Search Results for: TV

It’s Like This and Like That and Like What?

Death Row / Interscope Records, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,912 words)

 

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

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In the entirety of 1990, exactly one hip-hop single made it to the top spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. This was “Ice Ice Baby,” and the LP whence its dope melodies came, To the Extreme, also ruled the Billboard album charts for the final eight weeks of that year — knocking off the previous number one, another rap record, Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em. (It turned out that if U were Vanilla Ice, U could, in fact, touch this.) As the nineties rush-rushed in, aching to break out of the previous decade’s noxious forcefield of Aqua Net, one thing was clear: American Top 40 radio was ready for hip hop — so long as it was squeaky clean, or, failing that, performed by a white guy with the wackest eyebrows in history.

By the end of the decade, the landscape had shifted almost beyond recognition. Synth-pop was the stuff of nostalgia nights; rock was emitting the first gurgle of its death rattle (which sounded like this); and what had heretofore been called “hardcore” hip hop was so ubiquitous in “mainstream” (read: white) culture that its ubiquity became a bit in Mike Judge’s 1999 cult classic Office Space.

Read more…

Born Again

Illustrations by Karen Barbour

Michelle Dean Topic | April 2017 | 13 minutes (3,100 words)

This story is featured in collaboration with Topic, a digital storytelling platform that delivers an original story to your inbox each and every week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now.

Candace Newmaker was 10 years old when she died in 2000. There are only a few pictures of her, and even fewer biographical details. Here is what we do know: she had dark brown hair and eyes, she liked dogs and horses, and she enjoyed arts and crafts. Candace had been a ward of the state of North Carolina since she was about 5 the daughter of a very young mother who hadn’t been able to hold her own life together, and who had lost her very young children to the Department of Children and Family Services. Jeane Newmaker, a kindly nurse-practitioner who was single and in her early 40s, found Candace in the system when she was 6 and adopted her in 1996. It’s not clear exactly when things got difficult between Newmaker and her adopted daughter. Maybe things were difficult from the start. (Newmaker declined to comment for this article; this account is based on contemporaneous press reports in the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.) Candace, one of the girl’s therapists later said, could be sweet, but she could also be “mean.” One therapist said it just seemed like Candace had a “defense mechanism for being through so many places” — that “it was like having the average 18-year-old adolescent in your house,” one who was trapped in a 10-year-old’s body. Read more…

Captive Audience

Lucas Mann | Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV | Vintage | May 2018 | 13 minutes (3,553 words)

Hi (: I am ______, I am a 17 year old with a story.

I want to quit feeling like I am not important. I want to be somebody in my life, I do not want to be remembered as some face in the yearbook, I want to be heard. Currently, I make youtube videos, and I have 317 subscribers. I know it is not a big number, but I am finally being heard by some people and I love it. I just want to make people happy, in any shape or form. Putting a smile on people’s faces is my dream! If I could be casted on this show, my life would be complete. I just want people to know me more than just some girl who likes makeup. I want people to know who I am. My family is not against this, but they do think I should focus on school, which I agree with but this is my dream.

Height: 5 feet 5 inches
Age: 17
Gender: Female
Dream: This.

Please help me reach for the stars, this is my dream and if it comes true, I can’t even imagine my life. Help me out (: Help me be heard.

— from the Casting Call Hub website http://www.castingcallhub.com

I have, for a long time, suggested that we get rid of cable. I have even suggested that we throw out our TV altogether so that we may eat at our actual kitchen table and play more Scrabble. I’d say these suggestions come biannually, on average — they used to be more frequent, then ebbed, and are now increasing again. They have been going on for the better part of a decade. They arise, as most of my impulses toward change do, out of feelings of shame. They arise when we open up our home and visitors see the way we live — by which I mean what we watch and the frequency with which we watch it — and make remarks that I take to be scornful:

I cannot believe you guys have all the channels.

Or: How can someone retain so much information about Bravo?

Or: How do you do it? If I had cable, I think I would forget how to live. It’s just too easy to let your mind get lost in the slush and forget to look up.

It seems crucial that lovers put themselves in scenarios that would otherwise be boring and then very pointedly not feel bored.

The relationship between television and life is loaded. The relationship between television and love is, perhaps, even more so. Life, the way I think the term is most commonly used, is about action. Go out and live is the kind of thing that people say to those they deem flawed — ride something, climb something. Engage. Or it can be used as an insult to those who have nothing valuable to offer: get a life.

Love, the way I think the term is most commonly used, necessitates the same action. Loving passively is as shameful as living that way. When we love fully, we are doing something to make that love valid; it’s a conscious process, it’s active. Two people see each other in a way that elevates the act of sight to a challenge that must be confronted. Two people refuse to take their eyes off one another; that’s the idea. When we love fully, we are meant to engage.

*

For a long time, when you would refuse to give up television, I would pretend to be grudgingly acquiescent, as opposed to relieved. You would placate me and say that our watching was your fault, that I was merely implicated by association, the same way it is when I buy ice cream and offer you some — those aren’t your calories if you didn’t seek them out. We would, as a way to avoid any long-term legislation, briefly turn off the TV and spend the following hours in a sort of mutual meditation, leaning over the table at dinner, sometimes by candlelight, taking in the contours of the face in front of us, as though it had changed from the previous day, and the one before that, and the countless expanse of days that stretched out behind us (nearly every day of our adult lives), making us forget what it felt like to not know that face.

The literature of love, both the bad kind and the good, hinges on this type of sustained gaze. And, though the word boredom rarely comes up, it seems crucial that lovers put themselves in scenarios that would otherwise be boring and then very pointedly not feel bored. I’m thinking of Keats here, in one of those gorgeous poems to Fanny that I once read aloud to you in college, the last time neither of us owned a TV. I read to you of Keats wishing only to be:

. . . gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast. . . .

People used to live at such a slow, sensual pace. This is the kind of thing I still say on the nights when the TV is off. Nostalgia is all wrapped up in slowness. How long we used to linger. The capacity we used to have for sustained care, sustained concentration, sustained quiet.

My favorite book about love is John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. Berger wrote it in 1984 — an early–MTV era book — but he wrote with a slowness that implies timelessness, that makes a piece of writing feel resonant, or maybe the word is authentic. He was an aging icon in the French Alps then, describing the way his life had moved, the way he’d seen the world change, but at its core the book is a missive to his lover.

He writes of when he is without her, thinking of her, how she shifts in his imagination:

In the country which is you, I know your gestures, the intonations of your voice, the shape of every part of your body. You are not physically less real there, but you are less free.

How strong a gaze; how long lasting — until his love (who remains unnamed throughout) becomes the image of herself, a creation of his mind and memory as much as the person he knows. There is a bending of reality in this sentiment, and in turn a sort of dehumanizing, but in Berger’s hands it doesn’t feel gross. Instead, it is a way of seeing I aspire to. It’s the elevation of a person to art: to speak to the one I most care for and hopefully witness a grander sentiment (Love! Timeless love!) whisper out from the intimacy of that address. But Berger wrote these words long before anyone ever wrote the word mansplain, and I wonder now if he might ask for a do-over And I wonder, too, if I should try to find a better way to capture and perform my own love. You don’t need me to tell you what’s there, what’s been there, like it’s a show that only I’ve been watching. And yet I do, uncertain, trapped in my own voice, hoping you see at least a sliver of yourself in the portrait, frozen in sustained care.

We went to the Alps once, with your sister and a bunch of other leather-clad Europeans. All that money blown to spend New Year’s partying at high altitudes. Everybody else went skiing, but you knew I couldn’t, so you let me avoid the embarrassment by staying behind in the cabin. I spent a week binge-watching over bad Wi-Fi, and that experience of waiting for the screen to unfreeze while cold rain pecked at the windows of a moldy chalet only ratcheted up the claustrophobia. I watched. Sometimes I walked until I got bored, then returned to the screen again. I waited to hear you come in the door, and we’d put our cheeks together so I could absorb some of the cold from you.

On New Year’s Eve, after a long party, we lay in bed unable to sleep. The shadows of the mountains were maybe visible through our window, framed in moonlight, but we weren’t looking. We watched each other’s faces and waited for the laptop to buffer. Finally, we were able to watch The Real L Word, a show about actual lesbians in LA, developed to capitalize on the success of a show about fictional lesbians in LA that I never had any interest in watching. It’s a program we’ve only ever sought out in transit — in a motel in Pennsylvania, mid-move, U-Haul packed in the parking lot, dog whimpering at the sound of trucks passing outside, or in a semisecluded corner of O’Hare Airport on a night when all connections were grounded for tornadoes.

Sometimes it’s nice to match moods, to decide on that mood matching together. There’s a restlessness to The Real L Word that appeals only in restless moments. There’s a pulsing crassness to the way the most intimately personal is made to feel branded. The women fuck desperately in some scenes, and with the lights on, no pretense that they’re unaware of the cameras. They look up, let us see their faces, and then plunge their heads back between legs. In the nonfucking scenes, every word they say is loaded with as much pressure as sex; anything said about anyone can be taken as a slight. It’s easy to get a sense that they don’t know one another at all, or maybe they really do and this is how shallow knowing someone actually looks when there’s a camera around — another loaded thought.

Reality should not be a performance; a show, if it’s any good, should probably be exaggerating something. The resulting promise of the phrase, then, is an impossibility.

We were on the futon in the dark, in the Alps, listening to the party die down, and there was Whitney on screen, fucking white-dreadlock Whitney, celebrity makeup artist-cum-minor-celebrity, confessing in the confessional room after a pretty graphic tryst with her on-again-off-again.

Lust is easy for me, she said in front of a bright-red curtain, for some reason. Love is hard. Lust is exciting. Love is scary.

We looked at each other, like always. We didn’t say anything, but let Whitney’s cutaway lines hang between us as a question or an invitation. I saw your face, pale, and my face reflected in your dark eyes. It doesn’t take much to approximate profundity. At least not to me.

***

I’ve written about a lot of things, or it seems that way to me, but ultimately they’re all kind of the same thing. I write about loneliness, or dissatisfaction, or incompleteness. I have tried, in different (though not very different) ways, to make sense of the things that hurt. What is harder, and what I have avoided, is trying to honor the truth of everything that doesn’t hurt: that I am not alone; that (although I am reluctant to say the phrase exactly because of Jerry Maguire) I am closer to feeling complete because we are together; that often, in our little house in front of our big TV for hours until my eyes begin to sting, I am satisfied.

This is hard to reread after writing it. It seems an impossibly small statement to make, one meant to be offered only semisincerely, and a bit drunkenly, at special-occasion dinners.

Barthes says that love, as a subject, has been driven to the backwater of the “unreal.” Then, he strives to distinguish between unreal and disreal. The unreal is the fantastical — Tristan and IsoldeIt’s a Wonderful Life, that kind of thing. In its grandness and sincerity and removal, the unreal is easier to explain, always familiar. And so it’s the love story that is easiest to find in any book or movie or TV show, allowing the audience to linger in swelling impossibility.

But the disreal, Barthes argues, is where love belongs. The disreal is lived experience, the flickering, perceived moment, unsayable — if I utter it (if I lunge at it, even with a clumsy or overliterary sentence), I emerge from it.

My problem is that I am immersed in it and because I’m immersed in it, I can’t think of anything else to utter. We are in one place: our home; we see one person: the other. What else is there to say? I want to believe that I’m not interested in fantasy. I am interested in the disreal, not the unreal, both in the art that I seek and the love that I live. But if you look at any life long enough, with enough vested interest, how do you not begin to push toward the fantastical?


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Whenever you catch me looking at you, you say, What are you looking at? Which is a really loaded question. You know what I’m looking at — you, the person in front of me; what else could I be looking at? But what you’re asking for is the difference between image and interpretation — is what I see more interesting than what is really there, or what you think is really there? And all I can ever say is nothing. And then you roll your eyes and we become exactly what the world would expect us to be. And now I’ve gone from Roland Barthes to a sitcom punch line. I turn back to the TV.

***

It’s hard to trace an exact history of the “reality show.” The term is often applied retroactively — roots can be found in The Real World, back in the mid-nineties, or Cops in the late eighties, or in early eighties variety shows like That’s Incredible! or the seminal seventies docudrama An American Family. One thing remains consistent: it’s always been a tortured lineage, a confounding term.

The best parsing of the language I’ve read is this, from a book called Trans-Reality Television: “Reality show” as a phrase is self-confessing.

In proximity, the two words begin to chip away at each other’s meaning. Reality should not be a performance; a show, if it’s any good, should probably be exaggerating something. The resulting promise of the phrase, then, is an impossibility: transforming facts to the level of the spectacular.

I like that the implication isn’t that we who watch so faithfully are being bullshitted, but rather that we are willfully bullshitting ourselves to get what we want. We are promised a dynamic that cannot actually ever exist, and we accept that.

More than accept it. The genre means a lot to us, to me. I’ve never expressed that sentiment with even a gesture toward sincerity because it’s embarrassing. But I think I mean it. Sincerely. At least for now I do.

When you live alongside anything for a long time — any person, any character, any narrative structure, any screen flicker — you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

Far more than I’ve read Berger (or Barthes or Sontag, or any of the others on the grad-school syllabus that I claim shaped how I see the world), far more than we have walked through museums together (and really, how many times have I had the patience for more than one wing and the café?), far more than we’ve sat and listened and harmonized to the songs that we so seriously call ours, we have watched and internalized and discussed televised showings of spectacular reality. The Real Housewives of Atlanta (and New Jersey and New York and Beverly Hills and, to a lesser degree, Miami and Orange County), Keeping Up with the Kardashians, The Real World, Road Rules, The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, Love and Hip Hop, Sister Wives, Basketball Wives, Breaking Amish, Storage Wars, My 600-Pound Life, My Big Fat Fabulous Life, Shahs of Sunset, Married to Medicine, Botched, Say Yes to the Dress, Deadliest Catch, Million Dollar Listing, Intervention, The Little Couple, Vanderpump Rules — there are many more that I’m forgetting offhand, and there have been many that came and went and briefly held some importance for us, and there are many more being produced right now that we will soon adopt. These are the narratives that have underpinned our lives. These are the types of stories that we choose to live alongside.

When you live alongside anything for a long time — any person, any character, any narrative structure, any screen flicker — you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you. A part of what — and, more important, how — you remember.

***

We’re on your bed next to the window in your dorm room and we’re nineteen. I’m running my hands along your tattoo, your first one, and you tell me to stop because you don’t like your body, and I tell you that I do. You don’t believe me.

We ask for everything about each other, the kinds of details that other people wouldn’t know, as though that will confirm the importance of our conversations. My first memory was of a red vacuum cleaner on the gray carpet of my mother’s apartment on East Sixth Street. I was scared of the noise it made. It was a cramped basement apartment, and every sound was loud. I was frightened often. This was Alphabet City in the late eighties, and outside our windows I could see and hear the pacing boots of methadone patients waiting for their morning fix.

“Oh, I can picture you,” you say. “Were you blonder? Were you chubby?”

I was, both. And I want you to picture me that way: a cherub in a hard, looming world.

I do remember the vacuum cleaner, and that the carpet was gray. I have heard about the methadone clinic from my mother, mostly cheerful stories about me getting free lollipops. I don’t remember it, but I can picture it now, too.

You are running your fingers through my hair and smiling at what isn’t an outright lie, just an interpretation, the beginning of a character that I would rather you see, another in a quickly building collection — Q: How many partners have you had? A: Plenty. Q: Wait, did you come already? A: {Indecipherable, hopefully erotic grunt}.

You say you remember almost nothing. You didn’t speak as a child, you say, like not ever, because you moved to different countries and had to start learning language all over again. You remember an overall feeling of loneliness, but hardly any images. Oh, here’s one, you say. Coming back from the beach in Italy, drinking peach nectar out of a carton — how sweet and thick and simple it was. Oh, and you had a boy’s haircut. Oh, and you were bullied for your weirdness, and your silence, so you preferred to be alone — most of the memories you have are of that pain. Oh, and one more thing: you were a liar. When you did speak, it was never the truth. And there was one particular lie you told that was too big, too painful, and you’ll never talk about it even still.

This scares me a little but mostly turns me on — a repressed past; an untellable secret; dark, brooding eyes under a strange, little-boy haircut, lonely, sucking nectar out of a carton. It becomes instantly important to know that there is something unknowable about you.

***

I keep thinking of your secrets and the lonely anger, and all those redacted memories for a while, and then I forget about them as other details emerge to pay attention to. But these plot points linger, always, making each new scene a little more enthralling, and then they resurface, brief, overpowering — reminders that we can see so much of each other, know each other as best we can, and yet always, underneath, there is the unknown.

A few years later, at a party in Brooklyn, you’re talking and drinking and laughing, and then suddenly you’re silent and flushed, looking over my shoulder, down a crowded hallway. You’ve seen someone from childhood, from an American camp you were sent to when you knew no English, and your face is the face of a silent girl, alone and enraged. At first you ask me to hide you, but then she comes up and says, “Oh my God, how crazy to see you! Remember camp? Don’t you miss camp?”

I watch you glare at her, silent for a moment, and then you crescendo into emotion. You say that you don’t miss it at all. You tell this girl that she had been so cruel — does she even remember what she did to you? She says, “No, not me,” and you stand closer to her, and say with a new force, “Yes, you.”

There are others around us at the party, turned stiff and awkward, but you don’t see anybody else. The camp girl says she doesn’t remember it the same way, but then she squeaks through an apology. You don’t accept. The crowd watches; I watch, and watch them watch you. I am transfixed — by your tears, by your rage, by this beautiful soap-opera haze that has fallen over the hallway.

On the way home you don’t bring it up. You are silent; you hold your body in what looks to be a performed, anguished seethe, and I keep stealing glances at you as we walk. Years have passed, and I still remember it, a vivid, pleasurable return each time — those mysteries in you, the pain turned to brief power, probably overblown in my mind but always potent.

* * *

Lucas Mann is the author of Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV, out in May from Vintage Books.  He is also the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere.  He teaches creative writing at The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and lives in Providence, RI, with his wife.

From Captive Audience by Lucas Mann.© 2018 by Lucas Mann. Reprinted by permission of Anchor Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.

 

Walking Through the Past Into New Motherhood

Holger Hollemann/dpa via AP

Jessica Friedmann | Things That Helped | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | April 2018 | 36 minutes (9,972 words)

Every morning, my father goes for an hour’s walk before work. This is the ritual that starts the day. When I come down to the kitchen for breakfast he is just getting home, and the dog precedes him through the door, pattering around, looking for a sunny patch, while my dad dumps the shrink-wrapped tube of the newspaper on the kitchen table. Often it is damp with condensation, but when I peel the wrapping off, the newsprint itself is dry.

Depending on the season, my sisters and I wear identical pale blue knee socks with our school uniforms, or itchy, dark gray tights. Dad’s early-morning outfit is unvaried; tracksuit pants, a T-shirt, sneakers, and a jumper tied around his waist, disguising or reinforcing the back brace he wears on cold mornings. His back injury is one of the reasons for his walking, and for the careful, constant stretches he does. After dinner, he leaves the table and rolls his knees from side to side upon the floor.

As a child, I have no clear idea of what a disk is, or what it means to “slip” one or two or three. In my mind, my father’s spine is like a Jenga tower, with pieces sticking out precipitously, ready to bring the entire structure down. In fact, his spine is not too dissimilar now to a stack of blocks — bone on bone with nothing to cushion each vertebra. He teases his mother about the fact that she is shrinking, but he is not as tall as he was.

***

Every now and then, on a High Holiday or when someone has died, my father gets up early to accompany his father to shul, walking there, of course, because on these occasions you don’t drive. I don’t know what kind of tricky political maneuvering has gotten him to this point, or what strings have been pulled, but these mornings come as a kind of détente in an ongoing tussle over Dad’s lack of faith. He himself disclaimed religion years and years ago, but neither of his parents really accept that he no longer believes in God; or if they do, they believe that his defection is too late; he has already been bar mitzvahed, and that is that.

My dad keeps a few yarmulkes in a drawer in the hallway console, between misplaced golf tees and a set of spare keys. When I accompany my grandmother, Nagyi, to shul myself on odd occasions, I sit with her on the women’s balcony, something that must have been brought over from the old country, because in the early ’90s, who segregates men and women? Only the most conservative, but I don’t have any idea of the fault lines yet between Orthodox and Progressive, Hasidic and Reform. In my grandparents’ neighborhood, girls wear wigs and long black skirts, but Nagyi disdains them for their showiness. There are ways and ways to be a good conservative Jew.

On High Holidays, the main ways are prayer and food. Inevitably we three girls will arrive tetchy from being bundled into our “good” clothes and then sitting around afraid to mark them. We have Peter Pan collars edged with lace, and large velvet headbands holding back our glossy hair. We are keyed up, too, with the awareness of something special happening, but unable to read all the currents of the evening, the ebbs and flows.

Depending on the holiday, Papa’s intonement of Hebrew is either brief or on-and-on-and-on. Dad jokes that all Jewish holidays boil down to “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat!” but I scrupulously study the English text in the Haggadah, trying to make sense of it, or at least match the English words to the Hebrew rhythm. Some aspect of me feels that I ought to find this language resonant, or at least imbued with meaning, but it goes over my head, and the meal is reduced to a pantomime. We play a children’s pantomime, too, toward the end, hiding a piece of matzo for my grandfather to studiously not find, and bargaining its release for a net of gold chocolate coins.

At some point I ask Dad why he left the shul, and he tells it very simply: that he went every Saturday until he was 17 years old, when he raised a scriptural question from the day’s sermon with his father; that Papa told him very firmly not to question the rabbi, and since that point my father has had no faith. There is a horror around that quashing of spirit that is too great for my child’s mind to take in, and I put it away, unaware that it has tangled in my mind with a budding supposition — that Jews can get in trouble if they ask too many questions.

***

Questions are my lifeblood; I cannot live without them. As my legs grow longer I like to join Dad in the morning, prowling the suburbs before the sun comes up. It takes me a while to wake up all the way, but I love the feeling of the wind brisking up my cheeks as we cross the bridge into Richmond. As we head over the river we can see rowers out in pairs or single sculls, seagulls perched on the garbage traps, long snaky strands of gold light rippling with the flow of the water.

Often we walk in silence, the dog trotting at my father’s side. The sky turns pink and crisp in the autumn, and balloons go up over the city. When we talk, I bounce my newly forming philosophical quandaries o my father, who enjoys them. “How do I know that the color I see as green is the same color that you see as green?” I ask, and for the next 20 minutes we are down a path that is comprised half of classical philosophies of subjectivity, and half of how the eye actually perceives color as a lens. It amazes me that there are wavelengths of light — all around me and going through me — that I cannot detect at all.

Every term, we carry our school reports to our grandparents’ house, and they read over them and congratulate us, and my grandfather solemnly hands to each of us an envelope of cash. The money embarrasses me, but the pride I enjoy. I know how much it means to him to see us do well; he left school at 14 himself, to help his parents in their shop, in the country town my grandmother would later live in and loathe. He was the second eldest and survived the Holocaust with five of his siblings — six out of nine. They were the largest group of siblings to survive; I think there is a certificate somewhere.

The fact of this is somewhere in the background, also squashed, also repressed. When I come across Jewish children in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit or Number the Stars, I am careful not to invest too much of myself into them. It is easier to be Laura Ingalls Wilder or Emily of New Moon, or Jo March, with her independence and her comically small head. I tear through everything the junior school library has to offer, then get special permission to visit the senior school library for books.

Nagyi and Papa come to our end-of-year assemblies; they are faithful attendees of our recitals and ballet concerts. Dad watches the unbending of his father with astonishment. When I miss a mark in a spelling test, he shakes his head with mock dismay.

“You know when I was your age, if I brought home a test with a mark of ninety-six, my father would say, ‘What happened to the other four points?’”

I laugh, trying not to show how much I mind those few missed marks. I hear the conversations between my teachers, and I know that some of the work I am given is different, harder. The word potential is used cautiously; I begin to realize that I have a great deal of potential. But the thinly veiled excitement behind the phrase is a compliment I haven’t yet earned. I am expected to do something with this potential; I am supposed to live up to it; there is no telling how far I will go.

My parents pick up on and try to assuage my anxiety. “I don’t care if you want to be a garbage collector,” says Dad, “just as long as you are the best garbage collector you can be.”

Later I find that this is a mantra in all migrant households, and one that my friends trot out when we are telling the stories of where we came from. The best you can be echoes around the back of my skull, a lone refrain until I abandon my homework one night as mostly done, good enough. Dad looks at me over the top of his newspaper when I say as much out loud.

“There is no such thing,” he says, “as ‘good enough.’”

My mother is horrified to overhear this, but Dad looks me in the eye, and I know exactly what he means.

***

The school that my sisters and I attend is the junior school sister of a single-sex private institution. It doesn’t occur to me to find a school comprising only women and girls odd; at home Dad often groans jokingly of being outnumbered, though he wanted six girls initially.

We are here in part because of my mother’s hairy legs. As a teenage girl, she tells me later, she deliberately lagged to the back of cross-country running groups so that the older boys would not see her legs. She didn’t want us ever not to be swift; she didn’t want us to sabotage our chances, to feel the shame of exposure. She tells me about the incinerators in the girls’ toilets at her senior school; how girls were required to burn their bulky sanitary pads, and any girl bleeding was identifiable from the plume of smoke emerging above her toilet stall, announcing her like the election of a new pope. Later, on her teaching rounds, she gritted her teeth as boys pushed their way to the new computers at the expense of their female peers, and were rewarded with attention and opportunity for it.

That we can have and be anything we want is borne out by our parents, who, if they are not old money, are migrants or the children of migrants; our mothers and fathers, but mostly our fathers, started out with nothing, and look at them now. In the playground there is no feeling of racial consciousness; though I don’t know the term model minority yet, that is what we are, we migrant daughters of Jewish and Chinese and Indian doctors and lawyers.

My race education is of its place and time, which will make me blush as an adult when I understand what this means. I am sure we do learn about Indigenous Australians, whom we call Aborigines, sometime during primary school; I am sure that I make a poster presentation. I know that at some point we learn about bush tucker, and place tiny native-pepper berries on our tongues, and squirm and giggle at the thought of eating witchetty grubs. We all have enough food at home; we cannot imagine that anyone, by necessity or choice, would eat a bug.

We also learn that Captain Cook “discovered” Australia in 1770, that he and Joseph Banks staked a claim on Botany Bay and then the nation began; that from then on colonies sprang up, and convicts worked through their indenture, and the Gold Rush brought prosperity, and sheep and wheat and opals brought even more. We do not learn about the Frontier Wars, or if we do, they are not named as such, and the losses of life are downplayed. If we learn about the referendum to repeal Section 127 of the Constitution, reading In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted, it is as a footnote to history, not something that I, or anyone else, has ever made a diorama about.

There is also, pervasively, the Holocaust. It seems to permeate the entirety of our classes, later on, in History and in English, as the scale of World War II is pressed upon us again and again. We read Livia Bitton-Jackson’s book Elli, and it doesn’t escape me that Elli’s surname is the same as mine; that we are both fourteen. I read it once, put it down, and move on to other things. I don’t want to dwell on this book, or on the immensity of its subject.

One image sticks with me vividly, though: girls marching naked toward Auschwitz, one of them bleeding freely down her thighs, and Elli’s sudden realization that she might one day be as embarrassed and exposed as that. In a girls’ school, pads and tampons are batted around the bathrooms with nonchalance. They are wrapped in bright colors, and girls read out the trivia printed on their hygiene stickers from behind the stall doors.

The girls who are not the daughters of migrants have long sleek ponytails and suntanned legs. A few years earlier, they passed around a copy of Bridge to Terebithia, highly prized because it made them cry so much. It is not a crime to be sentimental, but when we are given a creative writing exercise — to produce an account of life in Auschwitz and Dachau — I feel my gorge rising on a hot tide of panic. I do not have the language to explain, even to myself, how sick I feel about these girls indulging in the so sad sadness of life within a camp, even in fiction, even for a minute.

I think about writing a letter to my teacher explaining this, but I don’t. It doesn’t occur to me to simply not do the work; I am too much of a Goody Two-shoes, a perfect student, a suck. And I know that I will have to face what happened in Hungary and Germany and Poland at some point, so I tell myself I am being mature and write the piece. And I get full marks, and I do not wallow and I do not inch. But later, when I have learned the language of appropriation and thanatourism and the concept of trauma porn, I will wish that I had not been such a coward, and that instead I had simply told my English teacher to fuck off.

***

More and more I come to value the time spent walking in the morning before school. At 16 I am in my final year of school, and so, unlike my friends, I don’t rush out and get my license straightaway. The thought of learning to drive, on top of the schoolwork that is piling up, feels like too much pressure, too much stress.

I am still intent on following my father, who is a dentist, into some kind of medical field, preferably surgery — from a young age I have been fascinated with the workings of the body — and so I immerse myself in chemistry and mathematical methods, the latter of which I loathe. I like chemistry for its acceptance of ambiguity, its stoichiometric equations that acknowledge that no state of matter is ever truly fixed.

Our early-morning walks take us past a little row of shops, where Dad and I slow our pace to navigate around the café tables that have been placed out for the early rush and shoppers coming out of the bakery clutching loaves of bread. A few years of after-school work at Bakers Delight have inured me to the smell of hot bread in the morning; it is a smell I miss, a comfort smell. At one shop front, I sneak a quick glance at a pair of shoes in the window. They are at sandals with an open back, with metal hoops and disks of black leather arcing over the top of the foot. They look like something Kate Bush would wear.

When I get my results, I let out a whoop, and then sit for a moment, looking at the computer screen. I have slept until noon to safely ignore the phone calls of curious family, and I know that my parents must be dying of tension in the other room, where they are respecting my distance while I find out whether or not I’ve got the marks I need. I have missed out on a place in medicine by one point, but I feel curiously light having had the decision made for me, and deeply content about my impending entry into arts.

I tell my parents my score, and they hug me and ring my grandparents, and later in the day, Dad presents me with a box. In it are the Kate Bush shoes. I know that secretly he would like to mark the occasion by giving me a car, but these shoes are much, much dearer to me. I hadn’t realized that he’d been watching each morning when I paused at the shop window to admire them and say hello.

***

In the first year of my arts degree, uniforms left behind forever, an older girl in my art history class takes me under her wing, and my life opens up in a way I have longed for, inchoately, for as long as I have known. Summer evenings pass in cheap apartments above shops, playing records on a machine bought at Vinnies and smoking on the roof, or in tiny paved back gardens, sitting on upturned milk crates between the back door and the dunny. I go to a fancy-dress party dressed as Annie Hall and fall in love with a lean, dark-haired boy in the corner, his brown eyes glowing over the light of his cigarette. I leave our conversation to go to the loo, unclipping my father’s borrowed suspenders.

“Absolutely not,” my friend hisses while I’m away. “She’s 17 years old.” But a year later I am half living at his house, waking up lazily and putting the stovetop espresso on while his housemates go to Tabet’s for cheese-and-spinach pies. We watch Betty Blue and play backgammon in the morning, clean up haphazardly, take cups of tea out into the backyard with the newspaper or an old copy of Heat. When his Deleuze reading group comes over, I head out the back and read fashion magazines. I already know my position on Deleuze.

It is here that I read Monkey Grip for the first time, and feel a faint marvel of clairsentience at Helen Garner’s prose. So I haven’t dreamed up this life out of whole cloth; it exists, it has existed before me and without me, and was waiting for me to come and inhabit it, to walk the very same streets I am now walking, and argue over ethics and love and sex, and obsessively write. I curl up on Tom’s ratty old couch with my feet in a pair of his socks, the heels coming up past the back of my ankles, and scrawl poems on the backs of old envelopes as my mind flies far above the plum trees and the washing line.

***

As I am growing older, my grandparents grow older, too. For years Nagyi has been abetting Papa as he slowly declines into what will be confirmed, later, as dementia. She is so canny, and her personality so forceful, that if any of us suspect that she is covering for him, we keep it to ourselves. The role of neurotic, fussy Jewish mother — and grandmother — is culturally prevalent; she leans into it hard. Another joke of my father’s: “A Jewish mother gives her son two ties for his birthday. He comes down to breakfast the next day wearing one of them and she says, ‘What, you didn’t like the other one?’”

At Seder we still play out the ritual of hiding the matzo, though in increasingly obvious hiding places, and increasingly it becomes obvious that he genuinely cannot find it. We all love this man: the strength of his back, his too-strong hands, his ability to fold laundry impeccably, a relic of his days in schmatte. I love him achingly, although for a long time now I have understood the undercurrents of earlier years; my mother’s tension headaches; the things that were said when my father married out. When my mother offered to convert, Dad threw a fit; his parents would accept her as she was, or not at all. But it put us, as children, in a precarious situation.

Papa’s memories, long repressed, begin to come to the surface. Nagyi has made an oral history for a friend’s daughter’s PhD, but now I steel myself to interview her, for my first book chapter, a published work; I think, mistakenly, that I can do the work of honoring this chapter of her life in five thousand words, over two afternoons. I want it out of my system, where it has taken up residence like a ghost. It is not my story; but it is in my body, it is in my blood.

Nagyi’s sister Ann joins us, and the two of them prompt each other, speaking rapidly in Magyar. What I learn has already come out in dribs and drabs, in offhand comments over the years. That the bodies were piled so high that after a while these piles began to seem ordinary. That they stitched gold stars to their lapels and slept bone-weary and cold on cots in the “good” ghetto, and were not lined up and shot into the Danube, and were not raped, they stress, not by the Hungarians, not by the Germans, and not by the Americans, who, in their jubilation and recklessness, may have been the cruelest of all.

Papa, though, has never spoken of the war. I only have the barest outlines: a Russian labor camp; the fact that his sister died in Auschwitz, that he has never said her name. He is gentle with our dog, but gets skittish when he hears him growling; I see him cringe almost imperceptibly, a reflex that goes against everything he knows about Alex’s fierce allegiance to all members of our family. A labor camp, dogs, and the fact that there are virtually no Jews left in Kisvárda today; these are the dots I try not to connect.

***

My life out in the world is everything I want it to be, but sometimes my child self catches up to me, anxious, nauseous, wanting so badly to please. I try to ignore this sense of being doubled, being always followed by a sadness I can’t explain. If my childhood was happy, and it so very often was, then how did the sadness get in?

There is no room in the story of a richly nourished and nurtured childhood for this sadness. There is no explaining why, even as a very young child, I am sometimes paralyzed in the night by a wash of loneliness so powerful that by morning I have buried it deep within me. The child psychologists I see, usually for only three or four sessions and only every two or three years, find nothing wrong with me other than a tendency to worry and the usual signs of giftedness. I am enrolled in extension programs, my parents hoping, I think, to burn off some of this anxiety through intellectual stimulation, in the same way puppies exhaust themselves into contentedness at the dog park.

Nobody at this time mentions the concept of intergenerational trauma, much less epigenetic history. Somewhere in California, Mike’s father is working on the supercomputer that will finally map the genome. DNA is an exciting new frontier, but its applications are still thought of as physical, not psychological. It is only as an adult that I encounter the idea of histones — those protective, elegant proteins cushioning the gene — and the research that demonstrates methylation and histone modification altering the behavior and memory of laboratory mice.

There is a famous experiment involving mice that were trained to fear the scent of acetophenone, a compound associated with the smell of cherries, by being given electric shocks. Their pups and even their grandpups were introduced to this smell after they were born, and showed a marked trauma reaction, having never experienced an electric shock or smelled or seen a cherry. I think about this a lot.

In human behavioral studies, the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors — the largest study population easily available to Western researchers — have been found to be demonstrably more resilient or, on the contrary, more vulnerable to stress than others. There is “a chemical coating upon [our] chromosomes, which would represent a kind of biological memory of what the parents experienced,”1 one researcher writes, and I wonder again at this doubling: What makes some become more resilient, some less?

I do not tell any of my child psychologists about the fact that I see ghosts; they disappear in the daytime, and I feel foolish for having believed in them. But sometimes late at night, in the space between waking and sleeping, I am seized with fear, terrified to move my arms or legs; my skin becomes hot, my heart beats erratically, and I become hypervigilant, because I am sure that I can feel a cool breeze on my face, or a presence in the room. It is not sleep paralysis, which I learn about later, because I can move my limbs, I am simply too scared to, and my mouth tastes like bitter almonds as the fear slowly ebbs away.

In my late teens, there are days when I can barely leave the house for thinking about the world; days when I stand paralyzed in the kitchen doorway for half an hour, unable to eat because the choice between toast and muesli is fraught, and something catastrophic will happen if I’m wrong. I no longer open the mail and the electricity to our sharehouse is cut off; the ghosts have become internalized now, they are dybbukim. I can no longer see them, but they still have the terrifying ability to grab me, without warning, and hold me in stasis.

I am 18, 19, 20, and I have still not learned to drive. My grandmother learned at the age of 46, I tell myself, there is no rush, I have plenty of time. On my long legs, I stalk vast swaths of the inner north, trying to exhaust myself on the nights I cannot sleep. The truth is I am petrified of getting behind the wheel; of the strength and power of a ton of metal beneath the touch of my hands and feet, of the compulsion I can feel when I’m only imagining driving to swing the wheel, drive too fast, cause a crash deliberately. I am not safe and I can’t feel safe. And so the soles of my feet get worn and tough, pacing and mapping the suburbs under dim electric lights.

***

To my grandfather, education is a priority above nearly everything else. Part of it, I am sure, comes from the fact that, due to his family’s poverty, he never got to pursue a higher education. Part of the thirst for knowledge undoubtedly comes, too, from the Jewish requirement to study and learn from the Torah; from the long, five-thousand-year-rich Jewish oral-history tradition that kept the faith alive under multiple occupancies, Europe and Africa over.

Knowledge, for the Jew, is spiritual; hunger for knowledge is spiritual. This is as close to any religious tenet that I absolutely believe.

But there is knowledge and there is knowledge. It is true that some things seem permanently etched somewhere inside me, often forgotten for years and then retrieved out of nowhere: the sound of Nina Simone singing “Break Down and Let It All Out”; the fairy tales I absently tell Owen; my father’s shoelaces, looping around each other as Olivia stealthily ties them together at his feet. He is sitting in his spot on the old brown leather couch, its arm worn thin over a deadly wooden block that is ready to catch you on the side of the hip as you fling yourself into the chair. The footy is on and Dad is reading a newspaper—he claims he can read and watch at the same time. At his right is a glass of scotch and an opaque white plastic Tupperware container, a cylinder that is labeled with the word ALMONDS in text that is wearing faint. Olivia ties his shoelaces together and then sneaks off, holding her mirth in, as one of us other girls flops across Dad’s shoulder and reaches for the remote.

I can remember this; it is vivid and clear as day, but my brain is already busy working, dismantling the memory, peopling it with alternating sisters or changing out clothes. Is it the mustard or the red-and-blue-striped jumper he is wearing? Is Alex, our beautiful big schnauzer, flopped at his feet? And what is it he’s shouting at the television? It is probably a variant of “Round the neck!” or “Come on, umpire!” or “That’s gotta be 50!” — phrases of pure ocker that slip out from time to time from a place of deep assimilation.

It always makes me laugh to hear them, though I know he has earned the right to call the umpire a bloody white maggot. When he stands around the barbecue with my mother’s brothers-in-law and says things like “Strewth!” and “Kenoath!” I know he is hamming it up, but it is also a proof of something: an affection and warmth that broaches difference; a shibboleth of belonging.

I do not want to take these things away from him. I can feel my mind always picking away at something, unbuilding and reconstructing it. It is the only way I know. Knowledge for me does not mean facts, and a thing is never done and dusted, and constantly questioning is exhausting, but I cannot turn my mind off. I am as tiny as a quark or an atom; if something appears to be solid, I still slip right through it, and it is hard to settle comfortably into ever staying in one place.

***

It doesn’t escape my attention that everyone in Monkey Grip is white, or that at the parties I go to, few people didn’t go to private school. We may have pissed off away from the values of our parents, but we are still, inescapably, products of our environments.

I settle down to write my thesis and try to come to grips with some of it, the morass of existence, searching the work of four poets for some link between the violence in their work, the fractures of their language, and their attitude to the land for some clue that will prove illuminating, and settle some of my anxieties. I am trying to resolve the settler-colonial problem, by myself, in a poetry thesis that no one will read. The poets I examine are settler-colonial or migrant; including Indigenous poetries will blow out my word limit by three or four times, but I still loathe myself for this exclusion.

When I visit my parents’ house my dad and I resume our conversations, which over the years have become arguments, pitched battles, as I move away from his particular worldview. In moments of quiet, we are still each other’s best friends. Walking together, sitting and reading, there is a current owing between us that comes of a mutual love and understanding of who we are aside from our thoughts.

But neither of us is the kind to bite their tongue, and the arguments, left off, will always be resumed. He thinks I am a Pinko-Commie-Greenie bleeding heart, and I say of course I am, that that is the heart’s function, to pump blood, to power the whole machine through its bleeding. He baits me persistently, and my sisters sink into their chairs as we begin, quietly at first and then with raised voices, to go over and over ground that neither of us will cede.

What infuriates me the most about these debates is that I can never seem to win. My father, with his scientist’s ability to learn by rote, has a vast storehouse of facts that sound extremely dubious but that I can’t refute with analysis, which is my strongest tool; his reach is vast, there are statistics to back up everything. I still cannot memorize a phone number, or quickly add up a bill. I get lost amid a wash of numbers I am sure are being construed wrongly, and cannot seem to right them.

I know, intellectually, that it is better to be stymied at every turn by someone you love and respect than by someone you loathe and fear. There is never any nastiness in these arguments, but still they get beneath my skin.

“Look,” my dad says, “there have always been fluctuations in climate. Look at the Ice Age. When you say ‘the hottest June’ on record, yeah, well, we’ve only been keeping records for a hundred years! It’s hubris to believe that humans can change the climate.”

“Jesus! It’s hubris to believe we haven’t!”

When I get to the point of hollering, my mum steps in. This isn’t rhetorical, I think wildly, this is really happening. I cannot stop thinking about the melting ice caps, or a teenager standing in line in the hot sun on Nauru, waiting for hours for a single tampon while the blood trickles down her leg. My grandparents walking through a field to get to the border, bribing a Russian guard in the dead of night.

One of my father’s mantras is “There are no new jokes, just new audiences.” Another is “Never spoil a good story with the truth.” The two of them, together, seem to form an unassailable fortress. Another favorite saying, when we were children, and blocking the television: “Honey, you’re a pain, but not a pane of glass.” Sometimes at dinner, I do feel like a pane of glass. The things that are so self-evident to me, the things I fight for, believe to be compellingly true, fade away to hazy transparency at his unwillingness to budge.

***

It is not just the climate, it is not just asylum seekers, it is not just gay marriage — for which Dad deploys reasoned arguments based on respecting the official process by which he himself came as a refugee, and for further entrenching a division of church and state. I can hurl ideology at my father as much as I want, but it won’t sway him over, and I cannot resolve the party lines that are drawn within my body, through the fact of my being.

It is the whiteness, precarious and volatile. It is the Jewishness, to which I am officially denied a claim but with which I identify so strongly, in memory and in blood. It is the fact of my dad having married out, having never taught me Magyar, though I pestered him to as a child. It is the fact of an assimilation so rapid and successful that within a generation, for the most part, we have forgotten that Ashkenazi Jews ever were anything but white. In America and Australia and Britain, we have left behind the fact of being “ethnic,” blending so successfully with the general population that we are no more noticeable than flies.

I read about William Cooper in one of Gary Foley’s papers,2 a historical figure I had never heard of before; a Yorta Yorta man who saw Europe’s Jews as kindred:

In November 1938, throughout Germany a major Nazi pogrom was conducted against the Jewish community. This notorious event was dubbed kristallnacht and signalled a dramatic upsurge of violence […] Less than one month later, on December 6th 1938, on the other side of the world, a Victorian Aboriginal man, William Cooper, led a deputation of Kooris from the Australian Aborigines League, in a visit to the German Consulate in Melbourne where they attempted to present a resolution “condemning the persecution of Jews and Christians in Germany.” The Consul-General, Dr. R.W. Drechsler, refused them admittance.

Like the Jews, Indigenous Australians were rounded up, incarcerated, subjected to eugenic experimentation — though the latter came, for Indigenous people, not at the hands of a single demonic figure like Mengele, but through a state-sponsored program of child removal designed to rescue the light-skinned and breed out the rest.

In the way in which you learn about something for the first time, only to have it arise again almost immediately, I hear through a Jewish friend about a playwright, Elise Hearst, who is writing about this incident. It is being co-authored by one of Cooper’s descendants, Andrea James, and swiftly turns from a period piece to a metafiction; the threads are so entangled between James and Hearst, and the relationship so complex, that the two women wind up onstage as actors, re-enacting the fraught lines between them; their bloodlines, the history of their ancestors, the stories they carry in their skin.

When the play is staged, I cannot make it, but I listen to excerpts on the radio thirstily. I have never heard anything like this before, and yet it seems deeply familiar, as though dredged out of my body and my brain. It is comic, it can’t help being comic, as when Andrea, lightly fictionalized, confronts Elise about the fact that a white actor is playing a Tamil ancestor:

ANDREA: First all you white people nearly exterminate us, then when there are virtually no roles left for black people on stage and TV, you want to take our roles, too!

ELISE: I’m not a white person!

ANDREA: Aren’t you?

ELISE: No! I’m Jewish, I didn’t do that stuff to your people. In fact I empathize with your suffering. Didn’t you see me in that last scene getting hurled into a garage, beaten and degraded?3

I’m not a white person. Aren’t you? In Hungary, where István the First declared that to become Catholic was to become part of Europe, and where Jews and pagans were ostracized, uncoupled from national identity by their refusal to convert, we weren’t white; in the beginning decades of the 20th century, where race and ethnicity were entangled in a hundred different ways, we weren’t white. Under Hitler’s fictitious and cynical categorizations of the Jews as a race, bound by eugenic claims that would be “substantiated” in horror, we weren’t Aryan, we weren’t citizens, we weren’t white.

But when the boat carrying my grandparents and my father crossed the equator, and the hemispheres shifted beneath the waves, a transmutation took place, one that rippled like a tide from the banks of Australia’s shores and back toward them again: “not-white” became, in policy and thought, a less pressing category than “not-black.” In this way, we took our assimilation from visible contrast to a much, much darker race, one that did not yet have full recognition under the law, as European émigrés immediately were granted. To be European became geographic, not ideological; almost as soon as we stepped upon the shores, we became cosmopolitan and the persecution ceased.

If white guilt, as Eula Biss writes,4 stems from the same root as white debt, then the debt I think about is not the small one: the debt we owe William Cooper for extending us the recognition of our humanity, when he himself was denied it by government, was not even let into the building to present his petition, in fact. What I think about is the far, far greater indebtedness we bear, as Ashkenazis, to all of those with black and brown and Asian skins. Because whether we think of ourselves as white or not, and whether or not we desire the privileges and protections of that whiteness, we could only have obtained its protections while the nation’s punitive racial agenda was bearing down elsewhere.

The small debt, to an extent, has been repaid. There is a history of Jewish involvement in the fight for Indigenous rights of which we can justly be proud. But I inch when I think of the thousands of years for which the Jews existed successfully as a diaspora, and the ease by which that diaspora has displaced others in order to survive, not heeding, or deliberately repressing, the damage. To open our schmatte factories and to educate our children, to live safely without fear of persecution, we have taken land that is not ours to take, broken spiritual ties, severed connections to country that can never be restored.

And whether or not it was done in innocence, it makes me burn with shame. I carry that shame in my body, next to my father’s stroppy agnosticism and my grandmother’s survivor’s guilt. I feel it when I think of everything I have gained from assimilation, and everything others have lost. It is the question beneath the question, a plea for absolution. I empathize with your suffering. Didn’t you see me suffering, too?

***

That Jews are reputed to be neurotic, possibly epigenetically, that we are paranoid, that we suffer from persecution complexes, is easy to understand. We have always packed up quietly and left in the night, melting away into the darkness before the bread has had a chance to rise.

Buts the paranoia cuts both ways. Because of our rapid assimilation, because of our ability to mimic and impersonate — the Jews in Hollywood, the Jews in comedy — we could be anyone, anywhere. At the root of countless conspiracy theories we are there, secretly, controlling the media or America or the banks. Like a potato creeper taken for jasmine, or a tomato mischaracterized as a vegetable when really it is a fruit; to be Jewish is to be a simulacrum, so near to the thing itself that you are indistinguishable until somebody looks too close.

After Owen is born, and as I sink swiftly into depression, and am no longer fooling anybody, I walk all over Footscray, pushing the baby and narrating my steps, as suggested by the hospital psychologist; it is supposed to ground you to say the things you are doing at the moment that you are doing them, to narrow your scope to the immediacy of voice and breath. What I think about instead is the land as it must have been just a whisper ago, before the boat carrying my father arrived, before the boat carrying my mother’s ancestors arrived. I wonder what songlines I am tracing as I walk around the river, comforting myself with the fact that I am not fit to carry them anyway, and envy the pakeha women at the park, white New Zealanders, for their casual naming of things to their children: paihamu, rakiraki, kikorangi.

I pace the river alone in part because I have no mothers’ group. When Owen is born, I attend fortnightly health checks with the maternal and child health nurse, making sure that he is okay, although increasingly she turns her attention toward me, using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), a set of screening questions that gives a rudimentary idea of whether a patient is suffering or not.

The nurse apologizes for the fact that there is no mothers’ group currently available, though I have no actual desire to attend one.

“Usually we would be able to put you in touch with some new mums in your suburb,” she says, “but there haven’t been that many Caucasian women giving birth lately . . .”

And seeing my bewildered look: “The Ethiopian women usually organize theirs at church. And the Vietnamese and Chinese women have their own support systems in place.”

These closed systems segregate us into small parcels — mothers and babies coping with fundamentally similar circumstances in sometimes radically different ways. I wonder about these other mothers as I see them walking toward me in the park, most often with their babies covered by screens or light blankets draped over the front of their prams. The Vietnamese mothers in particular seem paranoid about the sun, barely letting it fall on their babies’ skin. I get told off by an old man outside the market for taking Owen for a five-minute walk to the pharmacy in full view of the sky.

Are these women like me, are they swiftly sinking, too? I do not ask and I do not have the language to ask; in my plummeting state I cannot seem to get my voice to reach beyond the surface of my skin.

***

When I later try to figure it out, there is no clear answer to be found. Cross-cultural studies on the subject are only just coming into being, qualitative research admitted into the study of women’s experiences after years of being considered “fringe.” Anthropological findings from the early ’80s seemed to determine that postpartum mental illness is a Western issue only; that the postpartum rituals of other countries, built around succoring and honoring the mother and newborn child, successfully inured them from disease. But more recent studies suggest that these results came from the fact that non-Western women don’t often conceptualize postpartum sadness and fear as being medical rather than cultural.

The EPDS questionnaire I fill in at the maternal and child health nurse’s office seems so far to be the best study tool cross-culturally, with its ten weighted questions of behavior and mood:

I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things:

  • As much as I always could
  • Not quite as much now
  • Definitely not so much now
  • Not at all

            I have blamed myself unnecessarily when things went wrong; I have felt scared or panicky for no good reason; I have been so unhappy I have had trouble sleeping.

When the questionnaire is translated into other languages, the responses across study populations are remarkably stable; conservatively, at least one woman in ten scores highly enough on this questionnaire to be considered seriously depressed cross-culturally, with the figure rising to about one in seven when self-reporting is conducted in Western nations. I think about all the women I see walking around Footscray, and the women who would have been forcibly removed from this land once, and their descendants, and wonder how they are coping and whether there is a language for their suffering.

I read Dana Jack, on the self-silencing behavior that comes with severe depression. To the nexus of selfhood and social pressure, she brings the brunt of feminist thought to bear:

Self-silencing is prescribed by norms, values, and images dictating what women are “supposed” to be like: pleasing, unselfish, loving. As I listened to the inner dialogues of depressed women, I heard self-monitoring and negative self- evaluation in arguments between the “I” (a voice of the self) and the “Over-Eye” (the cultural, moralistic voice that condemns the self for departing from culturally prescribed “shoulds”). The imperatives of the Over-Eye regarding women’s goodness are strengthened by the social reality of women’s subordination . . . Inwardly, they experienced anger and confusion while outwardly presenting a pleasing, compliant self trying to live up to cultural standards of a good woman in the midst of fraying relationships, violence, and lives that were falling apart.5

In the time that I am sick, nobody tells me that I am a bad mother. Nobody tells me that my history of depression means that I should never have risked having a child, though I overhear friends talking about the fact that they don’t want their children inheriting their genes, their own illnesses, and I wonder what it says about me that I took this risk so blithely.

I am lucky, if wanting to die is lucky, that my illness is culturally sanctioned by the Over-Eye; it is not just that I am culturally, acceptedly neurotic, but that my face is the face of the suffering women’s canon. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Winona Ryder in Girl Interrupted: the tragic and creative white woman is such a well-known figure that our fragility and need for protection is automatically assumed — I know walking out over a ledge that there will most likely be somebody there to catch me.

I know this isn’t the case for everybody, and I know how few resources there are out there. I know that others need this help as much or more, but I have long ago lost the ability to feel shame about my choices. I have my white skin, my eyes that are green from crying, my polished middle-class vocabulary, and my nice home and healthy white child. My whiteness is a tool in my arsenal and I use it for all that it is worth, because it is one of the things that gets me sympathy and attention, and, ultimately, the means to stay alive.

At the same time, I can’t stop thinking about these other women, the ones who don’t have recourse to benign stereotypes, only harmful ones, who are supposed to be better at suffering, or more accustomed to it, anyway. There are women for whom the Over-Eye is judgmental and pervasive, the result of political, physical, and social marginalization that is very present and very real; women who are rightly wary of doctors, whose families expect their constant strength or whose priests simply ask them for more faith in God. And I wonder how they cope and how their children cope.

When I think of these women, I do not wish to speak for them, or over them. I do not wish to speak on behalf of these women, whose communities close ranks around them protectively, who wander by the river with their heads full of clouds or dreams. It is just that the problem goes so far, it spreads so wide. And I feel that at least part of my life’s work is to bear witness.

***

If I try to unravel what became of my Judaism, I can follow the threads back to adolescence, the time when my parents steer me away from it the most.

“We wanted to keep you away from the poetry of it,” my mother says years later, though I can’t remember in what context. For what she and my father intend, it is smart. We always have a Christmas tree and a menorah, an Easter and Seder, and they tell us tolerantly that we can choose what we want to be when we grow up. But all along there is the Father Christmas problem. If you grow up believing in God and are never disabused, that is one thing; but how can you choose to believe if He has never been in your heart?

My Jewish psychiatrist nearly falls out of his chair laughing when I ask him about this. “You don’t have to believe in God!” he says. “Of course you can be a secular Jew.”

I am in my late 20s, and it is almost the very first time I have heard the term. With all of my busy analyzing and unpicking and deconstructing, it has still never occurred to me that some of the things I learned before I knew what they meant were wrong.

Mostly I long for the consolation of a foundational good act. A bar or bat mitzvah is essentially this — an agreement with the community and God to obey law, which is knowledge, and to be responsible for your actions; to perform mitzvoth — good deeds — in order to enrich the community and prepare the world for a more holy day. It is also your responsibility to atone, on Yom Kippur; without a dedicated day of atonement I find I get wrapped up in grieving, with a sense of furious helplessness, the things my white skin and good education and enough money represent.

There is no such thing as “good enough,” I suspect, because “good enough” is a state of grace. I don’t know if I will ever stop feeling as though I am a double agent. That is the privilege of passing; it makes you invisible. In Australia, far from the rest of the world, it can feel like an academic argument, but I look at the rise of anti-Semitism in Hungary and in Poland, and the voters who rally behind American presidential candidates with white supremacist slogans and tattoos,6 and know that I might not be able to hide in plain sight forever. And I wonder whether the fact that I can and that I do makes me cowardly, or craven, or just pragmatic, and tired of arguing.

***

Today is Rosh Hashanah, and I think of my grandfather, lightly, as I walk through the blossoming backstreets. Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, marks the day Papa died, after a long slow week in which we all gathered around him. Today, front yards are over owing with bloom, little buds trusting that the thin warmth of early September sunshine will strengthen and nourish their transition into flowers.

I have trouble remembering the actual date of Papa’s death; the Jewish holidays oat, they are not stable signifiers. I try to learn the turn of the year by the natural world. Here in Kulin country, Melbourne, the year hinges on the turn of the seven seasons, and the two overlapping seasons of food and fire. Iuk (eel); Waring (wombat); Guling (orchid); Poorneet (tadpole); Buath Gurru (grass-flowering season); kangaroo apple; Biderap (dry season).7 There are life cycles that are closely observed, times of scarcity and of abundance. It seems infinitely more sensible than our imported calendar year, with its public holidays for Christmas and Easter, horse races and football matches.

The law says that any branch overhanging a boundary is a common good; it is the rule of summer harvests in the inner suburbs. For years, Mike thought that I was brazenly stealing lemons and pomegranates from our neighbors, not understanding how the system worked. Now I gather armfuls of the natives that have presaged the blossoms in their confidence. I take a sprig here, a sprig there. By the time I arrive home, my arms are over owing with wax and prickly wattle.

Before my grandparents bought their house, its land had been part of a large, sprawling orchard. Deep root systems connected the earth between their backyard and the neighboring yeshiva. Now my mother is making over the garden in rambling color, overwriting its history, once again, with olive trees, a fig, kitchen herbs, and a jacaranda.

Those growths and overgrowths are a wind blowing a few fragments of sand across the surface of a rock, nothing more. In the long view of history, I know that I am an ant, and this thought is oddly comforting. But of course, it’s just a theory that time travels in one direction, or “travels” at all. It’s funny how linked the language of the passage of time is with the idea of heading elsewhere, journeying, meandering — how shot through with the logics of motion.

I find, too, that to write about walking is to come across all kinds of metaphors involving feet and shoes. A lot of them are to do with independence: to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, for example, or to stand on your own two feet. Others have to do with empathy: to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, or walk a mile in them. But the one I keep coming back to embodies the ambiguity and ambivalence of my own position, with its undertones of split allegiance. It is that I have a foot in both camps.

When I open my computer after getting home, I find an op-ed an American rabbi, Gil Steinlauf, has written for The Washington Post, adapted from his Rosh Hashanah sermon. In it, he calls on Jews to abandon their whiteness, having gained everything from it, in order to be representative of a God invested in equality and tolerance. I am struck not just by the extreme clarity of the message, but by his positioning of the feeling of living in an existential border territory as being innate to the work of being a Jew:

Through the centuries, our moments of power have been all too fleeting. Mostly, our hope has been to be tolerated. From our place at the periphery, we have responded always with the ability to critique injustice, to adopt the cause of the oppressed, to envision a better and more just world. Even in times when we participated fully in non-Jewish societies, we always knew that we stood with one foot in the mainstream, and one foot outside.8

It is idealistic, but it is the kind of idealism I clutch on to, in order to keep myself and my treacherous body in check. As I get older, I think sometimes about finding a Progressive congregation, perhaps with a radical feminist rabbi, someone to talk to about this feeling of always encompassing division of some kind. I want my son to grow up feeling Jewish, whatever that is; but not the unwavering Orthodoxy of my grandfather, nor Dad’s symmetrical intolerance of its excesses.

I want Owen to grow up with a sense of being something other than male and white, not just for political reasons but because there is something else, innate to me, that I still struggle to express. I want him to sit at a Seder table waiting nervously to stumble his Hebrew and ask the four questions, and to learn that our bread is flat because, fleeing as slaves, there was no time for it to rise; that we eat bitter herbs to remind us of the bitterness of slavery; that we dip our food in salt water, then honey, to symbolize the replacement of our tears with gratitude for the sweetness of our freedom; that we recline on our cushions because we can do so — we are free.

Because Dad is so contrary, he has named himself as a grandfather not Papa, but Opa. “A German name!” says my grandmother in disgust. “It’s what Greeks say as they smash their plates,” he tells her in response. Occasionally we still take walks together, him pushing Owen along briskly to set the pace. Our conversations are more mellow now that I have a child, and now that he has seen me go to a place of sheer helplessness, where I am not equipped with stinging barbs or witty replies. There are still small barbs — things don’t change entirely — but they are little barbs of love that bind me to his side.

On the days I work, I take Owen to my parents’ place, and he and my mum romp and play, and often visit Nagyi in her small flat. After her own fall, she moved out of the house, which my parents are renovating so that she can return when the day comes, with a chair to take her up and down the stairs. Owen learns to walk more or less in the corridors of Sheridan Hall, leaning on Nagyi’s Zimmer frame for support as he stumbles over his feet.

Mum sends me proof-of-life photos during the day. When Dad gets home he sits in his customary place on the couch, and Owen wiggles up beside him. From time to time I receive a photo of them sitting side by side, Dad eating his almonds and reading the paper, Owen “reading” a book of his own. In the background, I know, at a low hum, the footy is on. Owen snuggles into Dad, into the softness of one of his old, ratty jumpers, and I know exactly what scent he will be breathing in, as I know the scent of my son’s milky head. It is the same jumper Dad used to wear in the mornings at least 25 years ago. It is more or less disintegrating into threads now, but no one can convince him to throw it out.

* * *

From The Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression by Jessica Friedmann, published by FSG Originals on April 10, 2018.  © 2018 by Jessica Friedmann. All rights reserved.

A longer version of this essay appears in Friedmann’s collection, under the title “Walking.”

***

[1] Kellerman NP. “Epigenetic Transmission of Holocaust Trauma: Can Nightmares be Inherited?” Israeli Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 2013, 50(1):33–9.

[2] Foley, Gary. “Australia and the Holocaust: a Koori Perspective.” The Power of Whiteness and Other Essays. Aboriginal Studies Occasional Paper (1). Melbourne: Centre for Indigenous Education, University of Melbourne, 1999.

[3RN Books and Arts. “New Play explores Aboriginal and Jewish Experience.” Segment presented by Michael Cath- cart, May 11, 2016.

[4] Biss, Eula. “White Debt: Reckoning What Is Owed — and Can Never be Repaid — for Racial Privilege.” New York Times Magazine, December 2, 2015.

[5] Jack, Dana Crowley, and Ali, Alishia (eds). Silencing the Self Across Cultures: Depression and Gender in the Social World. London: Oxford University Press, 2010.

[6] The Australian edition of this book went to print around the time of Trump’s inauguration; I am looking at these words, six months later, in order to make revisions for an American readership, and reading at the same time in the news about synagogue services in Texas that have gone underground for fear of neo-Nazi attack. In fact, we do not say “neo-Nazi” anymore; the armies of Trump-styled white men who have assembled in the streets of Charlottesville are named as Nazis, nothing less. It is Rosh Hashanah today, and I am trying to navigate a world in which White Supremacists chant “Jews will not replace us!” as they attempt to beat the shit out of black bodies in full daylight, aware that there will be no consequences.

While the anti-Semitic rhetoric and hatred has come out of hiding, and while it is almost a relief to put an end to the gaslighting, the feeling of paranoia, it is still overwhelmingly black bodies that are most directly affected by physical and structural violence, even when it is our name that is being invoked. The situation for non-Ashkenazi Jews, black Jews, and the Mizrahi and people of color must be almost unbearable. I don’t want to see what the next month brings, let alone the New Year — but I have baked an apple cake anyway, and let my son lick the spoon — and hope that all of us can have a moment of peace, of rest, before the onslaught begins again. L’shanah tova to anyone reading this endnote, and may the work of our next year be an attempt to disentangle ourselves from a hierarchy that offers us only conditional acceptance, and to throw ourselves into a social justice in which black lives matter.

[7] I learned of these cycles as an adult, and immediately wondered why I hadn’t known about them as a child. Owen will have better knowledge, though: the Bureau of Meteorology has been incorporating Indigenous Weather Knowledge into its forecasts since 2002, and now gives information on a dozen weather systems around the country.

[8] Steinlauf, Gil. “Jews in America Struggled for Decades to Become White. Now We Must Give Up Whiteness to Fight Racism.” The Washington Post, September 22, 2015.

How the Lani Kai Island Resort Thrives Under a Never-Ending Spring Break

Students on Spring Break in Florida. (Photo by Sean Drakes/Getty Images)

Jen Doll and photographer Eva O’Leary venture to the Lani Kai Island Resort in Fort Meyers Beach, Florida — a hotel known for choosing to host a seemingly never-ending stream of spring breakers to uncover how they not only survive, but manage to embrace the drunken debauchery of the spring break set — within reason, of course.

Then there’s the Lani Kai, which has been a relatively safe space for partiers for 25 years and counting. How does Mr. C do it?

I ask: why become a haven for spring-breakers? Why court that sort of trouble at all? “They’re the future,” Mr. C says. When the hotel started hosting spring-breakers, it employed ten security guards; now it has at least 18. But “these are good kids,” Mr. C clarifies. “Every once in a while, you get somebody that takes it too far, and you just get rid of them. Girls Gone Wild, they tried to come here, and we had none of that.” I ask about the booty-shake contest, and he laughs: “You gotta give them something.” Another thing the resort provides: a cheap all-you-can-eat brunch, because the kids “do not eat! They mostly want to drink. I want them to get at least one good meal.” Watching MTV’s Spring Break series from the comfort of my parents’ den in the ’90s, I never thought about those gyrating college kids getting a square meal, or who was keeping them safe.

I snap a picture of a black cotton dress hanging nearby that declares “I SURVIVED SPRING BREAK,” and marvel again at how this place is both homey and exotic, smutty and sweet. Like an insect cased in amber, the Lani Kai remains something of an untouched gem, pure in its impurity. And that’s what makes it, for better or worse, a spring-break touchstone. You can come here and behave like a 21-year-old again, no matter how old you actually are—as long as you’ve got proper ID.

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Finding the Soundtrack to My Desert Life

Photo courtesy the author, notes via Shutterstock

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2018 | 30 minutes (7,571 words)

After I transferred from the university in Phoenix in late 1995, I kept myself in motion so compulsively that I barely got to know my new town. I biked to class. I hiked after class. I ditched class to hike during the week and drove all over Arizona’s rugged southeastern corner to hike the whole weekend. Half a year passed during which I spent as little time in my sad, lonely apartment as possible. I didn’t know anybody in Tucson, and I didn’t want to — not yet. My previous friendships had only helped me turn myself into a pothead. And yet I couldn’t stand to be alone and sit still either. Struggling with my isolation and anxiety about life, I tried to work through my twitchy misdirection in the border region’s dry mountain forests and lowland deserts, taking advantage of the long highways that gave me time for silent contemplation at 75 miles per hour.

Madera Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains, Sycamore Canyon in the Pajarito Mountains — in those first Tucson months, I saw more of this rugged landscape than many University of Arizona students did in four years of college, yet I never really saw my new city for what it was, because I didn’t take the time. I only saw the land around it.

***

I was restless at age 20, lost, searching for something beyond my reach and always beyond my understanding, some cosmic insight and career path that Mother Nature’s vast deserts seemed capable of offering in a way cities could not. I’d smoked too much weed during the previous three years, and I was trying to quit in order to find my calling. Sitting still meant dealing with temptation; hiking kept me on track. I read a lot of ecology and nature books back then, and what compounded my avoidance was my belief that the wilderness held the answers to all of humanity’s questions — from the meaning of life to cures for cancer to an objective sense of right and wrong. I still believe in wild nature, but in my young, confused Thoreauvian worldview, urban areas were cancerous “man-made” places to escape, not savor, so I fled Tucson every chance I got, just as I had fled Phoenix the year before.

Phoenix was bland. It had a Taco Bell personality. Tucson had a singular, authentically Sonoran Desert character that evolved from its origin as a military outpost in Spain’s old northern territory, then developed in the isolation resulting from Phoenicians’ dismissal of the city as a backwater. People nicknamed it the Old Pueblo. Even before I moved there, I could see the Old Pueblo’s superiority. Prickly pear cactus grew as tall as trees. Roadrunners climbed ornamental palo verdes in the middle of town, and the lonely howl of passing trains rang throughout the night. Many streets had no sidewalks, just as many houses had no lawns. The plaster on old buildings peeled to reveal straw in the adobe bricks underneath. It was as if the city was letting you see who it really was.

Phoenix looked as engineered as Las Vegas, or worse, like bad cosmetic surgery. Central Tucson looked like an extension of the desert, natural and spacious and endearingly shaggy. I could see this when I arrived, but my philosophical views let me rationalize my unwillingness to really appreciate it; it was a city, natural-looking or not. Only when I discovered The Shadow of Your Smile, an album by a band called Friends of Dean Martinez did I finally quit running long enough to find something to value about urban Arizona, besides Mexican food and live music. I’d learned to use cities as basecamps for outdoor excursions. This instrumental steel guitar band helped me stay put, because its cinematic cowboy lounge music matched the personality of this Spanish colonial city. When I started looking at its beauty as equal to that of wildlands, I not only started feeling at home in my city, but also in my own body, and I found my sense of direction.
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Here is My Heart

 

Megan Stielstra | An essay from the collection The Wrong Way To Save Your Life | Harper Perennial | August 2017 | 27 minutes (7,366 words)

 

This is the first in a three-part series on gun violence.

In part one, long after the shooting at her old high school, Megan Stielstra worries about her father’s heart.

In part two, Nicole Piasecki writes a letter to the wife of the shooter who killed her father.

In part three, Megan and Nicole talk about the shooting that changed their lives, who owns the story, and what to do with fear. 

 

* * *

Write your name here. Address, here. Here — check every box on this long list of disorders and diseases and conditions that are a part of your medical history, your parents’ medical history, your grandparents’ medical history and down the DNA. So much terrifying possibility. So much what if in our blood, our bones.

I checked two. Melanoma and —

“Heart disease?” my new doctor asked. I liked her immediately; her silver hair, her enviable shoes. Is that an appropriate thing to say to your doctor? I know we’re talking about my vagina but those heels are incredible. Later, I’d love her intelligence and, later still, her respect for my intelligence even when — especially when — I acted bonkers. She removed the weird, spotty growths from my arm and told me they weren’t cancer. She diagnosed my thyroid disorder and fought it like a dragon. She helped me understand my own body and demanded that I treat it with kindness, even when — especially when — I was stressed or exhausted or scared. It’s so easy to forget ourselves, to prioritize our own hearts second or tenth or not at all. Do you see yourself in that sentence? Are you, right this very moment, treating yourself less than? Cut that shit out, my doctor would say, except she’d say it in professional, even elegant doctorspeak and to her, I listen. Her, I trust. Every woman should have such an advocate and the fact that our patient/doctor relationship is a privilege as opposed to a right makes me want to set the walls on fire. Look up — see the wall in front of you? Imagine it in flames.

“Megan?” she said, and I pulled myself away from her shoes. “There’s a history of heart disease in your family?”

“Yes,” I said. “My dad.”
Read more…

Do These Pants Make Me Look Like Everyone Else? Be Honest, Alexa.

Once upon a time, you bought a blue sweater because some fashion editors in a tastefully modern conference room decided blue was in for spring; now, you buy a blue sweater because your Echo Look scored blue more highly than green for you. What happens to taste when machines become the tastemakers? At Racked, Kyle Chayka meditates on style, algorithms, and our generic yet lullingly unobjectionable future.

Now YouTube tells me which videos to watch, Netflix serves me TV shows, Amazon suggests clothes to wear, and Spotify delivers music to listen to. If content doesn’t exist to match my desires, the companies work to cultivate it. The problem is that I don’t identify as much with these choices as what I once pirated, discovered, or dug up. When I look at my Spotify Discover playlists, I wonder how many other people got the exact same lists or which artists paid for their placement. I feel nostalgic for the days of undifferentiated .rar files loading slowly in green progress bars. There was friction. It all meant something.

To be fair, this content consumption was also extremely unethical. And it’s not like I don’t like Netflix shows or Spotify playlists. Like cigarettes or McDonald’s, they were designed for me to like them, so of course I like them. It’s just that I don’t always like that I like them.

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The Nighthawks of the Giant

(Sipa via AP Images)

Alex R. Jones | The Threepenny Review | Summer 2014 | 10 minutes (2,524 words)

After I was let go from my job, I started to go grocery shopping at night. This was some time ago, when I was younger and the city was dirtier. I didn’t like to shop in the day when there were only old ladies in the stores, because it reminded me that I was out of work. And at night I didn’t have much else to do. I had a small TV set on my kitchen table, and I would watch TV during dinner. It was winter then, and while I ate the sky outside my kitchen window darkened. In the apartment across the courtyard, the blue light glowed through the curtains, so I knew that those people were watching TV, too. When the commercials came on I shut off it off. Through the wall, I could hear the old Armenian man next door hacking up phlegm. That’s when I would grab my keys and take off.

I lived then in Hollywood, in the dark streets below the foothills of Griffith Park, in one of the pastel-colored apartment buildings which were built in the 1940s and 50s and had names like The Franklinaire or The Regency. It was the part of town where Raymond Chandler’s character Philip Marlowe had lived, coming home late at night with a bottle of scotch to find strange women lying in his bed. That never happened to me, though. When I was there, Chandler was long gone, and the streets smelled of fried rice, lawn clippings, and dog excrement. Rotting sofas lined the sidewalks. The streets, grid-like in daytime, at night seemed twisted and confusing, lined on each side with beaten old cars, running this way and that, but always downhill into the city, and the sodium streetlights illuminated the fog with a weird glow. Read more…

Did Brian Easley Have to Die?

Calvin Easley holds a wallet-sized portrait of his brother, Brian. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Aaron Gell | Longreads | April 2018 | 37 minutes (9,230 words)

This feature is published in collaboration with Task & Purpose, whose team of veterans, military family members, and journalists tell the stories of the military and veterans communities.

The thing that everyone remembered about the man in the light gray sweatshirt was how composed he was, how polite and respectful. One morning this past summer, he quietly entered a Wells Fargo bank branch in the Atlanta suburbs in a desperate state. But he didn’t curse or even raise his voice. He just calmly relayed the litany of setbacks and obstacles that had led him to an extraordinarily reckless act.

Brian Easley, 33-years-old, standing 6 feet 2 inches with close-cropped hair and glasses, had woken up on the morning on July 7, 2017, in Room 252 of a $25-a-night hotel nearby, where he’d been living, scraping by on a small monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A former lance corporal in the Marine Corps, he had served in Kuwait and Iraq as a supply clerk, separating with an honorable discharge in 2005. But his transition to civilian life had been fraught. Joining his mother in Jefferson, Georgia, he found himself suffering from backaches and mental illness. He met a cashier at the local Walmart, and soon they married had a daughter together, but he disappeared for long stretches as his symptoms worsened. After his mother died in 2011, he bounced around — alternating between relatives’ spare rooms, VA mental hospitals, and nonprofit housing facilities. During a few especially difficult periods, he slept in his car.

By the summer of 2017, Easley had lost even that option. His usual disability check from the VA had mysteriously failed to materialize, and the rent was due. If he couldn’t cover it, he’d be on the street, and the thought terrified him. In the first week of July,  Easley called the Veterans Crisis Line repeatedly to inquire about the status of his disability payment. When they hung up on him, he called back. On Monday, July 3, Easley made his way to the VA’s Regional Benefits Office in Atlanta. But after an argument with staffers there, he left in humiliation, his issue unresolved.

A few days later at around 9:30 a.m, the Marine veteran entered the Wells Fargo branch, a faux colonial building on Windy Hill Road, a six-lane commercial roadway, and claimed that the backpack slung over his shoulder contained C-4 explosive. He allowed several employees and customers to exit and informed the two remaining employees that they should lock the doors and stay put. Then he began making calls, dialing 911 to let the authorities know what was happening, and a local news station, WSB-TV, to explain his predicament. “They took everything,” he told the assignment editor who picked up the phone. “With my last little bit of money I got I’ve been able to hold up at a hotel, but I’m going to be out on the street and I’m going to have nothing. I’m not going to have any money for food or anything. I’m just going to be homeless, and I’m going to starve.”

71ab362315e32a10-Easley_Atlnata27

The Wells Fargo bank in Marietta, Georgia where Brian Easley took hostages during a three-hour standoff with police. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Easley spent nearly 38 minutes on the phone with the editor, relating his military history, his love for his young daughter, and his frustrations with the VA. At one point, he allowed her to speak with the hostages. One described her captor as “very respectful.”

Easley insisted he didn’t want to harm anyone. “I already told them if I detonate this bomb, I’ll let them go first,” he promised. “These ladies are very nice, and they’ve been very helpful and supportive.” He said he had no intention of robbing the bank, and though an employee had fled leaving piles of cash just sitting out at their workstation, he showed no interest in it. His focus was exclusively on his own money — that monthly disability payment from the VA.

“How much money are we talking about?” the editor asked.

“Not much,” Easley said. She pushed for a dollar figure.

“Eight hundred and ninety-two dollars,” he answered.

As Cobb County police deployed around the Wells Fargo, establishing an incident command center in the parking lot of the nearby Texaco gas station, two snipers, Officers Dennis Ponte and Brint Abernathy, took up positions at the edge of the bank’s rear parking lot. Chief Mike Register, who’d only recently taken over the department, arrived on the scene shortly thereafter. Easley, meanwhile, spent most of the morning on the phone.

In addition to WSB, he spoke to his wife, Jessica, and her cousin, Yolanda Usher. He fielded calls from random bank customers, politely informing them that there was an emergency underway and that they should call back later. He told his daughter, Jayla, then 8, that he loved her and to work hard in school. “Okay, Daddy,” she said. “I love you.” Through it all, he kept his cool, even indulging in some dark humor. He mused that he might be the “worst bank robber ever.” And when the WSB editor asked him for his Social Security number, he joked, “You’re not going to steal my money too, are you?”

As the three-hour ordeal unfolded, he remained unfailingly polite to his captives, allowing them to place calls to their loved ones and even maintain contact with police. “He just kept saying, ‘Ladies, I’m so sorry,’” one of the hostages told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation later. “And I was like, ‘I feel really bad. I understand. You’re in a hard spot.’ And he said, ‘Thank you. I appreciate that.’”

As reasonable and mild-mannered as he seemed, Easley did show some clear signs of mental illness. In his call with WSB, he explained that he was being followed and had been the victim of four kidnapping attempts, which he attributed to his halfbrother Calvin and a secret society. “I don’t know these people,” he said. “They seem to be able to track me wherever I go. They have my information.” During several difficult moments, he held his head in his hands and sobbed, muttering softly, “I just snapped.”

In an effort to understand the many factors that led to the Windy Hill Road incident, I spent seven months speaking to Easley’s family members and fellow Marines, officers of the Cobb County Police Department, Veterans Affairs officials, community activists, and experts in law enforcement, mental health, and military transition.

I found a story that was considerably more complex than it first appeared, involving the failure of the nation’s safety net; VA policies better designed to exploit former warriors than to assist them; a confused police response; and maybe an undercurrent of racial bias, one that the community liked to think it had outgrown long ago.

It was also the story of four former members of the U.S. armed forces, whose paths converged one morning in July on a busy suburban thoroughfare. Before the day was over, two would be recounting the incident to investigators, another would be facing the news media, trying to explain to the public just how it happened, and a fourth would lay dead on the floor of the bank, his head pierced by a single gunshot.

***

Born in 1983, Brian Easley was a mama’s boy as a child, his thumb rarely straying from his mouth. The youngest of eight kids, Easley lived with his siblings and parents, Barbara Easley and Bobby Lee Brown, in a ranch home in Williamstown, New Jersey. It was a tight fit — 10 of them in all, crammed into three bedrooms — but they made it work. Located south of Philly, it was a safe, quiet neighborhood with a small-town feel, notable mostly for the aroma of pizza sauce from the local cannery, which wafted across the local sports fields every afternoon.  Barbara was an indomitable woman, laboring tirelessly to make sure none of her children ever felt neglected despite their parents’ modest income. Brian was the baby, her very last, and she doted on him.

Easley had few friends growing up, but he was close with his brother James, the next oldest, joining him in PlayStation marathons that typically went on until there was no more game to play. Despite his height, he was soft-spoken and timid as a teenager. In school, he was painfully shy around girls, later confiding to his fellow Marines that he’d been a virgin when he signed up at 18.

Twelve weeks of basic training at Parris Island outwardly transformed him, precisely as the military intended. Watching him graduate in a ceremony at Camp Lejeune, his family members were dumbstruck. “I could not believe my eyes, how polished he was, how sharp, tall, strong,” said his brother Calvin, the oldest sibling. “I sat there in awe the whole entire time. He went in a little boy, and they turned him into a man.”

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Calvin Easley with a portrait of Brian from his service in the Marine Corps. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Assigned to the 2nd Marine Logistics Group, based at Camp Lejeune, the soft-spoken recruit fell into a circle of friends who each quickly took him under their wing. To them, Easley seemed less a warrior than a big goofy kid, more content to eat cereal and watch his favorite anime series than to hit the local bars or shoulder a rifle.

The group formed a tight bond, fortified during their deployment to Kuwait in 2003. Though Easley’s fellow Marines would roll their eyes at his devotion to Tolkien novels and compare him to Steve Urkel, the teasing was affectionate. His tranquil demeanor, generosity, and maddening compulsion to apologize for the smallest offense — and then apologize for doing so — earned him the nickname Easy. He mostly stayed out of the boisterous debates that often preoccupied his unit, only to pipe up seemingly out of nowhere with some deliberately inane assertion, like, “I hear Somalia has the world’s strongest navy,” and then hold a poker face as long as he could — which usually wasn’t long.

Deployed to Iraq in 2005, Easley was stationed at the Al-Taqaddum Air Base, known as TQ, where he served as a warehouse clerk with the 2nd Supply Battalion. Easley’s job was to fill requisition orders for Marine combat units operating throughout Al-Anbar province, where insurgents, including the nascent al-Qaeda in Iraq, were mounting a surprisingly fierce campaign to drive American forces from the Western Euphrates River Valley.

As the three-hour ordeal unfolded, Easley remained unfailingly polite to his captives, allowing them to place calls to their loved ones and even maintain contact with police

The work was arduous — up to 17 hours a day for months at a time without a break — contributing to the chronic back pain that would plague Easley when he eventually returned to civilian life. “The warehouse jobs are out in the rear, so I wasn’t on the front lines,” Easley told WSB. “I had one close call during a security detail, but that’s about it.” Nevertheless, according to James Dunlap, who served with him, mortar fire was a regular feature, often sending everyone scrambling for bunkers. “I’m thinking, ‘We’re in supply, we’re not going to see this type of action,’” he recalled. “But when they say ‘Every Marine is a rifleman,’ they mean it.”

Following his honorable discharge in 2005, Easley returned to his mother’s home in Jefferson. He met a woman, Jessica Tate, and they moved in together and eventually got married. Around Jessica, Brian seemed fine — strangely quiet maybe, but also devoted, sweet, and easygoing. To his family, though, it was clear that something was wrong. “We noticed a difference in him right away,” Calvin recalled. Diagnosed with PTSD, and suffering from schizophrenia and paranoia, Easley told relatives he was barred from reenlisting. He often set off on long walks by himself. On one occasion shortly after his discharge, he grew so upset at a sibling’s teasing that he flew into a rage that left the family shaken.

These symptoms are not uncommon. “After we got out, it got rough for everybody on the tour,” James Dunlap explained. “It’s easier to be in a war zone than live life out here. You’re not in the Marine Corps anymore, so what’s your purpose?”

***

In 2008, Jessica became pregnant. Both of Brian’s parents fell ill around the same time, and he found himself in New Jersey helping to help care for them, visiting Georgia only briefly for the birth of his daughter, Jayla, but vowing to come back soon.

“He never did come,” Jessica recalled. His phone rang and rang. Eventually, family members told her how he’d just stood up one day, announced he was going for a walk, and never returned. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I just had his baby and he disappeared. Is he leading a double life?’” she said. Fearing for his safety, she spent many nights crying herself to sleep. “I’m tearing up now just thinking about it.”  

It turned out Easley had checked himself into a VA mental hospital. Upon his release, he stayed with a brother in New Jersey. Aside from one trip to Georgia to meet Jayla when she was about 3, he mostly kept his distance. He explained to Jessica that people were after him — he wouldn’t say who — and he didn’t want to put his family in danger.

Just a week or so before Barbara Easley died, in 2011, Brian ley once again “up and walked off,” Calvin said. Voicemails and texts went unreturned. The funeral came and went with no sign of Brian, and years went by without a word. After calling every VA hospital in the directory, Jessica tried to move on.

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Brian with his daughter, Jayla, possibly around 2014. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

When he surfaced again around 2014, Easley moved in with Calvin in Georgia, taking his medication, keeping his VA appointments, and generally trying to get his life back on track.. He said he’d been in Orlando, enrolled in filmmaking classes. He made no mention to his brother about a brief spiritual detour, as a follower of the Black Israelites, a religious sect famous for preaching that African Americans are the true Jews. But perhaps it isn’t surprising that in his troubled state, Easley had gravitated toward a tight-knit community. “I think he wanted to belong to something larger than himself,” recalled Dunlap, who was in touch with Brian during this period. Eventually Easley “woke up,” Dunlap said, and was ejected from the group.

Easley didn’t spend much time in Georgia with Calvin and his wife, Anita—maybe a half year or so—before he was on the road again, moving to New Jersey to live with another brother. After several episodes, though, he returned to Marietta in early 2017, enrolling in computer classes at Lincoln College of Technology, a for-profit college located in a strip mall in Marietta. He had bought Jayla a phone and called regularly, helping her with homework and joining her in a prayer via Facetime nearly every night. Some of his money from the government went toward child support, and he wired more whenever Jayla needed it. Not long before Brian walked into the Wells Fargo, he had the idea to surprise Jayla with a dog. Jessica thinks the realization that he wouldn’t be able to follow through may be what set off the episode.

***

In the spring of 1971, 10-year-old Mike Register was walking through an affluent neighborhood of Macon, Georgia, when a pair of young men in a car waved him over with a proposition: How would he like to earn $5 helping out with some yard work? It was a tempting offer, but the situation seemed off. For one thing, Register was white, and the men in the car were black. Job offers like that just didn’t happen in Macon in those days. Register bolted toward the woods, but the men gave chase, abducted him, and later kept him captive in an abandoned house, demanding a $5,000 ransom from his family. His mother alerted the authorities and delivered the money as instructed.

All told, Register spent 20 hours as a prisoner, while the men debated whether to kill him. Eventually, they essentially let him go, threatening to slaughter his family if he said a word. The boy didn’t heed the warning. At some point, he’d managed to snag an ID belonging to the ringleader, 20-year-old John Plummer. After his release, Register presented the card to local police, resulting in Plummer’s arrest and eventual conviction. (The other two men were never identified.) At the trial, which drew charges of racial bias from the defense team, the all-white jury found Plummer guilty of kidnapping, then deliberated for just 10 minutes before suggesting a life sentence.

Surprisingly unguarded for a chief of police, now leading a department of more than 600 officers, Register is a voluble storyteller, recounting this traumatic chapter from a difficult childhood in an easygoing, buttery drawl without a hint of disquiet. Asked how the terrifying crime he experienced as a child may have affected his response to the Wells Fargo hostage-taking, he insisted it had no impact. “I certainly have empathy for anyone who is held against their will,” he said. “Certainly that’s a part of my life, and I’m very thankful that it turned out the way it did for me. But no matter what my life experience may have been, I certainly try to be objective with any situation.”

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Cobb County’s Chief of Police, Michael J. Register. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Register enlisted in the reserves in his early twenties, joining the 11th Special Forces Group and becoming what was then known as “SF baby,” jumping right into commando training without any prior military experience. He thrived in the reserves, taking time off from his work as a police officer with the Cobb County PD for intensive training and deployments to Germany, Haiti, and Belize, among other countries.

By 2002, when Brian Easley entered the Marine Corps, 40-year-old Register was in Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group, serving on a mobile reconnaissance team. After retiring from active duty in 2005, the same year Easley left the service, Register worked for the Department of Defense, devising strategies to counter the insurgency’s devastating use of IEDs. In 2014, he returned to suburban Atlanta and eventually resumed his career in law enforcement, becoming chief of police for Clayton County, 20 miles south of Atlanta.

Register was recruited as chief of police for nearby Cobb, which includes the city of Marietta, just three weeks before Brian Easley walked into the Wells Fargo. Though both counties belong to the metropolitan Atlanta area, they pose distinct challenges for law enforcement. Whereas Clayton is economically depressed and predominantly black, Cobb County is a mostly white, affluent bedroom community that was represented in Congress by a former leader of the nativist John Birch Society for nearly a decade and was long known for its “legendary intolerance,” as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it.

Though an influx of recent transplants, mostly young professionals, has tilted Cobb’s politics left, the county retains its reputation as a stronghold of white conservatism. Despite the 2017 opening of a new stadium for the Atlanta Braves, Cobb had for years steadfastly refused to allow the construction of a rail link to Atlanta’s transit system, in part out of a longstanding desire to wall itself off from the so-called “black Mecca” across the Chattahoochee River. (Years ago, a county commissioner infamously declared he’d stock the river with piranha to block rapid transit.)

Although the violent crime rate is considerably higher in Clayton than in Cobb — with nearly eight times as many murders on a per capita basis in 2016 — Register’s new position is in some respects trickier to navigate, given Cobb’s fast-changing demographics and more fraught political atmosphere. As chief of police for Clayton County, Register was an advocate of transparency and community policing initiatives, and Cobb community activists viewed him as an ideal choice to take the helm of their department as it sought to transform itself from a hidebound reminder of the region’s troubled past into an exemplar of the bighearted cosmopolitan New South.

To judge by the stream of racially charged incidents that have made the news in the area in recent years, change was long overdue. In 2015, the county’s only black commissioner reported what appeared to be racial profiling by an undercover officer — a complaint that elicited a shrug from her fellow commissioners. A few months later, the same officer was involved in a disturbing encounter with a black driver that was captured on dashcam. (“Go to Fulton County,” he said. “I don’t care about your people”). Following a suspension, the officer resigned.

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The front desk of Cobb County Police Headquarters in Marietta, Georgia. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

The community’s negative perception of the department was confirmed last year in an independent report on police operations drawn up at the county’s behest by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Although the report did not find evidence of systematic bias, it identified “a concerning deficit of public trust in and among a portion of the population.” It also made 34 recommendations, many of which Register is now implementing. Among a host of other changes, he ordered that all members of his department receive additional training in crisis intervention, crime prevention, cultural diversity, and fairness in policing. The chief has also considered a proposal by the Cobb Coalition for Public Safety to ensure that mental health professionals be called upon on in crisis situations. Some departments mandate that specially trained teams be deployed whenever an incident involves a potential mental health emergency, but in Cobb County, such experts are only brought in at the request of the crisis negotiation team. In Easley’s case, no such request was ever made.

***

According to the Marshall Project, law enforcement is the third most common occupation for military veterans, after truck driving and management. In part, this is attributable to the preferential hiring encouraged by initiatives like the 2012 federal program Vets to Cops. A career in law enforcement has an additional appeal to veterans, offering, as few occupations do, the sense of fellowship, duty, and shared risk that they experienced in the military. “I think that everyone, no matter who you are, you want to belong to something,” Register said. “People that have served in the military understand that they are part of something that is great, admirable, honorable, and that is important.” A police force, he added, “is a natural transition”  — conferring membership in what Ken Vance, executive director of the Peace Officer Standards and Training Council of Georgia, termed a “blue brotherhood.”

A substantial percentage of CCPD officers are veterans — several of whom, like Chief Register, played key roles in the Wells Fargo incident. Sgt. Andre Bates, the lead negotiator, served in the Marine Corps, as did Officer Dennis Ponte, the sniper who took Easley’s life.

In his 2016 book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger advances a powerful case linking veterans’ struggles with PTSD largely to the difficulty of navigating the fraught transition from the tight-knit world of the armed forces to the more isolating and superficial existence of life on the homefront.

This certainly tracks with Brian Easley’s experience. Joining the Marine Corps at 18, the former wallflower quickly found the camaraderie, friendship and shared sense of purpose that had largely eluded him until that point. After his discharge, cut off from his social group, he found himself increasingly alienated and adrift — an experience that undoubtedly contributed to his mental illness. Soon, aside from his immediate family and Jessica, he was more or less on his own, so lonesome in those early years that in addition to his primary job at a Home Depot distribution center, he took a second gig at a Church’s Chicken, not for the money, he told Jessica, but “just to pass the time while you’re at work.”

A career in law enforcement has an additional appeal to veterans, offering, as few occupations do, the sense of fellowship, duty, and shared risk that they experienced in the military.

When I asked Register how he has dealt with his own traumatic experiences — the kidnapping as well as his later service in Afghanistan — he shrugged off the question, more comfortable speaking about the prevalence of PTSD in general. But as frightening as his childhood ordeal clearly was, his success in dealing with it is not surprising: After helping to foil his own abduction, he was hailed as a hero by the national news media. In recognition of his bravery and quick-wittedness, the local police department named the 11-year-old its honorary chief of detectives.

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary,” Junger wrote in Tribe. “Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” Register seems to have found his purpose and his community in law enforcement, as did Bates, Ponte, and the many other veteran members of the CCPD.

***

As Brian Easley told the editor at WSB, the two hostages, and the crisis negotiator — basically anyone who would listen — his monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs came to $892. The VA confirmed that his last payment, for that precise amount, was sent on June 1. So perhaps it’s no wonder that when July 1 came and went, and the expected funds were not in the account, Easley began to panic.

According to WSB investigative reporter Aaron Diamant, Easley called the VA’s Veterans Crisis Line eight or nine times that week, including twice on the morning of the incident, and he was “hung up on a few times.” (When contacted, a VA spokesperson declined to comment on Diamant’s reporting.) According to its mission statement, the VCL was established in 2007 to “provide 24/7, world class suicide prevention and crisis intervention services to veterans, service members, and their family members.” But as the demand for its services has surged, the program has been plagued with issues. A March 2017 report by the VA’s Office of Inspector General found a number of shortcomings with the VCL, including deficiencies in operations and quality assurance. In response, the VA issued a press release touting improvements; a few months after Brian Easley’s death, it announced plans to open a third call center to handle another spike in demand.

According to Lincoln Educational Services senior VP for student financial services Rajat Shah, Easley visited the school’s Marietta campus on June 30 to discuss the possibility that his money had been garnished due to a tuition issue. A counselor at the school called the VA directly, and Easley was given an appointment at the VA’s Regional Benefits Office on July 3. He “was extremely agitated and belligerent,” a VA spokesperson told me , and as a result was briefly placed him in handcuffs. “Once Easley calmed down,” the spokesperson said, “police removed the handcuffs and a VA benefits supervisor … explained to him that his compensation check was recouped due to a debt he had created by his failure to complete college courses.” Easley agreed to return on July 6 with the proper documentation to set up a payment plan “and left the regional office voluntarily.” He never returned.

Perhaps unwittingly, Easley had become caught in a financial squeeze involving what are known as overpayments — a common pitfall for recipients of Post 9-11 GI Bill tuition assistance. Government tuition payments are made in full directly to an academic institution, but if a veteran drops too many courses or fails to attend class, the VA will initiate a process to recover the money directly from the student. According to Shah, Easley last attended class in late November 2016. He would have had to miss just six days of his module to trigger a mandatory notice to the VA, though Shah said the school tries to contact a student before taking that step. Easley’s overpayment was $1,163, so after the $892 was deducted from his account, he owed a mere $271.

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Objects found in Brian Easley’s pockets after his standoff with the Cobb County police. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

If, in fact, Easley did miss some classes, it would hardly be a surprise. He was suffering from a severe mental illness, something the Department of Veterans Affairs, which was responsible for his care, certainly knew. Although the VA claims it sent Easley five letters informing him of the overpayment, his erratic housing situation meant he probably never received them.

“This happens literally all the time,” said Carrie Wofford, president of Veterans Education Success, a nonprofit watchdog and advocacy group focused on veterans education. A 2015 report by the General Accounting Office estimated that a quarter of all veterans receiving tuition assistance are billed for overpayments, many without ever fully understanding how the system works. “Because VA is not effectively communicating its program policies to veterans,” the report said, “some veterans may be incurring debts that they could have otherwise avoided.”

Although Shah said Lincoln staffers tried to help Easley with the VA, the school has drawn criticism in the past for an apparent indifference to the welfare of its students. “The programs are costly, more than twice as much as at local community colleges,” the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee the committee wrote in a 2012 report, “and Lincoln makes virtually no investment in student services despite enrolling the students most in need of these services.” The committee said student retention and loan repayment rates were among the worst it had seen, and the report concluded, “Although the majority of students leave the company’s schools with no degree or diploma, the company also receives increasing amounts of Federal taxpayer dollars and profit.”

***

Shortly after Easley spoke to the 911 operator that Friday morning in July, the Cobb County Police Department showed up in force. They closed Windy Hill Road to all civilian traffic. They made sure those sheltering inside the Popeye’s, the Waffle House, the Wendy’s, the Subway, and the Chick-fil-A all knew to keep clear of the windows in case a detonation shattered the glass. The fire department was dispatched to the scene, as was the bomb squad, SWAT team, crisis negotiators, and a K-9 unit. Officers of the Sheriff’s Department handled traffic duties. Representatives from the Marietta PD, the ATF, the FBI, and its state equivalent, the GBI, turned up as well.

Register arrived within the hour, taking up a position at the makeshift command post. Solidly built, with a tree-trunk physique and wispy brown hair fading to gray, Register was viewed by community leaders as a reformer. The incident at Windy Hill Road would be his first test.

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Michael Register was recruited as chief of police for Cobb County just three weeks before Brian Easley walked into the Wells Fargo. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Meanwhile, inside the bank, Easley was getting a crash course in how TV news gets made. WSB-TV boasts one of the top local news organizations in the country: In the June ratings period, the station had attracted nearly two-thirds of TV news viewers in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Now, the staff had landed an incredible scoop simply by picking up the phone, and they knew it. On an audio recording of the call turned over to the GBI, one can hear the assignment editor’s colleagues scrambling to press their advantage. As she works to nail down what to Easley must have sounded like trivial details (“You said you had lived in Marietta previously, when did you live in Marietta?”), it seemed to dawn on him that her interest lay less in solving his problem than in working the story. “Okay, ma’am, I’m sorry,” he finally said, “but I’m about to wrap this up.”

As the call ended, two of the editor’s colleagues could be heard discussing how to proceed. “What can I report?” one asks. The exuberant reply: “Everything!”

Sometime after 11 a.m., Sgt. Andre Bates, the incident’s lead crisis negotiator, settled into a black Ford Taurus at the Texaco. He took a deep breath and dialed the number given to him by the 911 operator. Bates — who, like Easley, is black — established a rapport with the hostage taker almost instantly based on their shared military background. “I’m going through it with Veterans Affairs myself, so I know it can be difficult when they drag their feet,” he said.

Their status as former Marines further cemented the bond. “Semper Fi, sir. I’m a West Coaster, MCRD San Diego,” Bates said. “What can we do to resolve this, sir, and help you out? From one Marine to the other?” Although only Sgt. Bates’s side of the conversation is audible on the recording, his skills as a negotiator are evident. He gets Easley talking about his back injury and mentions his own knee and ankle issues. He assures Easley nobody is going to get hurt: “That’s my responsibility — to make sure you stay alive.” He compares the police force to the Marine Corps and engages Easley as a fellow enlisted man. “I have three of my chiefs that are personally here … guys walking around with stars just like it is in the Marine Corps . . . they’re not happy,” he said. “Just asking from one Marine to the next — to show that you and I are communicating and we’re on the same program — could you release one of those ladies, please?” And he appeals to Easley’s personal dignity, reminding him, “Your honor is worth more than the $892 the VA owes you, sir.”

Around noon, Easley agreed to a deal: A pack of Newports in exchange for one of the hostages. He seemed to mean it. As soon as he got off the call, Easley turned to his two captives and invited them to decide which one would leave. They told him they couldn’t choose. “Well, you’re just the teller,” he told one, “so I’ll let you go, and I’ll keep the branch manager here so they won’t blow my head off.”

The deal marked a significant breakthrough. They were working together now. A resolution seemed well in hand. In a brief interview, Sgt. Bates expressed absolute confidence that Easley would have honored his side of the bargain. “We were brothers who had bonded with each other,” he said. “I felt that me and him had connected as men, as Marines, and as family men.”

Bates hustled over to brief his superiors in the mobile command center, a large RV parked nearby. Among them were Register and the incident commander, Maj. Jeff Adcock. Reporting to him were Lt. Joel Preston, another Marine veteran, who commanded the tactical team, and Lt. Jorge Mestre, the crisis team commander.

It was a formidable group, with decades of experience. Mestre was a key figure in a 1999 incident in which he was wounded after trying to reason with a local man who was reportedly suffering from paranoid delusions. After opening fire on the officer, the man barricaded himself inside the house with his aging mother, and later killed two members of the Cobb County SWAT team after they stormed the family home. The tragedy is viewed as a critical lesson among tactical-policing experts, who blamed the incident on poor intelligence and inadequate staffing, revising standard procedures accordingly. For some members of the Cobb County PD, the killing may have carried an additional lesson: In a barricaded subject situation, avoid unnecessary risks.

The negotiator tried to appeal to Easley’s personal dignity. ‘Your honor is worth more than the $892 the VA owes you, sir.’

As Adcock and the other commanders quickly began hammering out a plan to deliver the cigarettes without endangering their officers, they had good reason for optimism. According to Chris Grollnek, a former SWAT officer who now provides training in dealing with active-shooter situations, “Ninety-nine percent of the time, when a negotiator is making a deal for one thing for another, the incident ends peacefully.”

Around the same time, another opportunity to end the standoff safely presented itself. One of the hostages who’d been on the phone with the police throughout much of the morning reported to Officer Christopher Few, Bates’s colleague on the crisis negotiation team, that Easley had gone to the bathroom. He was in there for more than a minute, it seemed, long enough for both hostages to potentially run out the doors. Once Few understood what was happening, he began to walk the hostage through an escape plan. But seconds later, Easley returned. “He’s out,” she said quietly.

Meanwhile, along the wood line, the snipers lay on the ground, squinting through scopes at the action inside the bank. One of them, Officer Ponte, had also served in the Marine Corps, working as a helicopter crew chief before his discharge in 1992. On assessing the situation, he’d selected a Lapua .338, a $5,000 semiautomatic rifle billed as “The Long Arm of the Free World,” and loaded it with Sierra MatchKing .338 250 grain ammunition, a combination he felt certain would have the power to penetrate the two glass doors and still maintain its trajectory. Then he’d aimed his laser at the building and noted a range of approximately 66 yards. Every once in awhile, as he peered through the scope, he got a good visual of the man in the gray sweatshirt. He radioed Lt. Benjamin Cohen, the assistant SWAT commander, and advised him that he had a clean shot. Should he engage the threat, he asked. Word came back: “Not at this time.” The rest of the tactical team was not yet in position. Stand by.

Minutes passed. On the SWAT team’s radio frequency, Ponte heard indications that a hostage might be released, but from what he could see, he later told the GBI, “There was no effort or energy being put forth toward releasing somebody.” Then Ponte made a fateful decision.

Around 12:15 p.m. on July 7, a single shot rang out on Windy Hill Road, ending the three-hour ordeal in the Wells Fargo and adding Easley’s name to the list of 236 mentally ill people killed by police in 2017.

***

Not only were Sgt. Bates and the various commanders caught off guard by Ponte’s action, his own fellow SWAT team members were as well. In a well-planned operation, the tactical team would have reacted instantly to the gunshot. Instead, nine long seconds ticked by before an officer put the CCPD’s BearCat armored vehicle in drive and began barrelling toward the door of the bank, inadvertently endangering the hostages, who were just then preparing to dash out in the opposite direction. After the BearCat struck a column and backed up, its hood covered with broken bricks, the hostages escaped, and members of the SWAT team hustled them into the back of the vehicle, which quickly reversed away from the bank.

The standoff was over. But exactly what happened to Brian Easley — and who made the decision to kill him — would remain a mystery for months. Addressing the news media shortly after 1:30 p.m., Register incorrectly framed the incident as an extraction operation gone awry. “We had a SWAT team, tactical team, move up on the bank to help get the hostages out,” he said. “During the extraction process, contact was made with the suspect, and it appears the subject is deceased.” The explanation seemed to imply that Easley had been shot during some kind of confrontation with the entry team rather than by a sniper hidden in the woods. No mention was made to the public of Bates’s negotiations with Easley to release one of the women for a pack of smokes. Although the entire command team knew of the arrangement — as did the two hostages and other members of the CCPD — it is only being made public now as a result of an open records request.

Barricaded-subject incidents, especially those involving hostages, are among the most difficult circumstances police officers face. Typically, attempting to negotiate a peaceful resolution is the preferred approach, with a tactical assault reserved as a last resort. But the balance between crisis negotiators and SWAT elements is a delicate one. Negotiators are trained to strike up a rapport with a suspect, calm them down, appeal to their sense of reason. Tactical officers, increasingly outfitted with military-style gear, are primed to take swift, decisive action.

The Cobb County Police Department’s internal Policy Manual states that in a hostage situation like the one at the Wells Fargo, a tactical solution must only be initiated “should communication with the subject fail to resolve the incident,” and that “the ultimate decision [on how to respond] will be made by the On-Scene Commander.” In the case of Brian Easley, communication was making genuine progress, and the On-Scene Commander, Major Adcock, had decided to let the negotiations play out. According to Ponte’s own testimony, he made the ultimate decision himself, an apparent violation of both policies. He cited no particular action on Easley’s part — an erratic movement or aggressive gesture, for instance — that might have indicated an elevated risk. When I reached him for comment, Ponte declined to speak except to say that his side of the story would be told “at the appropriate time.”

The standoff was over. But exactly what happened to Brian Easley — and who made the decision to kill him — would remain a mystery for months.

Sgt. Bates, the crisis negotiator, refused to criticize the actions of a colleague and fellow Marine. But asked whether he’d been sincere when he’d promised Easley that nobody would hurt him if he cooperated, Bates told me, “I meant that from the bottom of my heart. I’m out there to do a job. I’m pretty good at what I do, and the things I’m telling him are coming from the heart, one human being to the next. My job is to protect everyone so we can all walk out of there and play out whatever happened in court. That is the win for me.”

All of the experts I contacted were careful to emphasize they lacked a complete picture of what happened, and they expressed reluctance to second-guess CCPD’s handling of a dangerous and chaotic situation. They agreed, however, that the decision to shift away from a negotiating posture and initiate a tactical operation is not typically made lightly or based on the judgment of an individual officer, and that the situation on Windy Hill Road might well have concluded peacefully had negotiations been given more time.

Easley “articulated he’s not going to do anything to harm the hostages, so that’s a great sign,” said Randall Rogan, a crisis negotiation expert and co-interim dean of communications at Wake Forest University. “If a suspect is emotionally calm at the beginning of a siege or incident, that is the most critical moment.” He added that Easley’s demands were extraordinarily modest. “He’s not asking for a helicopter and $2 million dollars and taking two hostages on a plane.”

“Easley was very calm, he indicated wasn’t looking to hurt anybody, and he demonstrated a willingness to cooperate,” noted Jack Cambria, a 33-year veteran of the New York City Police Department who spent more than a decade in tactical operations and, later, as commander of the NYPD’s crisis negotiation squad, responded to more than 4,000 incidents. “Tactical assault is reserved for the last option, when it becomes absolutely necessary.”

Following a grand jury hearing, Ponte was cleared of any wrongdoing in connection with Easley’s death. District Attorney Vic Reynolds told WSB that the officers “followed the law and did what they were supposed to do.” According to the policy manual, “ability, opportunity and jeopardy” must all be present for a shooting to be justified. As far as anyone knew, Easley had the ability to cause harm to the hostages with a backpack full of explosives. He had the opportunity to do so. And the hostages were plainly in jeopardy.

Cambria, who trains law enforcement agencies around the country in crisis and hostage negotiation, agreed that Ponte likely acted within the law. Nonetheless, he pointed out, “Just because an action might be lawful doesn’t mean it was necessary.”

The operation appears to have been flawed in several additional respects. Given Ponte’s testimony that the hostages were not in sight when he opened fire, he ran the risk that one might have been injured by debris or a wayward bullet. A poorly aimed round might have set off the explosives Easley claimed to have in the backpack, mere inches from where the shot made contact. And there was one more possibility to consider: “When there are people alive near the subject, you very rarely will take a shot to neutralize him in the event that God forbid, he has a dead-man’s switch,” Grollnek said, referring to a detonator wired to explode if a trigger is released. Such devices, which work like a hand grenade, are simple to engineer. Had Easley been using one, Ponte’s shot could well have caused the deaths of the hostages. Finally, the haphazard extraction of the two captives also indicated that the decision to act may have been taken too hastily.

As the hostages were whisked to safety, a robot entered the bank and retrieved Easley’s backpack, placing it in a “total containment vessel.” It was eventually deemed harmless, and inside investigators found a Bible, some papers, and a small machete, among other incidentals. (Easley had never taken out the knife or mentioned having it, and Calvin later suggested he may have been carrying it for protection.) On his body, they found a wallet, a broken cross pendant, and an electronic device one hostage had assumed was a switch to detonate a bomb. In fact, it was a tool for detecting hidden listening devices, perhaps a prudent purchase for a man suffering from the paranoid delusion that he might be kidnapped at any time.

Before long, patrons of the nearby establishments, who’d been on lockdown all day, were finally allowed to go about their business. After being interviewed by police and GBI agents, the two hostages went home to their worried families. The local news teams packed up their gear. Easley’s body taken to the Cobb County’s Medical Examiner in Marietta. Chief Register addressed the media and then headed back to headquarters. Traffic on Windy Hill Road resumed in both directions.

***

The killing of Brian Easley was just the first of several crises to engulf the Cobb County Police Department in the early months of Register’s tenure. In late August, WSB aired bodycam footage from November 2016 in which Officer James Caleb Elliot is seen firing multiple shots at the back of an unarmed teenager as he flees through a residential neighborhood, striking him in the leg. A grand jury declined to recommend charges against Elliot, and DA Reynolds noted that officers pursuing a fleeing suspect in a “violent, forcible felony” are allowed to use lethal force. The fact that the teenager was not actually involved in a carjacking was viewed as immaterial, since the officer merely had to believe he was.

The new chief, for his part, indicated that legalities aside, the shooting endangered the public, and he used the release of the video as an opportunity to initiate additional use-of-force training. He also noted that the department recently purchased a new simulator to better prepare officers to handle such situations. Elliot left the force three weeks after the shooting, and a lawyer for the victim announced plans to file a federal lawsuit.

Then on August 31, Channel 2 released another dashcam video, this one from the summer of 2016. In it Lt. Greg Abbott, who is white, is heard remarking to a white motorist, “Remember, we only kill black people.” Though many observers pointed out the officer’s sarcastic tone, the starkness of his statement at a time of heightened concern over police shootings of African Americans (the killing of Philando Castile outside St. Paul, Minnesota, had happened just four days before the traffic stop) seemed emblematic. The video went viral. National outlets picked up the story. Representatives for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network told Register a protest march was being organized. Register’s office was bombarded by media calls from as far away as the United Kingdom. This time, Register moved swiftly, announcing that the process to terminate Abbott had begun.

“It’s been one of those weeks in Cobb County,” Register told me with a sigh not long after. The decision, he said, had not been easy. But Register was unmoved by the argument that Abbott had been trying to gain the motorist’s compliance by creating a casual rapport, calling the statements “inexcusable and inappropriate” and “not indicative of the values and the facts that surround the Cobb County Police Department and this county in general.”

A vocal contingent within the CCPD expressed unhappiness that he hadn’t defended Abbott. “They took it as me not supporting them,” Register said. After a local talk radio jock went after him — taking care to inform listeners that the police chief’s wife is African American and even noting her place of work — white nationalists went on the offensive, sending Register hate mail in which they called him “a disgrace to the white race.”

Following the decision, Register scheduled a set of mandatory staff meetings in which he laid out his rationale for demanding Abbott’s ouster. The radio station apologized. Eventually, the controversy seemed to die down. Still, it was clear the job was weighing on him. “I’ve got to tell you,” he admitted, “sometimes I’m like, ‘Damn, maybe I should have stayed in Clayton County.’”  

***

The tendency of police departments to close ranks in an effort to shield their actions from public scrutiny is well established and perhaps unsurprising. The same “blue brotherhood” that bonds law enforcement officers can easily slip into a form of tribalism when a member of the team is under threat. The commitment to one another that keeps officers alive in dangerous situations also seems to discourage self-reflection when things go wrong. Initially, after I asked Register about the killing of Easley, he mounted a strong defense of Ponte. “He saw this thing unfolding and felt that this might be the only chance to immobilize the suspect and save the two women, and he took it,” Register said. “If we would have waited five more minutes, and he had detonated explosives and killed himself and the two hostages, then we may have been having a conversation — ‘Now, why did we wait so long?’”

Register also emphasized that Ponte — who was cleared by a grand jury following another fatal shooting in 2016 — had struggled in the aftermath of the Wells Fargo incident. “One reason why it’s been so hard on this young man who took the shot,” he said, “is that he is a veteran himself and a Marine. It’s very hard on him. It makes you want to cry.” (Although Register repeatedly spoke of his officer as a “young man,” records indicate that Ponte was born in 1966.)

A month later, when I pressed Register about the revelations contained in the GBI report, which he indicated he had not yet seen, he reconsidered his position. While reiterating that the shot was legal, he said, “I do call into question the timeliness of it.” He also said he’d be looking into the apparent breakdown in command and control, explaining that he would “dig deeper and ensure that if there were any issues that created the dysnchronization between the negotiating team and the tactical team that we address that and we fix that. Certainly, as the event was unfolding, I don’t know if the communication was transpiring as quickly as it possibly should have.”

If we waited five more minutes, and he had detonated explosives and killed himself and the two hostages, then we may have been having a conversation — ‘Now, why did we wait so long?’

The next morning, Register called back. He mentioned an additional change he’d implemented a few months before, a monthly training session with his incident commanders to do “tabletop exercises,” reviewing some of the scenarios they might face in the field. He added that he’d been up half the night digging into the reports on the Easley shooting, and he’d scheduled a weekly meeting with his leadership staff to talk about developing a procedure for identifying mistakes so they won’t be repeated. “We have to take some time to look at what the findings were and come back for after-action reviews,” he said. “That’s the only way we were going to be better.”

***

Whatever mistakes may or may not have been made on Windy Hill Road on July 7, there’s one issue about which everyone seems to agree: Brian Easley himself bears a good portion of the blame. Even when one takes into account his mental illness and the other formidable struggles he was facing, the fact remains that Easley alone made the choice to enter the bank, claimed he had a bomb, and hold two women against their will.

“I’m sorry for what happened,” Calvin Easley told me when I visited him and his wife, Anita, in their tidy home in the Atlanta suburbs. “I’m sorry he went in there and took hostages. I’m very sorry for that. He was not in his right mind. But they didn’t have to kill him. He just wanted to get his story out.”

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On a phone call from the Wells Fargo, Easley told his daughter Jayla that he loved her and to work hard in school. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

That story is one that many veterans can relate to. The same military experience that helped make him a man left him anxious, troubled, and eventually unable to work. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he discovered a sense of brotherhood and meaning in the Marine Corps, one he was unable to replicate once he returned home.

But Easley did what he could. He cared for his daughter, calling her every day and sending gifts when finances allowed. He battled the VA for years to receive the benefits he’d earned through his service. He sought an education, hoping to start a career, support his family, and make a new life, only to find himself in a trap that has ensnared thousands of his fellow veterans.

Then, one morning in July, he woke up to find that the money he counted on to make it through simply wasn’t there. And just like the Marine Corps had taught him, he took initiative. He called the hotline. When they hung up, he called again and again. Finally, he walked into the benefits office to plead his case in person. But instead of recognizing a veteran in crisis and working out a plan, or perhaps directing him across the street to the hospital, writing a prescription, and getting him back on track, they sent him away in search of paperwork.

“The problem was bigger than the Cobb County Police Department and Mr. Easley,” Bates told me. “The problem is the system — how they treat retired veterans. You should get more than ‘I appreciate your service.’ The VA owes these guys more. They’re willing to put their life on the line for their country, and when they separate from military they deserve better.” In particular, he criticized the VA’s decision to handcuff Brian Easley rather than help him. “That’s where the whole thing went bad, I believe,” he said.

He was not in his right mind. But they didn’t have to kill him. He just wanted to get his story out.

“I’m just baffled about what is so hard to negotiate,” said John Delorme, a Marine who served with Easley. “This isn’t a terrorist. This is a guy who fought against terrorism. As a veteran it makes me feel smaller than a grain of sand, the way he was treated.”

“I just don’t want his little girl to grow up to think her dad was a bad person,” said Ian Emmett, another battle buddy. “He was a good person.”

Alecia Miller, who dated Easley for two years when he was in the military, agreed. “I hate for him to be painted as this crazy deranged person,” she said. “This is someone who the system failed, and because of that, a decision was made out of desperation, and someone has lost their life because of it.”

“You go over there and you fight a war for our country and everybody’s out to kill you,” Calvin Easley told me. “You don’t know nobody. You’re in a foreign land. But the real sharks? The real sharks are back at home. There’s no reintegration. You don’t get support from the country that you fought for.”

It was late. Anita stood behind him as he spoke, patting his back. “I’m livid,” he went on, fighting back tears. “He was a hero. He was not some psycho on the corner. He was not. He was a gentle giant until you pushed him. If you pushed him to the max, then you’d see a different person. But it took an awful lot. It took a lot.”

“I know this,” he said. “He was my brother.”

***

Aaron Gell is the features editor of Task & Purpose and an adjunct instructor at NYU’s Prison Education Program. He has contributed to numerous publications, including New York magazine, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair,

This article was published in collaboration with the editorial team at Task & Purpose. 

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Editor: Michelle Legro
Photographs: Hector René Membreno-Canales

Fact checker: Matthew Giles
Copy editor: Jacob Gross