Some Place Better Than Here

Chapter 22: Father and Son

22
Father and Son

===========DANNY===========

I stared down at my hands—my hands—locked around the steering wheel as if cemented to it. The bulbous mounds of my knuckles were popping out and growing red with the pressure, and the cradles of my thumbs were wrinkled and white with dry skin. I hated my hands. And in my hatred for my hands, I learned about the love and fear invited by a man's hands. A Man's hands. The ability those hands hold to build and destroy, and the horror in which a woman will never really know for what means a man might use those hands.

Man, stupid man, so readily expressing his rage through his hands. I've never known myself to be so moved to use my hands. Was it nothing more than a coward's instinct to raise them only against a woman? The idea that I might have been encouraged to handle Mary physically because I had unwittingly learned from her father that force was the best way to tame her behavior—absolutely sickened me.

Is my gender, renewed through each new generation, condemned to forever struggle with aggression?

Yes. Man is angry. Always will be. But, No. Man can triumph. We have the ability to choose intelligence over instinct.

But—what to do when rage arises?

It's not so easy to subdue rage, controlling our emotions is a practice much easier said than done. Anger is a wild animal: blind and unintelligent and uncompromising. Anger will always exist; the enemies of our virtuous repose will always exist too. The agents of wrath will never die. They'll exist in bad men, and they'll exist in bad circumstance, caused by the natural or supernatural. So what to do with rage? It has to be placed somewhere. It's a painful burden that can split you from the inside out if you choose to hold on. A virulent parasite to host. But I suppose regardless of the pain, it is our evolutionary responsibility to withdraw those ancient, barbaric vestiges internally, and better to let it wreak havoc on our spirit than place that rage onto somebody else. I guess the internal damage caused by receding rage is punishment for having rage to begin with. A man should be a more dominant master of his emotions.

Men will always wrestle with their rage. A man who disagrees is a liar. But a man chooses his own hand's purpose. He is not condemned.

I remember that my Dad's hands were gentle. He never hit or grabbed Mom. Dad's hands changed my diapers. Dad's hands could find their way over the infinite combinations of notes on a piano or guitar and make beautiful music with those hands. For as long as I wrestle with rage, I'll internalize it. Save it for later. Save it for the guitar.

But, at seventeen, I didn't know any better. I was terrified with my behavior, and I didn't do a thing with that terror other than place it in a black room at the far, far back of my mind.

It started with a single hard drop of rain that shattered against my windshield. The highway wind rolled the residue up and off. And then another hard drop fell. And then another, and another. Then with a loud crack, a showering skirt of rain rolled over the hood and pelted against the glass. The storm began.

By the time I had pulled up in my driveway, after leaving Wright Bros and spending the rest of the afternoon finding solitude on country roads that led me nowhere but back home, the world was drowned. The wet streets reflected the prematurely lit streetlights, and streams ran perpendicularly along the curbs, burbling at the sewage drains.

Mom's Jetta and a random U-Haul truck took up the driveway, forcing me to park on the street.

Okay, was all you had to say? Glad to know, Mary. Glad to know that it was meaningless to you, too.