With a diagnosis like mine, depression was going to come. It’s what I’d been told. It’s what I’d read in countless books. There is a sense of despair that comes with words like “inoperable” and “getting your affairs in order,” because they don’t give you any room to maneuver. There’s no ground for debate, at least not if you only focus on the prognosis instead of the diagnosis. I couldn’t do that. Even if I wanted to, Connie wouldn’t let me. I just had to remember the tools I learned the first time I faced down depression and then marshal them as I confronted my new paradigm.
I first encountered the specter of depression during my freshman year at North Carolina State University. Actually, that’s not true. It’s more accurate to say that I arrived for my freshman year at State with depression smuggled away in one of my suitcases, because I had been conscripted into the NC State Wolfpack by my father regardless of my own desires, and that was just how it was going to be.
My dad had been raised on Grandpa Tesh’s farm. All he knew was working with his hands. Accordingly, there was never any thought of (or money to pay for) my father attending college after high school. He worked the farm with his dad like the other boys in town. By seven, the same age I’d begun to explore my mischievous performative instincts, he had learned to drive a tractor. He could kill and clean a hog by the time he was ten. In January 1942, barely a month after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he had enlisted in the US Navy and worked his way through the ranks to become a chief petty officer on the USS Panamint, an amphibious assault craft that served as a flagship in the Northern Attack Force during the Battle of Okinawa.
I have my dad’s diary from the war. Even his description of the rigors of naval boot camp in Norfolk, Virginia, before his deployment to the Pacific Theater, are daunting.
Today was a ten hour day of marching, calisthenics, scrubbing our clothes, rifles-over-our-heads drills and pulling oars of the boats. I believe my back might certainly be broken from loading the heavy shells into the 5 inch guns. I have not slept in 4 days.
And that speaks nothing of the acute stress of his assignment once aboard the Panamint. From the top of the ship, he stood lookout and called in antiaircraft fire to shoot down incoming Japanese Zeroes and kamikaze pilots whose aim was to wipe out the US fleet off the coast of Okinawa. A good day’s work in his role could mean the difference between life and death—victory and defeat—for thousands of men. One wrong calculation or command and the fleet could lose a ship, possibly even the war. His job was so important that the Japanese fighters trained their .50-caliber machine guns on his perch atop the ship. He performed that duty every day for a year and a half, until the Japanese surrendered.
When I told this story as a kid during show-and-tell, the Japanese surrendered because of my dad. When I tell it now, it becomes that much easier for me to understand how, as a rising high school senior, my declared intention of pursuing a college education filled with courses designed to create a career in the entertainment world would have been met by my dad with alarm and even anger. By that point he’d graduated from naval war hero to vice president of sales for the underwear division at Hanes. Another respectable endeavor that could actually be quantified—now measured in hard dollars earned instead of planes shot down—unlike his only son whose plans, as best he could figure, would culminate in plate-spinning on the Ed Sullivan Show, or, worse, the circus. How embarrassing for him. A potential embarrassment whose wings he clipped before it ever had a chance to take flight, before I’d even entered my senior year of high school.
Young and naïve, I set out one warm Sunday evening in April 1969 to inform my father about my upcoming road trip with my high school buddies. Both my sisters had made a similar pilgrimage as high school juniors. Bonnie decided on Mars Hill Christian College. Mary Ellen, with incredible fine-art talents, selected Emerson College. And so it was time to share my vision for auditioning potential universities. I told Dad about my plans to do two weeks of college visits, mostly music conservatories and theater schools, including Berklee College of Music, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Manhattan School of Music, and more. I wasn’t expecting my dad’s response. It was swift and direct. He would not use his “hard-earned” money to support this nonsense and “no son of mine,” as he put it, would go to college for four years to become a “trained monkey.” (To this day, whenever I see a good monkey act, it makes me regret not learning how to train one myself. It would have driven my dad nuts.) Then he methodically listed all the reasons why a career in the entertainment business was not a career but a hobby.
It was then that I learned something that felt much worse than having my dreams cut off at the knees: My dad had replaced my plans for my future with his own plans. And his plans had little to do with me specifically; they were plans for the entire family, of which this major transformational moment of mine toward adulthood was merely a minor piece.
Over our pork chops and applesauce, Dad explained to my mom and me that he’d finally had enough of the rush-hour madness and working in New York City, so he and Mom were moving back to North Carolina. Since I was the last of the three children to graduate from Garden City High School, he continued, the high cost of property taxes in Garden City was no longer necessary. The plan was to move back to Winston-Salem, closer to Grandma and Grandpa Tesh, where Dad would take a lesser role at Hanes. He would leave Garden City for North Carolina when I started my senior year in the fall. Then, he would sell our home. Mom and I would downsize into an apartment on Seventh Street in downtown Garden City, close to school, so I could finish my last year of high school.
“Wait, what?” I said. “You’re selling the house? How big is this apartment? Can I have friends over?”
No response. I hadn’t even begun to think about the implications for college. That was the next arrow he pulled out of his quiver.
Because of his early move back to North Carolina, he said, he would be able to establish one full year of residency that would then qualify me for in-state tuition at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He would be able to save thousands on my education. Tuition would be $400 a semester versus $5,000. We would apply now for early admission into the textile chemistry program. Then, when I graduated, Dad would be able to secure me a job in the lab in the Hanes manufacturing plant. The day after high school graduation, Mom and I would drive the family car from New York to Winston-Salem. The rest of our belongings would follow in a moving van. He would make sure I had a summer job waiting for me in the Hanes mill.
I was now feeling faint. So many questions. Confusion. Panic. Dread. I looked down at my pork chop, now stone-cold on my dinner plate. I looked to Mom for assistance. She was looking at her pork chop. I was certain this was not her idea. Surely, I thought, she’ll step in, weigh in with her opinion, ask a few questions, something. This has to be as devastating for her as it is for me. Mom had close friends on Long Island and was a leader in our church family. She had put down roots for two decades. What about her weekly bridge game? What about . . .
My mind was racing. My face surely resembled what I envisioned was a victim in an Edgar Allen Poe story—prematurely interred, mouth open, soundless, buried alive. Seemingly helpless to do anything to combat a fate that had been decided for me, against my will. I could think of no other response in the aftermath of this news but to rise from the kitchen table and just walk the stairway up to my attic bedroom.
No one followed me. No one called out. There would be no debate. I closed the door to my room quietly, then drifted over to my record player and lowered the turntable arm onto my favorite Jimi Hendrix recording.
I’m not sure whom I felt worse for: me or my mom. Both of us were prisoners of this idyllic suburban fiction. Empathy for my mom was something I felt intuitively from an early age. There were many times, for instance, when I would be sitting with her, doing homework, and I would stop and ask, “Mom, what’s wrong?” She would smile and quickly deflect the question. As I got older, though, I realized not only were neither of us not alone in our struggle, but she was not alone as a woman, wife, and mother either.
This struggle was happening to millions of other women just like her after World War II ended and suburbia was born in earnest. Developers such as William Levitt bought up land just outside major American cities and built inexpensive, virtually identical tract houses throughout the 1950s. With a few exceptions, these homes were indistinguishable from one another. And with the GI Bill helping returning soldiers subsidize low-cost mortgages, often making it cheaper to buy in suburbia than rent in the city, young families flocked to these cookie-cutter homes with large family rooms and backyards.
But suburban life in the ’50s ended up being a mixed blessing for women. Men who had thrown back a few too many at the office in Philadelphia or Chicago or San Francisco or Manhattan and who took the last train home would wander aimlessly around their neighborhoods in a futile attempt to find their address—each home a clone of the one on either side of it. This often left wives on pins and needles as evening turned to night, waiting, hoping not to have to scoop up their husbands from the neighbors again.
Looking back now, many historians and clinical psychologists believe that the baby boom and the suburban sprawl of the 1950s had a horribly confining effect on many women. In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, women’s rights advocate Betty Friedan argued that the suburbs were “burying women alive.” Friedan said,
If a woman had a problem in the 1950s and 1960s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. . . . She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many other women shared it. If she tried to tell her husband, he didn’t understand what she was talking about. She did not really understand it herself.1
That was right on the money. My poor mom.