Tom McAllister
Three Essays 

1993

The cool kids in 6th grade had haircuts we called mushrooms: a fade stuck in a bad marriage with a bowl cut. I wanted the same haircut as those guys because girls talked to them and I also wanted to be talked to by girls. My dad took me to Tom & Al’s, a local institution where everyone knew that Al gave good haircuts and Tom did not, a fact I took personally, as if somehow I was accountable for the performance of all Toms everywhere (one of our regular games at recess was listing famous people with our names, and so I had compiled a thorough inventory of all known Toms, both good and bad). People sometimes waited an hour for Al, while Tom sat in his chair reading Playboy and I tried not to be caught peeking at the Playboy. The men around me talked about sports and women and how young people were not as good as they used to be. When a Dr. Dre song came on the radio, one man demanded that Tom turn off the “jungle music.”

I have never in my life had cool hair. The year before, I had mimicked my brother Kevin’s hairstyle and gotten a flattop, a boxy, weird haircut that held its shape when brushed back with a glue stick­–like product called Stix Fix. The best-case scenario was to look like Brian Bosworth, and the worst was to look like you had just failed the police exam for the third time. One of the older kids on the bus told me my head looked like a whitewall tire, an insult that made no sense to me then or now, but nonetheless upset me enough that a few days after this, I punched that guy’s younger brother in the back. Later, as a college freshman, I would try to grow my hair out like Jim Morrison’s, but it just got thicker and hotter and frizzier (on Instant Messenger, I told a girl I liked that I was growing it out, and the next time she saw me she said, “You look exactly the same”). Now, as more of my forehead reveals itself each year, my main goal is to just try not to look disheveled or too old.

My dad didn’t want to wait for Al, so he made me go to Tom. I was too shy to specifically request a mushroom, so I got a blocky and uneven fade instead. I wore a hat every day to hide it—a Pinky and the Brain ballcap my grandmother had bought me. While waiting for the bus, a classmate named Alissa turned to me and asked: “Why do you wear your hat so low?” We rarely spoke to each other, but I’d had a crush on her as long as I was aware of the possibility of having crushes. I told her I was wearing it that way as a joke, and to prove I didn’t care about my hat at all, I ripped it off and threw it into the bushes and decided never again to wear a hat. There is no way she remembers this conversation. She may not even remember me.

Everything changed hairwise in our school when Nick, one of the cool kids, showed up with his head shaved. The day before, he and his younger brother had had their bikes stolen by “some kids from Shawmont,” which was one of the public schools nearby, and which we all understood to mean “some black kids.” There are racists everywhere, but I didn’t realize until I lived outside this area how differently it manifests by location; in Philly, it is open and aggressive, whereas in other parts of the country, it’s more subdued and polite, though just as destructive. In grad school, I included the detail about “jungle music” in a short story, and a classmate who had grown up richer than anyone I have ever met said, “I don’t understand—is this story set in, like, the fifties?” Casual racism was just part of the atmosphere. Groups of men sat in circles and unhinged their jaws and let all the world’s garbage spew out onto the floor, and then they invited the kids to play in it.

Nick’s father, a Philly cop, was enraged, not at the thieves, but at his sons for having been robbed. He whipped them with a belt and then sat them in kitchen chairs and shaved their heads. They both had abrasions on their skulls where he’d shaved too aggressively. He told them, “If you didn’t have those ni---- haircuts you wouldn’t have got robbed,” which was presented to us as a punchline. Because you could still get detention for using that word at school, many guys had turned it around and called each other “Reggin” as a way of sneaking the slur into daily conversation. A guy named Eric had learned this trick from his father, also a cop. This was back when everyone’s dad was a cop and everyone’s mom was a nurse, there were only two jobs to have. I never used the word myself, but I stood there and laughed when everyone else said it. I laughed at every racist joke, especially the ones I didn’t really comprehend. I was a coward then and I’m often a coward now.

In my first book, I told the story of attending a neighborhood Christmas party in my first year as a homeowner in the Jersey suburbs, standing among a group of men and feeling that change in the atmosphere, when one of the guys looked over his shoulder and realized we’re all white here and nobody could yell at him for what he was about to say. He leaned in like a child on the playground telling a joke he’d stolen from his drunk uncle, some gag about monkeys or Obama or African names. Another guy bragged about the tricks he’d used to deter a black family from buying the house where we now lived. Later, one of these guys pointed at my Honda Civic and asked why I was driving “a dink car,” a slur I had never even heard before. When I saw one of those neighbors reading my book on his porch, I rushed across the street to reassure him that story was actually about racists in my old neighborhood. “I would hate to think we lived near anyone who thought like that,” he said. But he was the one who had made the jokes. He was the racist in the book, and he didn’t even remember it, or he did and he was daring me to call his bluff.

I am trying to get better at interrupting, saying, “I don’t really like this conversation,” or “I think you’ve got this all wrong,” or something. It’s not enough to just not be racist, or to feel bad about it; silence is a tacit approval of everyone else’s racist bullshit. A whole life devoted to avoiding awkwardness is pointless.

Well-meaning people have always pushed the notion that we just have to wait out the racists and watch them die off. The past few years have been a stark reminder of how stupid this idea is, how shortsighted and meaningless, to think the only way to fight racism is just to hang around and wait. Thanks to Facebook, I know Nick and his brother are Trump supporters and they spend days posting cruel memes about lazy Mexicans and Black thugs. They love the concept of walls, generally, and feel that most liberals should probably be put in jail, just to be safe. One of them has kids and they’ll grow up the same way.

After Nick and his brother got their heads shaved, everyone else followed. The principal sent a note home to parents addressing concerns that the head shaving was somehow a gang thing. My mom took me to get my head shaved too. In the middle of the shave, Tom stopped and called her over to say, “Something’s wrong here,” one of the worst things you can hear any barber say. My head was covered in scaly, peeling skin. Because I was half-shaved the only option was to finish the job and figure out the rest later. Within the space of our two-mile drive home, I convinced myself it was a terminal illness. It all scrubbed off in the shower, which meant it was probably just shampoo I had rubbed into my head without adequately rinsing. I spent the night lying in bed and wishing my hair could grow back, vowing never to cut it again. But hair grows at whatever rate it feels like growing. All I wanted then was to fundamentally change myself, but nothing I tried worked. I was changing all the time, but it was all out of my control.

2017

Our flight landed too early at Charles de Gaulle for us to get into our Airbnb, so we stood on the corner next to the Sully-Morland Métro stop, leaning on our suitcases at dawn and trying to look like we belonged there. I’m comfortable in cities generally, but we were both groggy, and LauraBeth, my wife, spoke only rudimentary French. Neither of us can sleep on planes, no matter what we try; this time, we’d both bought forty-dollar neck pillows with adjustable arms for cradling our heads, but when I wrapped mine around my neck all I could think was that I was a man using a forty-dollar travel pillow. The noise canceling headphones can’t cancel all the noise, and people are constantly in motion; sleep is not possible. On the flight, I watched Moonlight, and tried to read The Brothers Karamazov, but felt claustrophobic among all those blustery Russians pontificating about the existence of God while strangers brushed their asses against my shoulder on their way to the bathroom. High art doesn’t belong in economy class. We had euthanized the dog only 24 hours ago, and we were disoriented beyond any function. Our only goal was to be ignored by strangers until we could get into a bed. The city was still waking up, so for long stretches, nobody passed us at all.

I called the Airbnb caretaker, a Croatian woman who spoke some French and less English. She said something that sounded like she was coming to unlock the door soon. In America, I would have passed the time scrolling through my phone, but without an international data plan, my only option was to look at the world. LauraBeth and I talked about Daisy, the beagle-basset mix who had stopped eating and drinking a week ago and begun confining herself in the darkest corner of our bedroom. The vet said she could run a battery of tests, but at Daisy’s advanced age, it seemed cruel to subject her to more suffering. She gave us a rubric for determining when it’s humane to euthanize: list the six things she most loved to do, and if she’s only doing half of them (or fewer), then you can be pretty confident her quality of life is poor. I’m not sure whether I even have six distinct things I like to do (recently, I traveled to another university to speak to some classes, and afterward the faculty took me out to dinner; the Dean of Arts and Sciences asked me how I fill my spare time, and I told him “I watch a lot of sports,” to which he replied, “Okay, but what do you like to do?”). It’s a calculation I now make often, trying to determine if an activity I’m engaged in would make my list of six, if I could live without it, if it was simply a waste of time. We kept reassuring ourselves that we had made the right choice. You have to do that after you put a dog down because the guilt never goes away.

When we finally got into our room, I connected to the Wi-fi to email my mom. She’s always anxious when we’re traveling, and was especially concerned about us going to Europe in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. There’s a chance that if you travel to any place in the world, a terrorist could kill you. There’s a chance that either of us could be shot at our jobs, or in the mall, or at the grocery store. There’s a chance my neighbor could be stockpiling military-grade weapons and waiting to ambush everyone at next weekend’s farmers’ market. I struggle sometimes to shut down that voice in my head, the one that says the only safe move is to never go anywhere, because if you go there, you might die.

After reassuring my mom, I checked the news. Overnight, torch-wielding white supremacists had marched in Charlottesville, chanting “You will not replace us.” In the aftermath, the President was personally aggrieved at having to declare that Nazi marches are bad. He’s one of the least subtle men in history, so it was easy to see that, on some level, he thought Heather Heyer deserved to die (he has since repeatedly expressed regret at having criticized the white supremacists, who, it goes without saying, love him because of his racism). I was too tired to process all this information. I had never held out any hope for this President to be anything other than an historic disgrace, but I had also never imagined the specific details with which the disgrace would unfold. Everyone at home had been asking if we felt safe flying to France, and meanwhile, in the U.S., racist gangs were murdering people in the middle of an idyllic little college town.

I had been to Charlottesville that March to promote my novel. For three months in 2017, I traveled to literary events and my publisher paid for it, which briefly made me feel very important, even when few people turned up to my events. In Boston, we got three guests and made no sales because the books were never delivered to the store. Afterward, I ordered a $23 bourbon at the hotel bar and lost my credit card. In Charlottesville, I sold four books, and I ate a great burger and had an afternoon beer before boarding my bus home. I was on the bus when LauraBeth called to tell me her father had died. I was four hours away and useless to her. I had edits due on a new book and had to email the editor to explain that I could not possibly hit my deadline.

It was a busy and often unhappy year. In the backdrop of all of it were the protests. In January, my promotional event in Vermont had been a success, but when I landed at home, the airport was overrun with people protesting the Muslim ban. I heard a police officer telling his partner he wished someone would just knock all these faggots out, and I thought it would be easier to like the police if they didn’t act so much like cops all the time.

It would have been beautiful if flying across the ocean had allowed us to forget it all. That’s what travel was like before the internet; you packed some bags and flew a couple hundred miles away and home just did not exist. At least we got to sleep in a different bed and eat different foods. Our trip in summary: learning the Métro & climbing lots of stairs & walking & taking pictures & gargoyles & wine carafes & outdoor cafes & crêpes & a downpour at Versailles & so much cheese. We left the flat early every morning because our toilet had broken and would not flush, so we had to find cafés with public toilets. Over breakfast, I read the terrible news to LauraBeth, who wished I would stop reading the news. The Eiffel Tower was a grimy and unpleasant spectacle. Everywhere, there were police and military carrying assault rifles. I never felt unsafe, not because of the security but because it would have been so pointless to die on vacation (I keep thinking your death has to mean something, I keep reminding myself it almost never does).

We celebrated our tenth anniversary in a bistro across the street from our flat. Sometimes while we’re eating together, I’ll think about how miraculous it is that we still have things to talk about. The incredible fortune of finding someone who can tolerate you for so long! While we ate, the President tweeted in defense of Confederate monuments, and about how important it is to protect our borders. I thought, for the first time in my life, what if we just don’t go back there? Who will even notice?
 

2022

The night before my 40th birthday, I had a dream about going to Dalessandro’s, the famous cheesesteak shop where I worked through high school and most of college. Though I quit that job in 2003—hastily, after a fight about unfavorable schedules—I still regularly have stress dreams about it. Slips piling up, customers shouting at me, giant hunks of frozen beef that won’t cook no matter how hard I hack away at them. I dream of rolls crumbling into dust in my hands. Of brown bags that never fill up no matter how many sandwiches I shove inside them. On the worst nights, I wake up coursing with adrenaline, that overwhelming sensation of being in the weeds, familiar to anyone who has worked in food service. But in this particular dream, I was a customer, and the place, which in real life hasn’t been updated in any meaningful way since the early 70s, had changed dramatically. Fresh paint and new stylish flooring and marble countertops. The fridge that used to hold 40 ounce bottles of Colt 45 was now full of craft microbrews. The grim factory vibe I knew so well had been supplanted by a joyous atmosphere. The cooks were so young they looked like a different species. Back when I was the youngest guy on the griddle, nobody knew how to talk to me. One waitress always made time to tell me that kids my age are too stupid to know anything. Another one pulled me aside one bleak Friday afternoon and warned me, “Whatever you do, do not spend the rest of your life here.”

In my dream, I ordered a cheesesteak with provolone, fried onions, and pizza sauce, but they didn’t have any of the ingredients I wanted. They handed me a menu, but I couldn’t read it. I kept trying to tell the young guys stories about my days in their shoes and they looked through me, as if I were speaking in a frequency they couldn’t hear.

I’m reluctant to attribute too much meaning to dreams, but this one seems pretty straightforward. Sometimes you actually do have portentous dreams and sometimes things really do symbolize other things.

The evening of my birthday, LauraBeth and I walked toward South Street in Philly for the first time since before the pandemic. With each tentative step, there was a sense of rediscovery. Restaurants we’d been to dozens of times. The corner of 3rd & Bainbridge where we’d once been caught in a torrential downpour while helping a friend move into his apartment. The coffee shop where I’d been served by a former student who’d gotten an F in my course and, I swear, glared at me the whole time, until I left a ten dollar tip without taking a sip. It was all the same but it wasn’t. It’s hard enough to keep up with it all even in normal times.

We had dinner at a French bistro that I love, a place that had closed down for the first two years of the pandemic while the chef made ends meet cooking private meals for clients. I ordered the exact same meal I’d had there three years earlier, probably on another birthday. Carafe of house white, oeuf du pêcheur, trout meunière. Shared crème brûlée for dessert. Inside, the only difference between then and now was that the servers wore masks. We wore masks, too, when we walked to and from the restroom, under the theory, I supposed, that the deadly virus could only spread if we were in motion. I’m not supposed to be so flippant, but we’d all been living with it so long I didn’t care anymore. I mean, I cared. But not the same way I did two years earlier. If you think about it all too much, you can fall apart.

We wanted to get a drink after dinner, and although I still think of Philly as my city, still pride myself on knowing my way around every little pocket of town, I sat there Googling “bars near me” because I couldn’t remember what used to be there. Couldn’t even guess what was there now.

We ended up at Tattooed Mom, one of the few counterculture-type places left on South Street, which is more like a sad shopping mall these days. They checked our vaccine cards thoroughly; T-Mom’s is one of the very few businesses I’ve encountered that seemed to take their own precautions seriously. I led LauraBeth upstairs, where local artists have covered the walls and ceiling in so many layers of graffiti and wheatpastes and stickers and so on that the room must shrink by a few square centimeters every year. An imperceptible compression of the space until the day comes when there is no room left for anyone to stand.

Everyone else upstairs was half my age. Younger people were more likely to be out and about then anyway—most of my cohort was still taking their first tentative steps back into normalcy, many of my friends and colleagues having gone all this time without even entering a grocery store—but also everyone around me is getting younger all the time. Some days, I feel acutely that I am the only person who is aging. Other days, I feel fine. Four years ago, I was center stage in this room, reading from my critically-acclaimed novel, but that was so long ago it may as well have never happened. I fooled myself for a while into thinking that moment would be transformative for my career, for my life overall. Nobody up there on this night knew about it; there was no reason for them to. They were drunk and young and playing pool and sitting on each other’s laps. Some of them were about to make catastrophic decisions. Some of them would think of nights like this as the best in their lives. If they noticed me, it was only because I was in their way. You don’t really have a choice in whether you become obsolete or not, but I think there’s some dignity in acknowledging it.

In the year leading up to your 40th birthday, there’s a lot of external pressure to make a big deal about it. Even if you insist it is not a big deal. Especially if you insist. For at least six months, friends and family asked me what plans I had. Would I rent out a hall? A party boat? Some talked about their own plans, the trips, the goals to achieve beforehand—races, promotions, new hobbies. They talked about “bucket lists,” and I struggled to engage because I don’t even especially care for the phrase “kick the bucket,” it sounds like the way a child would process death, and I admit to being an annoying pedant regarding the meaning of the term bucket list, which I realize for most people means “some stuff I want to do someday” though it originated as literally “the final tasks I must complete before I die.” I didn’t want to do a big party. Eventually, a week or two later, we did a medium party, and everyone had a nice time. My youngest niece gave me a hand-made card with a drawing of a rainbow and the message: Uncle Tom—You are SO OLD.

That night at dinner, before we went out to the bar and surrounded ourselves with young people, the waitress asked if we were celebrating anything. When I said it was my 40th birthday, she rubbed my shoulder, leaned in, and asked me, sincerely, if my day had been okay. If I felt okay. I said I did. I said it really just felt like another day. She said, “When I turned 30. I sat under my covers alone all day and cried. But when I turned 40, I woke up and didn't feel anything at all. I just got out of bed and I said Fuck it, that's all there is.”

Tom McAllister is the author of four books, including the forthcoming collection It All Felt Impossible, from which these essays are excerpted. He is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse and teaches creative writing at Rutgers-Camden. He lives in New Jersey.