A Life Out of Whack: Confessions and Reflexions of an Un-American All-American

By Les Essif

A Life Out of Whack has two parts. The first part is autobiographical and sketches the atypical early life of a future academic scholar from family poverty to marriage and divorce at nineteen, from eight years in big-city and federal law enforcement to starting college at the age of twenty-six, culminating with a doctoral fellowship in French Studies at Brown U. The second part presents an alternative critical look at contemporary life and ethos: aging, nature, corporate capitalism, and American, French, and global cultures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica Editions Inc
• Release date: Sep 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781771833165

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INTRODUCTION

Let me begin with a word about the brainstorming process that led to this book. In 2001, post-9/11, I felt that the true sociocultural values of the United States, my home culture, did not so much shift or transform as illuminate their dark side. I had just completed my first scholarly book Empty Figure on an Empty Stage. I was discouraged, if not surprised, by the turmoil of the chauvinistic values espoused by American politicos and political pundits and the rekindling of a jingoistic political temper and world view. This political distress also pushed me to step outside a life of routine to take a closer look at the meaning of life in general and of my life in particular and I was inspired to begin keeping a journal. This new writing exercise was not a daily account of my life experiences and acute feelings but primarily a recording of what I considered to be original personal insights on the most salient topics of the day during this part of my life. In April 2013, I published my latest comprehensive scholarly book, American ‘Unculture’ in French Drama, a study that allowed me to rehearse a close critical look at my home culture and compare it to the very different French national culture. My many years of research on French culture had helped me understand the shortcomings of my own. This America project led to a major turn in my approach to my next book. I had more to say about life in general and about America, France, and the globalizing world in particular. I freed myself up for the project of reviewing my twelve years of journal entries and preparing some sort of narrative account of them. Having learned to read and write as a scholar, I read through all the entries and determined a very rough and contingent list of subjects under which I could group them, more or less alphabetically.

Once I sat down to begin the narrative writing process, I realized the project could benefit from a substantial autobiographical overview of my life, one that would set the tone for my observations in Part 2 and provide a background for them. This became Part 1. I then revised the Part 2 structure to bring the topics more in line with a flow from the most intimate, intuitive, and existentialist, to those with the most bearing on national and global culture as a whole, beginning with themes like aging, death, bodies, and family, and ending with corporate capitalism, hyperreality, and technology and media.

One question I needed to answer for myself was whether or not I felt that this material would interest a wide readership. This would be, after all, the very first time I would be writing not so much as a scholar, as an expert on French culture or on drama and performance, but as an individual with what I hoped would be received as a uniquely interesting voice.

There are scholars who have written critical monographs that attract a wider readership and more attention than mine have. There are novelists who create brilliant, compelling stories that deserve to be read and studied by millions, from one generation to the next. But I wouldn’t be writing this book if I didn’t believe that my life experiences have been truly unusual and that I have thought in a unique way about certain aspects of life, about the life I and others lead.

The originality of my life and mind is not merely a consequence of my upbringing and my exceptionally diverse career shifts, from pharmacy shop boy, to day-laborer for Manpower, to grocery store assistant manager, to taxi driver, to big-city cop and federal agent, to undergraduate and graduate student, to university professor and scholar of French culture and drama. The fact that I don’t get involved in spectator sports, watch TV, own a cell phone or have the internet at home, buy new furniture, take elevators, eat fast-food, drink coffee at Starbuck’s, and do not support either of America’s two major political parties, despite having an income and belonging to a socio-professional milieu where these things are the norm, points toward a more fundamental difference, but not one that would type me as an old hippie or Bohemian. I’d like to stake a claim to being different from my peers, including the old hippies.

Since it was my apprenticeship in scholarly research that brought me to writing, let me say a few words about this before outlining the upbringing that normally would not have led to my current career. The scholarly subjects of my writing as well as my writing style have evolved considerably since the mid-1990s when I published my first essays and began writing my first book. Setting aside my dozens of published articles one could say that the very different topics of each of my books reflect my tendency to diverge from the straight and narrow.

My first book, Empty Figure on an Empty Stage, focuses on the formal, structural features of what is known as the postwar absurdist theatre, with special attention to the importance of empty space in this type of theatre. My second book, The French Play, addressed from both theoretical and practical points of view my re-creative instructional approach to doing theatre, specifically to putting on plays in French with American students of French. My latest book, American ‘Unculture’ in French Drama, is in turn quite different from the first two. It takes a comparative cultures approach to theatre, to how French theatre deals with the subject of American unculture. This was in many ways the project that coaxed me away from the rigorous designs of scholarly writing; and much of what I will say in the present book about contemporary culture from a broadly humanistic point of view will connect to ideas and arguments that I introduced in the American unculture book.

Reflection and introspection can teach us a lot about life and times, society, culture, and ourselves. For me as a scholar, this means a meaningful shift from my usual emphasis on empirical, critical, and philosophical research toward a more serious approach to thinking about the institutions, conventions, practices, values, morals, and ideas that in Western society we have either adopted over time or have had thrust upon us. Consequently, this autobiographical-cultural narrative is meant to appeal not to scholars as scholars, but to the more universally, humanistically intuitive and reflective natures of fellow scholars and social peers alike.

As a scholar I write books about my special expertise with some hope of allowing my personal world vision and philosophy shine through. This memoir, on the other hand, is mostly about personal vision. I finally get to free my mind of the constraint of focusing on formally-dressed scholarly subjects! For the first time I’ll be writing directly, experientially, and philosophically about life in general and my interpretations of my life in particular, instead of writing about life through interpretations of French theatre — a course of study which has, nevertheless, taught me a great deal. I hope to offer a writing style that resists the scholar-researcher angle and appeals to my reader personally, existentially, and as a fellow citizen of local, national, global culture. I’m determined to write this book with as little targeted research as possible, an approach that will permit me to develop and deepen my arguments without the stigma of having to connect them to other authoritative sources.

But first I have to get straight what it is exactly I want to write about and how I want to write about it. My writing should reaffirm that my take on life’s processes has not only contributed to my writings and work with theatre as culture; I hope to make an original contribution to ideas and arguments that will not be limited to my life and experiences as an American college professor. However, given the dozen or so years of preparation for this profession and the twenty-five-plus years I’ve exercised it full-time, my experience in higher education will necessarily be an important part of the story.

The book has two parts. The first part is autobiographical and sketches the atypical early life of a future academic scholar. It includes some of the most remarkable and unusual experiences of my younger life that would seem inconsistent with my current professional situation: family poverty, multiple expulsions from school, running away from home, an extraordinary variety of jobs, married and divorced at the age of nineteen, eight years in big-city and federal law enforcement (NYPD and the U.S. Border Patrol), starting college at the age of twenty-six, moving from a PhD program in Hispanic Studies to one in French Studies.

Despite these inconsistencies, in many respects, my biography suggests nonetheless a kind of all-American life, one that to some extent achieved a version of the American dream by benefiting from a range of traits and values emphasized in American culture: sense of humor, social camaraderie, independence, competitive athletics, sense of adventure and change, self-made man, workaholic overachiever. Yet I have never adhered to a lifestyle that one would consider typically American. On the contrary, unlike the vast majority of my professional and socioeconomic peers, I refuse to conform to the capitalistconsumerist-smartphone-internet-TV culture, and my wife and I raised two children to understand that, in school, respectfully declining to participate in the daily ritual of the Pledge of Allegiance is a legitimate, viable option. Thus, the first part of the book makes a case for the unusual trajectory of my life, for my divergent lifestyle and mind, and for my having something interesting to write about.

The second part of the book presents a uniquely alternative critical look at contemporary life in general and American culture in particular. (My notions for an ideal society stand well to the left of the margins of those of my peers.) Fashioned from the journal I’ve kept since the events of 9/11, it consists primarily of my reflections and positions on a wide variety of philosophical, political, and cultural subjects, all of which are thematically organized into chapters. Many of the discussions of these subjects refer back to distinct parts of my life and feed into anecdotes relating to the subject matter.

Despite my all-American upbringing and credentials, many of my remarks will appear iconoclastic, unpatriotic, and un-American, meaning both critical of the United States’ history, the lifestyle it promotes and its domestic policies and foreign affairs, and committed to a life that contrasts with that of the average American. Given the American dream with its requisite myth-dogma of individual freedom, and in light of what American reality has become, perhaps the ideal American is one who appears un-American. Consequently, a close reading of my personal experiences, behavior, and ideas would thwart, I think, any attempt to classify me as un-American. Hence the title of this book. My own life and American life in general seem so out of whack these days — both individually and the one with the other — that, in the end, I stake a claim to being just as all-American as I am un-American.

I want to be as honest and as faithful to my thinking as I can possibly be. I also hope to avoid a narrative wrought with sermonizing and pontificating. While I have a perceptive and (sometimes excessively) analytical mind, some people will consider me opinionated, but I like to think my opinions have some merit. (You be the judge!) I do want to convey to the reader my own deeper feelings, which will necessarily reveal many of my personality flaws and biases. As French philosophers the likes of Montaigne and Rousseau have warned before me, my reflections and confessions will inevitably project a measure of narcissism. Like most humans — and all academics — I am patently self-centered. Though I hope I don’t sound like I’m proud of this.

I begin below by briefly and roughly outlining, more or less chronologically, a selection of highlights of my unusual background, mostly with respect to the Americana theme (un-American/all-American). These will establish the trajectory my life has followed — with special attention to critical situations and events as well as my thoughts and actions within these events, which led to a number of changes in trajectory and which have maintained a relatively persistent presence in my mind. I hope this leads to a reliably accurate account of my past.

PART ONE

THIS IS MY YOUNG LIFE

Childhood and adolescence: a privileged lack of privilege and a vital measure of resistance

IWAS BORN and grew up mostly in the very small Northeastern Pennsylvania town of Carbondale, population about 10–13,000. My childhood included a number of trips to the New York City borough of Queens and Long Island, where most of my mother’s family resided. For two years, from the age of six to seven, I resided with my mother and three brothers in Queens. This was a time when, because of financial difficulties in Carbondale, my mother moved her brood of four boys (the fifth would be born much later) to her mother’s home, where we were not really poor in the same way as in our home town. We were a quite poor family. Though I say this knowing that there are as many interpretations of poor as there are readers of this book. I remember, for example, conversations on the topic with my fellow doctoral students at Brown University in 1988, most of whom in my opinion came from fairly well-off families. Yet a good many of these students still tended to downplay their relative affluence and paint their family backgrounds in a negative light as being either working class or of modest means, with connotations of poverty. The term working class meant not really middle class. It was meant to convey some lack of material comfort and a condition of need. One of these students, who is now a professor at Harvard, claimed that his family’s difficult financial circumstances owed to the fact that both his father and mother were forced to raise their family on the very modest incomes they received as college professors and they couldn’t afford the luxury of wall-to-wall carpeting in their home.

Consequent to these and other similar conversations, I will say that, despite the relativity of material comfort, my family would have been considered poor by most American standards. My father, a first-generation American of Lebanese immigrant parents, was not working class; he seldom held any job at all. He had a sixth-grade education, my mother achieved two years of high school. My father was a disabled veteran, having received a medical discharge from the Army in the early years of World War Two due to a mental breakdown while still in basic training. Ever since, he was under the regular care of an incompetent Veterans Administration psychiatrist, who prescribed heavy doses of psychotropic drugs, which did not predispose my father to leading a life of labor. His father died when I was about four, but he often borrowed small sums of money from his mother, brother, and sister, who lived fairly close to us. Despite their relative poverty, they were all in a position to lend him small sums only because of their extreme frugality, their barebones material needs and austere lifestyle. They all were physically handicapped in some way and subsisted on small pensions from the federal government. My grandmother and uncle (an albino) were legally blind, my aunt, legally deaf. Given my father’s lack of income, my family received various forms of government welfare subsidies, the most memorable of which, for a child, was the biweekly allocation of surplus foods: peanut butter, cheese, flour, powdered milk, and the nauseating cans of pork and gravy. One source of our Christmas presents was the local Salvation Army’s holiday charity distribution program. The Army was also the go-to shop for most of my mother’s used clothing purchases and other sundry items.

Nevertheless, since our poverty was more small-town rural than urban, and our race/ethnicity was perceived as white Caucasian despite the Arabic origins of my grandparents — who could not speak English — we were spared all the nasty collateral damage of the deprivation experienced by racial and ethnic minorities in the vast yet compacted wastelands of U.S. inner-city ghettos, where the concentration and ethnic mixing make poverty more brutal. When I was four, we moved from an apartment to a rather large, if very old and quite dilapidated house. The coal furnace required constant refilling with coal and on long winter nights it would go cold long before we awakened the next morning, and we often had icicles in our kitchen. My mother cooked for many years on a coal stove.

But, happily for us, we shared our lack of material comfort with our neighbors. We lived in a neighborhood with a huge community of families in some kind of financial distress, and most of these families had lots of kids the same age as my brothers and I. My parents had five sons, but the single-mom next door had twelve children and she raised them all in the half of a house she rented, a space amounting to less than half the size of ours. Talk about relative poverty! The other house alongside of ours was rented by a family with five kids, all very close in age. They lived in the bottom half of their two-story house because the roof of the second story had collapsed and the landlord placed some kind of cover over the floor, which became the roof of the first floor. Relative misery!

Thanks largely to the communal situation in which we lived, we kids didn’t know how poor and deprived we were. There was always a huge clutch of friends to muster to play an array of games and sports. We called one another out to play by standing in front of a friend’s home and yelling Hello Mi-chael!, Hello Chu-cky! until the friend appeared or the mother would tell us they weren’t home or available to play. There was always a way to find or to confect some type of ball, be it a whiffle ball, softball, baseball, football, kickball, or basketball — or some facsimile thereof. The many local junkyards and unofficial dump sites provided hardware and parts to build bicycles, go-karts, and snow sleds. In the summer, the city government provided many of the neighborhoods with playground recreation centers, staffed with young social directors, a group that probably included college students working a summer job. The playgrounds were rundown remnants of Carbondale’s pre-war anthracite coal-industry glory days, and each summer the centers offered increasingly reduced staff, hours, and activities. But they helped keep us kids busy and amused during the summer, and we only used them as an alternative source of recreation anyway.

Our primary pastime consisted of kid-generated sports, games, hikes to swimming holes, building projects (like good-sized huts), and other activities. Summer evenings as many as two dozen of us, of all ages, played hide-and-seek or Frozen Witch. We often camped out overnight in someone’s backyard, and in bands of five or six we patrolled the mysterious nighttime stillness and sometimes callously rang doorbells or raided family gardens. In the winter, we spent most of our evenings sledding in large groups on the many hills that surrounded us. We kids were so busy in fact, and we spent so much of our young lives outdoors, that we didn’t have time to think about the wall-to-wall carpeting we couldn’t possibly have in our homes. One might suppose that this kind of childhood experience was more or less the norm for Americans growing up in the fifties and sixties. But I’m convinced that even at this moment of the American dream its availability was limited mostly to low-income families living in small towns. Kids came together as generic playmates, to play and cooperate in a fairly egalitarian relationship despite potential barriers such as family background and education, a mix that one might not encounter in today’s suburban neighborhoods, which are more homogeneously self-selected according to family income. Many of the kids I played with remained functionally illiterate well into adulthood, even as my brothers pursued higher education — which would come later for me. All in all, I would say that today’s kids are quite deprived!

On the lost art of material deprivation

I’ve heard too many fathers, especially those of my parents’ generation, say they wanted to give their children everything they were denied as children. They invariably refer to the material conveniences they thought they hadn’t had and surely missed. (Curiously, these are often the same people who wax nostalgic about how simple their lives were in the old days.) I’ve already discussed my deprived but happy childhood. With the kind of poverty we had experienced, I’ve always had in mind that, in this American society, some kind of relative poverty is often a virtue. At the very least, a childhood lifestyle guided by financial lack has as much potential to lead to well-being than one activated and facilitated by affluence. I’m quite sincere about this. One regret that I have about my own kids’ childhood experience is that, given the environment and the times of their youth, the economic milieu into which we were cast, they were not sufficiently deprived of those material goods and services and the societal structures that can damage a child’s innocence, creativity, and passion, and which can eliminate opportunities for communal interaction among children.

Living among the un-poor in a car-dependent suburb of a southern city, the abundant time-consuming toys we furnish children and the adult-organized and -supervised activities in which we engage them result in a deprivation that can be just as tragically consequential as financial limitation. Consider all the hype dedicated to promoting new technologies — a hype that is biased and manipulated by the corporate interests that, more than ever before in history, determine the nature and rhythm of the introduction of technology into our society.

Yet, from a social perspective, TV, electronic games, and more recently surfing the Internet and social networking are not healthy activities for either children or adults. A motorized vehicle that a small child can drive is not as healthy as a bicycle, from physical, social, and psychological points of view. A neighborhood pick-up basketball, whiffle ball, kick ball, or football game is healthier and more stimulating than not just the electronic gaming that might mimic these group activities but also the activities that soccer moms and dads shuttle their kids to twice a week. From a socio-psychological perspective, any game or sports event that is honestly and freely organized by a community of kids has more positive, creative passion-potential than anything an adult can propose for them.

But that’s not the way our consumerist society wants us to see it. Like too many middle-class Americans in this society, I’ve wound up in a 200-home suburban subdivision in which each separate home is built on one-third to one-half acre of land and there is absolutely no common turf or playing area for kids to play in or in which they can easily organize their own fun and community. What a waste that, in the place of a good-size communal basketball court, for example, probably one third to one half of these homes have their own private basketball equipment in the driveway.

Think about it. You’re an eight-year-old and one or a group of your neighbor-friends come to your door to ask you to come out and play (or, as in my experience, they simply stand in front of your house and yell Hello John-ny!). There’s something liberating and edifying about the spontaneous decisions and activities that follow.

So why does my family live in this neighborhood? At the risk of appearing both judgmental and hypocritical, the simple answer is that American neighborhoods seem to offer an either/or formula: either you live in a non-communal neighborhood like ours or you live in a neighborhood where you are exposed to more crime and bothersome, even abusive, behavior. Given the demographic status quo, what we consider to be poorer neighborhoods tend to produce certain kinds of uncivil behavior, such as loud parties, vandalism, and fights. So we live in our non-communal neighborhood because 1) we admittedly did not make the effort to resist buying a home in an area in which a number of our work colleagues do or would reside; 2) we thought we were buying the most expensive home we could afford; 3) prior to our expedited decision on a home, we did not take the time to thoroughly explore a wider range of areas in the city; and 4) once you buy a home and a mortgage, it’s quite difficult to change your mind: a new home and mortgage would be too time-consuming and costly to consider, barring any serious problem with the property you’ve purchased.

Small town economy

On a return family trip to Carbondale in the summer of 2005, I was both surprised and quite proud to learn that one of the sledding courses I had named as a kid (a combination of two connecting and steeply inclined streets) was still called Suicide Hill. On the downside, however, I was disappointed to find that all the small candy and sundry item stores that were so numerous when I was a child have completely disappeared. Within a three-block radius (although, given the way our streets were laid out, there were no blocks in today’s sense of the term) we had numerous tiny one-room stores like Mrs. Ungeleider’s, Walter’s, Bill’s, and Rice’s that we simply called candy stores, but which also offered staple items our parents could send us to purchase in a pinch, such as bread, milk, eggs, and clothes pins.

In March 2017 my oldest brother sent me a list of neighborhood little stores, Carbondale circa 1960 that appeared on a Yahoo site. This still incomplete list includes the names of around sixty stores. We always viewed these places as charmed, but frankly, I don’t think any of the owners of these stores could have possibly turned a profit. Their numbers constituted a sort of sub-economy of the city and were a consequence of the number of kids in the area and not of the purchasing power of the families.

Kids and their families had very little disposable income. We rarely had change to buy candy, ice cream, or cheap toys before becoming old enough to be able to earn something on our own. But from a very young age we learned how to tap into the local economy. Most of our money came from doing chores (snow shoveling, painting, yardwork, etc.) for the older single women and men living in huge homes by themselves, or from scavenging and selling rags, paper, and metal scrap to the local junkyards. Lawn-mowing, by the way, was not among the odd jobs of my youth, because very few homes in our community had any grassy-green lawn to speak of. The closest I came to cutting my own family’s lawn was clearing overgrown vegetation with a scythe.

School, disciplinary problems, and alcohol

We kids viewed school as time out from kid-inspired recreation. Stigmatized by a teacher-hiring practice corrupted by nepotism, our K-12 schools were very weak in academics. Yet there were few disciplinary problems of the kind you would find in big-city ghetto schools. Thanks largely to Pennsylvania’s generous higher education subsidies for the poor in the sixties and seventies, my older brother was the first college graduate in the fully extended families of both my mother and father (no one in my father’s small immigrant family had even attended high school). He was also the first to receive a master’s degree. Being second in line, I declined to go to college when my time came, but my three other brothers all followed the first and completed university master’s degrees — long before I even decided to attend college. My mother was exceedingly proud of her sons’ academic success. The dedication for my first book reads as follows: For Mom, Dorothy Marie. A devoted dreamer, a mother with a mission, you always knew your five sons would go to college. Thanks to you, we knew it too.

I didn’t enroll in college because I was, in short, sick of the disciplinary structure, the dogma, the conformity, and the inanities of K-12 school culture. I excelled academically up to the point of my first year in high school, consistently receiving the award for Best Student in Class. My high school experience, however, was not quite what one would characterize as normal or predictable, especially considering my early success. Some features of my high school years were rather normal. To earn money, I did a good deal of chores and yard work, painting, and snow-shoveling for a portion of the many elderly single-women around the neighborhood. I had a part-time job at a small drugstore, where I stocked and dusted shelves, washed prescription bottles, cleaned the floors, and, unlawfully, delivered prescriptions to customers in the drug store owner’s car. Like most of my peers, I got my learner’s permit at the age of fifteen and my junior driver’s license as soon as I turned sixteen, and, with the 65 cents an hour I earned at the drugstore, my brother and I bought an old car. But I was not supposed to be doing any driving for commercial purposes at that age. So much for small-town rule of law.

I also played on the high school basketball team for three years, and on the baseball and football teams for only the very beginning of one season. My overall academic history, however, was not stellar. In my first three years of high school I was suspended or expelled four times for behavior that today would generally not raise an eyebrow: growing a moustache, long hair, violation of dress codes, and challenging the high school administrators’ mandate that all sophomores must write an essay on the patriotic subject of What Freedom Means to Me. I decided to limit the content of my essay to a very short statement that freedom was not having to write the required essay. This defiant behavior was deemed an abuse of my freedom and the school principal exercised his freedom to suspend me.

The fourth of my suspensions was a bit more interesting. It was a consequence of my infatuation with alcoholic beverages and requires more explanation. In the United States in the sixties the legal drinking age varied among the states. In Pennsylvania, the age was twenty-one. To put this law into perspective, twenty-year-old soldiers returning from combat duty in Vietnam were not considered mature enough to enter a bar or be allowed to purchase alcoholic beverages. Given the narrow-minded and intolerant nature of my town, plainly reflected in the city and high school administrations, probably the most egregious and wide-spread disciplinary violation for an adolescent was alcohol consumption.

The State of Pennsylvania had at the time a very prominent Liquor Control Board with ambitious and active law enforcement agents. More or less as an act of defiance and a gesture of independence, from the age of fourteen I became an avid consumer of alcoholic beverages, and a pretentious one at that. I not only drank them, but I had the gall to purchase them myself, illegally of course. As surprising as this might seem under the regime of heavy surveillance (and especially to those readers who have grown up in a time of IDs with a photo instead of a cursory description), from the age of fifteen, I ordered drinks at certain bars and even purchased liquor by the bottle in two different State Liquor Stores (one in Carbondale and one in Honesdale, about sixteen miles away), which were run by an official state authority and the only stores licensed to sell liquor — beer at the time could only be purchased at either a bar, by the six-pack, or at a licensed distributor’s warehouse, by the case. How is it possible that a relative child of fifteen could pass himself off as an adult? Attitude! Acting! Conviction! Though it is true that I was discriminating with respect to the bars I walked into. Believe it or not, I was never even challenged for identification in any bar or in either of the two State Liquor Stores I patronized. So much for the strict control of a mind-altering drug and for small-town rule of law.

In large part in defiance of Pennsylvania’s draconian attempt at a limited, ageist form of prohibition, many of us students went to great lengths to mock the authorities and the system.

Carbondale was only about a one-hour drive from Narrowsburg, New York. The legal drinking age in the state of New York at the time was only eighteen, so groups of us high schoolers also made brief, oneevening or one-afternoon, forays to Narrowsburg where it was easier to pass oneself off as eighteen than as twenty-one in our home state. A few of us had fake ID cards as well. In the sixties in Pennsylvania there were no photos on the easily forgeable driver’s license. As another part of our drinking culture, we also inaugurated what we called the Salem Mountain Social Club, and we persuaded unwitting school officials to accept it as a bona fide student organization. The school secretary would announce over the school’s PA system the Friday night meeting of the club. Teachers and administrators had no idea that the primary activity of the event was the consumption of alcoholic beverages — a keg party on the mountain. Maybe this non-fictional recounting of juvenile business as usual at Carbondale High School sounds a bit like the adolescent shenanigans of the 1980s film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?

On one occasion, several friends and I were taken into custody by Carbondale police for an alcohol-related violation. But I don’t think our arrest was ever officially recorded on the police blotter, if there was one. The incident occurred on the occasion of a party at a school friend’s home. I had purchased beer for some of my friends and kept it in my car, which was parked across the street from the house. My friends and I were in the car drinking when the police pulled up behind us and flashed their lights. The patrol car was the only official one owned by the city, and the two patrolmen who approached us were probably the only two officers on patrol that evening. Unfortunately for the police, for lack of experience I suppose, they botched the arrest.

My friends chugged the last beers before the cops got to our car. So, what the officers encountered was a car full of adolescents and empty cans of beer, which could’ve been left by a legal drinker. In response to our refusal to confess, they told us they were sure we were drinking and they were taking us in, that is, taking us to the police station and that we were ostensibly under arrest. Since they only had the one car, they ordered me to follow them to the station. At that point I asked them if they intended to charge me with consuming alcohol as a minor. When they responded in the affirmative, I advised them that, even though they were mistaken about my drinking, if they really believed I had been drinking, then I shouldn’t be driving: Shut up, smart ass, and follow us!

My father comes into the picture and I drop out

When we got to the station in the city hall, the police chief was waiting for us. This was indeed an exceptional bust — yet not of the NYPD Blue genre. The small town that it was, the cops were at least acquainted with our fathers. They telephoned them and had them come to the station to deal with us. The small-town macho mentality assumed by all, the moment each of the fathers arrived on the scene, he beat his son rather brutally in front of his friends and the police. My father was the remarkable exception, and I’ll never forget this. Up to this point in my life, I had never got to know my father.

As I mentioned above, he was unemployed most of the time, but he did a lot of illegal gambling in the form of card-playing at night, probably with the money he borrowed from family. I think he was fairly successful at it and could at least make enough money to sustain his game. During the day, he mostly slept in his easy chair. Hooked on sleeping pills and probably some other psychotropic medication, he rarely spoke to his sons or his wife. He’d get very angry and extremely loud when we woke him up from one of his perpetual naps, and at times he made an attempt — a rather weak gesture — to inflict pain on us with a strap. But he was not a violent man, and when he acted macho, you could tell it wasn’t a role he had ever rehearsed or would ever get right. Fortunately for me and my friends on the night of our bust, my father had had the occasion in the past to play cards with the police chief, and he cajoled him out of pressing any charges. His behavior also helped the other fathers to tame (by shame) their passions, to temper the histrionic performance of their testosterone.

Quite the contrary to his usual fierce response to some very min- or incident at home, my father did not even raise his voice to me over this major affair. I really admired him that night. On the other hand, he missed the opportunity this incident offered to bond more deeply with me by neglecting to openly discuss my alcohol problem. Yet I’m certain that my father was a more morally and intellectually complex, deep-thinking individual than my brothers and I give him credit for: a real enigma of a man who had great potential to stand out among his peers. I rarely refer to him in conversation and when I do it’s usually in a derisive tone, especially in conversation with my brothers.

One would think that I tend to write him off as a father, believing that he lacked paternal wisdom and any sense of responsibility, and consequently that he had little to do with the individual I’ve grown into. Yet now that I’m forced to rethink my relationship with him, I realize how much he insinuated himself (and likely his own parental roots) into my personality and world view, as well as those of my brothers. My brothers and I mostly remember the empty clichés he spouted from time to time, often out of context, but he was also greatly respected among his peers. It would not be an exaggeration to say that nearly everyone in Carbondale, the city where he was raised, knew George Essif and largely respected him. People all over town used to refer to us Essif kids as Georgy’s boys. He had a nickname for every one of his friends, and at home a nickname for each one of his sons. I was Lass, my brothers had names like Flea and Bundle.

Like many Lebanese immigrants and Lebanese-Americans, descendants of the legendary Phoenician merchant classes, he tried his luck at selling various products, such as fresh produce and dress pants, on the highway and in the neighborhoods — without a license, of course — and he sometimes enlisted my help to do so. This experience was short-lived, but it included two encounters with highway patrol officers who called my father by his first name while reinstructing him about the need for a vendor’s license. We failed, but it was nonetheless interesting for both of us.

My father had cultivated an esoteric and unschooled taste for the arts. Having served as an usher at a movie theatre in his youth, he had a remarkable memory for actors’ names and an appreciation for some high quality films. He was a talented whistler and he played the harmonica, musical interests he passed on to me. Though I don’t remember him spending a great deal of time teaching me either of these skills, I connect both of them to him. One Christmas he offered me his old chromatic harmonica. On the rare occasion that I pick up one of my harmonicas, I think of him. Three tunes that I heard him play and that now are among my favorites are Old Man River, Clair de Lune, (which we played at his funeral) and the theme from the film The High and the Mighty.