White trash elegy

by David Benjamin

“How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance of our culture, our families, and our parents who have failed their children? How much is Mom’s life her own fault? Where does blame stop and sympathy begin?”
—J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

MADISON, Wis.—Every election year, an army of pundits announce, gratuitously, that a politician’s “story” is his or her greatest asset—or liability. This is a warning that has kept my hat firmly on my noggin and out of the ring.

I mean, really, who’d vote for Benjie? I’m a college dropout (although I went back), I’ve had two divorces and three wives (although No. 3 has stuck now for 36 years), my kids and grandsons communicate with me largely by rumor, I’ve lived outside the USA for a fifth of my life (including enemy territory—France), I’m a writer with millions of words—and a whole bunch of crazy-ass opinions—on the record, my name sounds Jewish, I used to subscribe to Ramparts and I have an “Alfred E. Newman for President” t-shirt.

Talk about political halitosis!

On the other hand, I’m what political analysts might call “authentic” and what feature writers would deem “good copy” because I grew up poor in a rural backwater. Lately, for example, Americans have been fed a classic narrative of underdog inspiration. We’ve learned a lot about the isolated and forgotten working-class “hamlet” (population 50,000) of Middletown, Ohio, whose denizens apparently suffer the onus of a “hillbilly” heritage despite not being actually on a hill (elevation 742 feet). Looking at a map tends to undermine Middletown’s podunk seclusion, because it’s a half-hour drive north to Dayton (population 135,000) and south to Cincinnati—which has Major League and National Football League teams, 300,000 inhabitants and a classic sitcom (“WKRP in Cincinnati”).

By comparison, my hometown, Tomah, Wisconsin (population 4,500 when I was there) is fifty miles from the closest “urban” center, La Crosse (population—hm!, 50,000). Tomah (elevation 1,017) is higher up than Middletown, but suffers the cultural deficiency of not having a colorful ethnic slur for its local folks, although I would gladly nominate the term “shitkicker” in honor of my Uncle Claude’s, Uncle Carl’s, crazy Uncle Harry’s and grandfather T.J.’s (now defunct) dairy farms. The only TV show set anywhere near Tomah was “Picket Fences,” whose town, Rome, Wisconsin, doesn’t exist.

I grew up speaking largely without a discernible accent and had no endearing regional sobriquet for my grandmothers, both of whom I just called “Grandma.” I lived my first eight years in a slab bungalow without hot water or an indoor toilet. From my earliest memory, my parents drank too much and raged at each other, keeping me awake, exacerbating my tendency to stutter and inciting me to wet the bed. Eventually, Mom fled that cottage of pain and dragged us off to live uncomfortably with her parents and then move on again to the town’s ghetto, the string of second-floor apartments above the stores on Superior Avenue.

As the children of a divorcée who waited tables for sixty cents an hour at the local supper club and collected welfare, Peg, Bill and I were deemed dead-enders. One of my teachers, Sister Mary Ann, made it vividly clear to me that I was white trash bound for no good end and doomed to Perdition.

But I wasn’t entirely attentive to my predestination. I was often hungry, always penniless and bullied in school, but I kept my chin up and cultivated a tongue-in-cheek perspective insidiously instilled by my grandparents and my dad. I had every reason to look at my prospects in life through the disillusion of Holden Caulfield or the rage of Jim Stark. Instead, I went with Huckleberry Finn. Looking back later—channeling perhaps my inner Sister Mary Ann—I toyed with the hypothesis that the haphazard architects of my upbringing and the moral wasteland of my broken home were to blame for whatever I perceived as my disadvantages and shortcomings. But I was neither strident nor even sincere in this self-piteous theory.

I knew in my heart, and later accepted, that a kid has no power over his or her sources in life. So there’s no point in judging them.

If anyone had reason to chafe at his imprisonment in the middle of a rural nowhere, it was my dad. He was one of the smartest people in a milieu where braininess was social anathema. He was also good-looking and charming. But when his looks and charm lost their cachet, he grew angry and stayed that way for years. Eventually, Dad channeled his exceptional intelligence into an encyclopedic knowledge of his community’s history, culture and relationships—and then he kept his mouth shut about all he knew.
This silence was Dad’s final irony.

If laziness—according to its most famous son—was the hallmark of Middletown, Tomah’s equivalent quality, in my experience, was stoicism. I grew up there among elders still spooked by the trauma of the Depression, followed by the great coming together necessitated by the deadliest war in human infamy. Everyone over the age of thirty had suffered and survived a decade of national despair, followed by an upswell of shared sacrifice unprecedented in American history. As a kid among these people, I absorbed that perspective, a sense that no matter how bad things seem, they’ve been worse before and folks always, somehow, helped one another to get through it all.

Among my dad’s friends was Al, who left an arm behind somewhere in France after D-Day. Al worked with Dad in his day job painting house interiors and putting up wallpaper. Al, the proverbial one-armed paperhanger, was one of the most positive people I can remember, glad to be alive and only in two pieces. Every time I think of him, with a tear welling in my eye, I smile.
It’s because of guys like Al, and because of my father’s maturation into quiet wisdom, generosity and love, that I hesitate to project my life’s misdirections and misfortunes on anyone else, especially the forebears whose confusion and frustration unfolded before my eyes. My parents lived in a state of constant crisis, a reality that I perceived only partly and sporadically because I was a child, which is a crisis of its own.

When I undertook the presumption of writing about my own “coming of age” in Tomah, I applied no onus—for everything that ganged agley—to anyone, even myself. I didn’t formulate or share a philosophy based on my childish blunderings or my parents’ belated efforts to grow up. Between the missteps, screwups and heartbreaks of my life as a kid in profoundly rural America, I learned (more or less) how to behave, whom to trust and what to fear. I figured out somehow that life is neither consistently comic nor relentlessly tragic, but if you want to get through it in two pieces or fewer, you’re best off scripting it as comedy.

When I told my alleged story, in a book called The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, I left a lot out, added stuff that didn’t happen and didn’t strictly stick to the facts. The result was more Laurel and Hardy than Thomas Hobbes. I laughed at myself, I was angry at no one. And, by conflating memory with fiction, and truth with burlesque, I queered any hope of turning my story into grist for political ambition.

Ironically, from adolescence, I’ve been a politics maven. But I never imagined running for public office—a pursuit that requires a surfeit of synthetic gravitas and pious self-regard. Whatever political aspirations I might have nursed were dead in the womb because, fueled by Dad’s irony and my grandma Annie’s sneaky sarcasm—and too much exposure to Mad magazine—I never quite managed to take my “story” seriously.