Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (14 page)

OCTET

P
OP
Q
UIZ
4

Two late-stage terminal drug addicts sat up against an alley’s wall with nothing to inject and no means and nowhere to go or be. Only one had a coat. It was cold, and one of the terminal drug addicts’ teeth chattered and he sweated and shook with fever. He seemed gravely ill. He smelled very bad. He sat up against the wall with his head on his knees. This took place in Cambridge MA in an alley behind the Commonwealth Aluminum Can Redemption Center on Massachusetts Avenue in the early hours of 12 January 1993. The terminal drug addict with the coat took off the coat and scooted over up close to the gravely ill terminal drug addict and took and spread the coat as far as it would go over the both of them and then scooted over some more and got himself pressed right up against him and put his arm around him and let him be sick on his arm, and they stayed like that up against the wall together all through the night.

Q:
Which one lived.

P
OP
Q
UIZ
6

Two men, X and Y, are close friends, but then Y does something to hurt, alienate, and/or infuriate X. They had been very close. In fact X’s family had almost sort of adopted Y when Y arrived in town alone and had no family or friends yet and got a position in the same department of the same firm X worked for, and X and Y work side by side and become close
compadres,
and before long Y is usually over at X’s house hanging out with the X family just about every night after work, and this goes on for quite some time. But then Y does X some kind of injury, like maybe writing an accurate but negative Peer Evaluation of X at their firm, or refusing to cover for X when X makes a serious error in judgment and gets himself in trouble and needs Y to lie to cover for him somehow. The point is that Y’s done some honorable/upright thing that X sees as a disloyal and/or hurtful thing, and X is now totally furious at Y, and now when Y comes over to X’s family’s house every night to hang out as usual X is extremely frosty to him, or witheringly snide, or sometimes even yells at Y in front of the X family’s wife and kids. In response to all which, however, Y simply continues to come over to X’s family’s house and to hang around and take all the abuse X dishes out, nodding sort of studiously in response but not saying anything or in any other way responding to X’s hostility. On one particular occasion X actually screams at Y to ‘get the hell out of’ his family’s house and kind of half-hits-half-slaps Y, right in front of one of the family’s kids, hard enough to make Y’s glasses fall off, and all Y does by way of response is hold his cheek and nod sort of studiously at the floor while he picks his glasses up and repairs a bent arm-hinge as best he can by hand, and even after this he still continues to come around and hang out at X’s house like an adopted member of the family, and to just stand there and take whatever X dishes out in retaliation for whatever it is Y apparently did to him. Just why Y does this (i.e., continues to come around and to hang out at the Xes’) is unclear. Maybe Y is basically spineless and pathetic and has noplace else to go and nobody else to hang out with. Or maybe Y’s one of those quietly iron-spined people who are internally strong enough not to let any kind of abuse or humiliation get to them, and can see (Y can) through X’s present pique to the generous and trusted friend he’d always been to Y before, and has decided (Y has, maybe) that he’s just going to hang in there and stick it out and keep coming around and stoically allow X to vent whatever spleen he needs to vent, and that eventually X will probably get over being pissed off so long as Y doesn’t respond or retaliate or do anything to aggravate the situation further. In other words, it’s not clear whether Y is pathetic and spineless or incredibly strong and compassionate and wise. On only one specific further occasion, when X actually jumps up on an end table in front of the whole X family and screams at Y to ‘take [his] ass and hat and get the fuck out of [his, i.e., X’s] family’s house and stay out,’ does Y actually leave because of anything X says, but even after this further episode Y’s still right back over there hanging out at the Xes’ the very next night after work. Maybe Y just really likes X’s wife and kids a lot, and that’s what makes it worth it to him to keep coming around and enduring X’s vitriole. Maybe Y is somehow both pathetic
and
strong… though it’s hard to reconcile Y’s being pathetic or weak with the obvious backbone it must have required to write a negatively truthful Peer Evaluation or to refuse to lie or whatever it was that X hasn’t forgiven him for doing. Plus it’s unclear how the whole thing plays out—i.e., whether Y’s passive persistence pays off in the form of X finally getting over being furious and ‘forgiving’ Y and being his
compadre
again, or whether Y finally can’t take the hostility anymore and eventually stops hanging around X’s house… or whether the whole incredibly tense and unclear situation simply continues indefinitely. What made it a half-slap is that X had had a partly open hand when he hit Y that one time. There’s also the factor of how X’s overt unfriendliness to Y and Y’s passive reaction to it affect certain intramural dynamics within the X family, like whether X’s wife and kids are horrified by X’s treatment of Y or whether they agree with X that Y dicked him over somehow and so are basically sympathetic to X. This would affect how they feel about Y continuing to come around and hang out at their house every night even though X is making it crystal clear he’s no longer welcome, like whether they admire Y’s stoic fortitude or find it creepy and pathetic and wish he’d finally just get the message and quit acting like he’s still an honorary part of the family, or what. In fact the whole
mise en scène
here seems too shot through with ambiguity to make a very good Pop Quiz, it turns out.

P
OP
Q
UIZ
7

A lady marries a man from a very wealthy family and they have a baby together and they both love the baby a lot, although as time goes by they become less and less keen on each other, until eventually the lady files divorce papers on the man. The lady and the man both want primary custody of the baby, but the lady assumes she’ll ultimately be the one to get primary custody because that’s how things usually shake out in divorce law. But the man really wants primary custody a lot. Whether this is because he has a strong paternal urge and really wants to raise the baby or whether he just feels vindictive about getting served with divorce papers and wants to stick it to the lady by denying her primary custody is unclear. But that’s not important, because what
is
clear is that the man’s whole wealthy and powerful family all line up behind the man w/r/t this issue and think he should get primary custody (probably because they believe that since he’s a scion of their family the man should get whatever he wants—it’s that kind of family). But so the man’s family comes around and tells the lady that if she fights their scion for primary custody of the baby they’ll retaliate by taking away the lavish Trust Fund they’d established for the baby at birth, a Trust Fund sufficient to render the baby financially secure for life. No Primary Custody, No Trust Fund they say. So the lady (who’d signed a pre-nup, by the way, and has absolutely nothing in the way of remuneration or spousal support coming from the divorce settlement regardless of how the custody issue is resolved) walks away from the custody fight and lets the man and his hideous family have custody of the baby so that the baby will still have the Trust Fund.

Q: (A)
Is she a good mother.
1

P
OP
Q
UIZ
6(
A
)

Try it again. Same guy X as in PQ6. X’s wife’s elderly father is diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. X’s wife’s whole huge family is really close and intermeshed, and they all live right there in the same town as X and his wife and the father-in-law and his own wife, and since the diagnosis came down there’s been a veritable Wagner opera of alarm and distress and grief going on in the family; and, closer to home as it were, X’s wife and children are also terrifically distraught over the old man’s inoperable brain cancer because X’s wife has always been so close to her father and X’s children love their Grampappy to distraction and are shamelessly spoiled and their affection purchased by him in return; and now X’s wife’s father is progressively enfeebled and suffering and dying of brain cancer, and X’s whole family and family-in-law seem like they’re getting a head start on grieving the old man’s actual death and are all incredibly shattered and hysterical and sad all the time.

X himself is in a ticklish position w/r/t the whole father-in-law-withinoperable-brain-cancer situation. He and his wife’s father have never had a very close or friendly relationship, and in fact the old man had once actually urged X’s wife to divorce X during a rocky period some years prior when things in the marriage were rocky and X had made some regrettable errors in judgment and had committed some indiscretions which one of X’s wife’s pathologically nosy and garrulous sisters had told the father about and which the old man had been typically judgmental and holier-than-thou about and had loudly communicated to just about everyone in the family that he considered X’s behavior disgusting and wholly
infra-dignitater
and had urged X’s wife to leave him (i.e., X) over, none of which X has forgotten over the years, not by a long shot, because ever since that rocky period and the old man’s h/t/t condemnations X has felt somehow provisional and tangential and
non-grata
with respect to his wife’s whole teeming intermeshed close-knit family, which family by this time includes his wife’s six siblings’ own spouses and kids and various soricine great-aunts and -uncles and ordinally disparate cousins, such that a local Conference Center has to be rented every summer for his inlaws’ family’s traditional Family Get-Together (caps theirs), at which annual events X is always somehow made to feel provisional and under continuing suspicion and judgment and pretty much like your classic outsider looking in.

X’s sense of alienation from his wife’s family has now intensified, too, because the whole enormous roiling pack of them seem now to be unable to think or talk about anything except the iron-eyed old patriarch’s brain cancer and grim treatment options and steady decline and apparently slim chances for lasting more than a few more months at the very outside, and they seem to talk endlessly but only with one another about all this, such that whenever X is there alongside his wife during any of these lugubrious family councils he always feels peripheral and otiose and subtly excluded, as if his wife’s close-knit family has woven in even tighter around itself in this time of crisis, forcing X even further out onto the periphery, he feels. And X’s encounters with his father-in-law himself, whenever X now accompanies his wife on her ceaseless visits to the old man’s sickroom in his (i.e., the old man’s) and his wife’s opulent neoromanesque home across town (and in what feels like a whole different economic galaxy) from the Xes’ own rather modest house, are especially excruciating, for all the above reasons plus the fact that X’s wife’s father—who, even though by this time he’s confined to a special top-of-the-line adjustable hospital bed the family has had brought in, and every time X is there he’s lying stricken in this special high-tech bed being attended to by a Puerto Rican hospice technician, is nevertheless always still immaculately shaved and groomed and attired, with his club tie double-Windsored and his steel trifocals polished, as if ready at any moment to spring up and make the Puerto Rican fetch his Signor Pucci suit and juridical robes and return to 7
^th
District Tax Court to hand down some more mercilessly well-reasoned decisions, a dress and demeanor which the distraught family all seem to regard as one more sign of the tough old bird’s heartbreaking dignity and
dum spero joie de vivre
and strength of will—that the father-in-law always seems conspicuously chilly and aloof in his manner toward X during these dutiful visits, whereas X in turn, standing there awkwardly behind his wife as she is drawn tearfully in to incline over the sickbed like some spoon or metal rod drawn in and bent forward by the hideous force of a mentalist’s will, usually feels overcome with first alienation and then distaste and resentment and then actual malevolence toward the iron-eyed old man who, if the truth be told, X has always secretly felt was a prick of the first rank, and now finds that even just the glint of the father-in-law’s trifocals afflicts him, and can’t help feeling that he hates him; and the father-in-law, in turn, seems to pick up on X’s hidden involuntary hatred and gives back the clear impression of not feeling at all gladdened or bucked up or supported by X’s presence and of wishing X weren’t even there in the sickroom with Mrs. X and the glossy hospice technician, a wish X finds himself concurring bitterly with inside even as he exerts an even wider and more supportive and compassionate smile out into the space of the room, so that X always feels confused and disgusted and enraged in the old man’s sickroom with his wife and always ends up wondering what he’s even doing there in the first place.

X, however, of course, also always feels rather ashamed about feeling such dislike and resentment in the presence of a fellow human being and legal relative who’s steadily and inoperably declining, and after each visit to the old man’s luculent bedside, as he drives his distraught wife home in silence, X secretly castigates himself and wonders where his basic decency and compassion are. He locates an even deeper source of shame in the fact that ever since the father-in-law’s terminal diagnosis came down, he (i.e., X) has spent so much time and energy thinking only of himself and of his own feelings of resentful exclusion from his wife’s clannish family’s
Drang
when, after all, his wife’s father is suffering and dying right before their eyes and X’s loving wife is nearly prostrate with agony and grief and the Xes’ sensitive innocent children are also grieving terribly. X secretly worries that the obvious selfishness of his inner feelings during this time of family crisis when his wife and children so clearly deserve his compassion and support might constitute evidence of some horrific defect in his human makeup, some kind of hideous central ice where his heart’s nodes of empathy and basic other-directedness ought to be, and is increasingly tormented by shame and self-doubt, and then is doubly ashamed and worried about the fact that the shame and self-doubt are themselves self-involving and thus further compromise his ability to be truly concerned and supportive toward his wife and kids; and he keeps all his secret feelings of alienation and distaste and resentment and of shame and self-urtication even about the shame itself completely to himself, and doesn’t feel like he can possibly go to his distraught wife and burden/horrify her even further with his own self-involved
pons asinorum,
and in fact is so disgusted and ashamed about what he fears he might have discovered about his heart’s makeup that he is unusually subdued and reserved and unforthcoming with everyone in his life for the first several months of his father-in-law’s illness and says nothing to anyone of the storms raging centripetally inside him.