Dreams of the Hollow Men
I see them in my dreams. When I can sleep, that is — I don’t do much of that these days. But when my eyes do finally fasten shut, when my breathing slows and my mind at last curls quiescent in the darkness, they rise and shake the memory-dust from their shoulders. The Hollow Men.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Bill appears most often. Bill wasn’t the only person I met my first night in Central Kentucky, at a bar stocked with locals eager to tell their tales. He was the most in need, though, of someone to hear him.
Bill was 54 and two months removed from the death of the love of his life, his Sharon. Her death was sudden, the result of an embolism after surgery for a broken ankle. They’d never married, but he called her his wife all the same, all 12 years they’d been together. She was nothing like his first wife.
She’d had some trouble with drugs, but got herself clean and moved into one of the mobile home properties Bill’s aunt manages. Bill happened to see her one day while he was out there and decided to impress her by hollering at another woman and her three kids across the way who were late on the rent. She wouldn’t even sleep with him the first year they were together.
“I could be sitting here with five of you,” he told me emphatically, more than once, “and if she walked in, you’d turn your head and say, ‘You must be Sharon.’”
Everyone at the bar that night had heard Bill’s story before, knew it intimately, practically lived it with him. He was a stocky guy, compact, even, the only man in town I’d seen with all his teeth, sporting a military-style haircut even though he’d been out of the Army for a while, retired after 35 years of service. He kept apologizing every time he said “fuck” or some variation thereof. He spent his days now playing golf and fishing and tending to his garden. He had a job for a couple years over at the TG Kentucky factory, where they make parts for Toyota, but he got himself fired after having to deal with a few too many terrible employees and a boss who didn’t have the right level of respect. “I wasn’t gonna let anyone talk to me like that,” he said.
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
He had proffered his local expertise, and so we made plans to eat dinner at the bar on my second night there. Over the next two days, I met some of Bill’s family and friends, because he was so keen on introducing us, and the contours of Bill’s life came into stark relief: purposeless, alone, grieving, with no one left to lend a sympathetic ear that he wasn’t paying. (He told me he was seeing a therapist.) Family was well-meaning but too doped up all the time to be helpful, friends had heard it all before and seemed a little tired of hearing it again.
“You’re the first person to bring a smile to my face in two months,” he said, tearing up. He flew into a rage — outside, out of sight and sound — when a mother-daughter pair from the trailer park “interrupted” our meal.
“You ever get bored, you call me up and I’ll be on the next plane to wherever you are,” he promised the next day, after I turned up at the bar again to meet with someone else. He left me two voicemails the night before I left, about what a gift I had been. All because I’d listened to him for a few hours.
There was David, in Virginia, who scared me so badly I briefly considered getting myself a gun for protection, dirt-caked fingernails and cutoff sleeves. Tony, a trucker based in Marshfield, Wisconsin, insecure about being interesting enough to write about. The polyamorous sexagenarian I met in Hawaii, mending a heart broken by a Russian woman. An old friend I reconnected with in Missouri intrudes even into my waking hours, broken from myriad personal catastrophes, drinking himself to sleep daily from 5 p.m. on. Everywhere I stopped, for seven months, there they were, waiting, it felt, just for me. The Hollow Men.
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
I deemed it passing strange at first, that I came across far more lone men than women. In some places, I reasoned, I may just have been in spaces women didn’t frequent because they didn’t feel like being hassled. Later, I thought it indicative of a gender role divide in which divorced dads have more time to spend wallowing at bars while their ex-wives handle child-rearing duties. Or maybe I, a lone woman, simply attracted all the lone straight men in a given establishment.
Whatever the reason, many of these men were all the more terrifying because of a desperate loneliness, an emptiness inside them that seemed to reach out.
This emptiness felt at times like a contagion, one I carried with me across state lines, and I began to imagine that I was the catalyst, that these men had been normal and reasonably happy before my arrival, and it was only upon coming in contact with me that they succumbed.
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Their stories were all similar, even the ones who were widowed, rather than left, or the ones whose marriages dissolved as mutually as possible: a feeling of having been deprived something that was theirs by right. As with the conspiracy theorists, we see the insidiousness of the myth of the American meritocracy at work here among the Hollow Men. They did everything right, so why are they being deprived of the ultimate prize? Why are they alone?
It’s maybe not all that productive to focus on the pain of these men, who are largely white, and whose tragedies perhaps pale in comparison to the systematic oppression of other demographics. Their pain stems in part from the promise of generations past, a birthright that never materialized. Spending even these few hundred words on their pain, a pain different from my own and yet not wholly unrelated, feels like a betrayal.
There are so many other stories to tell: The young black woman working at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama who sees the school-to-prison pipeline in action near-daily. The big bear of a black man in Ohio who helps run immigrant welcome programs at the YMCA. The Kewa people in New Mexico who are trying to keep their traditions alive; the old Navajo couple in Arizona who have been trying for seven years to have their home hooked up to the power grid.
And yet here I am, pouring their grievances out as though they were my own.
What right do these sad white men have to my sympathy, to my unconscious mind? Whether they have the right or not, the memories pluck at me. Maybe it’s the wasted potential of their own powerlessness, these men whose veins run bitter, who seek a willing audience and some damn respect and find the world will give them none. They could move mountains for their fellow men and women, if they wanted to. But they won’t.
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
They sit at the bar, the diner counter, in front of the television screen, voices a quiet and meaningless whisper. The rage and fear and loneliness builds inside them, opens a great swirling void that threatens to consume us all.
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
—T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
