Gotham Diary:
Alter Ego
2 February 2015
It is hard to think today. I had a couple of shocks late last week, and the worst of them was the very unexpected news of an old friend’s death. Although I don’t know quite why, this loss seemed to pack a warning to me, and I don’t know where to begin deciphering it.
That my friend had cancer I knew, but it wasn’t the cancer that killed him. On his birthday — we were almost the same age, he two weeks younger — he went into the hospital with pneumonia. Things just got worse and worse, and he died of sepsis after renal failure. Was it the chemotherapy? I watched chemotherapy kill my mother, but that was nearly forty years ago. Questions are idle. My friend never told me the nature of his cancer; he was too much the Southern gentleman to expose himself to pity. On the few occasions when we exchanged messages, he minimized the importance of his treatments, highlighting instead their nuisance value. I knew better than to press.
Our friendship had long had an emeritus quality. We had been colleagues for six years in our twenties, at the radio station. We both worked very hard to conceal the fact that we were in competition with one another, a task made easier by the fact that our jobs were in parallel. I was the music director — a rather jumped-up title of my own devising — and he was the program director, a vital position at any broadcasting station. He oversaw the announcing staff, produced the spots (commercials), arranged interviews, and in general ran the operation. I sat in a little room with my immense card catalogue, shuffling the month’s musical programming and then typing it up. My friend interacted with everyone; the only person I had to deal with was not even at the station: he was the offset printer who had to cope with my perpetual tardiness.
So our competition was not really professional. It was more professorial. We were both smart, presentable young men — actually, we would have been more presentable had we not been so damned full of how smart we were — who, instead of going to law school or doing something else to make money, were throwing our lives away (our nice families’ view) doing something “meaningful.” We were above, or below, the struggle for filthy lucre. We competed at playing this role, the object being to look cool and brilliant and not too shabby. I was better at brilliant, but somewhat unreliable; my friend was never not very cool. He had a beautiful voice that was most comfortable at the microphone, to which you might almost say that he made love. In person, he was inclined to mumble, so devoted was he to understatement, but on the air he was perfectly clear, if not loud.
Even though we were not at all alike, or thought that we weren’t at all alike, he served as my alter ego for almost all of the time that I spent in Houston. Another way to put it is that we were bound together during the passage from boyhood to manhood. And then I did go to law school, and, after leaving Texas for good, saw my friend no more than a dozen times during the rest of his life.
My friend was born and raised in Galveston, got a degree from Rice University, and until later life hardly ever traveled, but you would never have known that he was a Texan. A Southerner, perhaps — but one who had, long before I ever met him, scrubbed his voice of any trace of Dixie. This isn’t to say that he sounded like a Yankee, or a Midwesterner, or any other kind of American. That was an important part of his cool, as it is of mine.
***
Texas. One of the things I like most about Manhattan is that manhood doesn’t come up much. You don’t see young men worrying about whether they measure up to Clint Eastwood. No; they’re far too worried about their professional lives, real and projected. They’re not wondering what it takes; they’re just trying to prove that they have it. If you can make it here, you probably ought to stick around.
Over the weekend, I came upon an interview with Sebastian Junger, author of A Perfect Storm and now the director of three documentaries about war. In a nutshell, Junger believes that war is a good thing because it puts an end to doubts about masculinity. We ought to be grateful that war exists, because otherwise we would be menaced by hordes of insecure men looking for penny-ante ways of proving themselves. Just look at chimps &c.
To agree with this set of arguments — because they do seem to be correct, on the rough evidence — is not, however, to concede that war is any kind of ideal solution, or that we might not come up with something better.
And war — really, how long has it been since there was one? Nuclear weapons put an end to war as it was known from the dawn of history until the stalemate of Korea. “War as it was known” was an affair in which armies of roughly equal character confronted one another en masse, and at some distance from densely-populated areas. The only such war that I can think of since 1950 is the one that raged between Iraq and Iran in the Eighties. All the other recent conflicts have been what used to be called guerilla wars, and now are called insurgencies. In an insurgency, there is a profound imbalance between the opposing forces. One is massive and organized, the other local and improvised. Almost all recent conflicts have involved foreign occupation — usually, despite its refusal to see things as such, by the United States.
I doubt that the people of Syria have anything positive to say about war. Junger’s idea of war is effectively a sophomore-year-abroad program for men too poor or too lacking in intellectual firepower to attend a university. These “wars” are very far away, so much so that its veterans struggle with the cognitive dissonance between here and there. It was not very nice, or thoughtful, or productive, or anything else positive, of Chris Kyle to dismiss the people of Iraq as “savages,” but I can understand that it was one way of solving the conundrum that Fallujah and San Diego are on the same planet. If these wars were bought within the United States itself (as I sometimes dread will soon be the case), there would be very little talk of chimpanzees.