The following essay was reprinted in The Raven's Muse, a cute little magazine which is now defunct.
Sometimes, because he didn’t know how else to connect with me, my father took me walking.
I was around six the night we traipsed through a children’s fair, me staring longingly at all that spinning machinery, him no doubt bored out of his mind, and found ourselves in front of an arcade. I stood, framed by dozens of blinking monitors, witnessing this place I’d only ever glimpsed on screens similar to its own, this digital wonderland, this nearly holy place, where alien worlds could be accessed at the push of a button, and the boy with the quickest finger was king. My blood frothed with excitement as I stepped in. By the light of the monitors I saw boys, of all ages, engaged in private battles. This place radiated masculine energy, but not the kind that I was used to. It was no locker room, no football field, no dojo—places where I’d failed to prove myself before. As the crying boy in front of me dragged himself away, my feet moved and I found myself replacing him in front of Soul Calibur II. My fingers probed buttons arrayed in a pattern that was new to me yet felt no less familiar because of it, and I begged my father for a coin, half expecting a refusal on the grounds that video games did not give you bigger muscles, but this was our bonding night, so he assented. Electronic music filled my ears and drew a crowd of boys like bats to my location. They watched as I selected my fighter, a warrior encased in crystal who looked nothing like me, and we stood, silently, waiting for the game to start.
Then a boy to my left came close, got on his tiptoes and whispered into my ear. I bet you won’t even get past the first fight, he said. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t even started playing and this kid was already putting me down? My fingers clenched and I could feel it, rising to the surface. Anger, that familiar monster which possessed all the men in my family, rearing its boil-infested head. Images of my father, treasured like a shameful stash of stolen stamps, floated into my mind. I saw him clench the steering wheel with fingers white as pixie dust, and mutter under his breath swear words he thought I couldn’t hear or at least understand. Him, red as a lobster in a checkout queue somewhere that progressed slower than osteoporosis, waiting for his turn to have an order messed up by an incompetent employee. Him, minutes later, yelling in some poor asshole’s face when they inevitably messed it up.
To understand my father back then, it’s easiest to think of The Incredible Hulk. Though hidden, his rage was always there, a cobra poised to strike. You never knew what’d set him off, and once the wick had been lit, all you could do was wait it out. But I didn’t see my father’s rage as something to fear. I longed to be like him: big, strong, unafraid to voice dissent.
I looked to my small offender and imagined punching him to the ground, smashing his face against the unforgiving concrete and, in my victory, stepping on his neck. All this while my father watched, raptly, proudly, from the shadows. The boy was smaller than me, so it wouldn’t be much of a fight, but a victory was a victory. My face broke into a smile. The stage loaded and two polygonal figures manifested on screen. I won the first fight, easily. And the next one. And several more. I became delirious with success. The crowd around me had grown, packed close together like a holy procession, and the boys were no longer silent now but chanting, not my name as I’d have liked, but the name of my character. Siegfried, Siegfried, Siegfried. When I reached the penultimate stage, the devil-boy popped forward again. No one’s ever beaten HIM before! What makes you so sure you will? That was it. I couldn’t stand being belittled anymore. I would not have some four-eyes shake my confidence when it might cost me everything. I could not Shut your stupid face, schmuck, I bellowed, spittle flying from my mouth to coat the boy’s thick lenses, can’t you see I’m better than all of you?
He did. He shut up. And I understood why my father screamed so much. It was what you did if you wanted to be heard. Taxi drivers, cashiers, doctors, teachers, everyone had muck in their ears and all you could do was shout it off them. It didn’t dawn on me for many years where my father’s rage really came from. We didn’t speak on the way to the car, which confused me. I thought I’d done what he’d wanted of me. So why wasn’t I being showered in laurels? Why wasn’t I being seen?
But maybe my father saw me, all right. And for the first time in his life, maybe my father saw himself too. This was a man who’d gone from one trap to another. The trap of a tyrannic father. The trap of soul-suckingly steady work, which he eventually quit to start his own business, only for the 2008 recession to smash it back to pieces. The trap of being replaced as breadwinner of the family. The trap, why not, of children. My father didn’t rage because he felt powerful. He raged because he felt weak.
Which brings us back to me. From the day I was born, people had been confusing my gender, thinking because of my pretty eyes and small nose and soft skin that I was a little girl. My father showed indignance whenever it happened; but what if it secretly gave him hope? Hope that I would not be so easily perturbed. Hope that I would be the one to break the cycle. Hope that I would not become like him. On that night, did he see a side of me he hoped did not exist? Is that why he began to pull away from me? So that I did not turn into just another man? Another bitter, angry, howling man? If that’s it, his plan backfired, for in the next two decades I would make of him my model, or rather my own secret project, and try to decypher him, to pull him apart in order to discover what it was that he possessed and I didn’t, the secret that could pull a man out of even me.