“Hell is other people,” said Sartre, and he was not wrong.
After the eviction, my father came apart at the seams. Most days he laid on a frayed blue couch in the family room with his face pressed against the paisley flower cushions. For two years, until I left for college, I passed through that room every day. I kept one ear open to listen for the sound of him stirring; sometimes, if I timed it right, I could pass through the room after he had made his way to the shed behind the house where he fought an endless battle to keep our ancient cars running.
A few months after all of this began, on an afternoon where I thought my father was in the shed, I sat in my sister’s bedroom. In a hushed voice I began to speak my thoughts out loud: “What is wrong with Dad? What the fuck? He lays there all day and now Mom is taking care of some old lady who is losing her mind and there’s no food in the fridge and my skin crawls when I’m here at this house. Has Dad lost his mind? What is happening to our family? It’s disgusting to see him laying there every day…”
I heard a creak outside the door and trailed off. My heart began to pound. Why had I spoken out loud like this? I had make a terrible mistake; I knew these kinds of thoughts could never be spoken.
I opened the bedroom door and saw my father sitting on the paisley couch. I glanced up at him, and on his face was all the rage that had laid inside him eating at his heart for as long as I had been alive. It was right there now, no longer buried beneath a joke, within his shuckin and jivin, nor beneath veiled Old Testament references to Abraham putting his son Isaac on the altar under the knife. I saw hatred. “You’re no son of mine,” he said.
Yes, hell is other people–but only after we have made a hell within ourselves. When the wound comes to pierce us, as it did for me that day, it dispels our innocence. I moved into myself for a long time, the way a tree sheds its leaves for a long winter. I was fifteen years old, but I had witnessed the death of my father, in spirit. And my own death as a son.
But as I learned twenty years later–long after I thought I knew the rules that govern life–the innocence may return in a different form.
In those decades, I became a man alone in the world from other men. The wound congealed around my heart, and the scar tissue became tough. “It’s good that it hurts. The more it hurts, the more pain there is, the stronger I will become,” I said to myself. “Because I will eat it.” I began to visualize pain–physical, emotional, mental–as a glowing coal. I took this coal and ate it down.
This was my way of creating a hell inside myself. I wonder how old my father was when he created his? Was it when his father told him he should never have been born? Was it when his mother laughed her mirthless laugh and reached for another cigarette?
“We do not see the world as it is. We see it as we are,” said Anais Nin. Then yes, for a long time, hell was other people.
But remember too what Thoreau said: “The world does not change. We change.”
new gods 