Is it normal to wonder how you didn’t wind up more of a mess?

As a man, I sometimes find myself asking this question. As an American, I’ve met my fair share of masculinist jerks. Like the father berating his “loser” son—the kid had just lost a wrestling match—in a public restroom. Like the dudes who heckled me for walking my dog while wearing pink shorts. These are the men that make men look bad, though sometimes I worry that they’re just most men, full stop.

How then did I come to be spared (I hope) from masculinity’s more toxic trends? My feminist parents deserve some credit. Ditto my propensity, born of book-worming, for imagining myself as other people. My physique, lanky as a praying mantis, kept me out of the nastier sports.

To these I’ll add emo music, the soundtrack to my teen years, when I tried on new selves like so many pairs of socks.

What, you may ask, is emo? “Emo” is short for emotional, though my friends captured the genre in four words: “whiney white boy music.” Think Death Cab for Cutie. Google or Wiki will mash up adjectives in search of a definition: confessionalist, sensitive, hardcore, punk. Subgenres and regional schools proliferate, but to my amateur ears, emo means one thing: lovelorn dislocation from girls, popularity, and joy. Lyrics swoon, guitars moan, and band names broadcast—in the thickest of ironies—absence or loss.

Take these telling examples, provided here with a gloss: The Promise Ring (no doubt broken), American Football (our kind didn’t play), The Anniversary (preceding a break-up), and The Get Up Kids (no thanks, we’ll sit this one out). These were my mixtape heroes and masculine lodestars in the 1990s skinny jean scene of Cleveland, Ohio.

What did they teach me about masculinity? About life? That my hopes would be dashed, I’m guaranteed nothing, and girls will probably find someone else. This might sound like a common enough lesson, but it matters more when you grow up—as I did—white, hetero, suburban, and male. American culture raises our kind to Everest-like heights of entitlement. About sex, success, or art. Emo music bred some of that out of me.

As a virgin with a Walkman, I didn’t loathe girls I wasn’t dating; I moped. At concerts with my fellow mop tops. Finding melody to answer the “misery” of my day.

Of course, I wasn’t miserable, not really, but I’d found a community to help when I convinced myself that I was. Emo music offered me the first taste of a collective subculture, a “we” built not of chest-thumping aggression but of angst-laden melodrama. We swapped physical strength for hyperbolic introspection. We sang together in the little basement of our misspent desires. When the Get Up Kids crooned that “I’ll cry until I can’t see the whites of your eyes,” I knew, then and there, that boys could cry, and it could be cool.

Dorm poster cool. Chuck Taylors cool. Studded belt cool. I remade myself in the emo star’s moody likeness. Was a trip to Hot Topic involved? I’m afraid it was. Did I style my haircut—swoop of bangs to curtain one eye—after Bright Eyes’ frontman Conor Oberst? There are 35mm prints to prove that I did. He and emo’s other singer-songwriters seemed to hop, fully formed, from tour vans. They wrote lyrics that circled back—like black hair dye in a hotel sink—to their own vulnerability.

Photograph of the author as a young man leaning into emo’s “angst-laden melodrama.” (Image courtesy of Kerry Farrell)

In retrospect, vulnerability was emo’s greatest gift—at least for this male devotee. Vulnerability is anathema to traditional masculinity. Vulnerability, exposed or expressed, will get you mocked, maligned, or beat up. But emo’s lead singers wrapped vulnerability in Western shirts and suede jackets. Vulnerability shined from the band logoed-buttons we wore like merit badges down the straps of our shoulder bags—men could wear shoulder bags!

There was, I now see, a backward logic to this little salvation. I drew strength from emo’s overt vulnerability. I eschewed male violence while hugging the mosh pit’s softer circumference. (I never quite jumped in.) I met girls while listening to songs about not meeting girls. I still remember one who, mid-song at a Built to Spill concert, looked me in the eyes and tousled my hair. Was she high? Was she flirting? I spent the whole set trying to find her again in the crowd. (I failed.)

Was emo a panacea to toxic masculinity? Surely not. Was it feminist? I wish. The critic Jessica Hopper writes movingly of the women in emo songs; they’re just “vessels redeemed in the light of boy love.” Emo’s vulnerability, she notes, admits no “empathy, no peerage or parallelism” for girls. I don’t dispute it, but in the slow and ongoing project of my male self-improvement, emo offered a way out. From social isolation and depression. From a physical fight.

Thanks to emo, I took up cross country, inspired in part by Four Minute Mile (1997), an early Get Up Kids album that featured, on its cover, a track star in knee-highs having a smoke. I discovered another band called Track Star. These songs kept me running. And running kept me confident. That I could just flip the bird to my bullies. That I could flee.

In time, emo offered a bridge to richer, more nuanced art. In college I discovered poetry, my life’s work. Is it any wonder that an emo kid fell for poetry? As McSweeney’s notes, Emily Dickinson can sound awfully emo—“I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too?” Rainer Maria, a female-led emo trio that met in a poetry workshop, took their name from Rainer Maria Rilke. My own collegiate poetry workshops taught me how much I needed to mature. And stat.

I’ll offer one example of this, and one alone, which I’ve quoted to students whose bleeding hearts leave stains on my floor. The year was 2001. I’d submitted my first poem—a love elegy, no doubt—to my professor David Baker. “What is this, Derek? Over dramatized teenage angst?” David asked. “It reads like Shelley on a surfboard.” I’ve known David, a marvelous poet, long enough to thank him for this intervention. Long enough to realize that “Shelley on a surfboard” is a solid definition of emo. David helped me see, to quote Rilke, that I “must change my life.”

“Men at forty learn / Learn to close softly / The doors to rooms they will not be / Coming back to,” writes the poet Donald Justice. True enough, I’ve found, but less so in an era when old infatuations are just one click away. It’s easy to revisit my emo adolescence, which I’ve done a lot since my son tip-toed into middle school’s hall of mirrors. In the quiet hours before dinner, with my finger above the play button, I wonder: should I give him a tour of my youth?

The answer to this question is obvious to any parent: please, don’t. So too are the reasons why: because he’ll spit back much of the culture you offer; because he needs to discover his music and his masculinity, not yours. Thankfully, his life offers countless opportunities to do so, and his parents aren’t yet so “sus” as to be fully ignored (sus [adj., chiefly teenage]: suspicious, old).

Take one recent decision with lasting social repercussions: what instrument would he wield in band? Our son chose the flute. He YouTubed a few lessons. His excitement lifted like a cool and resonant note. Then he came home with a hesitation: Only one other boy played flute.

We chatted as a family about gender and music. We asked him why some instruments seemed “manly” or “girly”; where do those flimsy presumptions begin? And aren’t those categories increasingly fluid, challenged daily by his non-binary friend? Mostly, though, my wife and I did what most parents do in a crisis: we turned to the internet for help.

There we learned that James Madison, an actual Founding Father, once owned a crystal flute. Can you get more manly than Madison? We learned that Lizzo played the flute too—had in fact played Madison’s flute while twerking. Lizzo’s coolness, my son intuited, needed no proof. Then we watched the now famous video. Then we watched it again.

Was this enough to convince him? What had we hoped to achieve? We know that, months later, he’s still playing. We know too that he now likes to perform. His audience: our good friends and their daughter, who captured the performance on her phone. His repertoire: the “Among Us” theme song, which—bless his heart—he’d memorized that week.

Whatever emo did for me, dear Reader, is nothing compared to this, one of masculinity’s more hopeful futures: a 12-year-old boy, woodwind in hand, shaking everything he’s got.

The post Emo Music Made Me a Better Man appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 1941, my grandfather drove across the country from Detroit to California to deliver a car and see the World’s Fair in San Francisco. There were no highways, the car broke down constantly, he slept in fields, and he said it was the best trip of his life. He hitchhiked home with a bathing suit salesman. Three years later he landed in France in World War II and marched into Germany. “Patton was right,” my grandfather told me. “We should have gone after Stalin when we had the chance.” After the war, he got married in his uniform and took a job at Sears, where he would work for 38 years. When he retired in 1982, he moved into a house in Caseville, Michigan, where our family’s fishery once stood, and he served as township commissioner and knew everybody by name.

My father followed in his footsteps. Except the war was Vietnam and Sears started offshoring its manufacturing. My dad changed after he lost his job, moving among various retail positions and keeping to himself, hardly speaking at all.

And me? I spent a summer working the cash register in the lighting department at Sears, but I’ve had 28 jobs since I started working at 15, ranging from the night shift at a gas station to selling Oriental rugs to teaching graduate school to running a graphic design studio. I’ve never gone to war, and I’ve never been punched. My life feels insulated, detached from responsibility, and the effect is compounded by the fact that most of my activities are conducted in front of a computer screen.

I am a million miles away from my father and grandfather, who played by a different set of rules: a belief in country and companies, a dogged faith in firm handshakes and settling down.

2.

In 2004, I began driving through America. I wanted to understand my country and my place in it. After 55,000 miles of searching, I wrote a big book about my journey, and then I drove another 15,000 miles this summer, talking about the big book to small audiences. Although I came to understand my country a little better, the dignity of my grandfather seemed even more remote.

What kind of man should I be? This question nagged me late at night while I drove along empty back roads, staring into the scrolling asphalt. I’d follow the yellow line and let my mind wander through montages of old movies, advertising jingles, and tattered photographs. Cary Grant lighting a woman’s cigarette. Brando and Dean posing in white T-shirts. Eastwood’s parched stare. An unsettling amalgamation of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, rippling with sweat and unloading a belt-fed weapon.

I wanted dignity, grit, muscle, and grace. I waited patiently for enlightenment at scenic viewpoints all over the country. The Grand Canyon. Yellowstone. Glacier Park. Big Sur. I’d time my arrival for the magic hour, the moment when sunset gave everything a movie-star glow, and I’d listen to sentimental music along the way, making sure everything was perfect for my big moment. Key West. Death Valley. The Smokey Mountains. I waited, but the flash of insight did not arrive. This is what happens when you watch too much television.

Along the way, I absorbed countless billboards, posters, and neon signs. They told me that a real man is attractive but does not worry about such things. He is responsible yet impulsive. A loner yet social. You’ll find him at the end of the bar telling stories and slapping backs while catching the eyes of women, yet he’s also standing alone near a fence somewhere on a ridge, gazing at Wyoming or Montana. He built that fence himself because he’s self-reliant and good with an axe. These are the images attached to our khakis, family sedans, and mutual funds. They tell me to be aggressive yet sensitive. They tell me I don’t have sex enough. They tell me to develop six-pack abs and wax my chest. They tell me to wear baseball caps and eat all that I can.

I rifled through shoeboxes of old photographs, looking for answers. Here’s a black-and-white snapshot of my grandfather standing in the driveway with his two children tugging at his knees while my grandmother smiles in the doorway of a ranch house. My grandfather’s hair is neatly parted, and he’s beaming. He has a family, medals from the war, and a steady job with a company where he will work for several decades. He has a neat lawn and a sprinkler. He’s got a big Buick with fins. He is only 28 years old, yet he’s somehow older than I’ll ever be.

On my car radio, Bo Diddley says his grandfather picked his teeth with a hunting knife and wore the same suit all of his life. I see a distant trailer in the middle of the desert and wonder if that’s the place for me: rugged, remote, elemental. Then I think about the time I ran away when I was little. My mom said running away was fine, so long as I didn’t cross the street.

3.

In Minneapolis, an old man told me that men got confused when they abandoned cities for the suburbs. I thought about this while I drove, paying attention to the faded names painted on old brick buildings, those mint green cursive names like Jerry & Sons Hardware Supplies or Robinson Bros. Manufacturing, those muscular names that made sense compared to today’s childish vocabulary of tweet, Google, and blog. It’s difficult to feel dignified among our new language.

Where does dignity come from? I thought I’d find it at the edge of a mountain or canyon. Instead, I found it in the Rose Reading Room in New York. I found it in the town squares of places like Oxford, Mississippi or Brady, Texas. Go to any downtown and stand in the ballroom of its oldest hotel and take in those columns and soaring ceilings, all that wood and brass.

At a book signing in Pasadena, a tipsy man walked up to me waving a copy of The Sun Also Rises. “You know what Hemingway understood?” he asked, leaning over the table. “Don’t talk too much. Keep your feelings to yourself. That’s how it was back then.” I’d just finished reading parts of my book to a small audience. I’d answered all kinds of personal questions during the Q&A. Now, sitting at that folding table with a stack of books and a Sharpie, I felt overexposed. The man slid The Sun Also Rises across the table for emphasis and walked off, mumbling, “Silence, man. That’s how it was.”

My hand went to my pocket. Whenever I encounter a troubling thought, I pull out my phone. It’s become a dumb reflex that borders on the neurochemical, this constant jones for a hit of fresh data to distract me. But this time I stopped mid-pocket. I thought about the things I do on the Internet. The status updates, the likes and tweets, the compulsive monitoring of inboxes and feeds. All of my chatter boils down to I’m here. Pay attention to me. I turned off my phone and drove to the next event.

In the rearview, Nebraska trucks came over the ridge at sunset, and I fantasized about dialing 1-800-USA-TRUCK and hauling freight for 89 cents per mile. My mission would be clear: get from point A to point B. At a gas station in Wyoming, a giant bearded man in spurs was telling the cashier that he’d just completed his seven-day yoga challenge.

A few hours after my final book reading, I stood on an empty street in Salt Lake City, cradling the phone as my father told me that my grandfather was in the hospital. Instead of pointing the car south towards my home in New Orleans, I sped east to Michigan, where my grandfather lay fighting off pneumonia. I did not drive fast enough. I stood in the parking lot of a horrible chain restaurant in South Dakota and wept when I got the news.

4.

James A. Reeves Sr. died on September 21, 2011 at the age of 88. He taught me how to fold the American flag into a tight triangle. He taught me how to tie a cleat hitch on a sailboat and how to varnish wood until it looked like warm liquid. For six weeks, while touring for my book, I drove across the country showing his photograph to strangers in bookstores. My grandfather in uniform, saluting in front of a plane with a pin-up girl painted on the fuselage. My grandfather sitting at his big desk at Sears, holding a black rotary phone, hair neatly parted, black-rimmed glasses, and flashing that grin that always made you feel good, like you and he were part of something. I talked about how he inspired me, how he defined a type of masculinity that now seems lost: a faith in nations, companies, and handshakes.

After the funeral in Caseville, we filed out of his little church into the cold rain and watched the American Legion perform a 21-gun salute. A half-circle of World War II veterans saluted the American flag and fired their rifles. They folded the flag into a triangle, marched forward, and presented it to my father. The ritual comforted me. I envied it. People I did not know clasped my shoulder and shook my hand. “A grand and honorable man,” they said.

Driving home under a gray sky, I struggled to connect the dots. Silence. Dignified towns. The stern handshakes and the gunshots. I missed my grandfather. And I mourned the loss of what he represented–a life of clear steps: service to a nation, then a company, then a family. Many men rejected this narrative, of course, but it nonetheless provided definition, some sort of plot. Today the storyline has splintered, which is exciting because believing in a nation or a corporation is a strange thing to do. Yet we’re left searching for new things to believe in. We’ve been atomized and polarized, and our technologies reinforce this, encouraging the short burst and the inward glance.

In the middle of the desert at the far edge of a line of thundering sprawl, I saw a gigantic red blinking sign telling me to like Walgreens on Facebook. I hit the brakes and cut the ignition. Maybe this was the scenic viewpoint I’d been looking for. Amid the silence of a vast desert I was being asked to like Walgreens. I watched the sign blink for a while, then started the engine. How do you become a dignified man in America? I still could not answer the question. But I knew I would return to my new home in New Orleans and focus on creating better public spaces. And I’d look for ways to embrace silence, to slow down a little. This would be my answer for now.

James A. Reeves is a writer, designer, and motorist. His first book, The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir, is now available from W. W. Norton. He writes at Big American Night and is a partner at Civic Center, a civic design studio that champions cities.

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

*Photo courtesy of James A. Reeves.

The post To Be a Man appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.