Jacob Clifton

Men, women, dogs and violence

I’ve been quiet since my Dad died1. Not just here, with you: Everywhere. I’m a quiet guy now. I circle around things, I’m circumspect. A lot of bad things happen in this letter. I’m going to talk about them anyway, but as you’ll see I will circle a bit first, like a dog settling down to sleep.

We moved into this house, the Winterpalace2, a year ago. A shockingly fast year full of jobs and love and dogs and trouble and various financial twists and turns. And for that year, I’ve been a little scared.

When I lived in the center of Austin, in Hyde Park, I left my kitchen door not just unlocked but open, from 8am to 8pm,3 so Zooey4 could come and go as she wished. Even when I was working at the preschool, I let her go for it. I know how that sounds; naive.

It reminds me of my old therapist describing my life as “a series of trust falls sprung on the unsuspecting.” She also said my naivete was… I forget the words, but basically that I’m smart and convincingly human such that my wild naivete, or innocence, can be bewildering or even frightening when it’s revealed. I’m just an animal looking for a home.

Here in south Austin, in the virtual suburbs of Austin, I have felt very far from the city center and just the slightest touch of fear, in a time gone mad with monsters everywhere. We lock our doors triple, and when we do this I feel a strong sense of safety and comfort. All of this is new to me and change is hard.

You’d be surprised how much of our day-to-day is about gender — men are like this, women are like that, Zooey is doing this, Ambrose is doing that, women are great at this but terrible at that. Living with a man who takes the binary seriously, by age or temperament, has brought a lot of questions and arguments into my house that I thought I was done with. I have wanted to write an entire thing about this, about what it’s like living with a man after three years surrounded by women, and how much easier on myself I am than he is. How much more I believe women now.

Everything Ambrose did, for the longest time, signaled toxic masculinity to me: He steps in front of Zooey even when he doesn’t know where she’s going. He needs to be fed first, to be pet when she is being petted. He’s only slightly naughty, it’s just the finer points of etiquette he’s still not getting, and he is a puppy of one year. But in some moods I feel like a Margaret Atwood novel, like the dog is a sign that we can’t evade our gendered responsibilities forever.

I wrote a story called “This Is Why We Jump” that’s really depressing, not because of what happens but because of a sadness behind the page that’s palpable. It’s about a woman whose son is getting bigger every day, crowding her out of her own bed; it’s wholly about the space, the oxygen, that men take up without knowing it. Spoiler alert: The boy is actually a clone of her father, a seemingly harmless functionary, making him her son and brother and father all at once. It’s a story about being surrounded by the desires and the infinite fussiness of men, their simple needs to conquer and own and name. Ambrose is fascinated by Zooey’s urination, but never fails to pee on top of it when she’s done.

It is hard, as a man, to talk about men in this way. And yet in this house we do so much talking about it. “You grew up in a toxic time and learned a lot of unhealthy things about gay people and women, and now you bring that into my house,” I said, shutting him up. I’ve never shut him up before so we were both a little sideswiped by it. The truth is that he’s better at forming memories than I am, and so his past is always with him. And in that past, although he’s not really much older than me, he experienced the whole 80s-90s gay experience: Cruising, AIDS, Florida Orange Juice.

He’s got the Boomer love of his own image. He leaves voicemails, which gives my millennial self vertigo; he listens to the recording, sometimes more than once, before hanging up. He reads and re-reads his comments on YouTube videos to himself, locking it in. Making it real.

As I told Anna and Sophie, “If he heard a story about a man who went out and shot ten women, he would ask what the man was upset about.” It’s that automatic, choosing sides, trying to be empathetic to what seems like the obvious monster in the story. An impulse I’d admire if the monster was ever a woman or a gay man or anything but exactly this idea of a man: Cisgendered, heterosexual, unreliable, terrifying. Possibly he believes manhood is embodied in this same inscrutable man who would go out and shoot ten women.

I may find a lot of masculinity hard to stomach but my King Baby loves (adores, desires, worships) and fears it in equal measure. It makes a lot of sense but it also makes a lot of the conversations I tend to enjoy, which do touch on feminism and gender at times, a bit less enjoyable.

It’s probably a good idea to remember that I was essentially raised by a single mom, a feminist and intellectual, and may have formed some ideas about men in that context. But if I did, they’ve only been proven right.

So for the last year I’ve been thinking about all this: My fears of suburbia, his retro gay anxiety, the teen-male energy of Ambrose, the way women and men balance and live through the economy between them, in which we all have to live regardless of who we are or how we love. I have felt pushed up against the wall, literally in my own bed, by Ambrose who doesn’t know or care what effect his giant body has on those around him. About rooting for Zooey every time she has had enough of his shenanigans and snarls at him, shutting him up.

The house across the street has a deep purple pickup truck that’s always parked with its back to the garage, which is always closed. I have never seen the back bumper of this truck but I think about it a lot. In my dreams for the last year, this truck finally eases out into the street, slow as an oil leak, and I can see the back: Death’s Head totenkopf, Trump sticker, Confederate flag… Something more specific and terrifying, perhaps, like the sticker I saw in a parking lot at 15 that just said “AIDS Cures Fags.” Something about trans kids, or drag queens, or me.

This dream, in which nothing actually happens, is terrifying and it’s come so many times. The man across the street was friendly enough but bore enough of a resemblance to Andrew Tate that I didn’t trust him. When I’d kiss King Baby it’s this man I would imagine bursting through the door and executing us, the man across the street. When I thought about bomb scares or drag queen story hours or the Proud Boys there he would be, in the shadows, all the things I’m suddenly terrified about.

I know it is love because I feel like I have something to lose. I never knew this feeling until I got Zooey, and had someone to be a grownup for. But now when I think about losing King Baby my stomach flips over. This little family burns bright.

King Baby is unreconstructed when it comes to transgender issues, and it annoys me, but the way I see it, that’s a tiny percentage of the population and he just doesn’t have the experience to be respectful. I asked my mentor writer, Rachel, a lot of questions I felt horrible about later, in my naivete, back in the 90s and that means I got a head start in all the things we’re learning now, about how to treat trans people (hint: they’re people).

He’s a Capricorn and constantly coming up with reasons I’m going to leave him, things he did and didn’t do, like there’s a magical recipe to my love; like it’s finite. But once I did tell him “Don’t be silly, if I left you it would be because of the woke stuff5” and instead of saying “Wow, so that’s really important to you,” he said “You think about leaving me?”

The other night I told King Baby the Atwood thing, “Men fear that women will laugh at them; women fear that men will kill them” and for a second I saw comprehension in his eyes. He’s been unemployed for a month now. I tell him there’s time for him to figure it out but the manhood in him isn’t so easily appeased.

Jason tries so hard to meet me in the middle. He’s just afflicted by the anti-woke mind virus that tells him he happens to be the only rational actor in the world, and therefore the person in league with objective reality. You can’t argue with that but you can’t agree with it either. It’s male and it’s controlling and it’s inescapable. I say “we use the requested pronouns because it’s a way to show decency,” and he says, “Because you determine what’s decency?”

When the man across the street introduced himself to us, the first day after I moved in, he made a point of mentioning his girlfriend several times. Nothing new there. Straight people are fascinating, really they are. But we never saw the girlfriend. Like the back bumper of his pickup truck, which may or may not be covered in Nazi flair, she existed in a liminal space.

I thought, “I wonder if she feels like a prisoner” sometimes. I thought, “She must really love this cro-mag, because he seems like a boor,” and often I thought, “I wonder if they are white supremacists together.”

The house across the street became a symbol, without my really noticing. Or no, something more numinous than that; an objective-correlative. An engine pumping out just a little generic bit of fear, like the mosquito-gassing night trucks in American Horror Story: Cult. I would imagine him on a mattress on the floor, cleaning a gun and thinking about the day he might come over here and take two more faggots off the board.

Stoned, and consequently more imaginative, I would envision the great revolution, a real January 6th, 1776 redux, in which white nationalist followers of Trump and Marge would go from door to door, taking out the impure and leaving only untouched straight whiteness. Finally, finally doing what they’ve controlled us by threatening for so long. They’d come down the street Mad Max style, in huge decorated bulldozers and tanks, loud, chugging, rolling coal. The man across the street would wave hello, and point them to our door.6

I guess this is the right time for a content warning: domestic violence.

Last week I was in the shower and Jason came running to tell me that the cops were outside. I replied that I was in the shower and not likely to leave it, especially for the cops. He said they were asking about the man across the street, and my first thought was that he killed someone, or hopefully made a bomb threat.

I felt something like relief: This darkness wasn’t my own invention, there was something up, something was indeed up, and I was not crazy and I was not wrong. Every crime has a victim, which is why I kept going back to bomb threats and poison pen letters. I wanted him to be evil, to legitimize my year’s dark fantasies and fears, but I didn’t want anybody to suffer because of it.

But that’s not how men work.

We left for a few hours, just to get out of the house, and got a text message from a friend who stayed behind: “They found two bodies in the house across the street.” The cops classed it as a domestic violence situation, but for some reason described the situation — and I’ve seen this in other situations now, and it makes me wary — as a “double homicide.”

(Anna wagers this is because they neglected to follow up on a welfare check until days had gone by, and this is their way of covering up their own misdeeds. She trusts the cops even less than I do, which is not at all: 40% of policemen are engaged in domestic violence of their own.)

(I would spell out what happened, except you already know what happened. It’s practically a cliche at this point. The captive girl, her worried mother, the controlling boyfriend, a very bad night.)

“Do you feel at all tainted or embarrassed by this?” my Capricorn asks. He thinks a lot about neighborhoods, whether they’re “good” or not. He gets his ideas from his childhood growing up here in Austin, so all of his perceptions are a little bit off, but he does know his way around.

He’s asking if these are the wages of living in South Austin, living south of the River; if the price of living in a non-premium neighborhood is that sometimes men will kill women. I don’t have the heart to tell him it happens every day.

“I don’t understand what the T has to do with the LGB,” he says, parroting some TV terf. I tell him those are wedge questions designed to lead him down into hatred. The T has to do with the fact that first of all, straight people don’t care about the differences and most of them can’t tell the difference anyway.

They think transgender is some kind of ultimate gayness, and not a completely separate phenomenon. They will go after the trans kids, then the trans adults, then the gays. They already came for women. It’s a short trip.

But the second reason has to do with the numbers. Asked cold, and in the last year, a sizable sample of Americans estimated trans people make up about 20 percent of the population, rather than half a percent. That’s how much the Right talks and theorizes and lies about them. But look at that number, half a percent of people: that’s as vulnerable as it gets. The T goes with the LGB because as a LGB person, you know what it’s like to be afraid and to be hurt for being born a certain way. The question isn’t “why does the T go with LGB” it’s “How can you think twice about protecting the most vulnerable among you?”

But mostly it’s the first thing: Because there is no difference between the two fights; because they will come for you next.

In all that time fearing the man across the street and all his friends, it never occurred to me to wonder, much less worry, about that invisible girl he claimed to live with. The two fears, fear of straight people and fear of men, can sometimes get separated. I was scared enough for myself, condensing facts from the vapor of nuance and intuition, that I spared no thought for her.

I am happier than I have ever been, in my life, by a long shot. I love our little family and I love King Baby and I love our house, our street, our neighborhood. Whenever Austin’s skyline comes into view Jason will say quietly, “That’s your city. That’s your town. Look how beautiful your city is.” We’ve both lost jobs in the last month and so there’s a lot of the fun kind of scrambling to make all the pieces fit, but I’m outrageously happy.

A month or so ago I said, “In all those myths where the people are too happy or too proud, the Gods smite them or turn them into spiders or otherwise ruin them for being too happy. And now I get those stories, I get how they started now.”7

Friday I told my manager what was happening and he told me to take the day off. It’s hard to talk about what happened because I want to be sure it’s not “about me” if I do talk about it. I have just spent 2500 words making it about me, I guess.

But really it’s not about me. It’s about how Zooey is so accustomed to Ambrose trying to get her treats away that she wolfs them down now, face turned, so he won’t jump at her. How Zooey and I both carefully look both ways before she’s allowed to jump up next to me on the couch or bed for some petting time, without Ambrose throwing himself between us. All the little adjustments she has made in her life so that he won’t bother her quite so much.

When Zooey isn’t around, I love Ambrose to distraction. My long boi, my goofy jock. We slumber for hours together, wrapped up in warmth, so different from Zooey who doesn’t like to be touched very much. He cascades into you with his full weight, crashlanding, collapsed helplessly in love; sometimes it’s a slower, glacial melting against you. He puts his little paws up against you to stretch, pushing against you, luxuriating. He’s wonderful.

But when they’re not besties, when they’re not sleeping side by side or running back and forth together, he becomes less lovable. He nips at her ears, her tail. She bites at his graceful long legs, poking him jerkily with her short muscled Corgi legs and her snout in a way I can only describe as Cheri Oteri-like.

She fights back, and I root for her. “Get him, girly!”

It feels something like a balance. Indulging him when he mouths on me, never quite hurting but certainly nipping, without a second thought. Moisturizing the slowly healing gash down my leg where he launched himself off the couch a few weeks back. Bearing the scars of his euphoric, gregarious simplicity, which I must imagine is a lot like my own; always rooting for Zooey when she’s had enough.

The one thing I didn’t have the nerve to ask, back at the preschool, was a sort of exit-interview on this stuff. “What things did I do, as a man, that men do? Did I talk over you? Did I question your viewpoint automatically? Did I leave certain work to you women because it was women’s work? Was I lazy in that way? Did I assume things about you that weren’t true, causing confusion? Did I relegate you in my consciousness to some lesser place because you were women, teachers, preschool people?”

I didn’t ask because I don’t want to know. Still don’t.

I don’t think Ambrose has ever really been angry with me; even Zooey gives me the benefit of the doubt most of the time. But occasionally I will think about Ambrose snarling, enraged, and scare myself just a little bit. He’s a big boy. A big sweet goofball who could easily kill me. And I just have to be okay with that. It’s part of the deal I made when I brought him into this house.