Randy Flood, host of the Revealing Men podcast, is an avid reader of The Sun, a non-profit, ad-free magazine that publishes personal essays, short stories, and poetry. It was there that he first encountered author, Doug Crandell, through an essay about his father’s life as a laborer: “His Body of Work.” Flood, a psychotherapist and Director of the Men’s Resource Center says he found that essay and Crandell’s subsequent memoir, The All-American Industrial Motel, insightful about how masculine identity is tied to men’s relationship with their bodies, especially when those bodies are used and abused laboring in blue-collar, industrial jobs. He and Crandell talk about how men’s physical, emotional, and mental health suffer when the only metric by which they measure their masculinity is that which measures the amount of pain and discomfort their bodies can endure.
Excerpts from Flood and Crandell’s conversation follow. Listen to the full podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. This is the second in a three-part series featuring authors who move beyond the page to reveal a bit of the inner lives of men. The first in the series is Dr. Ronald Levant, author of The Problem with Men. Dr. Levant is widely recognized as one of the key people responsible for creating the field of psychology of Men and Masculinities. Next in the series is Fable Marcel Price (Fable the Poet), an award-winning writer, community advocate, and former Poet Laureate turned nationally touring storyteller and spoken word artist.
Learned Emotional Boundaries
Flood, who, like Crandell, grew up in a blue-collar family, recalls watching “grandfathers, and uncles, and my father working in labor. Using their bodies to be a provider for their families.” He saw some of the toll that physical labor took on those bodies. Where did that pain exist in their emotional lives?
“When I was seven,” recalls Crandell, “I had two fingers on my right hand; one, cut off, the other one severely mauled in a farming accident. And one of the first things my grandfather said, [a man] who would say very, very few words, was ‘Don’t cry.’
“Now, that was tough,” he says, “because, I mean, one, I was seven years old. So, you cry when you’re seven. It really impacted me, you know? That the men in my family rarely spoke. When they did, it was to re-emphasize how you should be. …My father was a perfect example of that. He would get cut, hurt, bruised, bones broken, and it was almost taboo to mention it.” Crandell goes on to share the story of a horrendous accident in which his father was severely burned and blinded for a brief period. “I hated for that time to end because I got to actually have an excuse to take him by the hand and lead him around the house and help him, which would never have been acceptable outside of that.”
“Him being blind,” notes Flood, “gave you a physical permission structure to lead your dad around, but when that permission structure dissipated when he was able to see again, then there was no emotional or relational permission structure for a father and son to be physically affectionate with each other.”
Labor Pain and Heartache
Flood reads an excerpt from Crandell’s memoir in which he writes that his father “had relied on his body to get him through polio, asbestos, prostate cancer, certain innumerable injuries. His body had toiled in factories and on farms. Its needs had caused heartache for him and others, too.”
“One of the things that’s just seared into my brain,” says Crandell, “is this way of marking up your body at the factory. If you worked a 16-hour shift, you then put a notch in your work boot. …then when you quit having to do that, that was even more impressive because you no longer needed to communicate to other men, ‘I’m tough’ because everybody knew it.”
Crandell takes a minute to reflect on how his father’s self-worth was directly tied to his ability to perform physical labor. “I’m 56,” he says. “When I worked with him in the factory, he was 51. … He was a person whose body was slipping away from him. And that’s how he always saw worth in himself, right? He can lift something, fix something, endure pain. And as that slipped away from him, it was clear that he was trying to remedy that, medicate that, if you will, with certainly, substances, but affairs as well.”
“I think it’s helpful to explain it through the social-cultural context of that era in terms of what we knew and some of the ways that masculinity was defined and gender roles were originally defined,” adds Flood. “… For a lot of men growing up in a more blue-collar framework, there’s a particular emphasis on the body providing you your strength and your sense of prowess. And if you can endure pain and discomfort, then that was like the metrics of your masculinity.”
Recognizing the Body’s Limitations
“My father, he did not love his body, or at least he did not treat it as if he did. His prostate cancer was made worse by his nearly 60 years of smoking, … by the time of his diagnosis, Dad had literally spent four decades breathing in the microscopic fibers that at work would lodge themselves under his skin, creating white cysts on our forearms, the backs of our necks, the tops of our feet. The steel-toed boots could keep a forklift tire from crushing our metatarsals, but they were no defense against asbestos. The factory had closed, and it had been more than 10 years since I pulled a shift there, but we carried the work around in our bodies, in our minds.”
Crandell witnessed his father’s physical decline while he wrote his memoir. “It was the toughest thing I’ve ever written,” he says. “…. I wanted it to be a tribute to his body, of work, meaning everything, right, his physical body and all that. But for me, I think the act of getting inside that narrative and spending time there, particularly with that passage, to see him slowly start to accept that his manhood might be connected to something other than that. …He made changes in his life. They weren’t maybe the kind of changes that you see in a movie, but he became more vulnerable.”
It wasn’t a vulnerability he would admit to. Crandell tells the story of when his father was baptized and refused to acknowledge it – even though there was photo evidence. “It was the same kind of message his father [Crandell’s grandfather] gave me when I injured my hand at seven, ‘don’t cry’. It was ‘don’t ask’.” “Right,” says Flood. “It’s as though it didn’t happen if you don’t acknowledge it.” “Right,” says Crandell. “That was off limits. …Out of respect, I never quizzed him about it again. But to me, it was what is permissible to talk about and what is not. And that vulnerability, …whatever that meant to him was just off limits.” Flood surmises that it was the idea of giving up or giving in to something greater than himself; “some type of unmasculine script or something that he couldn’t articulate” to his son.
A Father’s Respect
A lot of children can relate to not following the path their parents expected. Crandell’s experience is no different. “I think it was tough for both of my folks,” he says. “And probably more so for my father was the fact that I was writing in the first place. He was a big reader of Westerns and later on in his life, True Crime. And I tell people that, you know, those were the kind of books he liked. I mean, his son published a novel called The Flawless Skin of Ugly People. It was in People magazine. That’s not something we were ever going to be able to discuss. That was so strange to him.!”
Especially when writing The All-American Industrial Motel, Crandell sought his father’s input and approval. “I worked about two-and-a-half years,” he says, “to get him comfortable and no amount of getting him comfortable with what I was writing was going to work. … But I have to say this, he could have let that completely cut off our relationship, but he didn’t.”
“Did you ever get a sense of his approval or affirmation about you being a writer?” Flood asks. “No, I don’t think that he ever said ‘I’m proud of you,’ Crandell responds. Now, as a son, I really didn’t need that from him. …. I think I spent so much time writing about my relationship, particularly with my father and my brothers, that I worked through that. …. When he passed, I was grateful that I got to write about him. And again, to his credit, he could have said, ‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore. You’ve written about my weaknesses, my vulnerabilities. I don’t want to have a relationship with you.’ And he never did that. I think that was his way of saying he loved me and that it was okay what I was doing.”
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
Flood shares another example from Crandell’s book. It helps illustrate the relationship between father and son. Crandell is 20 and on his way to college. His father is dropping him off at the Greyhound bus station.
“I had money, but my father insisted on buying my ticket, then waited with me, due back at the factory at 4 p.m. … Impatient, he stood, stretched and walked toward the vending machine. At the factory, we had drunk gallons of coffee from such machines, … He returned and held out a black coffee for me, one on the other hand for himself. … I wanted to tell him how terrified I was that he would get sick but I didn’t know how to break our self -prescribed silences so I swallowed my feelings. The woman behind the glass partition announced my bus would be leaving in 10 minutes and Dad gave me a quick smile and began fishing out his truck keys. I stood and we shook hands like insurance agents. Then he said ‘watch your step getting on and off with your things or you’ll fall and booger up your knees.’ He turned and walked to his truck.”
“I can feel this tension,” says Flood, “and there’s this love and there’s this ‘I’m setting my son off, and what do I say? How do I say it?’ …. What I wished could have happened is more fantastical and idyllic … And what did happen seemed honest and authentic.”
“I don’t know if you’ve had that experience,” Crandell responds, “where you’re trying to put into words this memory that is so fundamental to who you are. … But I see him in that memory when he’s handing me the coffee and he has a coffee, something he had done hundreds of times at the factory. It was also a permissible way for a man to show another man that they were caring for you. … It was his way, … it was a way to show ‘I care about you, I’m worried about you’. And I think I like the memory so much because … it was a memory that told me whatever happened he would stay in my life. And that was before I ever wrote anything that, again to his credit, he accepted.”
Expressions of Care
Crandell’s father died at 74. “My one regret is that I wish I could have done more for him.” “What do you mean by that? Doing more for him?” Flood asks.
“I think I would have liked to have helped him,” responds Crandell, “maybe if he lived another decade, to have continued his path on being vulnerable. …. As I wrote about him, particularly in that essay, I realized probably for the first time how similar I was to him, which is not something I ever thought about. I’ve always thought of myself as kind of a modern man, and then I started realizing in my own life, how many times I refuse to be vulnerable. … Now, the great thing is, Randy, when we can recognize that, we can improve it. … He shepherded me into manhood in his own way. I would like to have helped him be able to just accept physical touch and to not have to be the head of the household.”
“I think I read,” says Flood, “that you said there were men you loved, but you couldn’t tell them about that. Is that just again, what was transferred to you? You felt like you’re supposed to give them a cup of coffee, not share actual words: ‘Hey, … I love you, man.’ “Say something about that,” Flood suggests. “Are you, have you been able to evolve in that way? Or are you still working on it like all of us?”
“Oh, still working on it,” Crandell responds. “… The men that I would love to have hugged on a regular basis and put my arm around and kissed. That just wasn’t possible. Now, I was able to do that … with my brother Darren …who also showed me a separate path. He was a big reader, very open with his emotions, kind, very, very kind. Being able to have those kinds of templates, right, to look at someone and go, well, they’re acting manly, they’re loving. …But Randy, it wasn’t that way I think with my father and some of the men at the factory.”
Grief and Masculinity
Darren died a short time before Flood and Crandell’s conversation. Crandell’s emotions are still raw. “When he was in the hospital,” says Crandell, “…there were other young men and older men of my family and friends who would come into the hospital room and stand at this distance of six, nine feet of my brother in the bed. … And that pained me for those men because I spent three days kissing him, making sure his mouth was hydrated with a sponge, holding his hand, telling him how much he meant to me, how much I loved him, every bit I could, … But I feel for those men because while I’m still grieving, I got to be completely open with my love. … it was just sad to me.”
Flood observes, “It’s like the physical distance they had to negotiate in terms of six to nine feet was emblematic or tantamount to how they had to distance themselves from their sadness or perhaps losing someone.” “Wow! Thank you for that,” Crandell responds. “I hadn’t thought about that. Yeah, that’s right.”
“It’s like there’s a collision course,” says Flood. “My masculine identity tells me that I’m not supposed to be emotive here, effusive with sadness and crying. And so then in order for me to perform that masculinity, I have to distance myself from him [Darren] and my feelings. When the remarkable thing about grief and sadness is that it communicates very clearly how much we love someone.”
Helping Men Evolve
Flood asks Crandell to talk a little about how the work he does with mental health in communities where people often use their bodies for work affects his writing. “It gives me a chance,” Crandell says, “to write from a place that I think looks at nuances around particularly men and their motivations. ‘Cause it doesn’t make sense. Why would you drink a 12-pack of beer every night, eat horrible food, and keep all of your pains, both physical and mental, all to yourself? It absolutely is absurd. …So many times I have people who say to me —Who are on the other side, right? Who’ve recovered, done the hard work — ‘I can’t believe I lived that way. I can’t believe that that was who I was.’ “
“It becomes an awakening,” says Flood. “We do a lot of individual and group psychotherapy. And a lot of the guys we work with, we explicitly do what we call emotional reclamation therapy, which includes reclaiming their bodies, not just for labor or athleticism, but reclaiming in terms of connecting to their emotions and the physical sensations of emotions, and seeing that as data, as information for them to pay attention to.”
Flood gives this example: “When you’re not sitting up straight and you’re slouching, you might get away with it in your 20s. But after a while, you develop back pain. And then the doctor says you need to work on the way you sit and the way you stand because your body’s screaming at you…. And I think the same thing can happen with guys who are having these pains in their life and stresses and insecurities that they’re not paying attention to. Giving them a chance to change their life. And that’s what we work on. I said if therapy works the bad news is you got to change your life!”
A Reading Prescription
Because this is a conversation with an author, the discussion moves men and reading. Both Flood and Crandell stress how important reading – especially, fiction – is to emotional development.
“Unless I’m part of a book club or really focus, even at the university setting, I can’t find a lot of men who read. Particularly, you can’t find any man who reads poetry who doesn’t write poetry,” Crandell says. [And] it’s very difficult to find men who read fiction. Yet we know that reading that kind of writing actually works those empathy muscles in us, right? It helps us recognize the other, get outside of ourselves. I think it’s one of the key things. If I could do anything in terms of policy, I would say ‘Alright! Everybody’s gotta read 10 books a year.’”
“You know,” says Flood, there’s oftentimes I end up crying after a story, or having belly laughs. And it’s because it does connect to our emotions. And so, I think that would be a good prescription for a very hypermasculine, disconnected man: ‘You need to read 10 fictional books per year. Here.’
The Divine in Writing
“Speaking of good, good writing,” adds Flood, “in your memoir, …you say, ‘who knows, maybe fire doesn’t really destroy paper, maybe it just transforms what’s written on it, into readable smoke, plumes traveling up to the heavens, reconstituted into something more durable, a multitude of prayers where they live on forever.’”
“That passage you read,” Crandell says, “I mean, that is an important part of my masculinity; to be vulnerable in meditation and in prayer, to be open to being thankful for nature and our health and all those things. And so, I think there’s a great place for non-dogmatic religion and spirituality and faith for men. And sometimes I think we miss the power of that across all faiths, you know.
“Yeah,” agrees Flood. “And I think the non-dogmatic version of literature would be that like whatever you define as God, but God is the author of all truth that’s collective consciousness. And so, anything that is written that reveals truth is divine truth. It’s something bigger than the person who’s writing it. And it’s something that we can all as humans capture. And that’s what I love about that prose at the end. It kind of goes up in readable smoke. And so into this higher consciousness that we can all then tap into.”
Different Paths to Emotional Intelligence
If you’re interested in Doug Crandell’s work, you can find his essays in the Sun magazine. His memoir, The All-American Industrial Motel, is available in a library near you, or wherever you purchase your books. Consider reading his work as part of your 10 fiction books a year prescription toward better emotional health.
The Men’s Resource Center provides in-person and online men’s support groups as well as individual and group psychotherapy programs for men seeking to learn more about what makes them “tick.” Men who are up to the challenge of learning how to be more open and emotionally secure; to be one of those men who can say—as Crandell notes— “’I can’t believe I lived that way. I can’t believe that that was who I was.” For questions or more information about our counseling and consultation services, contact us online, or call us at 616-456-1178.
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