“That's Dubus's son. Look at him. He's such a townie.”Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III is a tough read: After a pretty happy first ten years, the author's father (a highly respected short story writer and college professor) left his wife and four children for one of his pretty young students. Although Dubus Sr paid what he could in child support and visited semi-regularly, his young family was forced to live below the poverty line – with not enough food or clothes, a series of rented homes in tough mill towns – and Dubus Sr seemed oblivious to their situation.
I'd heard the word before. They used it for the men they'd see at Ronnie D's bar down in Bradford Square, the place where my father drank with students and his friends. It's where some men from the town drank, too – plumbers and electricians and millworkers, Sheetrock hangers and housepainters and off-duty cops: townies.
(T)here was the day-and-night swearing and shouting of men and women fighting; we could hear the lowriders revving their engines out front of the Hog Penny Head Shop down the block; there was the constant rumble of motorcycles two streets over. On the hottest days you could smell the wood from the lumberyard on the other side of Water Street, the piss and shit of the drunks in the weeds, the engine exhaust, the sweet lead of the paint flaking off our clapboards.Andre's mother, forced to commute into Boston to work, was rarely around, and when she was, was usually too exhausted to supervise her kids. Their home became party central, where the tough kids came to do drugs and have sex and listen to loud music – all activities that the three oldest siblings (barely teenagers themselves) also participated in (with the exception of young Nicole, padlocking herself into her bedroom, trying to do homework despite the noise and her scoliosis brace – and why was there so much scoliosis in the 70s anyway?). And these were tough towns with knife-carrying brawlers constantly looking for a fight. Being small and skinny, Andre was often beat up and forced to watch helplessly as his siblings were also under threat. After his brother Jeb took a particularly hard beating, Andre began bodybuilding, learned to box, and although his obsessive focus on fitness made him give up drugs and alcohol, he became a short-fused brawler himself; likely to kill or be killed. It was around this time that Andre's father – someone who confessed to never having been in a fight in his life – became interested in a relationship with his son.
I wanted to tell him about the membrane around someone's eyes and nose and mouth, how you have to smash through it which means you have to smash through your own first, your own compassion for another, your own humanity.Eventually, Andre learns that writing has the same catharsis for him that he had found in brawling (there were other ways to get the pus out, other ways to express a wound), and with his father's encouragement, he became an author. And yet, it took many years and a revelatory dream before he gave up fighting for good, with this interesting scene showing Andre using persuasive words for the first time as he confronts a murderous drug dealer on a train in England:
I wasn't going to throw a punch, even if the dealer was to step away from the wall and square off to shut me up; I wasn't going to fight him either, and it was as if, in my explanation to him, I had stood between those trains and taken off my clothes, then began to pull away every muscle I'd ever built; I ripped off the plate of my pectorals, dropping them at my feet. I reached up to each shoulder and unhooked both deltoids and let them fall, too; then I reached around for the muscles of my upper back, the first to show up years earlier, and dropped them at the feet of the dark dealer, speaking to him all along as if I'd never learned to do anything but talk, as if this armor I'd forged had never been needed because I could trust the humanity of the other to show itself. Trust. I was going to trust this stranger, this man who had entered my train car and not to talk. I was going to trust him to see and to listen and to do the right thing.I didn't know anything about Andre Dubus III before this, and only read House of Sand and Fog because Oprah told me to a long time ago, but I do remember really liking that book and found it interesting that Andre had a chaste courtship with an Iranian girl in high school and a close friendship with another Iranian at college; the empathetic portrayal of the Iranians in his book struck me even at the time as an enlightened position and it's interesting to see that explained. Townie is primarily the story of Andre's relationship with his father, and as they became very close in the end, his empathetic portrayal of his deadbeat Dad might be enlightened, but I found it maddening. I don't have much use for the idea that great men like the Bill Clintons or the Tiger Woodses (or the Andre Dubus IIs) can't be expected to embrace monogamy, and for Andre's father to have died and left behind three failed marriages and six unfathered children can't readily be excused just because he dominated his field. (And I found it interesting when Andre mentioned his father's story Killings as being his first insight into his father's art, so I read the story – upon which the movie In the Bedroom was based – and marvelled at how a man who refused to father his own children could write a story about a father putting everything on the line for a child. Poetic license, I guess.)
I listened to Townie on audiobook, and as read by the author, it was an enjoyable experience; all affectless monotone until he would break out with a scumbag Massachusetts accent. This is a really interesting (if hard to stomach) look at the roots of violence and delinquency, and the unlikely conquering of those traits – as he states in the Afterword, Andre and his siblings are all settled professionals now – in a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction way. I enjoyed getting to know Andre Dubus III (and to some extent, his father) and hope writing this memoir was effective in “getting out the pus”.
I kind of wrote here and here about what a juvenile delinquent my own older brother was, but Townie really brought back to me what a depressed and depressing place Stouffville was to be a kid in; seeming every bit as bad as the Haverhill where Dubus grew up, complete with bullies and a general air of danger and the potential for violence. My kids would have no idea what it was like to live like that; maybe my parents didn't either.
I had a stay-at-home Mom, but that doesn't mean that I didn't feel neglected. My father never left us, but that doesn't mean he fathered us. And like Andre in this book, my younger brother got tired of being pushed around, and when he reached high school (by the time we were in Lethbridge), he was working out, had a major growth spurt, and went from being bullied to looking for trouble. I remember once, when were we in our 20s and went to a bar together, Kyler got drunk and was actively looking for a fight, pushing me and Dave aside as we tried to talk reason to him; disgusting. At least twice he went to court for assault -- and what makes a young man put his future on the line like that? And what turned him around?
At that same time, Ken was managing a bar in Alberta and living with his nutty girlfriend, Mikaila. He was working late hours, partying hard, and was excited when he told us that he had put a down payment on a mobile home. This was going to be his life until Mikaila confessed that she had been sleeping with some other guy and was moving away with him. Devastated, Ken called up our parents who told him to just walk away from the job and the trailer -- move to Ontario and live with them until he figured out a new life. Dad advised Ken to take a job in his rendering plant and study for his Stationary Engineering ticket at the same time; to Dad, this was a pathway to lifelong employment, and so it has turned out: twenty years, a stable marriage and two kids later, Ken has a prominent job managing the mechanical aspects at the local hospital and I can't imagine that he would ever go looking for a brawl.
Meanwhile, twenty years later, Kyler has a PEng, a stable marriage, a kid, and owns his own engineering firm, but I can't exactly be sure that he wouldn't risk all that if he got mad enough.
And despite the fact that both my brothers looked for plenty of trouble while they were teenagers in Lethbridge, I shudder to think what might have become of them -- and me -- had we stayed in Stouffville. For my part, I was never a fighter -- never even saw a fight -- though I had heard that there were plenty of girls in town who were. What a crappy place to grow up.
My parents bought the house in Stouffville because it was the closest they could afford to move to Toronto for my Dad's new job, and even then, they could only afford this house because it had been foreclosed on and the former owners had left it in a mess; complete with food and feces smeared on the walls that my Mom was willing to clean off to get this deal. When we first drove up to it, my brothers and I thought we must be rich now because it was the biggest house we had ever seen (and, of course, when I look at it now I can see how unimpressive that house would be to anyone but poor children; within the first week of living there, our Dad had me and my brothers put our bathing suits on and have a shower together -- we had never had one before). Somehow, in that tough town, the sheen wore off quickly and, although there was no physical smell in the house anymore, there was something profoundly and psychologically lingering about living in the shit-smeared house. Despite living in that neighbourhood for seven years, I never made a friend there (there were quite a few boys from school in the area but no girls of any age) and everyone I knew lived in beautiful homes on surrounding acreages. What must their parents have thought of me? Did they think their kids were slumming?
I remember the one time Ken and my Mom were for some reason in the kitchen at my friend Cora's house; a yellow-brick century farmhouse, stuffed with comfy, homey antiques. Ken was maybe 14 (maybe even 13?), and as he was eyeballing Cora's Mom while she had a smoke, Mrs. Ryan offered him one and he took it. I was so embarrassed as he sat there smoking -- Ma didn't know what to say since she smoked too -- and I could feel that the whole thing reflected very badly on my whole family. Did the Ryans -- who were always wonderful and welcoming to me -- think of me as some kind of charity project? Did they think of my family as townies?
I remember once asking my mother -- who was in bed with a sick headache on a Saturday afternoon -- if I could go to my friend Terri-Anne's house (which was a ridiculously sprawling Italianate bungalow in the woods) and my mother flipped out on me, yelling, "They may look like they have it all young lady, but I could tell you stories..." Did my mother think I wanted to go there just to hang out in a nicer house? I just wanted to see my friend. (To be fair, it was cool that Terri-Anne started teaching me to play piano at her house and she was the first person -- only person, really -- that I knew with an Atari.)
Laurie's father was a contractor and they lived in an actual mansion in the country. Lori moved up from West Virginia and they lived in the first subdivision of mansions I ever saw (on a street with a ridiculous name like "Castle Way" or something) and their house had a pretentious beauty pageant vibe. Andrea's Dad was a lawyer and they lived in an ultra-modern bungalow on Lake Simcoe, complete with sailboat and dock. I couldn't help that these were my friends.
As shabby as Stouffville felt, I did have a friend who lived in a shabbier place: Becky lived at Musselman Lake, in what was essentially a winterized cottage. I loved it there, it was kind of like a Hobbit hole, but it was very small and the vibe out at the lake was even sketchier than in town. The Whelan brothers lived out there and I was always wary of leaving Becky's house in case John Whelan might be around, leaning against some lamp post, sneering obscenities at us. If my mother ever got the vibe that maybe Becky's family was a bad influence, she would have been right: her parents were total hippies who let their girls run wild, her Mom reading tarot cards and teaching us about her Ouija board, and her Dad being the first person to give me a drink (he asked me and Becky if we wanted to split a beer once when we were 11 or 12 -- half a beer got me drunk and it was a good thing I was sleeping over that night).
My Dad's friends were all creepy hillbillies at that time, too, including Garth; a bearded country bumpkin who I was uncomfortable to be alone with. Once, as I was coming down the stairs, he looked at me and said, "You look real good when you have your hands in your pockets like that. You should stand like that all the time." I think I was 12 at the time -- did I "look real good" because it made me look like I had hips? I know, in addition to outright avoiding Garth, I made a point of never standing with my hands in my pockets around him.
And honestly, I don't think my own girls know this kind of shabbiness; this neglect and want; this fear of being around the creepy and the leering; this awareness of coming from a house of shit-smeared walls. And it's not a money issue -- their Dad doesn't come from money, but he had a safe and happy childhood.
The one year that Ken went to Stouffville High was a disaster for him, with him cutting classes and smoking pot daily. He got into so much trouble that moving to Lethbridge was partially meant to give him a fresh start, and it was a fresh start we all needed (although Kyler blew it the first day of school: moving to Alberta made him think he should wear cowboy boots and, while mockingly calling him "Tex", these new bullies had an immediate reason to beat up the new kid).
Our house in Lethbridge wasn't large or luxurious, but since it was the nicest place we had ever lived in until that point, it certainly felt like an upgrade. And happily in Lethbridge, class distinctions seemed to disappear; I felt like I came from neither a richer or poorer family than any of my friends, for though my Dad would have made more money than any of their fathers, he spent less of it on us and I soon had my own job, my own money, and none of that mattered anymore. Could the explanation be as simple as the fact that we all lived in town? We were all townies?
And yet still, Ken will say to me that he's just a hillbilly at heart, and he and Kyler both drive ridiculously impractical pickup trucks, and I can only think that's the long fingers of a shabby Stouffville childhood maintaining their shit-smeared grip on my brothers. Again, what a crappy place to grow up.
*****
As an interesting tie-in, in the recently read On Chesil Beach, the Edward character was from a small, rural town and the biggest challenge he had had when moving to London was to suppress his urge to look for barroom brawls; he liked brawling, he had a hair trigger, but he knew that it marked him as a member of a lower class. It makes me think that the "townie" is a universal condition and that's interesting knowledge to come to at my age.
