"All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its' own way."
Looks good, right? Makes for a good opener in a piece of fiction: looks profound, looks firm. The truth as I'm aware of it is closer to this: every unhappy family is unhappy in ways that almost invisibly marginalize the problems lying there in plain sight, year after year, until all that remains is the impulse to spit, kick, shrug or ignore. As I write that, I feel like I'm about to launch into some bizarre episode about inbred rednecks in the Appalachians, Jerry Springering their way toward a shotgun murder on the front lawn, as deliciously dank and overripe as a two-week old melon. But I'm not. I'm talking about my own blood.
My parents were New York Jews who settled in Connecticut in the latter part of the 1970s, which is when they had me. Nothing out of the ordinary there. What was perhaps a little weird was the religious choice they'd made a few years before: they'd both converted -- mom first, dad sticking around for her when they started dating -- to Nicherin Shoshu of America, later known as Sokka Gakkai International. This is a practice that falls inside the umbrella of what we call Buddhism, but bears little likeness to what most people would associate with Buddhism: no meditation, no contemplation, no focusing on the breath, no walks taken in silence. Just chanting.
A bit of context: you're five, and the grown-ups say to you: "Right. Sit here and repeat these phrases out loud, over and over." The words are incomprehensible: they're Japanese, not that you have any idea what Japanese is, yet. You're at this for half an hour or more, each day. Judging from how they do it, the faster you chant this stuff, the better; the louder, the better. Both of them chant the chant with a fanatical, merciless devotion, seemingly trying to murder something an inch or two in front of their faces with the sound. They also, just to stretch the cult metaphor a bit further, hand out pamphlets in the streets, perhaps more innocently but no less single-mindedly than the Scientologists will be doing a few years later.
One truth about early religious indoctrination: it never leaves you. These days I'm in New York City: in Union Square, where I like to watch the speed chessers doing their thing, it's a block down to the NYC SGI Culture Center: a four-story affair where at most hours of the day, the sound of nam-myoho-renge-kyo wafts out from within. The staffers are unnaturally cheery: instantly ready with a hearty hello, are you a member, would you like to become a member - today? Do you know of the Gohonzon and the wisdom of President Ikeda? Since the break with the Priesthood in the early nineties, when NSA became SGI, the urge to convert has been officially tamped down on, but talk with any SGI rep and you can feel it: shakabuku, the bringing of more into the fold, runs too deep to go away. Some will ask. Some will shrug and give you a "hey, it works for me" and zip away much too briskly. One of these two things will happen inside of thirty seconds, guaranteed. One member I argued with a few years ago in San Francisco, when I still argued with members, wrapped things up by telling me, "well, you know, we're all just going to live and die and hopefully not starve too much in-between..." while glazed over, checking out the buffet.
I rarely go into the Culture Center. It's always there, nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Always, just a block down the alley, a few steps from the Barnes and Noble where I spent a weekend homeless, once, when I was eighteen, as intimate, as eerily familiar and as unwanted as a creepy old uncle, slapping too many backs at the barbeque, telling too many abrasive jokes, staring a little too hard at your cousin who just got her first period. It's common in SGI to refer to those born into the practice as "fortune babies". No one has called me this in a long, long time. Anyone who did, and meant it, would probably lose teeth.
Here and now, in 2011, both parents still practice. Mom does so with a sense of humor: dad, with an empty, terrifying fervor, identical to that with which he sat me down in 1983 and told me to change my karma. ("What's karma?" "DO IT.") Unchanging, year after year. His speech is peppered with "determinations" and "fortunes" and karmic hesitations between words, and sometimes it's charming, in a childlike way. He claims at times to be dying of something: I asked once, got a "you have no idea what I'm going through" and dropped it there. He will sometimes email me Ikeda's Daily Wisdom or syrupy stories of people who beat cancer. These mostly get deleted unread. When he types, he can't seem to spell, and he will invariably and mystifyingly use the letter "U" for the word "you" when emailing me, like a drunk teenager texting. "Sending u all good wishes for better times, I know u are doing your best." -sent from my Blackberry.
So finally I commented on the "u" thing. "I send to you my heartfelt wishes while having to type with my thumbs, and in return I get a sneer and the back of your hand? Go fix yourself and don't write back." -sent from my Blackberry.
I asked if his best wishes were really Twitter-length. This kicked off a long diatribe where I was told among other things that "your protestations of innocence rang hollow fifteen years ago", that I was "pretending that your own soul is not torn by the strife u are causing" and "keep it up and u will be the smugest son of a bitch in that graveyard we are all destined for", in-between alternating bouts of self-pity and condescension, and reflections on his misfortune at not being able to express the torrent of love within.
When he got to the reflective part, all toddled out in words a lot less genuine than a greeting card, and finally started in on telling me that I should "show me how u express your caring and concerned thoughts for me, so that I can read your language and emulate it", I explained, without a trace of humor for him to misinterpret, that trying to force concern out of me was manipulative, it didn't make me want to open up the floodgates and I didn't care that he couldn't stop judging himself and psych guilt-tripping.
This was last week. I was in the middle of school finals, trying to make something sound good in Pro Tools, and looking for a new apartment. I didn't pay much attention to any of this as I read it. I just told him why I didn't like him, and then told him more thoroughly.
It wasn't until this week that I looked back and thought - "hang on a minute... I said... that..."
"That" being: you're manipulative, you're blind, I know it, you don't, there it is, that's all.
That. That thing I never quite said before. I said it to him.
That thing that would have changed everything fifteen years ago, if I'd had the balls or whatever. I said that thing. And I didn't even notice for a few days.
It wouldn't have actually changed everything, of course. Life would still have been a lot of blood and thunder, trying to get away from them. But I believed that it would have, at the time, as much and as magically as I've believed anything in this life.
Though I never did say it. Or if I did it just went bad, like moldy bread.
And it doesn't change something now. He can't take it in or wonder if there was something there he really ought to hear. The next time he emails to "hope to convey my best wishes for happiness for u at every moment of life", he'll still be commiserating about the inevitability of karma. I'll ignore most of it, of course. Nothing I can do with it. I can follow the trail of breadcrumbs of his belief back, but there's no little house at the end of the trail. Just a bad smell, and a clearing, and the empty sky.
It's been overcast in New York. It's spring, amazingly enough: God didn't just flip the switch that goes from winter to summer this time. I've finally got back to some Wing Tsun, which is straight-up kung fu training, after being away from it for the two-odd years I've been in New York. I wanna dig out my juggling bags when it gets a little warmer and go busking in the subway. And I want more movement work to get into. Not just yoga and WT, but clowning, stage combat, something of the like. Just putting that out there.
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