It’s Saturday morning, and you’re still in bed. And your two younger kids have come into your room and are arguing over who gets to snuggle in against your back. Because somehow – at least judging by their behavior – nobody else in your house seems able to generate the requisite body heat to stave off hypothermia. By contrast, your body is infused with liquid hot magma, and your ass radiates enough heat to poach eggs six feet away. The last thing you need is a chatty seven-year-old stuck to your back.
Meanwhile, the morning person you married is out walking the dogs. By now she has already run a couple of miles, and probably done some kind of yoga in the front yard, and maybe push-ups. You’re not really sure because sleep – sweet, sweet sleep.
Then your phone rings. WTF? Who calls this early on a Saturday morning? You fumble for the phone and see with one eye that it’s your wife. You answer and she tells you that she just got a text reminder that the birthday party for your son’s classmate that you both thought was at 11:30AM has been moved up to 8:30AM. And it’s a thirty minute drive. And she’s still out with the dogs, and she has to take your daughter to her volleyball game at 9. So you’ve got to get the boy up and fed and out to door in short order.
Seriously? “Grumble mumble 8:30 birthday party . . .”
And it’s as you roll out of bed and pull a Turnpike Troubadours concert t-shirt over your head that you remember again – just like every other morning since it happened – what went down in America on Tuesday. Ugh.
But damnit, you’ve spent the last four days agonizing about that. This is your weekend with the family. So you shake off the gloomy thoughts, and you roust your boy and get him downstairs. And shit, you’re out of eggs. Because of course you are. So you give him a frozen Belgian waffle. It’s cinnamon flavor, but he’s spreading peanut butter on it. You object to the abomination he is creating, but he says “Dad, trust me, I’ve done this before.” And the confident eyebrow on the face staring back at you is your own.
You grab a jacket for each of you and then look for the birthday gift – the gift that your wife made a point of buying last night in the middle of your date. And you had chuckled to each other as you walked through Target on the least romantic date ever. But where did the gift go? And then you hear that your wife has returned. And she is in the other room admonishing your nine-year-old daughter, who found the unwrapped gift three minutes ago and – ignorant of the fact that it was intended for another – tore it open. Because of course she did.
So you’re going to a birthday party without a gift, yet again. But this it’s time not because you forgot to buy one until it was too late, but instead because you neglected to notify every other member of your household that this gift was not theirs for the taking. Because you didn’t know that was something a sane person had to do.
You drive for thirty minutes and arrive at your destination, a paintball park. You and your son walk up to the first building – a shop that sells paintball equipment – and you’re immediately on edge. Because proudly displayed on the back wall are no less than seventy-five paintball guns modeled after AR-15 assault rifles – the same gun that killed the first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary. And this is a first grader’s birthday party. And what’s about to go down here? And you’re realizing that your wife maybe hadn’t fully considered all the implications when she sent the RSVP.
The shopkeeper directs you to use a different driveway to get to the back, where the party is gathering. And so, disquieted, you get back in your car and drive around back . . . where you encounter Zartan and The Dreadnoks.
Twenty or thirty fully grown men climb out of their rigs in twos and threes. They are decked out in full camouflage, laughing and slapping backs, and prepping their toy assault rifles to pretend to kill each other for the rest of the morning.
As you climb out of your own vehicle, your son is doing his best Leslie Odom, Jr. impression, belting out a verse from Hamilton:
“Yo, turns out we have a secret weapon,
An immigrant you know and love who’s unafraid to step in,
He’s constantly confusing, confounding the British henchmen,
Everybody give it up for America’s favorite fighting Frenchman!
LaFayette! . . .”
And you put a hand on his shoulder. Because you don’t want attention. And you feel somehow vulnerable in this strange parking lot, full of men with faux guns and protective masks that obscure their faces. And something tells you these guys don’t speak Broadway.
Your son joins his buddies, and you find and greet your hosts. And you become more at ease now that you’re with other parents from the school. Now that you’re surrounded by the familiar language and trappings of privilege, in this pocket of private school types. The catered breakfast tacos from Salsa Limon (drool). The plentiful cardboard boxes of gourmet coffee. The Vineyard Vines pullovers and The North Face fleeces. You know these people. And it’s all gonna be okay.
Then a Facebook comment from earlier in the week returns to your mind. Booker wrote it. He is a distant friend from your college days. You’ve interacted with him rarely over the past 20 years. Still, you will forever think fondly of him, if only for the great complement he once paid you, to someone else, when you were not present. He had been discussing relationships between men and women with your friend Kelly, and he had insisted that men could not be faithful. “Men are dogs. All men. We’re all just dogs . . . Well, except for Hamilton.”
It’s not the kind of statement you forget.
And earlier this week, Booker, a black man, had responded to your angst about the election: “And just think if you were black or brown . . .”
Those words echo in your head, and you look around. You really look. And every person you see – every customer, every employee, everyone – is white.
Then you consider yourself, and what you’re wearing. A concert t-shirt from a country band. A Revolver Brewing hat, the logo for which prominently features two upright pistols. A scraggly beard. A generic hoodie. You were uncomfortable among the Dreadnoks when you arrived, but Hell, you could fit right in with them. In fact, wasn’t that Zartan’s power? Being a chameleon?
You felt ill at ease because those folks didn’t appear to be your people – NPR listeners who favor gun control and want to combat global warming. But there’s no outward marker to distinguish you from them which they can observe. Nothing that makes you different, nothing that might make you a target.
Nothing like, say, skin color for example. Or gender. Or religious garb. Or the loving embrace of a member of the same sex.
In other words, you have the privilege of dispelling your anxiety simply by retreating into what you appear to be: a white dude.
What if you were a Muslim father (like your buddy Khurram), accompanying your Muslim son to this party, and found yourself surrounded by those same thirty rednecks? Even if nothing happened, wouldn’t you feel anxiety? After Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric and scapegoating campaign, how could you not?
And of course, you knew this before today. At least on an intellectual level. But somehow, you didn’t know it on an emotional level. You didn’t FEEL it. But after this morning, after being a progressive liberal among at least what appeared to be a battalion of gun-loving conservatives – conservatives who would surely hold some of your beliefs in contempt – you somehow have a better grasp. No, you don’t know what it’s like to be black. But you do know what it’s like to be anxious among folks who might be hostile toward you.
And so you now have a deeper appreciation for the scope of the tragedy of the 2016 election. Because for you, last Tuesday represented a loss in terms of policy and agenda. But for people of color, the LGBT community, immigrants, Muslims, women, and anyone else who has felt marginalized, Tuesday was something so much worse.
These thoughts haunt you as you shamble over to watch the paintball safety video with your son. The video stresses how badly you can injure your eyes if you remove your goggles during a match, or if they fall off. And you wonder again: is this a good idea?
You feel a bit dazed as you sign the waiver. You’re a lawyer and even you don’t read those waivers.
You tighten your son’s protective face mask as best you can. And then he pulls up his hoodie and says “I’m Kylo Ren”. And as he says it, his classmates realize that it’s true, he looks so much like him. And for a few minutes he is a god among boys.
Then parents and kids alike walk down the road and over to the assigned course. And as you approach, you see that’s it a mockup of a city. It’s designed to facilitate the kind of house-to-house combat that was ever present in the Iraq war.
And something inside you sinks.
Questions begin to form on the edges of your consciousness. But you bat them away. Because this is a birthday party, dude. Don’t be a downer. Lighten up, it’s just play.
Then the boys enter, and proceed to stalk each other through the imagined ruins of Mosul or Aleppo. And they pretend to slaughter their classmates. And over the next three hours, between rounds of combat, they swap harrowing stories of near misses, and confirmed kills, and shots to the crotch.
And they’re laughing, and slapping backs . . .