And still, decades later, if I meet some guy named Matt, I continue to think, Hey, that’s my name, too. It’s a strange thought to have and I never share it, of course. You can’t just go around saying things that might alarm people. You have to be sensitive with others. There was always this dissonance about identity.
TEACHERS WOULD REMARK TO MY PARENTS OF MY QUIET INTELLIGENCE and generally obliging nature, but also of my dreaminess and of a punishing perfectionist streak then manifested in a near psychosis about checking my schoolwork over and over and over before the teacher would eventually pry it away from me. I’m sure I seemed docile enough, but it’s possible there was something just a little bit sly about me, too. And, for better or worse, I lived nearly entirely in my head. But I guess I’d always had this idea that the mind must be allowed to investigate for itself, without interference. The mind must be free and agile—and incoercible.
Fog delays of an hour or two were routine at my school. In the mornings, fog would rise from the ground like an otherworldly presence, and everything—farmland, silos, roads, houses—was shrouded and reconfigured, the way that blizzards rearrange the world, or dreams, until the fog was burned away by the sun.
Do you want to know one of the problems with having read lots of books in your life? You’re unsatisfied with descriptions that aren’t metaphor.
My parents were always busy. Both were from Pennsylvania and had already moved a lot for my father’s job as an engineer at Goodyear: first to company HQ in Akron, Ohio, then to Lincoln, Nebraska, now to Marysville, and eventually back to Akron again. There was no extended family anywhere close to us, and we were a harmonious, and dangerously self-sufficient, unit. My father, who looks—then, now, forever—unnervingly like George Washington (or Chevy Chase), was in grad school, too, working on an M.B.A., forever making the long, flat drive on Route 33 back and forth to Columbus. My mother taught at my Unitarian Universalist preschool—a place just crawling with fellow Silverstein fans, as you might well imagine—and later worked in our town as a case manager at a workshop that employed developmentally disabled adults with tasks such as sorting and packing small automotive parts.
Throughout my childhood and adolescence, my mother specialized in telling these long, slightly surreal stories about the clients at her workshops, tales that stalk me still. I would hang out with her at work sometimes, and occasionally she would take me along to client home visits—to group homes or to apartment buildings with dark, airless hallways. These were the first glimpses I ever had of truly marginalized people—people who then seemed to me, to steal a line from James Baldwin, in “the long, hard winter of life.” Mostly I dreaded these trips; on them, I recall having all these nebulous semi-thoughts I knew I wasn’t scheduled to have yet, sort-of thoughts about the idea of luck, about how merciless fate was and how so much of who you were was a mere accident of birth. But I think somewhat differently, and a bit more practically, about things now. I now understand that these were people who fought to lead productive lives, and I also see that they didn’t need anyone’s sympathy.
Even when I was young I was old, and I always had more of an interest in adults than I did in other children. I still have an exceptionally vivid image of the rather curious woman who drove my elementary school bus, yet I can’t entirely recall the faces of any of the kids on the bus with me. This bus driver, who, in memory, was always chewing on a toothpick and who, even in deepest winter, would keep the fan over the dashboard blowing, was clearly someone who had been through some rough stuff (she was missing a pinkie). I’ve always enjoyed learning about the processes of how things are done, and I was interested to observe that, when driving over railroad tracks, she would stop the bus right in the middle of the tracks and then crank open the door to listen for a train. It had seemed to me then that the actual railroad track was perhaps not the ideal location from which to determine if a train was barreling toward you, but what did I know?
She kept a small transistor radio up in front with her and had it tuned to a Top 40 station. Confirmation that my story is a period piece, whether I like it or not (I do not): two of the era’s big hits I’d hear most often on the bus were the Marvin Hamlisch reboot of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and “Feels So Good” by flugelhornist and composer Chuck Mangione. But there was another song on that radio, one that got to me even more: “Games People Play,” by a band with the superlatively noncatchy name of the Alan Parsons Project. It was an up-tempo tune in the somewhat cold prog-rock manner, but the lyrics ground me to pieces:
Where do we go from here
Now that all of the children are growing up?
The song was, in my interpretation, a howl from middle age: the dispossessed man, fearing irrelevance, fearing purposelessness, asking, What do I do with myself in the world now? I was just a little kid, but I can tell you that I really keenly felt this song.
Writers—or anyone who does anything “creative” (used loosely)—are always getting asked where they get their ideas, but that’s never the right question. You always know everything, all the time. There are no new emotions; there are only new events. If I may quote Ingmar Bergman, and the following observation he gives to a character in his brilliant film Fanny and Alexander: “One can be old and a child at the same time.” I knew that this “Games People Play” song was saying something I didn’t particularly want to hear, but something I already understood about what it feels like to be a person in the world.
There is wisdom beyond knowledge.
Also: What if adult life was a game you couldn’t win?
MY FATHER WAS PROMOTED TO A NEW JOB AT GOODYEAR HQ IN AKRON, and two days after my ninth birthday, we moved from the cornfields in the center of the state to the Rust Belt up north. The move happened in late winter, and it was colder in the new place, a little bit harder, and everything—people included—seemed slightly more beaten up. The sunsets, at first, before I finally started paying attention, didn’t seem as striated or as luminous as they had back in the flatness of Marysville, and new categories of precipitation fell from the sullen, but possibly more interesting, northeast Ohio sky. Although I hadn’t complained about it too much, I hadn’t wanted to leave Marysville. I remember how unutterably sad it seemed to me, seeing, in March, Christmas decorations still up in the window of a local insurance office in my new town, Tallmadge—then a dry town, by the way, with the discouraging motto “City of Churches.” Tallmadge was adjacent to Kent, home to Kent State, and I soon learned the names of the four young people murdered there by their government on May 4, 1970: Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder, Sandra Scheuer. I always kept these names close.
Soon after we moved, there was a fire at a house in our new neighborhood. The house, one street over, was, in my view, the best one around—a late seventies translation of a center hall colonial, and one night it burned to the ground. But why hadn’t we heard any sirens? Had there been sirens? We awoke one morning to see, from our dining room window, the big white house we barely knew now lying in ghostly ruin.
My father, a cause-and-effect man, a realist, and, frankly, a cynic, was of the opinion that the fire was probably arson and an insurance scam—everyone in the house was absent that night (so we’d heard; we were the new people in the neighborhood, and we’d never met or seen the family), including the pets. This actually seemed to me a reassuring hypothesis, since it had to do with money.