Tough guys don’t dance. You had better believe it.
—Norman Mailer
Genesis
The Southside me isn’t a pleasant dude. He was born in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago, among tough Polish and Irish. His father worked in a tile factory off Archer and could get Southside, too, with a Thai accent. But you couldn’t take him all that seriously, because he was short and liked his slacks pressed and wore golfing polos. A Southsider needs nothing more than jeans and a T-shirt. If the winds get rough in the winter, a hoodie will do, or a denim jacket. A Southsider wears only gym shoes—dirty ones—so he can book it out of any situation. See ya.
When I was young, I got picked on a lot, a Peter Parker–type before he got bitten by the radioactive spider and started kickin’ ass. For a while I took it. I buried all that hurt, that rage, inside, and there it sat building and building. Then one day, in third grade, the Southside me came out unexpectedly, like a Chicago gust. He unleashed himself on Dan Flavin, class clown, who had called my mom something not right earlier in the day. Rule 1: Don’t ever mess with a Southsider’s mom. People die for shit like that. So when Dan Flavin stood in line to go potty, the Southside me rabbit punched Dan Flavin in the back and watched Dan Flavin crumple to the ground. When the teacher asked what happened, Dan Flavin pointed at the Southside me, but I transformed back into the goody-goody everyone knew; the teacher didn’t believe a word Dan Flavin said.
But that punch—it felt good, you know? It felt like the Southside me could fuck anything up. So, at nine, he enrolled in tae kwon do and got a black belt. He studied Muay Thai at temple, though he despised the other students, a bunch of Sally Northsiders, a bunch of doctors’ brats. He watched boxing and practiced his jab and right hook against walls; no joke. Made his knuckles callused and hard. The Southside me was getting himself well-versed in the fine arts of terminating, even though he was Buddhist, and, as a Buddhist, he shouldn’t hurt an ant. He fucked ants up, though, by the mound, and it didn’t matter what his mom said—the thing about coming back as an ant in the next life—because the Southside me, he believed only in the moment; he was never seconds ahead of himself.
Secret Identity
Most of the time, I’m quiet. I smile. I listen. I’m the guy who manages to say nothing and remain memorable, like it or not. It is not an act, I assure you. It is residue from a past I’m still trying to piece together. Why is it I seek the back of a room? Why is it that in large social gatherings I feel trapped? I was a shy and anxious boy, but some of that sifted away, and what is left are these particles I cling to.
Most of the time, this is the person everyone sees. The gentle fat man. I am cordial to strangers, quick to say hello in the hallways of work, and like to leave presents for people just because. It is not an act, I assure you. It is, at times, a hindrance. Moments when the other me is needed, he doesn’t come out. He stays in his cave, and I find myself smiling and apologizing too often.
Most of the time, I preoccupy myself with frivolous things, like my image. It’s not an act, I assure you. I dress well—sporting nice long-sleeved shirts and stylish jeans. I wear hip black-rimmed glasses—Versace—and sport different types of hats—the fedora, the Kangol cap. I’m obsessive when it comes to shoes. I own at least thirty pairs and each are coordinated with an outfit.
Most of the time, everyone describes me as nice. I like the simplicity of the word, though my wife always says, “Before I met you, everyone considered me the nice one.” At this I laugh and think, They don’t know the whole truth, do they?
Talk the Talk
A Southsider doesn’t finish the ending of his words, doesn’t enunciate his consonants, and oftentimes mumbles. He ends his sentences with questions, you know? His voice dwells in his throat, and his mouth barely opens when he speaks. A Southsider shortens everything. He doesn’t like “Ira” or his whole last name; he perfers “I” or “Suke.” He has mastered the word “fuck”: “That Sally fuck”; “What a fuckin’ D-bag”; “Stupid fuck-o.” On average, every third word is usually “fuck.” It’s the clearest word in a sentence, a word that has a variety of meanings, depending on inflection and body language. “Fuck you” with a laugh means “Are you kidding me?” “Fuck you” with a stiff pat on the back means “I love you.” “Fuck you” in the lowest of tones means “I’m gonna kill you.” That’s another word a Southsider doesn’t take lightly—“kill.” We don’t joke about it.
Once when my wife and I first dated, she said she’d kill me in jest.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t. But there must have been a look on my face. Of confusion, of fear. I could feel the hair on my neck rise. The last time someone said that to me, the Southsider came out and had to bump a few heads before someone broke the skirmish up. But here was this longhaired woman from the prairie, this poet, and I was falling for her.
“I’m kidding,” she said. “My family says it all the time.”
“Oh.”
“It’s part of our language.”
“Oh.”
“I love you,” she said.
And if there’s another word a Southsider fears, even more than “kill,” then it’s this one, “love.” Another four letters, sharp like a blade.
Landscape
The Southside me is like the Southside neighborhoods with the cracked and weedy sidewalks, the eroding brown-brick buildings, the abandoned factories. The Southside resists any type of change, unless it’s for the worse. Ask my father who was laid off after twenty years. Ask my friends, who are still there, trying hard to make something for themselves. Ask the closed-down industries. But amid the deterioration, there exists loyalty. It’s like a tiny flower sprouting in a mound of shit.
Who Are You?
In my junior year of high school, I had an English teacher who challenged students with wit, sarcasm, and difficult questions. I don’t remember her name, but I remember reading a lot of slave narratives and Native American literature. I also remember the pointed scowl she gave smart-ass students to shut them up, which usually worked, a miracle, considering she taught a bunch of insubordinate Southside kids who would rather be anywhere else in the world but in an American literature class.
I sat with a group of guys who sat next to the cutest girls in the class, and I watched my friends pass notes back and forth, the girls giggling each time they read what the guys wrote.
Once this teacher—I think her last name began with a B—snatched one of the notes in transit and read it aloud.
“You’re telling me this is more important than A Light in August?” Ms. B said. She carefully unraveled the note, her pinkies pointing up. Her glasses dangled around her neck, but she never put them on. She lifted them up and squinted, peering through them like they were a magnifying glass.
“How did you get out of the third grade, Mr. Wolfe, with handwriting like yours?”
Brian Wolfe—B-Bear—wasn’t fazed. He was cocky, like all Southsiders, and liked the attention. Smiling, he said, “My mom says the same thing.”
Ms. B ambled to the front of the room. She always presented the demeanor of a woman not from this time period, but one who strolled along the Seine in Paris with a parasol. “Well, isn’t this the question of the class? I had hoped we could discuss this today in light of our readings. What Mr. Wolfe has written so sloppily to Ms. Styx is: I would like to know you better.”
The class laughed. B-Bear mouthed I do at Gina Styx, who was so red she hid her face in her arms.
“Hasn’t it been the case this quarter,” Ms. B said, “that all the texts we have read come back to the question of identity? Who are we? Where do we come from? To whom do we owe our roots?” Ms. B pointed at B-Bear. “Let’s start with you, Mr. Wolfe. Please inform the class where your family originated.”
“I’m all Irish, baby.” Many in the class hooted.
Ms. B went around the room, asking each student where he or she came from, and to be precise. Most of the class said they were Italian, Polish, or Irish. There was a student whose parents were from Pakistan and grandparents were from India. An exchange student from Denmark said he wasn’t Danish at all but Swedish and German. A girl in the class said she had Indian blood, Cherokee, she thought, but she was mostly Mexican.
Another said, “I’m everything that makes white, which is too much to list.”
I dreaded the question. I was sixteen, and all I wanted to do was blend.
So when it was my turn to speak, I gave a smartass answer: “I’m a Chicagoan.”
B-Bear patted my back and said, “Damn straight.”
“Ira,” Ms. B said. I was the only student she did not address with a formal title. “Be serious.”
“A Southsider,” I said.
“Hell yeah,” B-Bear said.
“I am laughing on the inside,” Ms. B said, her face without affect.
Later that semester, Ms. B told me during a conference that I was confused. On my papers, I wrote eloquent and insightful responses to the work we had read that semester. In class, I was a brainless twit. “Eventually, you’ll have to choose.” Ms. B put on her glasses for the first time and peered at me. “Which one will you be?”
Secret
The Southside me is not as tough as he thinks he is. He is, in fact, weak. He’s power without a source. Don’t tell him, though. It would destroy him.
Conflict
After nine years of marriage, my wife doesn’t like the Southsider. She’s from the sincere part of Illinois, where the tallest structures aren’t skyscrapers but silos, where strangers can become friends in seconds, where physical confrontation is the last thing people want to be involved in. She knows when the Southsider has kidnapped her husband’s body. She can tell by the tone of his voice, the half-smile that almost looks like a sneer. He comes out sometimes without notice or prelude. He’s just there, an unwanted guest, and everything in his demeanor says cocky and unmotivated. Everything out of his mouth is sarcastic and insincere.
“What’s wrong with you?” my wife says.
“Nothing.”
“You’re lying.”
He doesn’t look at her. He knows this woman can take him down with kindness. To look at her is to look at defeat.
“Something’s up,” she says. “You’re acting weird.”
It isn’t weird to the Southsider. It simply is.
“Nothing,” he says.
“You’ve been like this since morning.”
“Like what?” And this is when he looks at her. With that smile. With that attitude. Like a challenge.
“Like this.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He really doesn’t. Because to a Southsider, to admit something is wrong is to admit a flaw. A Southsider is not flawed.
“Don’t talk to me until you’re better,” she says. This usually does it. This wakes him up. And what follows, though he abhors it, is an apology.
Guilt
A Southsider can be from anywhere, not just Chicago. I’ve met some in upstate New York, in Florida, in Ohio. They usually hail from dying cities, like Cleveland, and Rochester, and Pittsburgh. They grew up in middle class families. Some of them, like me, have been far removed from their Southside roots, yet they can’t fully shake the Southside out of them. They cling to that part of them like a security blanket. And if they do forget, even for a minute, guilt, heavy and suffocating, sits on their chest.
Lesson
At Sunday school, during Buddhism class, our Ajahn—monk teacher—told the story of Angulimala, a serial killer turned monk. I wasn’t the best student. Usually, I sat in a corner of the room, doodling. This lesson, however, caught my attention. It was the detail of the severed thumbs that did it.
The tale of Angulimala is like most Buddhist parables: a man takes a wrong path and continues along this path because he feels he is far beyond saving. Angulimala’s path was that of a murderer. As a young man, Angulimala’s teacher, jealous of his student’s virtuous nature, gave a false prophecy that if Angulimala didn’t kill one thousand people, he would risk an early death. Out of his mind, Angulimala began slaying anyone who crossed his path. He cut off his victims’ thumbs as memorabilia and, at first, hung the thumbs on trees. But birds carried the thumbs away. For safekeeping, he began to wear the thumbs around his neck.
Years and years went by, and finally Angulimala needed one more victim to reach one thousand. He saw two people on the road—one was his mother (the Southsider’s weakness!) and the other Buddha. He decided to kill Buddha, so he chased after him, his legs working hard on the dirt road, but he never gained ground. The harder Angulimala ran, the farther he was from Buddha. It seemed improbable that a man who dashed at full speed could not catch a monk who walked.
“Yo, Monk,” Angulimala said, panting. “What’s up with you?”
Buddha turned to Angulimala, head glowing with wisdom, and said, “What do you mean?”
“Why don’t you stop, so I can kill you?” Angulimala said, still winded.
“I have stopped, man,” Buddha said. “You haven’t.”
These words saved Angulimala, of course, and he became a disciple of Buddha for the remainder of his life.
Afterward, our Ajahn said that most of us possessed a good and a bad, two identities intertwined in one body. Enlightenment is the merging of the two, which leads to a deeper understanding of existence. What purpose, one should ask, does each identity serve?
“Purpose?” a Southsider would say. “What the fuck?”
In Buddhism, the purpose to life is to end suffering, just as Angulimala ended his after realizing his sins and adopting the Buddhist path. But the Southsider is, in many ways, the embodiment of suffering. He is a suffering boy, in a suffering neighborhood, in a suffering city, in a suffering country, in a suffering world. He is drowning in it.
Highlights
Once the Southside me emerged and wrote a letter to his Southside friends about how much he hated them; it was scathing in its delivery, prose littered with capital letters and exclamation points.
Once the Southside me emerged and pushed a kid so hard against a locker it dented.
Once the Southside me emerged and dirty danced the shit out of a blonde at a nightclub. After the dance he grabbed her face and kissed her. They never exchanged a word.
Once the Southside me emerged and rolled a bowling ball out of a minivan going sixty miles per hour. He wanted to test that physics law he learned at school.
Once the Southside me swung the car around mid-traffic to address a man he saw kick a dog. He didn’t care about the car horns or dirty looks. He said to the man, “You kick that dog again, I will fuck your face up. Got me?”
Once the Southside me emerged and whipped a chair across a classroom because of a bad breakup. He was sent to see the school psychiatrist and commenced a forty-minute stare off, which he won.
Once the Southside me emerged and sat in front of his house on a lawn chair with a baseball bat and a bucket of golf balls. It was Halloween, and this Halloween he’d be damned if someone was going to fuck with the mailbox again.
Once the Southside me emerged and threw quarter sticks of dynamite out of his car in the Forest Preserves. Why? Because it was fun.
Once the Southside me emerged and crashed a Southside party with other Southsiders, and the Southside me delivered the best line of the night; when asked if he felt tough tonight, he said, “I’m tough every night.”
The Good Side
The truth is the Southside me could be fun to be around. Find him at a party. Notice how the party gravitates around him. Listen to his laughter, a joyous sound. Watch how his face wears a permanent smile. During these moments he is not conscious of his deficiencies. He does not worry about what he looks like to others. He doesn’t care what people say about him. He does not concern himself about being a good son, husband, friend, dog-father, writer, teacher, and all the other roles he plays. He simply exists. This is his most natural Buddhist state.
Aging
In the last few months, I’ve seen less and less of him. As I get older, so does he, and, perhaps, he knows there’s not much need for him anymore. He’s not there when someone cuts me off or when the neighbor’s house alarm goes off at six in the morning. I miss him, but I would never say it to his face. I miss him like we miss our memories—a nostalgic longing, a yearning to have time back. I miss him in that he provided access to a rarely known side of me, and, at times, it was liberating, despite the trouble he caused. Trouble can be, as he says, a source of comfort.
Now he comes in those quiet times, baseball cap turned backward in stone-faded jeans and a Just Do Me T-shirt. He taps my shoulder. He nods. He says, “Yo.” He says, “You forget about me?”
And I tell him in the sweetest voice I can muster, “How can I?”
Ira Sukrungruang is the author of four nonfiction books This Jade World, Buddha’s Dog & other mediations, Southside Buddhist and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy; the short story collection The Melting Season; and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the president of Sweet: A Literary Confection and the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.
Photo by Mike Wojan from Pexels