Turtles All the Way Down

I was named "Joss" because my mother understood that "Jocelyn," her first choice, hadn’t been used for males since the nineteenth century. She sensed something Scandinavian in its sound, and she liked that the same way she liked her Swedish chairs and coffee tables, and the Nordic whiffs in her own maiden name, Daneby. My last name, "Newton," came from my doughty South African grandfather, who first crossed the Atlantic to America at age twelve, two months after his own father, my great-grandfather, had disappeared. Legend (almost certainly apocryphal) held that he’d joined the raiders who’d followed Dr. Jameson into the Transvaal, and had been killed, setting off the Anglo-Boer War. (I say "apocryphal" because I’m usually uncomfortable trying to connect individuals, especially myself, with the dubious stuff we call History, my aberrational interest in South Africa notwithstanding.) Later, my family got luckier and less adventurous. Every generation since then went to war, at least technically, and nobody except me sustained more than a scratch. Whether this story of its youngest and last member merits telling will be judged from these pages.

I’m writing this as I sit in a house (a house dripping with seven years of my precious sweat equity) in a western county of New Jersey, an area both helped and hurt by the migratory influx of the upwardly restless young of the Reagan/Bush years. It’s a tribe I won’t disparage with the outworn label "yuppies," at least as long as I remain one of its fringe members (albeit marginally frayed). I can see the Weichert FOR SALE sign out front.

I’m middle-aged, and I like to admit it. (The soothing cliché informs us that our mid-forties aren’t really middle age anymore. Still . . .)

I sit here, keyboard on my lap, trying to write about . . . a search?

Which hints at a discovery. An end, maybe? Something else to be judged from these pages.

It began ten years ago, more-or-less, in 1984, the year, among other things, of "recovery" from recession, and the year the 80286 microprocessor would launch the PC’s relentless overhaul of the world. It was a turgid year for my oversad, inconsequential self, but, I think, a healthy year despite that. (You knew you were going through emotional trauma – I recall a comic’s stale line – if the songs on AM radio all seemed written just for you.) I have to start there.

I was thirty-four then, a whelp of the century’s middle parts. Some more broad strokes:

I was five feet and nine inches tall. I was thin (some said "compact"), I was nearsighted, and wore glasses or contact lenses. I had coarse, spiky brown hair, still free of gray. I looked vaguely Asian if I put on sunglasses and let myself get tanned. I was usually clean-shaven – my cobweb whiskers were too rarefied for a good beard – but for my great trek in 1984 I’d grown an anachronistic Fu Manchu mustache, hoping it would give me a more redneck look, more appropriate for my self-cultivated persona as The Vietnam Vet (not to be confused with Joss The Brutal Boy – he’d been real).

I’d been told I had that ageless look common among the mentally retarded (or is it mentally challenged these days?). I’d spent my fifteenth to twentieth years looking like I’d just gotten my drivers license, my twenty-first to twenty-fifth year looking like a high school senior, and my twenty-sixth to what had passed of my thirty-fifth year looking like a perennially thirtysomething graduate student. I liked looking young (I was less crazy about looking retarded) because my looks sometimes seemed to give me permission to act not quite like an adult. Lately I’d sensed that some people – especially my parents’ overachieving friends – were giving me just that kind of permission, as if I really were some ever-treadmilling degree candidate in need of constant forgiveness for not growing up. But that was changing. Hence this journey.

My sex life . . . (Wait. Way too big a can of worms to open now, but it hadn’t been good.) I wasn’t loud; I wasn’t quiet; I was passive in most situations, even though for that year and a half debut of The Brutal Boy I’d endured enough physical and mental trauma to be considered (maybe) a pathology. In fact, once I’d even enjoyed my fifteen minutes of fame for the dubious distinction of having been a military casualty. Half a life ago . . .

1984.

Three halcyon days, late summer. I was driving a five-ton Ryder truck east on Interstate 80. The truck carried my worldly possessions, or at least most of them that weren’t in bank accounts. Following the truck was my well-preserved little Pontiac Sunbird, and inside it was my well-preserved father, sixty-six years young.

Oh, the memory of those three days! I loved it as soon as it became a memory, love it still, but while it was happening it was . . . Oh, the revisionist mindset!

I was scared down to my bones. I was scared as only someone on a First Day can be scared. I might have been more scared on other First Days. (That January day in 1969 when, with forty-some other numb-faced Iowa Marine recruits, I’d endured the quiet flight – Des Moines/Denver/San Diego – that had preluded that physical and mental trauma. That had been worse. Yes, but that had been kid’s fear, from a youngster who’d wondered how he’d survive. All those stories of horror . . . Would he come through with enough body and mind to have a life afterwards? And that kid’s fear had been the fear of someone who still saw himself as a kid and who saw drill instructors and the architects of war and policy as "adults," and who couldn’t have known he’d been more green psychologically than physically.)

Worrying in 1984 about what would happen seems silly now. Just an insignificant, ordinary case of the jitters in a situation so far removed from . . . from just so much, right? I’d lived a lot by then, hadn’t I? After all, realistically, what was there to fear during that pleasant August, compared to all I’d known in life?

Plenty.