The Pure Products of America Go Crazy -
X’s portrait of Y, like the one he did of Z twenty years ago, suggests not complicity but the studied cooperation of a detainee.
The eventual allowance I received as a child in America, from my own father, the first allowance I remember, was given to me to soothe the pain of the allergy shots I required, starting around age 7. There was the sharp flush of the needle’s injection, and then, at the corner store near the doctors office, my father would hand me a quarter, which I would use to buy comic books.
The cycle was pain, then money, and power over pain. A feeling like victory — if not over the pain, at least over powerlessness. And one of my earliest experiences of fatherly love.
Pain, money, power over pain. My mistake being that money is not power over pain. Facing pain is.
From “Inheritance,” Alexander Chee