THE HUNGER by Daniel Marshall

Adults snickered. Somehow, we knew they loved us, seemed to mean well — remembered our birthdays; but they were not in our world. They snickered about us. We couldn’t escape fast enough.

Some of the aunts on my mother’s side — the outspoken ones — snickered. My father’s siblings didn’t snicker about us, though they seemed in another world; but I do remember my uncle Rob, whom everyone loved, chuckling over an ethnic joke he’d told. They thought things were funny that made me feel uncomfortable.

I grew up in a world of stereotypes. It was their world, and at first mine — a world of debate and differences, of enemies and of struggle for recognition and survival. We learned from them that we faced discrimination. Their world was a world of ideologies and positions, of apologetics and demonstration, unlike today’s world of cultures and personality types, of dialogue and sharing.

Sisters snickered about us behind their hands, black books, teaching materials -- their long black rosaries dangling by their sides, fixed at the tops to their black leather belts. Their starchy stiff, arching veils weaved and bobbed as they turned to speak with each other.

I was hungry for affection, tenderness, seriousness, respect. My friends were serious about stickball, wrestling, ring-a-lev-io — except for Bill Benson who was willing to go along with anything, but liked most to sit on a stoop doing nothing. My sister liked him; girls were unpredictable. We boys did things together and did not talk intimately, unless talking about grades counts as intimacy.

We ourselves snickered at what we thought was obvious, was common sense. Although we knew what it was to cry and feel sad, still our clowns and enemies were less than human to us. We didn’t think of them crying as we did. They were always dressed, as far as we were concerned, and never went to sleep — Yankees and Giants, Germans and Japanese, Protestants and Communists. Our enemies were always menacing.

It seemed to me, in high school and college, that students interested in sports or alcohol were among those peers who tended most to snicker, and I drifted away from them. Their world did not feel interesting. I felt uncomfortable with cliques. I wanted to be part of every group, to try everything. Never snicker, I thought.

People I most respected, liked, and admired didn’t snicker; they respected others. Maybe they had areas of weakness, but they could also be tender. It seemed to me that people snickered and disparaged when feeling weak. Though they might protest, “All in good fun!”, to me it didn’t feel like fun.

Sarcasm was worse than snickering. Sometimes my mother laughed a sepulchral, mocking laugh, emanating from her mouth but not from her eyes, bespeaking anger, disparagement, exasperation, manipulation — not humor at all. “Lighten up! Laugh!” she would say, at those times, about something I took seriously. Our second eighth grade teacher scolded the class girls for “making cow eyes at the boys.” I wished some would make cow eyes at me! A later public relative of this manipulative humor was the smug, wry, sardonic wit of William F. Buckley and Rush Limbaugh, from them descending rapidly through the incivilities of the Bob Grants, Steve Maltzbergs, and Sean Hannity’s, the dissembling snidenesses of George Bush, and the ferocity of Dick Cheney into bitterly polarized cliquishness and factionalism.

Whatever my experience of all this was, I did not have coherent knowledge of my tendencies and feelings; but I feared terribly to be disparaged. I was hungry for affection, love, adventure, beauty, knowledge, and activity. Not all the food in the world could satisfy my hunger.

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AUTHOR BIO:

Daniel Marshall is a writer and a pilgrim. A Brooklyn native, he lived in Berkeley when Berkeley was the center of the universe, has apple picked in New Hampshire and orange picked in Florida, was deeply involved with the Catholic Worker and is now underground, working as a college librarian in Manhattan. He lives in Harlem with his wife Dee and is always searching for community, communion and the reflection of Christ's spirit in the real world.