Townie Essay

Anna Kleis

Professor Zabalbeascoa

FYSH: Text and the City HON 110-303

8 May 2015

The Road to Violence then Recovery

Throughout his life and especially early on, Andre Dubus never seemed to elude the violence directed at him and others no matter where he lived. School fights and street fights occurred daily with or without warnings. When Andre was twelve years old and living with his family in Haverhill, he describes school fights as being commonplace: “You’d see some boy getting his face punched over and over, and soon a teacher or vice principal would push his way through to break it up” (10). Over and over again, Andre would cluster around the fight with his fellow classmates and eventually become desensitized and immune to the violence that he would then utilize, himself, on the streets. At a bar, Andre initiates a fight with Steve Lynch, “swinging and swinging…his lower face wet and red, his mouth a dark hole though my fist felt nothing…” to satisfy his need for bloodshed (128). 

As the memoir progresses, Andre justifies his need to fight with the excuse to protect anyone and everyone.  He evolves from the victim to the aggressor and inflicts brutality against others, causing him to always be surrounded by violence.  From an unlawful person throwing a Molotov cocktail into his mother’s car to getting into countless bar fights, this perpetual cycle of fighting and chaos affected Andre tremendously. Andre is a product of his environment; his setting, economic circumstances, constant fear and humiliation, family dynamics, gender, and education that ultimately produces his art that is writing all expose Andre to violence and open his eyes to salvation from it. Similar to Andre, Mickey Ward, portrayed by Mark Wahlberg in “The Fighter,” resorts to violence as a lifestyle because of his upbringing in the poor neighborhoods of Lowell, Massachusetts.

This memoir is filled with endless fights, the details graphic and very palpable. Whether it is one of the bi-weekly school fights, brief street fights, or lengthy beat-downs, Andre captures the essence of what it is like to be the victimizer. One scene that is especially striking is the fight in the diner that Andre starts with the person who pulled the knife on his friend, Sam. Andre is relentless in his attack: “look how he falls to the tiled floor, look how he curls up on his side and covers his face and squirms for the door…I straddle him and keep punching him in the skull, the ear, the temple, his bare hands, his neck…I’m standing and kicking him in the head” (225). This truly shows Andre’s undiluted rage that was typically inflicted among his victims. These outbursts are direct consequences of Andre’s upbringing in poor neighborhoods surrounded by drugs, alcohol, violence, and a lack of parental structure.

The settings of Newburyport and Haverhill that Andre and his family resided in throughout his childhood and adolescence were detrimental to his upbringing. Because of the divorce and his father’s lack of child support payments, Andre’s mom singlehandedly raised her four children. They were forced to shack up in the poorest parts of each town they moved to, living like scavengers. They ignored “the five days of dishes stacked in the kitchen sink and on the counters…the dust everywhere, the loose hairs, the grit tracked over the linoleum floors and throw rugs…” because they could (50). After a fourteen-hour work day and a mindless dinner, Andre’s mom possessed neither the time nor energy to clean, let alone look after her own children. In his surroundings, it seemed as though Andre lived a “survival of the fittest” lifestyle because he needed to survive, and the only way he could was to be fit, a quality he acquired even though “each day I got up just wanting to get through it” (50). If only Andre and his family lived on the other side of the river in Bradford, “where a lot of Jocks at the high school lived, the kids who wore corduroys and sweaters and looked clean. It’s where houses had big green lawns and the college was where Pop taught,” then his case study might look a bit different.

Andre was compelled to be able to protect himself because of the constant state of fear and humiliation he lived in due to failed attempts at protecting those he thought he could protect. When Tommy J. arrives at Andre’s house and beats up Jeb for liking his little sister and calls Andre’s mom is called a “fuckin’ whore” while trying to defend her son, Andre feels helpless and becomes extremely humiliated: “I stood there on the sidewalk where Tommy J. had beaten up my brother and called my mother a whore. And what had I done? I’d pleaded with him. I’d called him Tommy and pleaded”(78). He was petrified of Tommy and what he was capable of doing and he was unable to protect Jeb and his mother because of this pure fear. This triggers an epiphany for Andre; he tells himself that something like that will never happen again: “I don’t care if you get your face beat in, I don’t care if you get kicked in the head or stabbed or even shot, I will never allow you not to fight back ever again. You hear me?” (78) And so begins Andre’s transformation as he begins training, doing countless sit-ups, bench presses, and combinations until he can’t do them any more. He tells himself and believes that he is not worthy enough so that he will only train harder and build more muscle. Later in the memoir, he relishes on his accomplishments after he kicks in someone’s motorcycle: “I was throwing combinations at the heavy bag that rocked the joists of the house I began to feel I was defending for the first time” (137). Andre has channeled his fear and humiliation into aggression, and this sparks the beginning of a very violent period in his life. He transitions from the victim to the victimizer.

With Andre’s father nearly nonexistent in the Dubus family dynamic, it is assumed that Andre would take on the protective role since he is the oldest son. In this aspect, it is as though Andre’s mom is an extra sibling because he has to take care of her as well as the rest of his siblings. He is gendered into his violent transformation because he has no other choice. His dad is oblivious to the life that Andre, his mom, and his siblings are really living: “’I’m coming in from the jungle. I’m tired of being out there in that jungle.”” (144). While Andre’s mom has been working two jobs, barely able to provide enough for her children to survive, let alone actually parent them, Andre’s father has been on the other side of the river, instigating romantic relationships with his students and drinking his feelings away. Andre would do anything for the attention of his father, and he gets this when his father expresses his admiration in Andre to his newest father-in-law: “he opened the rear door of his father-in-law’s expensive sedan and said, ‘My boy just beat the shit out of three punks downtown,’” with the pride in his voice “unmistakable” (231). It could be said that Andre resorts to violence in part because of the attention it elicits from his emotionally and physically absent father. They are united by violence, alcohol, and the pure fact that Andre’s dad isn’t meant to be a parent. Andre has to maintain his savage façade in order to catch his father’s attention. This family dynamic is damaging to Andre until he is a young adult and is finally able to come to terms with what he has been doing and overcome his victimizing.

When Andre was a teenager, he lived two separate lives. In one life, he would partake in street fights and exhibit his thirst for bloodshed. In the other life, he would be a disciplined student and athlete, sneaking books home, doing homework and running for the cross-country team. As Andre began to really discover his passion for writing, he began to move away from the first life and toward the latter. He can escape from violence with his writing, as “single jabs turned into words, combinations into sentences and rounds into paragraphs” (264). He would make his characters ones that wouldn’t back down, men “who did not flee, men who planted their feet and waiting for that moment when throwing a punch was the only thing to do” eventually formulating a membrane “between what we think and what we see, between what we believe and what is”(290-1). Literature is a rare art, and Andre’s literature became a special kind of art due to the experiences that molded him. He was able to channel all of his rage and all of what could have been and what could be into a piece of art to share with himself, his dad, or anyone he wanted. This is a significant change in Andre’s life because of the brutality that has been embedded into his mind and muscle memory. With writing, “I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself…and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers…if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing” (232). This self-improvement and self-awareness is the first step on Andre’s journey to defeating his inner demons and being able to continue through life and resist the urge to join or initiate a fight.

At the end of the memoir, Andre starts a fight with two men at the airport and is both admired and feared for it by witnesses and fellow plane passengers. Before he started the fight, though, he thought about the consequences of a fight. This is the first time that he actually thinks before he acts, thinking that pushing for a fight may not be a good idea and he should get his facts straight before throwing punches. He realizes this in the airplane’s bathroom: “You should’ve just walked her to the gate, that’s it. And don’t think you did any of this for her because you didn’t. You did it for you. And you need to stop. You need to stop doing this.” (336).  In addition, on the train through England, Andre is able to walk the drug dealer outside and reason with him rather than start a fight. His epiphany in the airplane fuels his desire to rectify his actions, and his reasoning on the train is a big indication of his salvation because he is aware of what could happen, which is never good. Moreover, Andre’s story exemplifies that of a success story. He could be that guy at the end of the bar who reminisces on his “glory days” of his fighting and what could have been. However, he isn’t because he didn’t box the night he was scheduled to in order to win a championship. Instead, he became a resilient individual who sought refuge in writing and prospered very much at it. Andre is now a famous author and professor at the up and coming University of Massachusetts Lowell, teaching, writing and advocating for a crowd that is eager to hear his story.

Mickey Ward’s success story is similar to that of Andre’s in that he overcomes his need to be violent and seeks salvation in a more important aspect of his life. He grew up in the streets of Lowell with his brother, Dickey, teaching him how to fight. In terms of family dynamics, Mickey assumed protective role over his mother and sisters due to Dickey’s unreliability and excessive drug use that transformed into a severe addiction. Mickey learned to defend himself to ultimately stay alive, something that more people than we think have to fight for everyday.

Why is it that some people are born with so much to lose, and some people are born with so little? Growing up knowing that I would always have a roof over my head and food at my table is a stark contrast to Andre’s life in itself. Essentially, we are opposite human beings, yet the comprehensively diverse paths each one of us has taken has landed Andre and I at the same place utilizing and furthering our educations: UMass Lowell.  Perhaps one day we will cross paths, but for now we will continue to live our lives like we have always known how to, our pasts impacting our current decisions and our mistakes shaping who we are for the future.

Word count: 2,089