This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

    Years ago, a man came into my classroom and handed out fliers for his missing kid. Now this guy was big and intimidating, and he was clearly very angry, so I thought to myself “okay, he’s pissed off that his kid’s run away.” Not unreasonable, it can be stressful tracking down a runaway. But if he really wanted to find the boy, why did he give me such a blurry photo?

Tobias Wolff’s autobiography of his lousy childhood doesn’t have a an especially complicated story. It’s the 1960’s, the author’s parents split, the father keeps the older brother, his wife keeps their younger son “Jack” with her. First they go to Utah to try Uranium prospecting (does anybody even remember that craze?) and then to Washington State, where she hooks up with a brute named Dwight and things get rough. There’s no self-indulgence here, no self-pity or the “I had a horrible life” attitude. I expect that after living a life with unreliable parents, you learn to do more on your own, and he certainly does; paper routes, work, forging his report card so he can get into boarding school. When he finds out that his stepfather has stolen his money, he makes one last dash to get revenge; he sneaks back into the house, steals Dwight’s guns, and pawns them. This had to be the best part of the book.

Tobias Wolff’s memoir is no surprise to me, but the story isn’t typical of the period. His mother shacks up with a man who has kids and is legally married to someone else, so this would have raised eyebrows at the time. Then again, his mother is completely spineless, so why wouldn’t she shack up with a brute like Dwight? Since this was the 1960’s, a time when cohabitation was not allowed, I could tell it was going to be bad. This man already has kids of his own to take care of, so what does he want with a woman who brings along another one? Tobias’ older brother gets to live with their father, who doesn’t pay any child support, so in effect the boy is told that he doesn’t count. Perhaps he only expects the very worst? When he tries to escape by asking an uncle in Paris to take him in, his mother writes in advance that Toby has problems, so that option doesn’t work out either.

   Perhaps I’ not shocked by this story because I’ve seen it before. There are families where the father is an abusive drill sergeant, the mother is completely spineless, and the kids grow up angry. But This Boy’s Life takes place in the early 60’s, and not only was Tobias (he calls himself “Jack” in his youth) dealing with a brute stepfather and coward of a mother, but he was also dealing with a lack of rights. It was an era when a man wouldn’t get jail time for beating his stepson and stealing the kid’s money.

Back when I was 13, I was in a bible study class and we got to the part where the Jews say “let’s go back to Egypt, I miss the food, I miss the melons, I miss the onions.” The teacher said to us “we learn a lesson here, don’t dream of the past, it was never as good as you remember.” When I disagreed, he said “Ben, we didn’t have to lock our doors when I was your age, because we had nothing to steal!” As for this book, maybe the message is “the past sucks” and we shouldn’t look back? Perhaps this book is an anti-tribute to the Eisenhower-Kennedy era? It certainly makes life in the 50’s and 60’s look horrible; women had no rights, kids had no rights, men controlled the family finances, kids had no advocates, nobody ever believed a kid who said he was being abused.

This is why I never believed Michael Jackson when he said “I was robbed of my childhood.” I would say “childhood sucks Michael, you didn’t miss anything!”