Risky Business

On a visit to New York several years ago, I happened to be in a small art gallery and went to the ladies room.  When I got inside, I was kinda surprised to find a young boy in there.  Had to be at least 8 or 9, I thought, and maybe a bit older, and he was just sort of standing there.  It took me a second to realize that he was waiting on some woman in a stall—probably his mother.  A little weird, you ask me, and a touch creepy, and I just couldn’t get excited about dropping my drawers and going for a tinkle while the kid was there.  So I decided to wait until the kid’s mom was done and they were outta there. 

Anyway, I don’t even know how what happened next got started.  Might’ve been me and my big mouth; I could’ve just kept my trap shut and waited quietly for the two of them to leave, but the way I remember it, the mom said something like, oh, you can go on ahead and I said something like, well, I’m a little confused.  Is there a problem with the men’s room?  Something mildly what-the-hell-are-you-thinking-lady.  Like that. 

Oh my goodness.  Oh, that woman just tore into me.  Called me a f***ing idiot (hey, this is a PG-13 blog) and didn’t I know that no one ever let a young boy—he was 10, by the way—go on his own into a men’s room . . . blah, blah.  All this is happening in front of her kid, by the way, and he looked like he wanted to shrivel up and die.  Way to really look out for your kid, lady, and what a great object lesson.  Yes, this is the correct way to treat a total stranger who asks an innocent question or makes an observation with which you disagree: cuss her a blue streak. 

Now, in retrospect, and if I put my shrink-cap on, the woman was probably a little embarrassed that I called her out on some fairly inappropriate behavior in front of her son.  (Think about it, folks: you take your 10-year-old boy into the ladies’ room so you can listen to him tinkle, and then he gets to listen to you?  I mean . . . you don’t even have him wait outside?  Think about it.)   Anyway, I was so surprised I didn’t get off any good zingers (and, really, her poor kid was there, listening to his mother go ballistic; I felt kind of embarrassed for him).  Still cursing me—boy, she bore an uncanny resemblance to Laura Linney, though she wasn’t—the lady stomped out with her kid, and that was that. 

But that incident’s always stuck with me.  It actually upset me, thinking about what was really going on here.  It wasn’t as if this kid was 5 years old or 6.  This was a 10-year-old kid, and yet his mother acted as if she couldn’t let him go anywhere without supervision.  I mean, for crying out loud, we were in a very small art gallery.  NYC or not, it wasn’t as if she couldn’t stand outside the men’s room while he went in, if she was that concerned.  Just . . . weird behavior and kind of smothering, you ask me.  And what message was she really sending her kid?  Just when did she think her child would be old enough to pee without mommy’s supervision in a public restroom? 

I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago when I was in Tucson for the Festival of Books.  One question directed specifically to me was about the controversies my books sometimes generate, particularly given the “mature” themes (their word, not mine) and what I thought about all that, why I did it, etc.  (This same question actually came up again in an interview I did for a blog just a few days ago, in fact.)  At any rate, I said something similar to what I said in the blog—I think; I really can’t remember—because what really stuck with me was something one of my fellow panelists said.  It was really very bizarre, at least to me. 

Here’s what she said, and she did it in this imperious, professorial way, too: “Young children need to be protected.” 

 Now she said other stuff, but that was her lead, and I was, like . . . wuh?  I know I couldn’t keep that off my face either; I was just so flabbergasted, and this wasn’t a therapy session, so to hell with keeping a neutral expression.   Mind you, all of us on the panel had earlier responded to a question about book bans, and all of us said the same thing: we hoped our books did get banned someday because then everyone would read them—and now this same woman is telling me that, no, no, we writers need to protect kids? 

Wuh? 

I thought that writer’s comment was really off for a couple of reasons.  First of all, it was coming from a woman whose 12, 13, 14-year-old protagonists headed up crime families and did fairly awful things to people.  So, honestly, her comments were pretty disingenuous.  Second, it seemed to me that what she was suggesting was that writers needed to bend to the will of some kind of thought police.  That we always to be mindful of–cue somber, doomsday music–our responsibilities. 

And I’m, like . . . huh?     

I’ve already written that risk is our business, but it bears repeating.  Because let’s do take a moment and think about why people choose to read books in the first place.  Yes, you’re looking for a good story; you want to be entertained; books take you out of yourself and put you somewhere you’ve never been (or maybe always wished you might go)—and isn’t that encouraging risk?  Think about the stories that intrigue us most: the popularity of dangerous romances, overthrowing governments, having adventures, running away . . . All these are about risk.  In fact, having characters face terrible situations, make hard choices, get themselves out of trouble . . . all that risk is what makes a book really entertaining.   

Books are a safe place to take risks, too, put yourself in someone else’s shoes, develop empathy and see different sides to the same story.  While it’s true that works of the imagination can fuel action, I don’t believe that we need to or should be concerned as writers about that.  (Frankly, if kids don’t like the story, they won’t read it, no matter what it’s about, or whether you’ve protected them or not.)  But risk is a necessary ingredient to any story; it’s because my characters take risks and are put in risky situations that some readers find a narrative compelling.  If there is no conflict; if everything is safe and familiar . . . why bother?  (I know that I don’t find a story that features girls jabbering on about nail polish for three pages—this is in a real book that I’ve really tried to read that everyone was raving about—to be all that compelling.  Some kids obviously do or enjoy that, or it wouldn’t be in the book, I guess, but it doesn’t speak to me; the narrative would’ve worked fine without it; and I would never do something similar unless it served some purpose.  Or maybe I was missing the point: tangerine nail polish really is risky with pink lipstick.) 

Besides, my feeling is that kids are little too overprotected and smothered these days anyway.  I think back to things I did when I was younger—playing in dark culverts and the woods and climbing a tree as far as I could go; wandering around alone; walking to the drugstore a couple miles away all by my lonesome so I could spend the allowance eating a hole in my pocket—and know that there are a lot of parents out there these days that would never, ever let their kids explore or take what they see as those kinds of unacceptable risks. without an electronic umbilical cord–and maybe not even then.  It’s not that my parents were negligent; bad things happened to kids then just as they do now; but there wasn’t such an air of anxiety about this.  (There was plenty of anxiety about things: the Cold War, smog, Vietnam, oil embargoes, presidential assassinations, a very-nearly impeached president . . . the list goes on.  Perhaps all this focus on protecting kids these days is because the tech has now evolved to the point where adults can trick themselves into feeling they control a very limited sphere; I don’t know–but it’s as worthwhile a hypothesis as any.)   

In some ways, kids today are being taught to be quite risk-averse, and I see that play out in kids whose parents demand to know where they are every second.  (And I’ve talked about this already as it relates to social disconnectedness, parental anxiety, and the overuse of technology to keep tabs on kids as a way of assuaging adult’s fears.)  Certainly there have been a number of studies that bear this out; an excellent article in The Atlantic talks about this very thing and a playground designed to encourage risky behavior, and is well worth taking the time to read.  (The author was also interviewed on NPR and that can be heard here.)  Read those articles; listen to that interview and then think about the lady in the bathroom: just what did that 10 year-old boy need protection from?  (If you answer the men’s room . . . uh, I don’t think so.) 

Conversely, it is when the risks of what kids might do is . . . well, muted and muffled–when kids are cocooned in a virtual reality that allows for no reciprocity–that I think you do more harm than good.  What I mean is this: how many video games have you seen where you’re encouraged to blow away as many aliens/bad guys/etc. as you can?  Right, a gazillion.  And yet . . . is there any reciprocity here?  That is, if an avatar pulls a trigger, does that have any impact on the game?  The avatar?  The kid playing the game?   No.   Come on, you know it doesn’t.  I don’t know any game that translates the visceral and physical experience of pulling a trigger—its impact on the person doing the shooting—to a kid. 

But I do remember the first time I shot a gun.  It was during my AF training days.  I remember how shaky I felt beforehand; how much I trembled after the fact (lucky I didn’t pee myself, really; I near about did on the combat obstacle course when I had to do this rope swing high off the ground and over a very long distance); how surprised I was at the noise; how the recoil felt; how bright the muzzle flash was.  The smell.  This feeling of awe I got, and then how sick I got to my stomach—because I realized, at that moment, I could now kill someone, very easily.  That pulling a trigger wasn’t a theoretical anymore, nor something I could view from a safe remove: I knew how this felt. 

Do guns scare me now in that way?  No.  But I respect the risk involved in handling them, and that’s why I make damned sure that if any of my characters shoots a gun, wields a knife, cocks a club . . . it’s all very visceral.  This isn’t a video game; actions have consequences; blood has a smell;  things hurt; pull that trigger, you risk killing someone, and it has an impact on you. 

So, no, I don’t protect kids from that experience.  I don’t try to mute or muffle it in any way—and I happen to think that this is the responsible way to portray risk, the potential for violence, the consequences of action.  That’s my job as a writer, and my only responsibility: to tell the best and most authentic story I can, risk and all.