in hysterics when she had me pulled out of school. I think it hurt her the most because she suddenly knew the only person who was keeping her safe from herself was gone. It’s still hard not to see that as the exact date her life began to go really off the rails, although it’s still better than a lot of other people with bipolar disorder. She knew the pain of his judgement was good for her on some level. She might slow herself down from making a terrible mistake out of fear of her mother’s judgement, but only fear of her father could actually stop her from going through with it.

It only took him a few months to die. I helped clean his sheets a few times, and move him to the bath when he messed the bed. He was not embarrassed to be naked in front of me and that helped me not to be embarrassed to see him naked. He was delirious at the end, but in a moment of fierce intensity he insisted that he could see his mother, his aunts, and his uncles. He was not religious, a lapsed Catholic, but I believe he saw them although at the time I was convinced it was delusion. I have found a somewhat frustrating-to-others cross between empiricism and superstition in my middle age. I do not believe our world would be what it is if such miraculous events were provable and “scrutable” this side of death, but I also believe that some boundary begins to crack and ceases to keep those lines so clean when our mind begins to disconnect itself from our bodies.

He was buried in a military cemetery with a twenty-one gun salute. I took part of his ashes and gave them to the ocean, which is what he wanted done with all of his remains. A naval man longs to be close to the sea. My grandmother refused that at the last moment, terrified of being buried somewhere without him when her own time came. I think he would have understood. Above all else, he considered it his duty to be there for his family.

I’m about to have another child. A few days ago I thought my brand new baby boy was well on his way, but it turned out in the messiness of pregnancy that really my wife had just eaten the Spicy Honey Pepper Pimento Chicken Sandwich at Chik-fil-A and it gave her false contractions. That’s a slight exaggeration on my part but if you were to explain it to someone without wanting to look smart, that’s more or less what happened. Still, he’s due any day. I think I started writing this piece for him. One of his names will be in honor of my grandfather.

What do I want him to know when he’s old enough to read this? And his older brother and hopefully his other siblings? I want you all to know what it means to be strong.

I ran from duty for basically all of my twenties. Even when I did things like show up for my little brother and sister, it was done by pushing off the necessary forging of my own obligations and duties. I wanted to live disconnected from the world, neither taking nor giving. I did not understand that those kinds of duties are like the bones around which an adult identity is formed, and that you cannot be strong if you have none. That was my single greatest mistake, and I’ve repeated it here in the description.

My grandfather was not strong in and of himself. He was strong in the service of his duty to his family and what he believed was right. Not only right for himself but for others. Strength is a place you move toward and inhabit and you are strong only while you remain in that place. That place isn’t a physical place like New York but a place in your mind. You cannot be brave if you live your life so that you have nothing to fear beyond your own death. You must build things you value and risk the hurt of losing them. You cannot be dutiful without duty. You have to try and risk your own weakness. You cannot be responsible without obligations. Find the courage to invest yourself in other people. You’ll be hurt, many times, but not nearly as much as if you hold yourself back entirely. It was the willing pursuit of those duties that made my grandfather indomitable and I do not regret my own tardiness as it led to the birth of my particular children.

You’ll find your own particular ways to be strong. This isn’t a template to be rigorously matched, line for line. That kind of thinking is only another way of holding yourself back, avoiding responsibility so you can always point toward something else to blame someone else. This is music, a song to be heard, so that you can find your own steps to the one correct rhythm that will nevertheless have to be matched to your own unique and ever-changing circumstances. Put yourself out there. Prove that you can hear the rhythm. You have to start dancing and you have to risk tripping over your own feet a few times.

He wasn’t perfect and I know he wouldn’t argue with that. He was so tough he didn’t know how to be soft when he needed to be. It never even occurred to him to be soft, the same way I’m sure lots of things don’t occur to me because of my own nature. But no one can be everything to everyone, and to think so is simple arrogance. No one can solve every problem and it’s a whine to ask someone else to do so. But he was himself and that was everything to me growing up.