simon & garfunkel

by Kodi Gonzaga

i can’t think of anything more filled with blood spattered evidence of generational trauma than a simon and garfunkel song playing on a car radio

the lyrics haven’t changed since my father first heard them, wherever he was, in his beat-up car with a hole through the floor on the passenger side or in his friend's kitchen drinking milk and playing risk, wishing and wishing and wishing that he wouldn't come home to anger and dreaming of the day he’d finally run away

they don’t change when i listen to them either, many years later, driving through the dark to an SAT testing center with my father at the wheel, and he puts on The Boxer and i hear for the first time something that resonates in my bones but i don’t yet understand why

and it isn’t until later, not even fully grown but grown enough and known enough to see what’s happened to our lives and our hearts and our heads, and i look up the lyrics on the computer screen that has become my home and house and refuge and cage and i see what it was that hurt me so that barely-morning on the drive into north georgia

“i am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told, i have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles such are promises”

i cannot count how many times i have heard my father tell me that he grew up poor in a little town in west virginia along the ohio river, that he was smarter than the rest and had two best friends and his father and his belt were vivid memories, his mother pouring boiling coffee on his head and screaming with a witch’s face in his dreams, and i would cry but not for him, because he only told us of his misery to shame us into knowing how much luckier we were, because of him, because of him

“all lies and jest, still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”

i do not know how many times i have tried to tell him how i feel, to explain to him the things inside of me like bees and knives and oceans and i cried and cried and cried because the only thing he ever seemed to think of were bits and pieces of my speeches, things that wouldn't turn his world upside down, and i guess that’s how i learned just how fragile of a grasp my father held on his own mind, and i was shattering it with tennis balls just to see the web of fractures grow and grow and i could no longer stand to watch him crumble under the weight of my realizations

“when i left my home and my family i was no more than a boy in the company of strangers in the quiet of the railway station running scared laying low seeking out the poorer quarters where the ragged people go looking for the places only they would know”

we did not run away my father and i, too devoted or scared or, well, i don’t think we will ever know which really, but we did what was wanted and they sent us away, and it was frightening and wonderful and i cannot thank life enough for showing us this way

my father went to boarding school for his final grade school years and i know he felt unmoored after realizing he was no longer the smartest boy around, but i wonder sometimes if he felt afraid of the rich kids and the smart kids and the other boys his age who knew he came from nothing and may have laughed at his way of speaking way of dressing way of staying sane

for me it was my undergrad, i sought out laughter, intellect, and quirky dispositions and i realized i was queer and smart and hurting for so many different reasons, and i learned it wasn’t normal to be frightened of your dad and i think, i think that broke me, just a little, just enough

“asking only workman’s wages i come looking for a job but i get no offers just a come on from the whores on seventh avenue, i do declare there were times when i was so lonesome that i took some comfort there”

my father never told me what his love was like before he met my mother but my mother knows and told me, a young girl broke his heart, and i know he drank and partied in his sophomore year so badly that he tanked his grades, his father kicked him out, he didn’t get into med school until the day before classes were to start

i’ve graduated now and yet i have no life no job no idea of what i want to do, become, and no they’d never kick me out, but back when i was dating, fully anxious and afraid, i’d have sex until i cried because it was the only way i could sleep, and after we broke up i’d drink a portion of chardonnay the same way, not whores i know but something about vices takes the pain away

“then i’m laying out my winter clothes and wishing i was gone going home where the new york city winters aren’t bleeding me leading me going home”

i am so so aware of my father’s suicidal thoughts and his desire to die before he can’t remember his name or move on his own, he tells me this so much i wonder if he knows how much it hurts me to hear him say that he’ll shoot himself before he gets to that, because now he’s seen it in his own parents and i don’t know how he felt watching them die lost and alone, and i wonder if he thought that they deserved it, but i don’t think so

“in the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade and he carries his reminders of every glove that laid him down or cut him ‘til he cried out in his anger and his shame”

i used to take karate and i miss it now, i realize how much anger i had in me every time i walked inside, how much power i could feel in my body when my muscles were strong and fast enough to fight him if it ever came to that, but it never did, only threats and angry voices, loud and thunderous crashing like a tidal wave a storm, i wished for him to listen and hear me and i screamed my pain through pencil on a journal page and secretly hoped he’d read it one day and realize what he was

he fancies himself a fighter, my father, built on grit and strength, and i fancy myself one too, and i wonder if he wanted that for me, or if he simply drew me up the only way he knew, pain and pride like blood and wine, mingling and tangy on the tongue but rich and full and there because for us that is our life

i don’t know who will say it first, if i will break from him with force and fear and go alone into the world, or if he will leave somehow maybe a bullet or morphine or simply accident and chance, but either way this is what we’ll say,

“i am leaving, i am leaving but the fighter still remains.”