Nearly Inspired Version 1: Shooting

Through the long years of our alienation, I still visited my father, though the trips had been reduced to coincide with the periodic death scares that measured out his ten-year struggle with colon cancer. Now and then the doctors would tell him that they could do no more. He would make the call; I would book a flight. Each time the doctors managed to cook up some new treatment option of dubious promise, and each time my father proved resilient. In the midst of these treatments, and while he lacked a useful length of colon, he signed himself up for a kind of para-police handgun training. A member of his congregation loaned him the 9mm Glock that the program stipulated, and he took to the desert for four days to fire 1,000 rounds. This was a relief to him, I think, because as he grew older and sicker my father’s fascination with violence increased even as his capacity to participate in it diminished.

We had often gone shooting together in the vast open spaces of New Mexico, which we both loved. Though my father was being swept up in the early stages of the fevered right-wing madness that has overwhelmed evangelical Christianity, his cowboy ethos had not given way entirely to militarism, and shooting was an activity we could still share. So, on one of my death visits, when he suggested that we go out and do a little damage, I eagerly agreed. I thought it might furnish a reprieve from the constant religious talk and my father’s latter-day habit of fantasizing about the way he intended to face his own death. I had served as audience for him in my youth and couldn’t stomach it any longer, even though I could tell that my rejection of his attempts at charm or gallows humor or demonstrative courage hurt him. I could no longer relate to the small set of totalizing religious convictions that steered his thinking, and our conversational scope had shrunk to exclude almost any serious subject. The rigors of his personal faith permitted very little neutral ground. Hence the guns, and hence the desert.

It was very early spring in the those arid mountains. Strips of snow per­sisted in the lee of hills and wherever the wind had gathered it into piles. We had been accustomed to shoot on an infrequently-used access road outside of town that cut into the side of the Rio Grande Gorge. We parked on a landing at the top of the road–a dizzying place where people came to light fires and shoot down at the defunct appliances and ancient cars that littered the rocks below–and we hiked down the road for a quarter mile until we came to a familiar high-walled portion of the canyon. Standing on the far side of the road, with our backs to the gorge, the striated clay of the canyon wall provided a natural backstop. My father had quit smoking and drinking in what he referred to as his B.C. days, and he’d replaced those more egregious vices with an impressive Coca-Cola habit. I had been shooting at plastic 20-ozCoke bottles, which always littered my father’s car, for as long as I could remember. We’d harvested a fair number of these and carried them to the site in a plastic shopping bag. Kneeling in the red clay of the gorge, we pushed the bottles into the earth upside down, reserving a full 2-liter bottle to be shaken and ceremonially exploded in the finale.

My father offered me the first turn, and I plinked away steadily with a .22, making the bottles dance and skitter until the red labels detached and fluttered across our makeshift range. Small caliber guns are easy and fun to shoot, and I was enjoying myself. My father took his turn with the larger gun, a .357, and blasted holes in the loose sand of the canyon wall, missing as often as he hit. He reloaded and fired more and faster. He missed more. His facial tic–that old reminder for me to hide–asserted itself, and a slight but sharp spasming of his hands brought him to a temporary stop. I took another turn while he calmed himself and, when the slide locked back, I looked over to find him staring at me.
“l always thought that I was better at this than you.”
I looked back at him, remembering the last time he had exploded at me. He’d sent a dish flying across the kitchen then whipped around in search of a recipient for his rage. This was how it usually was, coming out of nowhere. I was reading on the couch, and, though committed to never retreating again, I had not yet given up my strategy of calm and (I hoped) infuriating compliance. I set my book down, folded my hands in my lap, and looked back at him, feeling, not for the first time, the desire to do him harm. Whether he sensed this or not, he left the room, swearing loudly. I quietly retired to my own room where I sat on the bed and stared at the wall. We never spoke of these things.

Here in the canyon, the old, familiar, furious stillness, which seemed to form the core of our relationship, gripped me. We stared at each other in silence. I wondered idly if he would raise the gun in his hand and, if he did, whether I would raise the gun in mine. I felt tense but oddly at home, as if threat asserted the intimacy of our connection in an otherwise bland world. The rest of life and all the stodgy boredom of work and reason and doing the right thing receded for a moment in that gorge, and I pondered questions of family: I wondered if my father hit people to wake himself up, or to wake them up; I wondered if, now that he had stopped, he missed it. I wondered if there was still a reservoir of violence in in him, as I feared there was in me.

“That .357 is a beast,” I said, “probably better for shooting bears than for this kind of thing. Let’s set up the 2-liter bottle and see what it does to that.” We stood a moment longer.
“You’re probably right,” he said, and laughed.

I let my father do the honors and the bottled exploded in an orgy of foam. We gathered our debris and began to make our way back up the access road, our tension dissipated by the honest work of trudging. Despite the barrel-chested stockiness that we share, my father had always had a peculiar physical grace, a darting capacity that terrified me in my youth, but on that day he was slow to ascend. The once-red hair and pony tail (a relic of the hippie days for which he had repented) had gone almost entirely white, and his movement, though recognizable, was halting and labored. He had been physically imposing for my entire life, but as I watched him struggle up the hill, a flood of pity went through me all at once, and I felt a strange desire to shield this graying animal from other eyes.

Some years of remission and continued alienation followed that trip, but the next and last time I went to Taos there was no question that he was dying. Overconfident doctors had led to complacency, which in turn had led to a stunning metastasis. They removed a lung to buy him some time, an intervention that still seems wildly implausible to me. He sounded different on the phone, a mind struggling to express itself through a failing body.

As usual, I flew into Albuquerque and made the long drive to Taos with the Milky Way blazing above me. He and I had made the drive many times together on the visits after my mother spirited me to Seattle. I was devoted to him at first; then broken-hearted and terrified; and, finally, bitter and quiet, asking for and offering nothing. As the space between us widened, rendering us incomprehensible to one another, he more or less acceded to the boundaries that my behavior implied, preaching around me rather than at me on our drives. No response was required, and I often wondered, with hypocritical grief, whether he had given me over to the devil.

When I arrived in Taos, I checked into a hotel on the plaza and made my way immediately to the nearest bar, where I sat, looking down at my hands circling the glass. I thought that they had hardened to look much like my father’s, and I thought about what his had done and what mine could do. He had gently, reverently placed his broad palm on the Bible during sermons, beaming with the love of Christ; he had curled that same hand into a fist and smashed my sister’s face. She was long gone–he never met his grandchildren–and so was my mother. Everyone from his old life to whom he owed a duty of care had left for their own safety, and the departure of each reconfirmed in his mind that those who serve god must suffer in this world.

This seemed cheap to me, and still does. I didn’t so much crave an acknowledgement of what he had done (which was hardly in dispute) as I longed for him to undergo the kind of painful transformation that his own beliefs required. My father maintained that he had undergone the brokenness that leads to repentance in private. The rest of us were obliged to respect the fact of his repentance and trust to his authority, which would continue without pause. Our failure to move forward seemed like a rejection of God’s grace to him, and thus, by degrees he associated respect for his authority with the correct worship of God. Like all insane systems, it was efficient and self-contained. I truly believe that I could have forgiven him everything if, for a moment, he had seemed devastated by the harm he caused, if he seriously questioned his right to command us. But authority was bound up with his personality, inseparable from his very flesh. Because he could not bend, our family broke, and he reigned alone and over nothing.

I remember little of the time I spent with him on that last trip–except for astonishment that, so close to death, his absolute certainty persisted unmarred by any sense of our family’s story, as if God’s forgiveness had eradicated us. But I do remember that on the trip’s final day he suggested we take to the desert with his guns. This seemed wildly irresponsible to me, given his condition, so I looked to his wife for approval. She shrugged–what harm could it do?–so we gathered the necessary items, got in the church van, and headed back out into the high desert. As the familiar dusty browns and greens passed by the window of the van (Calvary Chapel emblazoned on the side), I reflected that the tithes of his congregation were sub­sidizing this trip and that few in the congregation would object to its purpose. I also thought that, if any realistic approximation of Jesus were watching us, he would consider the entire affair an abomination. A sense that I needed to pay attention and bear witness, however, interrupted my ironic philosophizing, and I returned to what felt like the sacred absurdity of being present. I felt very aware and slightly ill.

We found a gulch in an otherwise flat and scrubby expanse. My father had scared up some retired bowling pins and saved them, like champagne, for this occasion. We positioned the van with its broad rear double doors facing our earthen backstop and set up shop on the gray carpet of the interior.

The bowling pins exploded terrifically, and we fired at their fractured pieces until we had reduced them to white and tan splinters. My father was enjoying himself, adjusting his stance and reciting elements from his pseudo-police handgun training. The ease that accompanies practiced movement had always calmed both of us, and for a moment I felt kinship with him, but my thoughts swerved again. Here was a preacher of the gospel, mere months from death, relishing explosive power. Did he not understand that violence had ruined his life and grievously damaged mine? Could he not forego the complex of God, power, threat, and force and fix his mind on peace in his last hours?

The orthodoxy of my youth had scared the shit out of me, because, how­ever much certainty was on offer, the promises of salvation were intermixed with the terror of becoming unworthy. I feared “backsliding,” and the church fed me a steady diet of stories about people who had done so. I vividly remember a children’s story about a missionary who, in the exotic locale where he preached (supported by his beautiful and pure new wife), fell prey to tempt­ation and committed adultery with a native. An otherwise unimpeachable life was ruined, and he came back and unwittingly infected his new bride with HIV. The story was racist and medically dubious–basically Victorian–but it was presented with luscious detail. The couple were trapped together with all trust lost, their bodies “burning” with AIDS. The point was that you were never safe, and that the no degree of vigilance was unjustified. You had to fear yourself. There was a lurid glee in passing these stories down to the Christian youth, and, though this stuff smells of the campfire story or the urban legend, we were meant to believe it. It bred guilt and paranoia in everyone I knew.

This guilt expressed itself in strange ways. I don’t know any conservative Christians who don’t share the experience of fearing that the rapture has occurred when they temporarily lost their parent at the grocery store or when they woke up in a quiet house. It is no exaggeration to say that such small events could trigger a visceral fear that you were a secret monster in your family–soon to be abandoned by those you love and doomed to suffer through the impending reign of the antichrist. However silly this may sound from the outside, these strains in fundamentalist Christianity tortured and marred a generation of evangelical youth.

I was trained to see the events and impulses of daily life as battles for my soul’s salvation, episodes in the “spiritual warfare” that constituted the reality behind the bland incidents and events of life. I remember praying desperately for some kind of sign from God that I was among his elect. Nothing. I remember standing during worship at church, trying to generate feelings of awe and devotion, which, as anyone can tell you, is a doomed endeavor. Most of all I feared that I had committed “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit,” a mysterious action that Matthew’s gospel describes as the only sin that God won’t forgive. For me and for my peers, the existence of an unforgivable sin more or less obliterated the notion of God’s forgiveness, because we were never quite sure whether we were at risk of committing it, or whether we already had. This was terrifying, and I put a great deal of work into a series of stratagems, increasingly complex, marshaled to suppress any thought or emotion that might signal that I had crossed that fatal line. Doubt was such a sign, as was the failure to feel God’s presence or feel appropriately loving towards him. Doubt of the entire structure was a sure sign, but even questioning the received interpretations of our modern and ridiculous sect was cause for concern. Thus, I began by wanting to serve God and my fellows, and I ended by policing my own mind until it snapped.

As my father and I stood in that desert shooting bowling pins, I remem­bered all the fears that his religion had inspired, and I meditated–detached, again, from the precise reality of where I was and whom I was with and, in general, why I was there–on how the ghosts of these fears had never left me. Hell as a metaphor haunted me, and my life had been marked by an inquisitional obsession with the correctness of my own thoughts. One could be damned and not know it; one could live in hope, however thin, but live, in fact, as a ghost, separated from grace. But another side of me pushed against this. Was this ghostly state not, in fact, my father’s situation? Surely the secular liberalism that had supplanted my Christianity dictated that abuse of one’s family was unforgivable if anything was. Had my father in effect committed the unforgivable sin and rendered the rest of his life a ghastly facsimile? Was the blunt and hazy grief I felt whenever I was in his presence a way of mourning for a man whose reality had been lost in guilt and attempts to reorder the world to justify himself? He certainly didn’t think so, but that would be, after all, the essential horror of the situation. Even as redemption was passing you by, you would be too blind to lay hold of it. The Calvinists have dwelt much on this.

Again on that day I shook my head and tried to return to the moment. If I wasn’t going to stand on liberal principle and object to the activity and the company and sit right down in the New Mexican dust and rend my garments and protest the state of my life and the world, I might as well stop circling the drain of my own psychology and pay attention. I was, after all, holding a gun. I focused on the dry wind on my skin and weight of the steel and polymer in my hands; I focused on the slow breath I released before squeezing the trigger and the report that contrasts and complements the meditative calm of taking aim. I felt my father there. He was as present as he had ever been, somehow more so, precisely because the the majority of his breaths and thoughts resided forever in the past.

Perhaps we had this in common: we both found moments of violence or control clarifying, if not strictly pleasurable. I know that he shared with me the sense that the majority of life was taken up in navigating mundane practical tasks and undergirded by low-grade anxieties. Even though he had found his way to relative calm, we both considered the actual experience of life, on a gut level, offensively boring. Shooting was good. It was something you could feel in your bones, transgressive and bracing, the kind of thing that reminded you that you were a powerful mammal and not a consumer. For a moment in the desert, we were together, two people obsessed with and trapped by our respective metaphysics, united in the struggle to justify and assert ourselves against necessity. Not once did I think that we might shoot each other.

As we neared the end of the bowling pins’ useful lives, I turned from our range to ask if we had anything else to serve for a target. He couldn’t see or hear me. He was leaning forward against the van, his head on his arm, blanched and quiet. I approached him and gently laid a hand on his shoulder. I suggested we go home, and he nodded. A quiet urgency, which felt like fate, hung in the air. I drove us home, leaving our wreckage of splinters and casings behind.
Back in Taos proper, as I helped him from the van and into the house, he draped his arm over my shoulder in a posture of intimacy that had been foreign to us for 15 years. I briefly remembered how much I had feared that arm, and the idea of knocking him down and giving him a few hard kicks floated across my mind. I settled him onto the couch. His wife was puttering in the kitchen, and she looked unconcerned, which granted me a sense of relief I had not known that I needed. Sitting on the couch opposite him, the mix of rage, grief, and pity I was feeling produced an odd sense of vertigo, and I sat trying to breathe deeply.

After a time, my father’s own breathing slowed, and he seemed more comfortable. His wife was still behind me in the kitchen and the protocol of the situation eluded me. How do you excuse yourself for the last time? Is there a non­-casual way of doing something so momentous? Do you wait for someone to do the excusing for you? Having gathered himself, my father said that he had some videos for us to watch, and he conjured up YouTube on his television, to my great surprise. We spent the next hour watching grainy, black-and-white footage of atomic explosions, tests of nukes going off in the desert of his home state or in the sky or over now-poisoned seas. I struggled to accept that this is how we were spending our last moments together, but when I looked at him viewing these images of apocalypse, his eyes shone, and I let him be. He had preached the end of the world for decades, and there was something to his consistency. It was a fitting end for a fundamentalist.

Power and violence and God had fused together in my father’s heart, and I thought then that his take on religion made a certain sense. God had redeemed him, and what that really meant was that God had redeemed violence, which was inseparable from his nature, for him. The personal acts of violence that had marked his early years were rendered largely unnecessary by participation in God’s vaster scheme, where violence shot through life in a thick, rich vein; a counterweight to whatever hope individual acts of goodness or gentleness might inspire. I shuddered and felt that my own feeble moves toward justice or change could never partake in this potency and, worse, that the part of me closest to my father bore witness against me, hinting darkly that I would come along in due time.

Such were my thoughts when, exhausted by the day and perhaps by the atomic excitement, my father said, “I should be getting to bed soon.” It was 5pm. I got up and gathered my few things. He struggled to rise, and slowly escorted me outside. We stood in the driveway. “I don’t think that we will see each other again,” he said, “thanks for coming out.”
“Of course,” I replied.
“I love you, Michael.”
“I love you, too.”
With that, we shook hands and hugged. The old familiar smell of him conjured a kind of horror in me, but under that was something else. In those few seconds that we held each other–for the last time, but also for the first time in many years–I felt how the necessity of running from him had made me reject every memory of kindness or decency involving him. Having cut him from my life, it felt wrong to cherish any of these memories; it felt like displaying an amputated limb. But this man had taught me how to read and study, how to shoot a BB gun. We’d gone on long bike rides that ended with milkshakes. That I’d also found myself pinned against a wall with him screaming in my face, fist raised–that did not, in fact, cancel out the goodness, though it made the goodness inaccessible to me. That may be as good a definition of abuse as I can summon, being asked to reconcile irreconcilable things. My father had asked for an inhuman capaciousness on my part, and, though I had to leave, leaving felt indistinguishable from failure.

I remembered–or, more accurately, felt–these complexities as I backed my rental car out of the driveway. He stood and watched, his face unreadable, and I labored under the other-worldly knowledge that I would never see him again.

I drove back to the bar and ordered two whiskies and a beer. Then a couple more. Then too much. I attempted to arrange the vignettes that comprised our relationship, but the pieces and fragments of memories seemed to lay on the bar before me, inert. He was a dying minister from a cut-rate, absurd denomination. I was a heathen son at home in neither the church nor the world, half lost in books, with violence in my veins. My father and I had never had it out, never even investigated the contours of our silent truce. This was to be the story of our relationship.

As it happened, we never spoke again. Some months later, when his name lit up on my phone, I knew it was not his voice that I would hear. I let it go to voicemail, got out of bed, made coffee, and sat at my desk, where I called back. His wife gave me the news–an uncomfortable death, but far from the worst–and, after offering each other the customary inadequate platitudes, we hung up. I sat there for an hour, thankful for the early hour and the privacy, knowing that a relationship so intimate as to make the distinction between friend and enemy meaningless had ended.

When you leave the church I don’t just lose heaven, you lose all that heaven implies: a sense of timeless continuity, the thought that–however vaguely you may conceive of it–the ones you love are never lost to you. You lose mystery and the infinite and everyone–both belief and the capacity to believe. To be fair to my father, I think he tried to warn me about this, and perhaps his broad acceptance of force and his eventual worship of power were symptoms of some internal bargain he’d made to avoid ever washing up on the shores of fear and doubt again. Des­peration might have given birth to a certainty based entirely on need, and the ensuing relief might have endlessly reinforced the original choice. I could understand that.

A photo of my father sits on a bookshelf in my home. He’s seated next to my mother, who is holding me as I grin goofily, perched on her leg. We all look happy, though the anger and violence that would blight our family had long since taken root. There is some joy in that picture, and some hope. When I look at it I wonder if any of us would have had the strength or the desire to continue on if we’d known what was coming. It is a mercy that we don’t know how much even the most privileged lives are going to hurt when we embark on them.

When I look at that picture I see the beginnings of myself in the proud lines of his face, the anger and confidence and mercilessness that I both use and resist. These qualities did not originate in our family with him. They go all the way back, having dripped into his life and then into our lives like ink into water, forever mixed in, darkening and complicating everything. This does not absolve my father, but it makes human sense of him, and in a small way the fact that I have not descended into the physical violence that marred him points towards redemption. He was less vicious than his father, and I have been less vicious than mine. Still, progress is a treacherous notion, and when I stare at the ceiling at night and remember, I am compelled to admit that we share an inheritance, my father and I. We each express participation in a greater unhealable wound, a chronic condition that cannot be satisfactorily described with the wan academic terms of my liberalism. Though, I believe in little else, there is a kind of return to my childhood faith in this, a restoration of continuity, and I take some comfort in it. Whatever faith has been lost, whatever degree of doubt must be admitted and endured, whatever hope there may be, I am compelled to say that–with all my heart–I still believe in sin.