I sometimes wonder what became of my father’s fists. His ashes sit in an urn in my mother’s garage—the wife he hated most, which is why I put him there. It was a small act of retribution, a final joke at the old man’s expense. For years I dreamed of besting him in a fight, of putting him in his place just once. That never happened. Instead, after his death, I placed the dust and bone fragments that remained of his massive body on a shelf in an unheated garage just a few miles from the West Virginia border.
Now, years later, I still hear his voice in my head, and in the hundreds of emails he left behind. “I have looked out for you,” he wrote to me not long before his heart gave out, “and if I gave you the worst you ever got that is called toughening up…….Not that I was any thing like my old man.” This was his final self-justification: all the pain he inflicted on his children was for our own good, an echo of the even greater pain his father had inflicted on him. Reading those words, the old ambivalence surged up—anger, pity, a perverse understanding. I hated him for saying it, yet I knew that he was trying to look out for us. Violence was the way he knew how.
My father came by his violence honestly. He was born into it, a cherished son of southwestern Pennsylvania steel country, where toughness was the coin of the realm. His own father had been a diesel mechanic on a submarine in World War II, to whom the war gave a stage for his extraordinary physical courage. Family lore and wartime diaries tell how he once dove into the ocean to rescue drowning POWs whose Japanese ship his own submarine had sunk; he scorned the many honors he received. Once, he allowed the sub’s medic to slice open a massive abscess on his thigh without so much as a drop of anesthetic. These feats made him a local legend, the larger-than-life tough guy who could drink anyone under the table then sleep through a double shift at the steel mill.
If war, as Dave Grossman writes in On Killing, is a realm of sanctioned atrocity where normal rules are suspended, then my grandfather never fully reentered civilian life after watching the 1,159 English and Australian prisoners of war who had been aboard the Japanese troopship Rakuyō Maru drown in front of him, thanks to torpedoes he had loaded into the tubes (54 of the POWs were saved, according to the unit citation). Upon coming home, he ruled his house like a defeated enemy, terrorizing his wife and three children. In On Anger, Seneca writes that anger is a kind of delusion that “throws itself upon the very weapons raised against it, hungry for vengeance that will bring down the avenger too.” That was my grandfather: a man so consumed by rage that he would destroy himself just to spite the world.
My father came of age under this regime of fury and pain. On some level, he adored his dad—worshipped the war hero—but also feared and hated him. How could he not? The old man had been so inexplicably masterful on the outside that researchers who contacted me on social media decades later quoted a surviving shipmate’s plaudits about his speed and strength. Within the family, however, he was an unchecked tyrant, who once killed his own son’s pets in front of him as punishment for having taken them in as strays. Growing up, my father could never be as great as the hero his father had seemed, nor could he fully escape being the victim his father had made him. He learned early that life was war: one either dominates or is destroyed.
Deprived of any actual battlefronts, my father found other arenas to prove himself. He lifted weights incessantly, transforming his already big frame into something formidable. He became a star high school football player—a top national recruit at West Virginia University in the 1950s, later semipro—and pursued boxing on the side. He owned a nightclub and was not shy about using his fists to keep order. He didn’t just carry guns; he brandished them. If my grandfather’s war had been about survival and duty, my father’s war was about performance—proving over and again that he was the manliest man in any room.
There was always a sense with him of some invisible opponent he was trying to beat. Perhaps that opponent was his father’s ghost, the one man he could never outpunch. He certainly had no intention of following him into combat: after his stint at WVU, where he’d gone through ROTC, he cited a knee injury from his football days to avoid service in the Marines just as U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia was ramping up in 1963 and ’64. He had, he would remind me, little interest in fighting for anyone besides himself. Even so, he grew into a man who saw the world through the sight lines of combat. And like many combatants, he carried the war home. The enemy became us: his own sons.
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Our household had no civilizing influences—my mother was long gone. My father married five times, and none of his wives managed to soften him or save us. It was mostly just the old man and his three boys—four if you count his brother, eighteen years his junior, whom he took in after their father abandoned them both—trapped in a domestic war zone. If we stepped out of line, punishment was swift and often shockingly violent—smacking us across the temple with a brick or wrench. I have vivid memories of grappling with him, of my older brother landing a lucky punch, only to have the old man respond by gouging and gnashing like a cornered animal, or suddenly landing an overarm throw like a practiced judoka when I had managed to underhook and back him against the wall. His eyes would blaze, his lips peeling back, spittle flying. Ira furor brevis est, as Seneca quoted—anger is a brief madness—and my father’s rages were nothing if not mad: the wild eyes, the grimace, the guttural roar, the groaning and bellowing. But brief though the outbursts might have been, the fury smoldered until his bitter end.
“It’s you or me,” he would sneer at us whenever we mustered the courage to fight back, “and I damn sure hope you want it to be you, because I sure as hell want it to be me.” In his mind, any tussle with his sons was a battle for his very survival. And we were forced into the same logic: we believed that if we didn’t stand up to him, he might kill us—or kill some part of us that we needed to keep alive. So even as preteens we fought our father like men, swinging fists at the giant who loomed over us.
These fights started over nothing. Consider one of many: a TV remote. A loud sigh. A look. The old man was in his late fifties then; my younger brother was a 250-pound fifteen-year-old varsity wrestler. They were at my uncle’s house, where we lived at the time. My father, who never missed an episode of Inside Edition, wanted the channel changed. (He never got up to do it himself.) My brother didn’t move. The old man lunged. My brother caught him in a front facelock. Leaned back into the couch. Applied pressure. A simple wrestler’s guillotine. My father twisted. No panic—just calculation. He bit down hard. Tore through flesh. Spat my brother’s nipple onto the carpet. Blood spurted. We all stood watching. This was a few months before Mike Tyson took Evander Holyfield’s ear, to the shock of the nation, in a fight Tyson lost in the eleventh round. My brother and I weren’t the slightest bit shocked. This was our father. There were no rules in his war, no surrender. You fought to win or you didn’t fight at all.
There is an unwritten code in boxing, one I later saw echoed in the pages of Thomas Hauser’s The Black Lights: a fighter enters the ring knowing it’s “me or him,” but tells himself “I’m not trying to hurt anybody … This is my job.” My father wasn’t shy about hurting us, but he framed it as a job too—his duty. He was the drill instructor in our personal boot camp of manhood. And we learned the lesson, armoring our bodies as best we could.
I, for one, aspired to become a truly gigantic human being just to survive him. By my late teens, I was thick with muscle, benching what some might consider huge weights. Yet no matter how strong I became, I was never stronger than the idea of him. Even as my father aged, a heart patient in his seventies, he remained the undisputed alpha in my mind.
I often thought back to a time in 2000 when we came to blows. I was a few months past my eighteenth birthday; he was sixty but close to three hundred pounds and stout, still performing eighty- and ninety-pound standing dumbbell presses for sets of twenty. I stood nose to nose with him, trembling with rage I’d carried for decades, and he grinned and said, “Go on, buddy-o. You better kill me.” I went to grab him instead, ducking for a takedown that I hoped would de-escalate matters. Reading that move like a child’s picture book, he broke my nose with an uppercut that loosened both of my front teeth. Somewhat chagrined by the damage, he took me to the cosmetic dentist to get them reset—after which they looked much better than before. Only last year, however, was my septum repaired.
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He died in 2014 without ever having acknowledged the harm he’d inflicted upon us. A few years before, I had built an archive for his emails—hundreds of messages, many of them bizarre, conspiratorial screeds. Too old and tired in his final years to bust heads—though he was still packing heat with a concealed-carry permit—he poured his aggression into words. The same man who once bit through his son’s nipple was now ripping into me via text, “busting my balls” with insults and wild rhetorical swings. The emails were full of capital letters and ellipses, profanities and slurs. In one, he berated me for sending him an article about reparations, ranting that “the only repARations I support would be for our lady Mother Earth … killing 110% of all the humanzees on this green blue O R B……………every man, woman and child.”
The content was by turns absurd, offensive and disturbing. He toggled between conspiracy theories, misogynistic slurs, racist dog whistles and personal jabs at me (“pussman” was a favored nickname when he thought I wasn’t responding promptly). Freed from the need to literally knock me around, he found that he could still dominate me by sheer verbal onslaught. The message was the same: I am in control; you are a disappointment; the world is full of idiots and it’s all going to hell.
In the final year of his life, when he could barely walk to the fridge without getting winded, he could still compose an email that made me feel like a scared little boy. I recognized that these diatribes were, in essence, the dying echoes of his lifelong warfare. They were ridiculous, yes—but they were also revealing, a window into his unfiltered id. Here was a man who had always performed hypermasculine aggression in person, now doing performative aggression online. In one of his more bizarre notes, he addressed me as “scholar of scrotes” and launched into a pun-riddled rant—half lunatic joke, half loyalty test—about the “Holycost or ‘HOLY CAUSE,’” demanding to know if I “SUPPORT THE HOLY CAUSE or do u DENY it (de nile ain’t just a RIVER IN EGYPT).” He ended cryptically: “late up here … time….hmmm … I will not now put more in writing even in my old FOG state … PAP 73 O U T.”
It was as though he knew these emails were his last stand, his last weapon. Pap 73 out. His sign-off resembled that of a military signaler or a ham-radio enthusiast (he was neither). The battlefield had shifted to the digital ether, and he still refused to surrender.
Over time I became something of a curator of his hate, taking his phone calls and responding to his emails so my siblings and his ex-wives wouldn’t have to, while arranging the written output so they could enjoy a laugh at his expense. I turned them into dark comedy on a Tumblr blog that eventually became popular enough that the now-defunct magazine Matter included entries from it in an East Village show in 2016. That was my way of coping—publicly framing his rants as an art project composed of “crazy dad emails.” The posts gained a following; people were morbidly fascinated by this foulmouthed patriarch’s missives. Strangers on the internet laughed at lines that, when I first read them, had made me seethe or cringe. Removed from the immediacy of my father’s presence, the words became a grotesque performance that others could find amusing or bewildering. By posting them, I was implicitly saying: This is absurd. Can you believe this? Perhaps, I kept telling myself, I could get a book out of this.
Our modern world has found myriad ways to sanitize and mediate violence—drones that kill from afar, digital filters that hide gore—but someone, somewhere, still has to face the raw reality. In On Killing, Grossman notes how increasing the distance between killer and target (physically or emotionally) makes killing easier. A bomber pilot at twenty thousand feet can “pretend they are not killing human beings.” The social media universe relies on an army of human moderators—tens of thousands of them subcontracted in places like the Philippines or India—whose job is to screen and remove the heinous material that floods platforms: beheadings and child pornography, torture videos, hate crimes, bestiality, extreme hate speech—an unending parade of depravity that most users never see.
But the distance that protects one party only pushes the burden onto another. The bombardier still sees the target on a screen; the content moderator still watches the murder to verify it. Our society, it seems, keeps wanting to reap the benefits of violence (power, catharsis, profit) without acknowledging the personal cost. As Grossman observed, there’s long been a “cultural conspiracy of forgetfulness, distortion, and lies” around the true nature of violence. We collectively choose to look away, to euphemize (“collateral damage,” “tough love”), to let others dirty their hands so we can keep ours clean. But someone always pays.
My father’s emails, ugly as they were, forced me not to look away—if nothing else, he understood the big lie at the heart of civilization. They were like a cracked mirror he held up, insisting I see his pain and my complicity in it. By engaging with the emails—by reading and archiving and publishing them—I became both witness and warden to his legacy of violence, which he began eagerly expatiating on once he knew that my grad-school and writer friends were reading his work. (He was on board with doing whatever it took to become a writer whose content drew eyeballs and commissions, and happy to get some attention along the way: “U have to do what u have to do to get ur name out there while u can for what ever you can … Fuck the rest.”) It was exhausting, but also liberating. I had found a means of turning his aggression into something I could control. I could pin his words on the page like butterflies and dissect them, rather than letting them live in my inbox where they had once made me tremble. Perhaps that is why I write so candidly about him now. It’s another form of content moderation—contextualizing the violence, putting it in a narrative, seeking meaning in it.
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In the final tally, what did my father’s violence accomplish? From his perspective, I suspect he believed it made us strong. In one sense, it did. My brothers and I all developed a hardy shell to survive him, taking his lessons to heart: never show fear, hit first if needed, laugh at pain, trust no one other than yourself to save you. Those lessons have been a burden, but they have also at times been an asset. I cannot deny that the grit that helped me endure certain challenges has roots in the “toughness” my father cultivated. But the costs are legion. Shattered self-esteem. An instinctual reactivity that has made intimacy difficult. A baseline of anger that I’ve had to consciously temper. These are wounds that don’t show on the surface, but they run deep. Years after my father died, I’d still get a spike of adrenaline if I heard heavy heels on a hardwood floor behind me—the sound of him approaching in his elephant-skin boots. A certain timbre of yell can freeze my spine. It took me a long time to see it for what it was. Abuse happened to other people, weak people. Not hard men like him or me.
My father’s violence cost him plenty too. It left him a lonely old man whose marriages all failed and whose children breathed a collective sigh of relief when he died. In his prime, he may have been respected or feared by peers, but at the end he was largely alone, muttering into the void of email. In one of his rants, he cynically remarked that humanity itself should be wiped out as a “virus” on the earth. The irony is that his own anger had already accomplished this extinction on a personal scale—his rage had eradicated all human connection around him. No further plague was necessary. He lashed out at the world because he was terrified the world would move on without him. And eventually, it did. He died; the earth kept spinning.
“No pestilence,” writes Seneca, “has been more costly for the human race.” My family is a testament to that. Yet I also hold to Seneca’s belief in the possibility of reason and gentleness. I have tried and mostly failed to break the cycle, aspiring to become a father figure to myself in the ways my father couldn’t. The man was neither fully monster nor misunderstood saint; he was a product of inherited fury who lacked the tools to behave otherwise.
Now I am a middle-aged man, the same age my father was when I first saw him as old. I share my feelings more openly; I have loving relationships with my wife and daughter; I practice self-reflection in a way that would have made him scoff. And yet—I carry the imprint of his hypermasculine worldview like a birthmark. Sometimes I catch myself reacting to frustration with a flash of temper that is pure him. My voice will rise, a curse will slip out, my face will harden—and I have to take a breath and remember to be someone else, someone better.
When I hold my father’s wooden urn in my hands—there’s a big, garish image of a solitary wolf on it—I feel the heft of it and think: This is what all that fury was for? In the end, every man is reduced to ash or dust, kept in some kind of receptacle, “a coffin or big urn for your guts,” as my father put it in an email. “The bruises from punches are like icebergs. You see only a small part,” a former fighter told Thomas Hauser. The real damage is mostly hidden.
And yet—here is the ambivalence that remains—I also carry love for him, love even for his violence. How do I admit that after all that I’ve recounted? Perhaps it’s just love of the idea of a father, any father. In his own warped way, he was there for us. He was the big orange sun around which our lives revolved. He did put food on the table. He did get my front teeth fixed after he smashed them. He paid for my first several sets of contact lenses, even if I later came at him with a kitchen knife after he ridiculed me for struggling to put them in mere hours before I was due to take the SAT (he disarmed me without much effort). These mundane acts of provision were, in his mind, part of his duty as a father, just as much as the beatings.
Sometimes in the blackest night—like him, I’ve always been an insomniac—I wonder: Did he have it right? Were the beatings duty too? The question sits like lead ballast in my gut. I hate it. I fight it. But part of me—the part he built with his fists—believes it was right. This is the violence that flows still in my blood. This is the final victory he perhaps died thinking that he had won. That somewhere, buried deep, is the terrible thought: boys need breaking to become men. I know better. But knowing and believing, especially in those wee hours before the sun rises, can be oceans apart.
As I finish writing this, I notice the time: it’s late, past 3 a.m. The hour when my father often wrote his emails. If my father’s life was a testament to the raw power of violence, let this represent an effort to confront violence with truth. There is an image that comes to me now: of young men in a boxing ring, touching gloves after a brutal round as a sign of respect. I like to imagine, in some alternative universe beyond this one, my father and me doing something like that. The bell has rung on our final round. The storm and stress of blows is over. No one has lost an ear. And in that calm, we acknowledge each other—we see, finally, the wounded love that lay beneath the blows. “No regrets except all of them,” he’d gruffly say. Maybe we’d nod before we walked back to our respective corners.
I think it would have made Seneca smile—the idea that time and reflection have cooled the rage that once burned so hot. That old Roman aristocrat put it best: “Nothing will serve quite so usefully as a deterrent as looking closely first at anger’s ugliness, then at its peril.” I have looked at anger’s ugliness up close, lived in its peril my whole life. I choose, finally, to lay down the arms I raised in response. The war my father bequeathed to me stops here. I step out of the ring. I leave the black lights behind. And in the dim small quiet that follows, I begin to write not a different ending but something else entirely.
Art credit: Laurent Craste, Écrasement – version crottée, 2009/2013. Porcelain, glaze, pigments; 14.3 × 38.5 × 22 cm. Photo by David Bishop Noriega. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.
I sometimes wonder what became of my father’s fists. His ashes sit in an urn in my mother’s garage—the wife he hated most, which is why I put him there. It was a small act of retribution, a final joke at the old man’s expense. For years I dreamed of besting him in a fight, of putting him in his place just once. That never happened. Instead, after his death, I placed the dust and bone fragments that remained of his massive body on a shelf in an unheated garage just a few miles from the West Virginia border.
Now, years later, I still hear his voice in my head, and in the hundreds of emails he left behind. “I have looked out for you,” he wrote to me not long before his heart gave out, “and if I gave you the worst you ever got that is called toughening up…….Not that I was any thing like my old man.” This was his final self-justification: all the pain he inflicted on his children was for our own good, an echo of the even greater pain his father had inflicted on him. Reading those words, the old ambivalence surged up—anger, pity, a perverse understanding. I hated him for saying it, yet I knew that he was trying to look out for us. Violence was the way he knew how.
My father came by his violence honestly. He was born into it, a cherished son of southwestern Pennsylvania steel country, where toughness was the coin of the realm. His own father had been a diesel mechanic on a submarine in World War II, to whom the war gave a stage for his extraordinary physical courage. Family lore and wartime diaries tell how he once dove into the ocean to rescue drowning POWs whose Japanese ship his own submarine had sunk; he scorned the many honors he received. Once, he allowed the sub’s medic to slice open a massive abscess on his thigh without so much as a drop of anesthetic. These feats made him a local legend, the larger-than-life tough guy who could drink anyone under the table then sleep through a double shift at the steel mill.
If war, as Dave Grossman writes in On Killing, is a realm of sanctioned atrocity where normal rules are suspended, then my grandfather never fully reentered civilian life after watching the 1,159 English and Australian prisoners of war who had been aboard the Japanese troopship Rakuyō Maru drown in front of him, thanks to torpedoes he had loaded into the tubes (54 of the POWs were saved, according to the unit citation). Upon coming home, he ruled his house like a defeated enemy, terrorizing his wife and three children. In On Anger, Seneca writes that anger is a kind of delusion that “throws itself upon the very weapons raised against it, hungry for vengeance that will bring down the avenger too.” That was my grandfather: a man so consumed by rage that he would destroy himself just to spite the world.
My father came of age under this regime of fury and pain. On some level, he adored his dad—worshipped the war hero—but also feared and hated him. How could he not? The old man had been so inexplicably masterful on the outside that researchers who contacted me on social media decades later quoted a surviving shipmate’s plaudits about his speed and strength. Within the family, however, he was an unchecked tyrant, who once killed his own son’s pets in front of him as punishment for having taken them in as strays. Growing up, my father could never be as great as the hero his father had seemed, nor could he fully escape being the victim his father had made him. He learned early that life was war: one either dominates or is destroyed.
Deprived of any actual battlefronts, my father found other arenas to prove himself. He lifted weights incessantly, transforming his already big frame into something formidable. He became a star high school football player—a top national recruit at West Virginia University in the 1950s, later semipro—and pursued boxing on the side. He owned a nightclub and was not shy about using his fists to keep order. He didn’t just carry guns; he brandished them. If my grandfather’s war had been about survival and duty, my father’s war was about performance—proving over and again that he was the manliest man in any room.
There was always a sense with him of some invisible opponent he was trying to beat. Perhaps that opponent was his father’s ghost, the one man he could never outpunch. He certainly had no intention of following him into combat: after his stint at WVU, where he’d gone through ROTC, he cited a knee injury from his football days to avoid service in the Marines just as U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia was ramping up in 1963 and ’64. He had, he would remind me, little interest in fighting for anyone besides himself. Even so, he grew into a man who saw the world through the sight lines of combat. And like many combatants, he carried the war home. The enemy became us: his own sons.
●
Our household had no civilizing influences—my mother was long gone. My father married five times, and none of his wives managed to soften him or save us. It was mostly just the old man and his three boys—four if you count his brother, eighteen years his junior, whom he took in after their father abandoned them both—trapped in a domestic war zone. If we stepped out of line, punishment was swift and often shockingly violent—smacking us across the temple with a brick or wrench. I have vivid memories of grappling with him, of my older brother landing a lucky punch, only to have the old man respond by gouging and gnashing like a cornered animal, or suddenly landing an overarm throw like a practiced judoka when I had managed to underhook and back him against the wall. His eyes would blaze, his lips peeling back, spittle flying. Ira furor brevis est, as Seneca quoted—anger is a brief madness—and my father’s rages were nothing if not mad: the wild eyes, the grimace, the guttural roar, the groaning and bellowing. But brief though the outbursts might have been, the fury smoldered until his bitter end.
“It’s you or me,” he would sneer at us whenever we mustered the courage to fight back, “and I damn sure hope you want it to be you, because I sure as hell want it to be me.” In his mind, any tussle with his sons was a battle for his very survival. And we were forced into the same logic: we believed that if we didn’t stand up to him, he might kill us—or kill some part of us that we needed to keep alive. So even as preteens we fought our father like men, swinging fists at the giant who loomed over us.
These fights started over nothing. Consider one of many: a TV remote. A loud sigh. A look. The old man was in his late fifties then; my younger brother was a 250-pound fifteen-year-old varsity wrestler. They were at my uncle’s house, where we lived at the time. My father, who never missed an episode of Inside Edition, wanted the channel changed. (He never got up to do it himself.) My brother didn’t move. The old man lunged. My brother caught him in a front facelock. Leaned back into the couch. Applied pressure. A simple wrestler’s guillotine. My father twisted. No panic—just calculation. He bit down hard. Tore through flesh. Spat my brother’s nipple onto the carpet. Blood spurted. We all stood watching. This was a few months before Mike Tyson took Evander Holyfield’s ear, to the shock of the nation, in a fight Tyson lost in the eleventh round. My brother and I weren’t the slightest bit shocked. This was our father. There were no rules in his war, no surrender. You fought to win or you didn’t fight at all.
There is an unwritten code in boxing, one I later saw echoed in the pages of Thomas Hauser’s The Black Lights: a fighter enters the ring knowing it’s “me or him,” but tells himself “I’m not trying to hurt anybody … This is my job.” My father wasn’t shy about hurting us, but he framed it as a job too—his duty. He was the drill instructor in our personal boot camp of manhood. And we learned the lesson, armoring our bodies as best we could.
I, for one, aspired to become a truly gigantic human being just to survive him. By my late teens, I was thick with muscle, benching what some might consider huge weights. Yet no matter how strong I became, I was never stronger than the idea of him. Even as my father aged, a heart patient in his seventies, he remained the undisputed alpha in my mind.
I often thought back to a time in 2000 when we came to blows. I was a few months past my eighteenth birthday; he was sixty but close to three hundred pounds and stout, still performing eighty- and ninety-pound standing dumbbell presses for sets of twenty. I stood nose to nose with him, trembling with rage I’d carried for decades, and he grinned and said, “Go on, buddy-o. You better kill me.” I went to grab him instead, ducking for a takedown that I hoped would de-escalate matters. Reading that move like a child’s picture book, he broke my nose with an uppercut that loosened both of my front teeth. Somewhat chagrined by the damage, he took me to the cosmetic dentist to get them reset—after which they looked much better than before. Only last year, however, was my septum repaired.
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He died in 2014 without ever having acknowledged the harm he’d inflicted upon us. A few years before, I had built an archive for his emails—hundreds of messages, many of them bizarre, conspiratorial screeds. Too old and tired in his final years to bust heads—though he was still packing heat with a concealed-carry permit—he poured his aggression into words. The same man who once bit through his son’s nipple was now ripping into me via text, “busting my balls” with insults and wild rhetorical swings. The emails were full of capital letters and ellipses, profanities and slurs. In one, he berated me for sending him an article about reparations, ranting that “the only repARations I support would be for our lady Mother Earth … killing 110% of all the humanzees on this green blue O R B……………every man, woman and child.”
The content was by turns absurd, offensive and disturbing. He toggled between conspiracy theories, misogynistic slurs, racist dog whistles and personal jabs at me (“pussman” was a favored nickname when he thought I wasn’t responding promptly). Freed from the need to literally knock me around, he found that he could still dominate me by sheer verbal onslaught. The message was the same: I am in control; you are a disappointment; the world is full of idiots and it’s all going to hell.
In the final year of his life, when he could barely walk to the fridge without getting winded, he could still compose an email that made me feel like a scared little boy. I recognized that these diatribes were, in essence, the dying echoes of his lifelong warfare. They were ridiculous, yes—but they were also revealing, a window into his unfiltered id. Here was a man who had always performed hypermasculine aggression in person, now doing performative aggression online. In one of his more bizarre notes, he addressed me as “scholar of scrotes” and launched into a pun-riddled rant—half lunatic joke, half loyalty test—about the “Holycost or ‘HOLY CAUSE,’” demanding to know if I “SUPPORT THE HOLY CAUSE or do u DENY it (de nile ain’t just a RIVER IN EGYPT).” He ended cryptically: “late up here … time….hmmm … I will not now put more in writing even in my old FOG state … PAP 73 O U T.”
It was as though he knew these emails were his last stand, his last weapon. Pap 73 out. His sign-off resembled that of a military signaler or a ham-radio enthusiast (he was neither). The battlefield had shifted to the digital ether, and he still refused to surrender.
Over time I became something of a curator of his hate, taking his phone calls and responding to his emails so my siblings and his ex-wives wouldn’t have to, while arranging the written output so they could enjoy a laugh at his expense. I turned them into dark comedy on a Tumblr blog that eventually became popular enough that the now-defunct magazine Matter included entries from it in an East Village show in 2016. That was my way of coping—publicly framing his rants as an art project composed of “crazy dad emails.” The posts gained a following; people were morbidly fascinated by this foulmouthed patriarch’s missives. Strangers on the internet laughed at lines that, when I first read them, had made me seethe or cringe. Removed from the immediacy of my father’s presence, the words became a grotesque performance that others could find amusing or bewildering. By posting them, I was implicitly saying: This is absurd. Can you believe this? Perhaps, I kept telling myself, I could get a book out of this.
Our modern world has found myriad ways to sanitize and mediate violence—drones that kill from afar, digital filters that hide gore—but someone, somewhere, still has to face the raw reality. In On Killing, Grossman notes how increasing the distance between killer and target (physically or emotionally) makes killing easier. A bomber pilot at twenty thousand feet can “pretend they are not killing human beings.” The social media universe relies on an army of human moderators—tens of thousands of them subcontracted in places like the Philippines or India—whose job is to screen and remove the heinous material that floods platforms: beheadings and child pornography, torture videos, hate crimes, bestiality, extreme hate speech—an unending parade of depravity that most users never see.
But the distance that protects one party only pushes the burden onto another. The bombardier still sees the target on a screen; the content moderator still watches the murder to verify it. Our society, it seems, keeps wanting to reap the benefits of violence (power, catharsis, profit) without acknowledging the personal cost. As Grossman observed, there’s long been a “cultural conspiracy of forgetfulness, distortion, and lies” around the true nature of violence. We collectively choose to look away, to euphemize (“collateral damage,” “tough love”), to let others dirty their hands so we can keep ours clean. But someone always pays.
My father’s emails, ugly as they were, forced me not to look away—if nothing else, he understood the big lie at the heart of civilization. They were like a cracked mirror he held up, insisting I see his pain and my complicity in it. By engaging with the emails—by reading and archiving and publishing them—I became both witness and warden to his legacy of violence, which he began eagerly expatiating on once he knew that my grad-school and writer friends were reading his work. (He was on board with doing whatever it took to become a writer whose content drew eyeballs and commissions, and happy to get some attention along the way: “U have to do what u have to do to get ur name out there while u can for what ever you can … Fuck the rest.”) It was exhausting, but also liberating. I had found a means of turning his aggression into something I could control. I could pin his words on the page like butterflies and dissect them, rather than letting them live in my inbox where they had once made me tremble. Perhaps that is why I write so candidly about him now. It’s another form of content moderation—contextualizing the violence, putting it in a narrative, seeking meaning in it.
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In the final tally, what did my father’s violence accomplish? From his perspective, I suspect he believed it made us strong. In one sense, it did. My brothers and I all developed a hardy shell to survive him, taking his lessons to heart: never show fear, hit first if needed, laugh at pain, trust no one other than yourself to save you. Those lessons have been a burden, but they have also at times been an asset. I cannot deny that the grit that helped me endure certain challenges has roots in the “toughness” my father cultivated. But the costs are legion. Shattered self-esteem. An instinctual reactivity that has made intimacy difficult. A baseline of anger that I’ve had to consciously temper. These are wounds that don’t show on the surface, but they run deep. Years after my father died, I’d still get a spike of adrenaline if I heard heavy heels on a hardwood floor behind me—the sound of him approaching in his elephant-skin boots. A certain timbre of yell can freeze my spine. It took me a long time to see it for what it was. Abuse happened to other people, weak people. Not hard men like him or me.
My father’s violence cost him plenty too. It left him a lonely old man whose marriages all failed and whose children breathed a collective sigh of relief when he died. In his prime, he may have been respected or feared by peers, but at the end he was largely alone, muttering into the void of email. In one of his rants, he cynically remarked that humanity itself should be wiped out as a “virus” on the earth. The irony is that his own anger had already accomplished this extinction on a personal scale—his rage had eradicated all human connection around him. No further plague was necessary. He lashed out at the world because he was terrified the world would move on without him. And eventually, it did. He died; the earth kept spinning.
“No pestilence,” writes Seneca, “has been more costly for the human race.” My family is a testament to that. Yet I also hold to Seneca’s belief in the possibility of reason and gentleness. I have tried and mostly failed to break the cycle, aspiring to become a father figure to myself in the ways my father couldn’t. The man was neither fully monster nor misunderstood saint; he was a product of inherited fury who lacked the tools to behave otherwise.
Now I am a middle-aged man, the same age my father was when I first saw him as old. I share my feelings more openly; I have loving relationships with my wife and daughter; I practice self-reflection in a way that would have made him scoff. And yet—I carry the imprint of his hypermasculine worldview like a birthmark. Sometimes I catch myself reacting to frustration with a flash of temper that is pure him. My voice will rise, a curse will slip out, my face will harden—and I have to take a breath and remember to be someone else, someone better.
When I hold my father’s wooden urn in my hands—there’s a big, garish image of a solitary wolf on it—I feel the heft of it and think: This is what all that fury was for? In the end, every man is reduced to ash or dust, kept in some kind of receptacle, “a coffin or big urn for your guts,” as my father put it in an email. “The bruises from punches are like icebergs. You see only a small part,” a former fighter told Thomas Hauser. The real damage is mostly hidden.
And yet—here is the ambivalence that remains—I also carry love for him, love even for his violence. How do I admit that after all that I’ve recounted? Perhaps it’s just love of the idea of a father, any father. In his own warped way, he was there for us. He was the big orange sun around which our lives revolved. He did put food on the table. He did get my front teeth fixed after he smashed them. He paid for my first several sets of contact lenses, even if I later came at him with a kitchen knife after he ridiculed me for struggling to put them in mere hours before I was due to take the SAT (he disarmed me without much effort). These mundane acts of provision were, in his mind, part of his duty as a father, just as much as the beatings.
Sometimes in the blackest night—like him, I’ve always been an insomniac—I wonder: Did he have it right? Were the beatings duty too? The question sits like lead ballast in my gut. I hate it. I fight it. But part of me—the part he built with his fists—believes it was right. This is the violence that flows still in my blood. This is the final victory he perhaps died thinking that he had won. That somewhere, buried deep, is the terrible thought: boys need breaking to become men. I know better. But knowing and believing, especially in those wee hours before the sun rises, can be oceans apart.
As I finish writing this, I notice the time: it’s late, past 3 a.m. The hour when my father often wrote his emails. If my father’s life was a testament to the raw power of violence, let this represent an effort to confront violence with truth. There is an image that comes to me now: of young men in a boxing ring, touching gloves after a brutal round as a sign of respect. I like to imagine, in some alternative universe beyond this one, my father and me doing something like that. The bell has rung on our final round. The storm and stress of blows is over. No one has lost an ear. And in that calm, we acknowledge each other—we see, finally, the wounded love that lay beneath the blows. “No regrets except all of them,” he’d gruffly say. Maybe we’d nod before we walked back to our respective corners.
I think it would have made Seneca smile—the idea that time and reflection have cooled the rage that once burned so hot. That old Roman aristocrat put it best: “Nothing will serve quite so usefully as a deterrent as looking closely first at anger’s ugliness, then at its peril.” I have looked at anger’s ugliness up close, lived in its peril my whole life. I choose, finally, to lay down the arms I raised in response. The war my father bequeathed to me stops here. I step out of the ring. I leave the black lights behind. And in the dim small quiet that follows, I begin to write not a different ending but something else entirely.
Art credit: Laurent Craste, Écrasement – version crottée, 2009/2013. Porcelain, glaze, pigments; 14.3 × 38.5 × 22 cm. Photo by David Bishop Noriega. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.