re: college / my little selling-out / the fake forgiveness lament (3/8/25)

Let the record show, and show it time and time again, that I was the first: the first among my peers to look inside and ask so why did I come to Boston, anyway? Now we all wrestle with it, drunk and unsatisfied and jobless, but it was not long ago that the question was initially posed to me alone, before I even really stopped to pose it to myself. To it I would give my reason, which at the time I did not have to invent as much of, and then someone would tell me the response: “oh, well you're going to love Boston." No mind was paid to whether Boston would love me, though. And to that: no, it does not. This city semi-stochastically gives forty thousand rewards to the worst of us, and it repeatedly delivers bad fortunes to the good of heart. And, sometimes, me. And most immediately, I’m thinking, there are people here who think ugly of me — and worse still, most of that ugly isn't even true. But in this, no mind is paid to whether I actually care about that. My good friend from Worcester tells me: no, I do not.

At the time she tells me this I'm drunk and amenable, but she never has to press me hard on these things anyway. She's good at that. Just a suggestion, really, that’s how she phrases it. But she sees with certainty through the bullshit I'm putting on. I want to care, because it might lend some legitimacy to the idea that I am a Bad Person, which I must so desperately want to be. She tells me this later. Because how would I know I lived It if I didn't have real shame to cling onto? The yardstick with which I measure my Lived Experience? Some things are not to be ashamed of though, and I am told that some things are not even real to begin with. Some people, even, are not real to begin with. Though, I am in luck, because in my life there is still some shame to be had.

Much is said, rightfully, about the opening lines of the Silver Jews' 1998 album American Water. Of course, because it is iconic, because it is the ideal of a hook. Because the sentence, “In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection” takes up such a wonderful space in your mouth, your mind. But, personally, I’ve always been most concerned with the opening to its more somber companion, The Natural Bridge: “No, I don’t really want to die / I only want to die in your eyes.” This line is addressed, secretly, at poet and lead singer David Berman’s father, Richard Berman, a deeply evil and deeply rich lobbyist which David will succinctly describes as “a world-historical son of a bitch” when the band breaks up and he decides he can reveal his secrets. “I am the son of a demon,” he further confers on us in the letter following the band’s end, My Father, My Attack Dog. And so, in this element, it was a song which always most of all resonated with me. I loathe to delve so deeply into my own specifics, as the machinations of my father’s evil rarely reached beyond the familial space so much as Richard Berman’s had, but my father was too a deeply evil and deeply rich man, one who sent the collapsed heart of my family asunder and rent our skins. I hold him in a similar light to all the worst evils of the world, he one of few who I reserved a seat for true hatred of, and I held no punches in letting him know during the youthful and vital teenage years. It was then, at least, when he knew well of my hate, and he knew well enough to say he hated me too.

Have you even ever rented a room? David Berman asks his father this while craning his neck upwards to see the other man, so high in his tower as David stands in his low and indefensible plain of apparent poverty and addiction. At one point, I would futilely yet angrily cry this upward to my father from my own similar impoverished station, he did not listen, but today I can no longer claim to do this so sturdily. Because in August of twenty twenty four, I decided I had an answer to the question asked in every interview and icebreaker, I had a new reason for why I came to Boston and this one did not compel me to unwind convoluted descriptions of polyamorous implosions and whatever twitter-manufactured styles have come to answer the permanent identity crisis plaguing trans 4 trans spaces and the world. It was simple: I was going to college. I had taken inspiration from the tenacity of my new friends and my new girlfriend, all of whom had made or were in the process of making the four-year divergence. And it was complicated: I needed the money. Money, of which I had precious little, because it had all been burnt up on sustaining the unsustainable, both in terms of past rent and past relationship. Except for my college fund, which sat so large and so ready yet so out of reach — because the conservator of it was my batterer father. He had not closed the fund. He had not spent the money. He could’ve spat in my face and made the whole deal easier for me. He did not. I figured this was due in part to legal fixtures established in the winding, manifold post-divorce settlements, though as well simply good manners — lawyers still loomed over the factions of the family left in Virginia, watching for misbehavior to capitalize on, and I suspect at some point a man must have to tire of fighting. Simply, the money was still there.

Him tired or not, my access to that money depended on one thing: the foreclosure of my accrued values. In the fiery year of sixteen, I made a promise to myself not to touch the man’s money, no matter even if he somewhy gently offered it to me. In the January of this year, I stabbed that kid in the back. And then proceeded to, in what has now grown to a chain of forty-plus emails, twist that blade deeper and deeper. My mother, who retains a deep hatred of the man, still encourages this. She just wants to see me in college. She doesn’t care that it’s some two-year commuter school built into the side of a subway station. She doesn’t even care that I now regularly make formal niceties with my father to accomplish this end. I simply patter away at my keyboard in another request to him and hope I don’t fall too deeply into the fantasy-writing of it, the story I’ve constructed to make this all more amenable. In which the man I am writing to is not the same as the one who raised me. Even as a kid, in the heat of it all, I would sometimes wonder if adulthood might mean compromise with and forgiveness of my parents, who were then, among other things, responsible for making my life hell. I did this legitimately with my mother. I still do not know if I ever will with my father — instead, I reason that I just need the money from him. And I need an answer for the question of why I live here. These things, more than I need to not betray myself-at-sixteen.

When I'm walking around the city I always feel as though I may be a tweaker, an honest-to-goodness freak of society, because I think there is no connection between myself and the people I'm looking at when I'm in wait at a bus stop or some other place you're meant to leave. We have our own little parallel society, so we may as well be addicts and the like. We only interact with the yuppie freaks when we need to, when servicing them at our low-wage jobs or weaving through them in sidewalks and restaurants. Those are the sorts of places you try and assimilate in, then fail to. I suppose I only pretend not to have a rich father who is bankrolling my education. But these people do not pretend at all, or they just do a very bad job at it. “You see,” I could begin, “it does not count, because he was very bad to me, and my mother, and my brother when I was younger.” I can delude myself into thinking I am being paid some sort of restitution for what I’d endured. “Recompense for physical and emotional damages,” I would say. But that is not the reason for the money. I am paying tuition from a trust fund. It is even a little difficult to reconcile the man sending my school thousands of dollars and covering bookstore purchases with no complaints, with the man who made my growing-up years so dangerous. I do want to indulge, and ask myself: Did those years even happen? Maybe I am misremembering.

I always end up passing the Little Building — which is actually rather big — next to the Boston Common and adorned with flags for Emerson College, as I make a commute across town after my classes at the community college. I have a friend who has a friend named Emerson. I wonder if they've ever seen those flags and paused, like it is painful or just fascinating to recognize someone in an object. Like when I pass the sandwich shop near my apartment, the one named Roxy, and I always loiter my eyes for just a bit longer than I ought to. The sandwich shop named Roxy is alright, though, if a bit pricey. I went there with a friend when she visited Boston. She though it would be funny, and it was, I suppose. As my ex still floats around this city, so it would seem, though mostly in the margins of the pages, too ashen to pay any mind beyond her now-historical, now-symbolic role as an archetype for something in my mind. And sometimes, I listen to songs where they mention my father’s name. I used to avoid them out of principle. But him, he is now relegated to similar vague spaces as her. Is the virile of my hate a tapped resource? I rarely see them outside of screens, confined to objects. I just feel a general discomfort when I engage it now, and it is blasphemous to say.

When my friends and I are meandering up north of the city, where we go with only tepid frequency, we almost always end up charting a path through Tufts University. This most recent occasion, though, was different. We entered into what we made out as a church. This was on pure whim, or something like that, and I think we were all scared because upon entrance, it immediately became apparent that what appeared to be an Orthodox mass was in session. I had never voluntarily attended mass before. We were quiet, we did not move, we did not dare run afoul God, and we sat at the very back on a bench behind some wooden dividing wall — let it symbolize our still-obvious veneer of contemporary irony and guilt. But we did let enough of this down to really listen to the priest, who spoke of forgiveness, and I thought that I had made the very concept a bastard. I re-admitted my mother into my life with mailed cursive letters and the express message to her that I would forgive what I could not forget, because I could not have lived her life much better than she had. Not with what she had been through so recently. And I meant that in my heart. But upstream of her was pouring out the toxins of my father, architect of so much of her suffering and the rest of his litany of unforgivables, things of which so many are not even mine to forgive. As if I would want to. So his return had only been with the unceremonious subject line: College. And then, so many times over, Re: College. Hey dad, here is my receipt for a TI-84 graphing calculator — in no part genuine.

Despite how willing I am to bend my posture just enough to take his money, I do never think of forgiving him, except seldom the nights where I feel less so like the status-quo atheist and more so like a Bad Christian. It is then, when I wonder if some day I might be able to put it all up on some shelf in my heart. Along with the highway-overpass town where I grew up and the crueler things about it. But that day is not now, not even soon, so I line my pockets and my school’s pockets with his money, and then I pretend the shame and self-hatred I feel about it all constitutes some amount of absolution for this little song-and-dance that we do. Sometimes, he references with such vagueness the “hard times” I fell on as a teen, and after which wonders out loud if I ever recovered. He never references what or who exactly caused these “hard times,” but I do like to think he is at least being semi-sincere when he inquires. And I say, oh, it is easier now at least. At least it is easier now. But I can only speak for myself. And I’ll listen to the opening track of The Natural Bridge, where David Berman offers his father an ultimatum, after it coming the sting when his father only laughs at him (so the song goes). And I’ll only dream of being a person of such moral stature again. But if I had any consistency of beliefs, I would’ve by now written an album consisting of seven songs and a single chord and then I would’ve set myself on fire in front of everyone who would be so stunned by the truth of it. That’s what I would’ve wanted for myself, at sixteen. But in choosing to live I chose to compromise on these things. Now, at twenty-one, I can only tell myself all these aggravating little half-truth half-answers when I start to ask a question.

And I don’t know about you, but I moved here for the Boston Red Sox.