In the spring of 1994, I was driving back from running an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at a prison in Orange, New York, when blue lights appeared in my rearview mirror. I had gone through a rural intersection and taken a right onto a narrow road. I might have rolled through the stop sign. I took off my seatbelt so I could dig through the glove compartment for my paperwork. After years of driving illegally, I now had a license, registration, and insurance. The officer approached. I rolled my window down and placed my hands on the steering wheel. A young guy around my age, mid-twenties, with the same kind of pizza-dough face as mine, asked me for my documents. Hoping for a warning, I handed over my information, and he returned to his cruiser.
I went back to staring out the windshield and thinking about a poet I thought I was in love with, who wisely saw me as trouble. The light had just started to fade in the tall oaks and maples. When I checked the rearview mirror again, I counted five police cars, with twice that many officers gathered nearby in a huddle. One of them spoke on a radio and relayed information to the others. I stopped breathing, and, every time one of the cops glanced in my direction, the muscles in my neck ratcheted tighter.
The prison, called the Monterey Shock Incarceration Facility, was where young offenders, almost all of them Black or Hispanic and from New York City, marched around a military-style campus wearing olive-green fatigues, some of them carrying eight-foot logs, while the guards, all white, barked orders. Then the young men sat in neat rows in a cinderblock room and looked at my friend and me, two white guys from a college town who had come to share our “experience, strength, and hope.”
This was how it had started for them, I thought now: waiting to be surrounded. Except this couldn’t be happening to me, because I was Jason Brown—I was innocent. One of the officers produced a bullhorn, while a half-dozen others approached my car in a crouch, their hands on their guns. From what I could see, the remaining officers seemed to be taking up positions behind the cruisers and preparing for battle.
The officer with the bullhorn raised it to his mouth and yelled, “Jason Brown, get out of the car with your hands in the air.”
They split into two columns on either side of my car. Though I knew I should follow the orders of the officer with the bullhorn, I no longer had any control over my arms and legs. My thoughts spun out of my head and flew into the air, leaving my body behind. I felt as if I were watching a TV show about someone named Jason Brown who was about to be arrested for crimes he claimed not to have committed. The Jason Brown in the car was starting to hyperventilate, while the Jason Brown watching this on TV was curious to see what happened next. The approaching officers froze, and the voice through the bullhorn repeated its demand. Either I would step out of the car, or they would drag me out. I understood that if they dragged me out they would be angry, yet I was no more willing to open the door than I would be to shove my hand into the mouth of a shark.
The guy with the bullhorn told everyone to hold on. I sat with my hands molded to the steering wheel. One of the officers ran back to the cruisers. After a minute, the rest of them joined him. Another minute passed. The officer who had originally pulled me over approached my car. He tapped on the roof, handed my license back, and looked around the interior.
“We had the wrong Jason Brown,” he said. “There’s another Jason Brown with an arrest warrant. He’s very dangerous.”
My forehead collapsed against the steering wheel. When I eventually leaned back, the officer held a yellow sheet of paper in front of my face.
“What’s that?” I said.
“A citation for not wearing your seatbelt.”
We had been married a year when my second wife told me she had dated another Jason Brown, a helicopter pilot. I asked her if she was sure she had married the right one. “I do like helicopters,” she said, and smiled.
When I published my first book, a man wrote to me and said, “My name is Jason Brown, too, and I am a writer. What are we going to do about this?”
To me, the name Jason Brown sounds like an amateur golfer. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, a spate of future athletes were born with the name Jason, including Jason Brown the professional football player and Jason Brown the figure skater. Another Jason Brown, born either a month or two years after me, became a fugitive wanted for murder, in Phoenix, and appeared on the F.B.I.’s “Ten Most Wanted” list. That Jason Brown was born in California, which I was not. He had a master’s degree in international business, which I did not. For a while, he was a Mormon and owned a business called Toys Unlimited. At one point, Jason Brown took a firearms class; at another point, an eyewitness claimed that Brown had accidentally shot his truck. A little while later, he allegedly shot an armored-truck driver five times in the head and made off with fifty-six thousand dollars in cash. He hasn’t been seen since.
I wish I could tell it straight through, but that has never worked out. Too many pills, too much booze, born missing a beat or a bearing—often I come to the end of a sentence not knowing where I started. Frequently I read Camus, Arendt, Baldwin, many others, but I always come back to Camus, looking for a road map I can recognize. I can go a week, sometimes a month, and I feel almost engaged, motivated, invested. Then, without warning, I’m frozen. The muffled voices of my family, students, and others seem to come from down the street. For long stretches of time, I can’t move.
“Well, you were born late,” my mother once told me, “and before I even laid eyes on you, the doctor told me that you looked like a Neanderthal. I didn’t think that was such a nice thing to say. We couldn’t separate you from your bottle for at least four years, until you developed trench mouth, and when we brought you to preschool you curled up in the corner and moaned until the teachers made me come back for you. Also, for a long time, you would only play with orange toy cars, and then, one day, you found your father’s hammer and smashed all your cars to pieces.”
Like teen-agers from any generation, I suppose, my friends and I wanted everything destroyed and remade in our image. But we were the last generation for whom there were no rules. Pretending to be undercover police, Dan and I borrowed a friend’s blue Chevy, put a flashing light on the dash, and pulled people over. Once, when I picked up a job crewing on a sailboat going from Florida to Maine, I left school for three weeks and told everyone my godmother had died in a plane crash. I was going to Florida to sprinkle her remains over a coral reef. I told kids that I was from a rich family and even had them drop me off in other neighborhoods, only to have to hike halfway across town to my house.
Already drunk and driving with a guy from my high school whom I didn’t know very well, I stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy beer. After we loaded the back of the car, everything went dark until sometime later, when I came to naked in a one-room cabin. I was lying on my back, and a woman I had never met was sitting on top of me. Apparently, we were having sex. A dozen or more people sat drinking in the cabin. “Who are you?” I asked. Her eyes were closed.
In my last year of high school, my father moved out and my friend Tom moved in with me. My parents’ house, in Portland, Maine, had a windowless, dank basement apartment where Tom and I lived.
“You know, he’s very, very handsome,” my mother said one morning, while I was pouring myself a bowl of cereal upstairs. I supposed there wasn’t much I could do about that. There were handsome people out there. That I might be one of them, as my mother had said many times, in no way cancelled out the existence of other handsome people and of the desires that ripped through our lives like the wind. My mother blushed, as if she were fifteen. She put her hand on my arm, smiled, and raised her eyebrows. I poured my cereal into the sink.
In the spring, a month before we graduated, my mother, Tom, and I were drinking in the kitchen and we ran out of beer. I took Tom’s car to get more from the corner store. The name on my fake I.D. was Bob. Bob Brown. On the way back, I crashed into a fire hydrant and slammed my forehead into the windshield. The car wouldn’t start, so I left it there and walked home with the beer under my arm. It was dark by the time I reached the house. I sat at the kitchen table as blood dripped down my cheek, along my neck, and into my shirt.
“What happened to you?” my mother asked. Tom took a beer out of the case, and she looked at him the same way she looked at me. Or she looked at me the same way she looked at him. He looked at the floor.
At the end of the week, Tom and I were buying a slice of pizza downtown on Exchange Street. We only had enough money for one slice and were trying to split it evenly in half as we stood in an alley.
“Your mom asked me to have sex with her,” he said, and shrugged. This wouldn’t have been an unusual thing to say. Not for us, not in our world. He was just keeping me informed. I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t have to. Sex was not something we could say no to. It was all around us. My mother shared whatever sexual thoughts passed through her mind.
Maybe the context started when I was ten. That’s the age that makes sense from other proximate evidence surrounding my memory of getting out of the tub and turning to my mother, who held a towel. Instead of handing it to me, she dried me off: first my head, then my chest, then below. I turned in a circle in front of her. She said, “You’re big down there.”
It would be helpful, in a way, if there had been one particularly heinous act I could point to—one act, that is, that stood out from moments like that one, in which I stood next to the bath and she smiled as her hand lingered on me. The same smile, coy and embarrassed, that she would flash in the future when she would come into the bathroom to dry me off, or touch my arm as I passed her in the kitchen, or tell me about the men she liked and why. The same smile she would later offer Tom, my other friends, other men, me.
For Tom and me, our mothers’ sexuality was like the coastal fog of our native state: everywhere, in our lungs, slowly suffocating us, though we didn’t know we were suffocating. We didn’t know what was happening to us when it was happening to us. A person’s hand on your body is like a word. It has no meaning—doesn’t even exist—outside of context. Once the context is set, once the fog settles in, anyone’s hand on my body would feel like her hand. Every woman who ever smiled at me with desire was my mother. If I was drunk or had just met a woman, there was a chance I could make it work, but not for long.
“To those who despair of everything, not reason but only passion can provide a faith, and in this particular case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair—namely, humiliation and hatred.” Camus.
In college, while blacked out, I took off all my clothes and walked across campus to a party where I started talking in a soft, serious voice about certain key passages in Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science.” I had blackouts all the time by then. Many of them were not really drinking blackouts. I would lie down and fall asleep after a few beers, only to wake up sometime later as someone else. This other Jason Brown liked to be on the move. One night, I threw my clothes and furniture out the window and had to see the dean. I woke up in the bushes; I woke up in hallways. Once, I was down by the Androscoggin River and found a pair of pants hanging from a branch, with the name Jason Brown written on the tag.
In 2002, when I was thirty-three and coming out of another failed relationship, I paid for a five-day codependency workshop at the Caron Foundation, in Pennsylvania. A number of people from A.A. had attended, and they spoke highly of the ability of the therapists there to take you back to the origin of your damage. By the time I arrived at the orientation, I was sure I had made a huge mistake.
The program was designed for people who were still having trouble with relationships. Our group of twenty was mixed in gender and appeared to range in age from sixteen to sixty. After we got to know one another, we broke into small groups of five or six to talk in therapist-guided sessions about the problems, most of them sexual in nature, that had led us there. Then we were handed foam bats to wield against furniture, the floor, walls—anything but the other participants. We were supposed to expunge our rage. That was the plan, I was told.
The food was great, and the therapy didn’t work at all. I sat in a circle on the floor with my small group and narrated what I knew about what had happened between my mother and me—a part of my life I had never talked about before, not like this. I wasn’t describing anything I had somehow repressed or forgotten, but, in telling it to all these strangers, I felt as if I were talking about someone else’s life. That person, the person in my story, didn’t sound like me.
When I finished, I took up the foam bat and pounded on the chairs and tables and walls while the strangers watched. It was satisfying to beat on objects while the strangers (two of whom, a teen-age girl and a forty-two-year-old wife and mother of three, I found attractive) watched me pretend to lapse into a rage storm. For their benefit, I contorted my face and clenched my fists. I grunted. I wanted to be a sensitive but explosive Jason Brown. Misunderstood, sexy—the James Dean of damaged lovers. I had worn my tight black shirt for the occasion. But I wasn’t enraged, not in the slightest. When, at age twelve, I had put my fist through the windshield of our car, I was full of rage. When, during my first year of sobriety, I picked up Dan and threw him across the room, I was enraged. I knew I was supposed to get back there now, but I couldn’t, not while I was working the audience.
Having relinquished my bat, I returned to the group, curled up into the fetal position, and pretended to cry. I hadn’t been told that this was expected, but I understood the script. The mother of three rested her head against my back while the teen-ager pressed her warm lips against my ear.
Later, in a private meeting with the therapist, I confessed that I didn’t think I was supposed to be there. I was a fake. In the same way I had faked my rage in front of the group, I had faked everything else in my life. Starting when I was twelve, I had spent years guzzling booze in a periodic way, but I didn’t think I was really an alcoholic. I went to the meetings because I needed somewhere to go. I needed someone to be, and “alcoholic” fit better than anything else.
“It’s not like anything happened to me,” I said. Nothing, I meant, that justified how I still felt, years after giving up drugs and alcohol. In other words, my mother hadn’t had sex with me, so I didn’t see what I had to complain about. I was sick of my failed relationships and of how I felt, but, mostly, I was sick of hearing myself complain—yet here I was, complaining again. The more we talked, the more he nodded. I imagined that he could see that I was terrified of myself. I had tried to halt for good all thought, desire, rage—everything—once by slicing up my arms and once by throwing myself in front of a bus. In the latter case, I was wasted and fucked up the timing. The bus stopped and waited for me to pick myself up and get out of the way.
Then the therapist used the word I couldn’t apply to my experience with my mother. No one had ever said this word to me, about me. He used the word again together with the words “emotional” and “covert.” According to the therapist, all three groupings—the word “incest” alone and the word paired with the other two words—described what had happened to me, which I found impossible to believe.
I have the ability, always have, of not being wherever it is that I am. I see, I hear, but I am not there, not anywhere. This was the case for me now as he explained how my personal context overlapped with the diagnostic context. On one level, these were all just words, like the words of my name. The therapist finished his discussion of my new context and asked me what I thought.
I told him I had no idea. I didn’t think anything.
He leaned forward. He had a perfectly manicured dark-brown beard that matched his eyes. “I don’t think that’s true,” he said.
“But nothing happened,” I said. “She didn’t . . . ”
“Didn’t what?” he said.
“Do anything to me.”
“She did,” he said calmly. “Based on what you’ve described since you got here, she did.”
The therapist thought I was trying to avoid the truth, but that wasn’t the case. I’d heard other words and acronyms: A.D.H.D., dyslexia, bipolar disorder, alcohol-use disorder, major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, suicidal ideation—not a disorder but a symptom. Abuse. Survivor. For my mother, what they used to call borderline personality disorder. Maybe we had been winged by some of these, I told myself—my family tree on her side was riddled with examples—but I was no hard case. I knew how these things went. First came the category that only half fit. Categories like footprints in a field. Our lives poured passively into the molds. Then the narrative to support the category. Then maybe medication that would make me feel less like me than the booze and drugs I had taken to medicate myself in the first place.
The bearded therapist with coffee breath didn’t understand that part of me wanted to believe what he had said. If I could accept his word—if I could only agree that something had happened to me—then my life would no longer be my fault. Not just parts of my life, certain mistakes, but the whole thing. That was the promise as I saw it. What an incredible relief that would be. The trouble was that I resisted the tools that psychology and academics had given me to explain everything: by absorbing statistics and micro-categorizations of pathologies, traits, and isms, my feelings had become a function of systems, diseases, genetics, class, race, gender. Even if I could put a name to what felt like my true story, it might not be true at all. It might just be the story that made me feel better. I had a sense that there was a disturbing parallel between my desire to obliterate the pain and confusion of my experience with booze and drugs and my desire to extinguish my uncertainty with the totality of interpretation. Maybe both were ways of trying to make the real story disappear.
I left the therapist’s office with his words lodged in my brain. A handful of words to describe what was wrong. No words can bear that burden—but when you’re drowning and words are all you’ve got, then words are better than nothing.
Over supper that night, I sat across from the mother of three, just the two of us, not talking, looking at each other between bites. When your context is set early on, you don’t feel attracted to the people you are allowed to be attracted to. Only the people you are forbidden from touching can break the spell. I said I was going to the bathroom and slipped out the back of the cafeteria. When I reached my dormitory, I found the teen-age girl standing in the hall outside my door. Her room was just around the corner. She hadn’t noticed me until my performance, until my fake rage and grief. Now she noticed me. I recognized the look on her face when she raised her chin. Her cheeks were burning, eyes watering. The heat of her sorrow passed right into me, and I understood that she didn’t want to talk or play with foam bats. We’d done enough pretending. I shook my head, rushed into my room, shut the door behind me, and turned the lock. Now I was feeling something. Terrified of my bottled-up desire and the certainty that I would always be alone, I stood sobbing at the window and looked out toward the dark woods.
Camus again: “A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. . . . He means, for example, that ‘this has been going on too long,’ ‘up to this point yes, beyond it no.’ . . . In other words, his no affirms the existence of a borderline.”
When one becomes the sexual object of one’s parent—or, I imagine, of any member of the close family—there is a part of oneself that becomes sealed off like an insect in amber. Over time, one begins to suspect, especially during important moments in relationships, at work, with friends and family, that one is not fully present, not wholly there. Finally, it is impossible to avoid the feeling that this sealed-off part is the real self and therefore the source of all our fear and all our desire. Then it becomes impossible not to feel that this part of us we cannot touch, cannot know, determines who we are and how we see the world. It explains, maybe, why other people never seem quite real and why we never seem real to ourselves, as we pass through the world speaking, acting, desiring. This explains why when I meet people I often have the strange feeling that I am them and not me. Then they walk away, back into their own lives.
A local woman found my mother’s father where he had killed himself, in the garage attached to the barn, in New Hampshire, in 1996. He had pulled his car inside, connected a hose from the tailpipe to the interior, and gassed himself. Assuming, as people do, that his pet would not want to go on without him, he died with his cat, which had been a present from my mother. They passed away listening to the rumble of the engine of the car.
One of his daughters (my aunt) disappeared—I have no idea what happened to her. One son later served time in Sing Sing for molesting a boy. His brother, when he was about fifteen, supposedly chased his father through the house blowing holes in the walls with a gun. He was trying to kill his father but was too drunk to aim. I don’t know what happened back there, in that family, not exactly. History is a thunderhead passing over the earth. We are the lightning that touches the ground.
In 1991, I lived in Portland, in a condemned apartment next to a sex shop and across from the Nu Body Health Spa, a place that had nothing to do with anyone’s health. I lived with Dan, and we were both three months sober. Behind the apartment was a funeral home. Frequently smoke poured from its smokestacks. One day, a voice told Dan he was Jesus. I asked him if he believed the voice, and he said that at first he did but then he thought about it. I suggested he write a note to himself, I am not Jesus, and leave it next to his bed.
It was a Saturday in May, and I wanted Dan to go with me to some kind of gathering. Maybe with A.A. people at Denny’s, I can’t remember. I never wanted to go anywhere by myself. I was lucky when I rolled with other people, especially with Dan. He had a motorcycle, and I had a broken VW Rabbit.
He said he was busy with his old girlfriend. What happened next didn’t happen, not in the usual sense. I only know what happened because Dan later told me about it. I lost time as completely as if I had blacked out from downing a fifth. Dan and I weighed about the same—between a hundred and ninety and two hundred pounds—but he was twice as strong as me from lifting weights. Also, he knew how to fight and I didn’t, not really. I lifted him off the floor and threw him against the wall. Then I jumped on his chest and tried to strangle him. He got off a good shot to my face at some point. When I came to—when I came back to myself—I tumbled off him, and he scrambled into the corner.
Unremembered acts that we learn about through someone else’s report belong to a second self that lives slightly out of reach. Scenes from a novel we read years ago. Sometimes it seems as if we remember what we do before we do it, and our actions feel like the shadow of memory.
My mother remembers a time when she had just turned seven and had been given a litter of kittens for her birthday. She was always caring for some animal: bunnies, mice, pigs, dogs. That weekend, three weeks after her seventh birthday, she had to leave the cats with her mother and stepfather because it was her allotted time to visit her father on his farm in New Hampshire. It was the coldest weekend of the winter in upstate New York, where they lived. When she came back, she found the box of kittens outside by the shed stiff as wood with their eyes frozen open. “They were making too much noise,” her stepfather said. I frequently think of my mother standing in a shed looking down at a box of dead kittens. She stood there until she stopped shaking. Then she walked inside.
I often have the feeling that I am unstuck in time and living more in the past and the future than in the present. More in her life than in my own. She has spared me the worst of what happened to her—I know that—but I don’t know how. I can’t say that either of us has changed. I don’t know of anyone who undergoes fundamental changes because they want to. It may be possible to change, but not without becoming someone you don’t know.
Our mothers are the first people we know, at first the only ones we can trust, our only gateway to ourselves. If my mother didn’t recognize me, I would see myself vanish by becoming a stranger to her.
In Arizona, in 2001, my mother lived alone in a dirty apartment across town from me. Usually, she couldn’t figure out how to make the Internet work. Usually, the answer was that she had not paid the bill. When she called on the phone I had bought her, usually I didn’t answer. When I talked to people about my mother, I often lamented the burden of looking after a lost cause. I liked to tell people that she couldn’t live without me, but I had already begun to suspect that I couldn’t survive without her.
My mother had her own lost causes: cats with terminal diseases, former show dogs abandoned in shelters, her boyfriend from the bus riders’ union who slept in a riverbed and complained that the coyotes came at night to nibble on his toes. He saved half his supper from the shelter and gave it to them so they would stop chewing on him. “This probably was not the best idea,” my mother said, raising her eyebrows.
She was also involved with a group called the Samaritans, who drove out into the desert south of Tucson to leave jugs of water at key points for people who had been abandoned by another kind of coyote. More than once, I saw her cruise by in the passenger seat of a white Toyota truck. She wanted to rescue people—“the people with dark hair,” as she called them—from history. One jug of water at a time, she would be their savior.
I thought of the men at the Monterey Shock Incarceration Facility, in Orange, New York, years before. Most of the men had been under twenty-five, strong, tall, many of them handsome. They sat upright in their fatigues and looked at us. My friend and I always left the camp feeling as if we had helped those who needed it—those who had been forsaken by history—but I later discovered that we had the story upside down. They were dealers and kingpins, not addicts. They came to our meetings because they were forced to by a world that had given them few if any options. We came to them hoping to be saved from ourselves.
Camus: “Here ends Prometheus’ surprising itinerary. Proclaiming his hatred of the gods and his love of mankind, he turns away from Zeus with scorn and approaches mortal men in order to lead them in an assault against the heavens.”
I have a memory that feels more like a dream: I am young, I don’t remember how young, and I rise from my bed before dawn and walk to the bathroom as if I am being led by someone’s hand. I stand on the tub to reach the upper cabinet, take out one of my father’s razors, and cut red lines lengthwise along my arms.
When I first stopped drinking, I had a recurring dream that my mother and I were walking through a narrow tunnel that led deep underground. We were being led by men with automatic weapons. The air was heavy, hard to breathe, and finally we came to a small room carved out of the earth. The room was lit by a torch, and at the center of the room, on a pedestal, sat a clay bust of a dog’s head. The bust radiated an oppressive power that forced me to my knees, and I had to look away. Then I couldn’t breathe.
It is only by applying a kind of constant pressure, as a compress is applied to a wound to staunch the bleeding, that one can keep from drifting away, even as it is impossible to say what one is drifting away from.
My mother told me fragments over time—handfuls of puzzle pieces dropped from a box. After divorcing my mother’s father, my grandmother remarried her high-school sweetheart in Buffalo. A few times a year, my mother’s father, a travelling salesman, drove over from New Hampshire (in that ocean-blue car) and took my mother back to the old farm in North Sutton. Because I have been to the farm and know the smell of must from the stone cellar rising through gaps in the pine floors and know the sight of crumbling horsehair plaster and the shotgun in the closet—because I have woken in the morning to stare out the warped panes at the lower field dotted with cows and descended the stairs to the kitchen to find my grandfather already drinking—I can see my mother, aged eleven, walking in the winter field below the house with her hands brushing through the air over dry grass.
I am going over a story, looking for what’s missing so I don’t have to see what’s there. Her thin legs. She held herself taut, arms out to the side, and turned around. The cold dampness on her cheeks anticipated the storm. The limbs of the apple and maple trees bending in the wind. A knotted cloud grew closer as she climbed the front steps and let the porch door slam with a crack. The front hall steeped in a century of wood smoke. Her father passed out on the sofa in the parlor. Her upstairs room remained unchanged. Across the hall, what had been her father’s room was also unchanged. A skin of dust covered every piece of furniture.
She woke in the middle of the night and gazed out the window toward the snow-covered fields glowing under the full moon. A vibration in her chest rippled back to its source, somewhere out there. Before she saw the fresh tracks that led from the house to the opened barn door and from the barn door back to the house, she felt as if this were a story being retold without a teller. He wouldn’t kill himself in the barn for another forty years, but what she didn’t know, what she couldn’t foresee, was already in motion. He was coming for her. She rushed to the door that led to the empty back room and turned the knob, even though she knew that the room on the other side of the door was the same as the room on this side. There was no inside and outside, not for her, not anymore.
