[“Dad told me the story then about how he’d come home after Mom got him out of the service and how the first thing he’d done was put away all his Marine stuff in a closet, like he was hiding it in shame. Sometimes, when he’d drunk too much, he’d get out his uniform, his dog tags, an old smoke grenade from a training exercise, and turn them over and over in his hands. The way he explained it, there was a hidden John Sexton, and that John Sexton was a coward.
“Your mom didn’t hold it against me,” he said. “She was just happy to have me home. She didn’t want the war, didn’t want her husband in Vietnam getting shot at. But I felt . . . I felt—”
“You felt bad.”
Dad shook his head. “Bad ain’t even the start of it.”
According to Dad, he felt like he’d let everyone down, his wife, his mom, his country, and especially his own father. As a kid he’d always felt weak, like he’d failed as a boy and couldn’t live up to his dad’s expectations, and then, joining the Marines, he thought he’d found the perfect way to put those doubts to rest.
Remembering how afraid he’d gotten as his deployment date crept closer and closer, he said, “I just couldn’t do it. I started having these dreams that I was in the jungle. Just running through trees and grass and swamps, something chasing behind me, something or somebody breathing on my neck. I just couldn’t handle it.”
After he’d come home Dad said he did his best to make the marriage work. But it wasn’t enough. In the back of his mind he was a fraud, a coward who had failed at being a man.
To counteract that feeling, he tried to transform himself into a man more like the one he wanted to be. He taught himself how to fix things around the house, to work on the car, to hunt, and all that developed into a fantasy where he and my mom would move to Alaska and live an old-fashioned, rustic life. Maybe if he built a cabin with his bare hands, if he killed and prepared their food, if he could survive in the snowy tundra, he’d finally prove himself. It was this drive to reinvent himself that destroyed their marriage. Dad was faithful to Mom until he wasn’t, that is, until he had the chance. For years he didn’t stray, and then he met a group of people who lived a little fast. He felt cool for the first time, and these people had no idea who Dad was and what he had done. That clean slate was attractive. He could play a different role around these people. They knew him as John Sexton, the Marine. He could drink too much. Listen to his music too loud. He could be John Sexton, the Outlaw. He could be the John Sexton who hadn’t shied away from the most frightening challenge of his life.
I told him then about my days in Terre Haute and Carbondale, only this time I didn’t just brag about my exploits but admitted I’d felt like a fraud, like I was trying to prove something beyond what I was capable of. Then, without thinking, I told him about my eating disorders. To my surprise, Dad laughed his ass off.
“I’ll tell you something I ain’t told anybody else,” he said. “I did the same fucking thing back in the day. I barely ate anything for days and I’d go run for miles, come home, and swallow down a fistful of Dexatrim. That shit used to be fucking speed, man. That was the most messed-up time of my life. I didn’t know if I was coming or going, I tell you what.”
Dad went off on a rant then talking about men and America and how the two were inextricably linked. This man who’d just years before railed about antiwar protesters being “faggots” and “pussies,” myself included, was ranting on how the country had been founded by aristocratic intellectuals who were so insecure about their masculinity that they pretended to be frontiersmen and farmers. He said the reason we got in so many wars was because we were worried about being emasculated. Referencing George W. Bush, a president he’d quoted and romanticized for years, he said, “Look at that asshole in there now. There’s boys dying left and right in Iraq because Junior wants to one-up his dad. You ask me, a shrink could do a hell of a number on W.” We spent the rest of the drive talking about history and politics and how masculinity had plagued both, essentially ruining everything and making life miserable for everyone. Then, not too far outside of Carbondale, a couple dozen bathroom stops in, he got nostalgic and weepy. After all that loneliness, all that misery, all that pretending to be something he never was, Dad said he wished he could go back in time and talk to himself in basic training and let his younger self know he didn’t have anything to be ashamed of. Then he said no, he’d rather go back even further, back to when he was just a little boy—“when I didn’t know my dick from a hole in the ground,” he said—and tell himself to hold his chin up and not worry about what anyone thought. ’Tween you and me,” he said, “I’ve lost too many years to this shit. I hate what I was, honest to god I do, and getting to talk like this makes me hate it all the more.”]
jared yates sexton, from the man they wanted me to be: toxic masculinity and a crisis of our own making
