Letter to Arby's 2

Sometimes the answer to a question is like the far rim of a narrow canyon. It’s close enough to see, but it still takes two days to GET there.

The answer to all this – MY answer – is one such.

But ... enough of you have asked me to explain that it seems worth it to make the attempt. This will take a while. Follow along if you like.

By the time I get to the end of this, I expect some few of you will understand where I’m coming from. And maybe some of you will hate me absolutely, because I will have insulted you to the core.

...

Tommy (not his real name) was my best friend from the third grade on. We climbed trees together, sneaked out of our houses and rode bikes down to the park at midnight, went camping, wrote adventure stories in which the two of us were the heroes, went to the library and spent all day there reading and exploring. Once we blew ourselves up with a chemistry experiment and Tommy had to go to the emergency room, and then wear patches on his eyes for two weeks. I was Best Man at his weddings – two of them.

Vietnam came along, and the Beatles, and Nixon, and a whole counter-culture movement. And somewhere along the way, Tommy ended up on one side of a line, and I ended up on the other. Tommy went shallow and corporate, and I — well, I was never a hippie, but I could see the point. I went out and tried to become somebody I myself could respect and admire.

One day we were kicking around together, and Tommy wanted to go to a gallery downtown, where there was an exhibition of art from the collection of Armand Hammer, the biggest of bigwigs at the huge corporation where Tommy worked.

He bought an art print – a dull painting of lily pads on a pond – and had it expensively framed. It was so far outside the bounds of anything I knew he liked or was interested in, I was completely mystified. “Why did you buy this?” “I’m going to put it in my cubicle at work. The regional supervisor is touring through our offices next week, and he knows Armand Hammer personally.”

Huh?

I’d seen the signs in him for years. He’d bought an ultra-cool car. It sucked on gas mileage and fell apart continuously like a cheap toy, but people turned to look when he drove past, and boy, he just glowed every time that happened. He bought a house in “Benchmark” – he couldn’t afford it, but he had the “right” address, and he loved to tell people where he lived. He started smoking a pipe (because he’d read that Hugh Hefner smoked a pipe, and he thought it made him look sophisticated and worldly) and developed all sorts of little affectations centered around that pipe.

Over the years, Tommy, my best friend, slowly vanished under the surface of this ... non-person.

We live our lives on two stages. It’s really one stage, but it has two sides to it. It’s like you stand facing one way and there’s this one audience, but if you turn 180 degrees and face completely opposite, there’s this other audience.

On one side of the stage, the audience is everybody you know, everybody you come in contact with, every OTHER person.

And on the other side of the stage, sitting out there all alone, is You. One of the audiences for your daily actions is you yourself.

For that audience of others, you do, oh, so many things. You buy the “cool” car. You wear your gang’s colors. You put on makeup. You use the same glistening grease in your hair that all your friends use. You shine your shoes and wear an uncomfortable suit, to be “respectable.” You take the “right” drugs. You go to the “good” college. You walk and talk and vote like everybody else, to keep them happy with you.

Or you do all the exact opposite things, so you can shock and horrify them and go home chuckling every night, savoring the cow-like expressions of alarm on their faces, or the shrill tones of their voices as they shriek “Oh my GOD!! Would you just LOOK at that?!?”

For the audience of You, you learn to shoe horses ... just because it’s always fascinated you. You go hiking in the woods by yourself ... because you love learning something new about nature. You buy the silly, dull nerdy car that gets great gas mileage and lasts practically forever. You eat your peas with a big spoon, because it seems more efficient ... to you. You sit down with a bunch of friends drinking martinis, and you order a Tom Collins ... because you think martinis taste like hair tonic. You’ve got your settled, establishment friends, and you’ve got your rebel friends, and you decide to join neither group because – to you – both seem like costumes put on for no better reason than to impress other people.

Listen, now, because this is important: IT IS A MISTAKE TO LIVE TOO MUCH OF YOUR LIFE ON THE STAGE FOR OTHERS.

For every bit of yourself you give to that audience of others, you will have less to give to You.

Does that make sense? There’s only so much “you” to go around. If you caper and prance onstage every available minute for other people, you kinda cheat yourself of finding and developing the unique You that you are. And it seems to me that if you do all the things you do only to impress others, or just to fit in with them, there’s no need for the You to even exist. And life obliges you by letting your You atrophy away.

One other aspect of this, equally important:

There are two ways to feel good about yourself. One is to do a thing that stimulates you directly with a feeling of accomplishment. You learn to fly a plane. You climb a mountain. You lift weights and become strong. You increase your eye-hand coordination by learning to juggle. The action itself grows you, touches something inside you, and you come away liking yourself more, respecting yourself more, knowing yourself to be more solid and capable.

The other is to do something that impresses other people. Then they say "Wow, I’m really impressed!" and you get a second-hand good feeling from their awe and admiration.

Get it? First way, playing on the Stage of You: you feel good as a DIRECT result of your own actions.

Second way, on the Stage of Others: you get the good feeling only as the INDIRECT result of another person’s reaction to your action.

IF ... If they like what you do. If they notice. If they take the trouble to tell you. If if if. Your good feeling is at the mercy of those others, who might be too tired, too busy, too drunk, too distracted, too unimpressed, or just too selfish to give you an admiring stroke.

And then, to get more strokes, you have to impress them again. Your life becomes an infinite treadmill, with you slaving away ever harder for a taste of their feedback.

We all live on this treadmill to some extent. A paycheck is one of the kinds of positive feedback, and we all need one. And we’re social beings, so we have to be on that Stage of Others some large part of our lives.

But, again, it’s a mistake to give over too much of your SELF into the hands of others.

Okay.

It’s about 1972, and I’m hitchhiking solo around the southern and western U.S. for a month. I have a couple of hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, a bright yellow backpack, and a desire to SEE things.

And I do. Before the month is up, I’ll travel 5,300 miles, and I’ll see bits of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona and New Mexico. I will get countless rides of lengths varying from 2 miles to 300, 6 propositions from gay men, 3 people who offer me drugs, an African-American trucker named Tracey who tells me – in loving detail – everything I need to know about “gettin’ black pussy,” a Mormon couple in Utah who mistake me for a clean-cut Mormon boy hitching home for the summer from Brigham Young university (and who give me a ride anyway when I tell them I’m not), a drunk driver who tells me he is AWOL from the Army (and who picks up FIVE other hitchhikers, after which he almost kills the lot of us with his driving, and after which I ask to be let out at the NEXT offramp), and a sunburned nose. I have slept in 18-wheelers, cars, pickup beds, campgrounds, motels, people’s houses, back yards and on roadsides. And I meet one fat little spider named "Norman" who I realize – years later – might very well have killed me if his housemate "Eddie" had been home at the moment he lured naïve little me into his home web.

But for the moment of this story, I’m stuck in a city. Cities suck for distance hitchhiking, because almost every driver who passes you is going somewhere close. My solution is to find the nearest Greyhound station and buy a ticket to a small town near the interstate. A significant number of drivers who pass you on such out-of-the-way sections of the interstate will be traveling distance. You stick out your thumb, you smile and look small and safe and non-deadly, and within an hour, two at the most, you’re cruisin’ off into unknown new places – with ever-new traveling companions.

So here I am in the Greyhound station, sitting reading a book from my pack, when a guy walks up to me, holds out his bare arm, and says “How much will you give me if I put out this cigarette on my arm?”

The arm in question, thrust forward for my inspection, has those long, strong muscles tall people sometimes have, is covered with clear, healthy brown skin, but is marked with about eight ugly, puckered circular scars. One of them is new enough it’s still wet-looking, an obviously recent burn. I can see more of them on his other arm. And every one of them is something he did to himself ... for a couple of bucks from the last dozen or so people who were empty enough that they were willing to PAY him to hurt himself while they watched.

I am f*cking horrified. Shocked sick. This is beyond ugly. It is filthy, wanton, nihilistic self-destruction. Compared to this, back alley whores are Sunday-school wholesome. I mumble something and look desperately back down at my book, and the guy finally just leaves.

Okay.

Now here’s this young man in Arby’s with this big foreign object impaled in his face.

I already know it’s not for him. It is almost wholly and exclusively for the Stage of Others. He’s going for shock, or maybe admiration.

And to add a level of pathetic emptiness, he’s doing it, in some large part, for complete strangers.

Put me in a room with Pat Robertson or Bill O’Reilly, and a definite line will snap into existence between us. These people are Destroyers, and I’m a Builder. They’re haters, and I’m just not. They are, in my opinion, nasty, aggressive christer conservatives who want everyone else under their thumb, and who are willing to tell any lie to get there. Give them their own country and they’d have public executions in less than six months ... and it would be for stuff like masturbation, or listening to rap music.

Everybody who has responded to this matter, I’m pretty sure that if we were all together in the room with O’Reilly or Robertson, we would ALL be on the same side of that line. However ...

Here we are in this room, absent those two flaming neo-con idiots. The line is there, but somehow I’m on one side of it, and a number of you are decidedly on the other side.

Without any internal changes at all, suddenly I’m bad, I’m evil, I’m stupid, I’m wrong, I’m mean, I’m a destroyer.

I am suddenly not one of US. I’m one of THEM.

Given that, I’d like to make a few points.

One: nothing in what I’ve said was about the infective dirtyness of piercings. Y’all brought that up. Two or three made the point that piercings are easily infected, and so piercees are careful to keep them clean.

Okay ... this actually touches on both points of my REAL disturbance with this young man. Why would you do that to yourself? I already believe it’s problematic to give your life over to getting a rise out of other people, but why would you actually injure yourself, place your health at risk, in return for mere attention from ... strangers? Yuck. The person who would do that just seems so empty to me.

Two: I don’t think I mentioned tattoos.

Three: Prejudice and religion.

I spoke of prejudice in the sense of handicaps, skin color, birth culture, but I purposely stayed away from the issue of religion ... because religion is NOT in the same category as the others. I’ll go into it some other time if someone wants me too, but it’s a whole other issue than handicaps and skin color, and it may take a fairly long time to explain why.

Four: Judging others.

You get to judge me. Several of you have done so, and I’m fine with that. But I get to judge people too.

Remember the guy who put cigarettes out on his arm? Though I reacted – unconsciously judged him – instantly after seeing his arms, my revulsion was NOT because he had ugly scars, or was dirty, or some other race. I reacted because the scars were the visible showpiece of an ACTION.

I reacted to him on the basis of the visible evidence of WHAT HE HAD DONE to himself, and the pathetic, sick reason he gave for it.

Imagine a guy who cut off his own nose, or both his legs, deliberately. I think those of you who see me as a disagreeable tight-ass in regards to Face Piercing Boy might react as strongly and in the same way I would, at one or both of those people.

Sure they have the “right” to do it. But those of us looking on have an equal right to form our own opinions about them and to decide, based on their ACTIONS, whether we’ll include them in our circle of trustworthy others.

Speaking strictly for myself, both of those people would disgust the hell out of me. I would have nothing to do with either of them, and I couldn’t feel the least bit bad about it.

The poor guy who cut off his own legs, he’d be handicapped, and might need my understanding and acceptance and even help at some point on that basis. But ... I’d still reserve the right to judge him for what he had done. At the very least, I’d always believe – and I think most of you would agree – that he was not in the same ethical category as a guy who lost his legs saving a kid from a train, or even someone who’d lost both legs to diabetes. If I could help it, I’d have nothing to do with the self-mutilator, ever. I’d probably even have second thoughts about letting him park in handicapped spots.

Judging people for the THINGS THEY DO is not pre-judging based on appearance. It is JUDGING, and it is not only perfectly fine, it is absolutely necessary.

I am waaaay opposed to the death penalty, for instance, for a number of philosophical reasons that it would take me an equally long essay to explain. But I agree wholeheartedly that something drastic has to be done about people who kill other people. First, they have to be judged ... not for their skin color, or national origin, or rich, influential families. But for what they have actually done.

The hardware in this young man’s face was SOMETHING HE HAD DONE. Something he had done to impress or shock others. Something he had done to his own face, something ugly and easily infected, for reasons no better than those of the guy who burned himself for money.

Finally, here, feeling decidedly uncomfortable about finding myself on the other side of that line, over in the company with Rush and Pat and Bill, I’ll mount a mild defense about who and what I am.

Brace yourself, I’m about to trot out my Liberal Club qualifications. Even I know this is as comically pathetic in its way as the guy who, accused of being a racist, protests “Why, some of my BEST FRIENDS are Negroes!”

But ... at least the following stuff is actually true, and hopefully that will count for something.

I loved my dog so much I still sometimes cry about his dying, four months later.

I get pissed off every time I read one of the stupid stories in the news about the recent spate of “bear attacks” – because I know very well they’re NOT attacks, they’re just bears trying to live in a world that’s squeezing the life out of them.

I think Pat Robertson is a truly evil man who, in a more enlightened world, would be put instantly away in a mental institution for the things he says and does. And if there was real justice, he’d be stuck in a padded room with Ann Coulter, and a boxful of dominatrix outfits, in both sizes.

I have baby skunks in my back yard that I think are cute as hell, and we coexist peacefully, even though they dig up my plants and put big holes in my lawn. (You can see pics of them at my www.HankFox.com site.)

I think George Bush is a catastrophe for western civilization, and the world is a MUCH more dangerous place since he got real power into his stupid little hands.

I have donated more than a gallon of my own blood, and I once had a homeless guy living in my house for more than a month while he got back on his feet.

I have held more than 50 different jobs, in a dozen different professions. I have hopped a ride on a freight train. Sat naked in natural hot springs – in public, and hundreds of times. Vagabonded around the country on my own, for decades. Camped in the wilderness. Eat my peas with a spoon. Wear loose, comfortable clothing, and god help the corporate weasel who drops by my cubicle at work to decide if I’m a good Company Man.

I’m not angling for any humanitarian awards or rebel badges, here. I’m only making the point that – except for this momentary matter at hand – compared to people like Jerry Falwell and Dick Cheney, I’m probably on the same side of the imaginary line as a lot of you ... and might even be further from that line, in some ways, than many of you.

But ...

For my own reasons, I don’t agree about big ugly face piercings.

I probably never will.

Deal with it.