The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [32]
My coach’s name was Morgan. Morgan was a big man, ex-military, with curly black hair, a black mustache, and a softening middle. He looked a little like a post-rehab version of Keith Hernandez—soft-spoken, deferential, all nose and mustache. Morgan had originally come on the Encounter Weekend at the behest of his wife, who apparently was a coach long before he was.
There were four other men in our group. Besides myself, there was Jose, huge Mexican with a sheepish expression and a steam-boiler body; Aaron, a squat and alert Pennsylvanian with a clean-and-jerker’s build; and Dennis, a somewhat vacant and medicated-looking man pushing forty with a bald head a stubbly beard. Dennis looked like a distantly menacing version of Homer Simpson after electroshock therapy. Seated just a few feet away from us in our tight circle, he gazed out at us like he could barely make out our faces. I was worried about him from the start.
Once Morgan had us all gathered together, we looked for table space in the cafeteria area of the main building. Ominously, each of the cafeteria tables had a fresh box of Kleenex resting on top of it.
“Well,” Morgan said, “I think what we’re going to do, to start, is this. I’m going to tell you my story about my wound, and then we’re going to go around in a circle and each of us is going to just tell his story. Is that okay?”
Everyone nodded. I noted with displeasure that I was seated first after Morgan in clockwise order. Already I was panicking; what kind of wound could a human cipher like myself possibly confess to?
Morgan told his story. I was so nervous that I could barely listen, but from what I could make out, he was not doing so well with the group. Even a perfunctory look at my fellow group members told me that we had people here with some very serious problems, and yet Morgan’s wound was a tale that wouldn’t have even ruined a week of my relatively privileged childhood, much less my whole life—something about being yelled at by his dad while he was out playing with remote-controlled airplanes with his friends as a thirteen-year-old. He hammed up his trauma over the incident in classically lachrymose Iron-John-in-touch-with-his-inner-boy fashion (again, there is something very odd about modern Christian men—although fiercely pro-military in their politics and prehistorically macho in their attitudes toward women’s roles, on the level of day-to-day behavior they seem constantly ready to break out weeping like menopausal housewives), but his words were bouncing off a wall of unimpressed silence radiating from the group.
“Anyway,” he said, “that’s my story. Does anyone have any questions?”
Blank stares. This was a tough crowd. To buy time, I asked, “Did you ever talk to your dad about that incident?”
He said he hadn’t, then said something about never really making up with his father. Five minutes into our group acquaintance, we were at a full 9.5 out of 10 on the International Uncomfortable Silence scale.
Morgan turned, glanced again at my name tag, and sighed.
“Well, uh, okay, then,” he said. “Matthew, do you want to tell your story?”
My heart was pounding. I obviously couldn’t use my real past—not only would it threaten my cover, but I was somewhat reluctant to expose anything like my real inner self to this ideologically unsettling process—but neither did I want to be trapped in a story too far from my own experience. What I settled on eventually was something that I thought was metaphorically similar to the truth about myself.
“Hello,” I said, taking a deep breath. “My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversized shoes.”
The group twittered noticeably. Morgan’s eyes opened to tea-saucer size. I closed my own eyes and kept going, immediately realizing what a mistake I’d made. There was no way this story was going to fly. But there was no turning back.
“He’d be sitting there in his