Austere.

“What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?”

Robert Hayden

I.

I saw my father and two men hang their overcoats on the rack, drooped like wet anthers on a matte flower as they proceeded into my humble home. Their footsteps impressed the floor all at once in a proud symphony as they made their way to the dining room, where they sat themselves down at a roundtable in jolly laughter and hearty enthusiasm. Their echoes became giants through the classic Corinthian-white halls, traveling lightspeed as I sat wide-eyed watching them brag themselves out the boredom of that winter Sunday. I was spellbound by the thickly dressed ebb of their baritones, though I knew not much of the matters they speak on. Manly matters, I supposed. The bellycheer and conversation flowed as patient as tree-sap runnels, eventually finding its way to the familiar discussion of manliness—a discourse in which their stubborn egos would war relentlessly under the table. I saw battle in their eyes, broad-shouldered armies resting at attention in the buds of their pupils. Here, I learned the bane of all men; I learned of pride and power, of braggadocio and esteem defense. I gazed on in fear, in intrigue, in bloodrush fanaticism against my own father. For a small pocket in time, he did not seem like the same person. He was not the ripe-hearted hero I had once imagined him to be. He was a mere man, crowned with the halo of hubris that would soon change the way I thought of him, and thought of myself.

This was the day I first confuse love with fear of my father. I learned his percussive footsteps, heavyweight yet spacious like redwood branches falling to the ground in rhythm. When I was in trouble, they were the stimulus inspiring shockwaves of nerves and regret. When I was virtuous, they were more like a forewarning of his impending presence, snapping my conscience into full-fledged attentiveness.

His usual declaration to me was, “I’m going to make you into a man.”

“A man?” I thought, “Only God can make a man.”

I found out the hard way what make a man meant in his mind. I have early memories of his command to stop putting my hands on my hips, which he designated as a feminine pose. For a long while, I could not even define the word feminine, but from the sober tug of his voice I could tell that it is something no man should be. The look in his eyes when he chastised me over trifles is one of shame, something I learned to perceive in his deeply hickory and full iris. When they interrogated me, I, too, felt shame well up inside. I felt like an impostor of a man before I was given the chance to become one, or know what it meant to be one. In that shame was the simple irony that I had at one point in time studied and revered my father, with pure lovelight and high regard. Now, I dismissed him as a contemptible and prejudice autocrat, drowning me out in his antagonizing eye.

The years turned like pages of the same book under my father’s house as he chaptered his mannerisms into sanguine obsessions. Everyday, he made me a “man,” as if the maturation to manhood were a Rocky training montage. I had digested the stigma of wearing flip flops, the humiliation of the color pink. I found repercussion in picking nosegay flowerheads from the ground and then knew that to my father, masculinity was not something that grew like foliage, but an inborn fire. I could not bring myself to reconcile with what he thought I should be. Sometimes, it felt like he wanted to rid me of sincerity, for I was not born as an emotionless slab of concrete he seemed to be. I was very much so a lover who saw paradise in all things sensitive and kid-gloved, and the only shame I had about it was that I knew that deep down he was disappointed in me, so I thought. I could not emotionally handle this shame and so it turned to conviction as my relationship with him grew standoffish, especially when I nestled under my mother for all the empathy and acceptance he would not give me. During this time, we were two plates of simultaneous drift apart, unable to synchronize the passage of time and movement. I thought that was just the way it had to be. Our happiest moments were like phantoms of a distant past, our laughs like dying ripples in runnels of muddied water. We were two of a kind, with a strict boundary of love and contempt dividing us. Then, I would have sworn that I knew everything there was to know about my father. I would have sworn that I that I was innocent and he was guilty, I was the victim and he was the offender. The truth is, I was indeed a victim—but my own ignorance was my only offender.

II.

The climax of our cold war came last August, when unbearable humidity cloaked our days only to have the heroic breeze disrobe it at night. The heat that day had made my house a house full of hotheads, which meant no good for both me and my father. He sat on his kingly couch, swamped with sweat and temper, his thickened brow quivering with tension as angst ran rampant through the household. I, marked with the same temper, had an unusually low tolerance for annoyance that day as well, and so the inevitable always has its way.

My dad noticed my casual wear, my flip flops and faded pink shirt. It was a cardinal sin of mine. I knew it would draw a reaction from him, and yet I did not care enough to avoid it. I was ready for his worst, as I had stiffened my ego so that he may not crush it. I expect him to strike, to spike his breath and raise up from his seat disturbed.

But worse. He dismisses me, his unattending eyes deciding to focus on something of more significance. His following words pierced me like the very head of a knife ready for bloodletting.

“I can’t believe one of my sons would wear flips flops. How can a man wear flip flops this much?”

The gravity in his voice sunk my shadow deep into a trembling blackness. Time became a bony oblivion. I was not mad. I was not filled with hate. I tried so very hard to be filled with nothing—not possible. But in that moment, the mocking was worse than a beating. It was worse than anything else he could have thrown at me. There, I saw a man knee-deep in his pretense and pride, all his inhibitions twining like beeswax angles in unarmed warfare. I had been rejected by my fomer beloved idol, who I then concluded was not changing, and would never change, even for the love of me. I could not stand it. Fueled by fires of embarrassment and dejection, I stormed off alone to pity myself in my misfortune.

My poor mother saw it and immediately understood what had happened, but did not chase after me. I see this now as a balking tactic. What she would soon disclose to me was her discovered secret, an intelligence that was in turn kept secret from him. I sought her out and asked her to help me cope with the situation. I retrospectively owe her much thanks, for it was her who assured me that my father’s love for me could never be snuffed when I needed the assurance most. I asked her anxiously why he was like this, what had molded such an irreversible blemish in character. Her spirit was visibly broken to pieces at my hopeless pleading. I could see she had a tentative answer, not because she was uncertain, but because the truth might not have been a truth I needed to know. It, in fact, was.

When she began to talk, it was in her tale voice that is the sound of wind thickening through the sky. It was soothing, it was intelligent, and it signaled that the uninhibited truth shall be told. She told me of her suspicions from hints she had gathered gradually over the years: my father, an excellent student and very charismatic young boy, had a teacher in 8th grade who he had a rather close bond with. The teacher had numerous times invited my father over his house for minor menial labors and conversation. The teacher, as my father had accidentally recounted in an absent-minded recollection, was murdered in his home in 1988 for allegedly being a predator on young boys (she, perhaps very wisely, left the connection up to me). And though the pieces of mystery come together as such, my father had never confessed to being sexually abused. Out of fear, maybe, out of embarrassment, out of denial. I understood my mother’s point: perhaps ego is just his disguise of deep pain.

It at last hit me that that was the dawn of his spiritual necrosis, his enduring and mute philosophical suicide.

I leveled my breath as a spiteful silence mobbed my throat’s pit. Between the distracting knot in my throat and the stubborn weakness in my legs, there was a masquerade ball of emotions all dying to dance, my gut the dancefloor beneath all those anxious feet. In that moment, of all the emotions I felt, I above all felt sorrow. Not a pity-sorrow, but the sorrow of realizing that I foolishly assumed that my father was a pastless villain. Throughout all my fits of childish myopia, I hadn’t bothered to think with concern for him, but rather conviction. I had designed a self-pitying plight that vilified a very broken man; once a fatherless, alm-clothed boy from Detroit’s skid row, everyday vying for attention from an affectionately unheeding mother. He was the lone man of the house, coerced into what everyone under his own roof and beyond told him a man was. He only knew such pain; he was a victim of a delicate defeat—each of the civil twilights that ended the day a victor against his will to be what he wanted. Then, in this awakening, I understood that his hidden baggage had been my confused pulse, his internal demons like running axles in my own esteems. Only then did I realized that he was more broken than I ever was.

I, looking deeply, found the insulting irony in the situation to be that I had failed my father the same way he had failed me. I had thought it standard for a man to have no internal weakness, and for this I was just as guilty of the same prejudicial thinking that plagued him. Deep inside, I wanted him to be the strong, unwavering hero that I had imagined every fabulous father to be. And so, I indeed failed him. I denied him the human right to be imperfect and still beloved. In my catharsis, I found my thoughts to be mirrors in a house of mirrors, my light bending obediently to form a distorted image of my father—teary-eyed, wanting to be loved but unable to ask. It was not a pretty sight, but it was beautiful. It was beauty in the sense of revelation, raw and flowering truth undaunted by me staring into it.

For my father, and for myself, I wept that night, long and gently. I was unashamed, for that is what made me more of a man.