On Fatherhood, Masculinity, and Steely Dan

I initially embraced the millennial scripture that Steely Dan was uncool. But in college, when I found Gaucho, the band’s seventh album, I let myself enter—and fall in love with—the bizarre, romanticized world of Los Angeles’ darkest undercurrents, Chinese takeout, and heroin addiction that vocalist Donald Fagen and guitarist Walter Becker wrote about. It was as if I had stumbled upon some utopian reckoning, an Eden populated by men like my dad, who always reach backwards toward their regrets; a place that explained the hurt that was my family’s heirloom.

Gaucho was partially conceptualized over the phone, as Becker had been hit by a car, suffered secondary infections during recovery, and was bedridden for six months. It quickly became an idyllic experiment, one of yacht-rock mythology and sleazy white Californians nose-diving into debauchery. The songs wrestle with mortality and the futile—and predatory—pitfalls of growing up, especially as a common man in post-Vietnam America, like in “Hey Nineteen,” when the song’s protagonist is courting a younger woman and notices cultural gaps: “Hey nineteen, that’s ’Retha Franklin / She don’t remember the Queen of Soul / It’s hard times befallen the sole survivors / She thinks I’m crazy, but I’m just growing old.”

From the jump in 1972, Steely Dan lionized the boring jerks, the low-life nobodies of the bicentennial years. Eight years later, “Hey Nineteen” and “Babylon Sisters” track the embarrassing moral bankruptcy of predatory men pursuing younger women in the Valley. The former leans into generational disconnect between two vastly different people. “Time Out of Mind” riffs on the endless pursuit of a perfect heroin euphoria. There is a haunting, persistent sadness throughout, most notably on the title track “Gaucho,” when Fagen sings, “Just when I say, ‘Boy we can’t miss / You are golden’, then you do this.”

Fagen and Becker, flannel- and leather-donned balding geeks in tinted sunglasses, were not the hedonistic men whose perspectives they adopted. But like all great writers, we leave parts of ourselves in the stories we make. Gaucho, Fagen’s tribute to Becker (who was slowly succumbing to a gnarly heroin addiction that upended the record’s production schedule), reflected the drug epidemic thrashing across the United States with a personal curve. Many of the songs stand in for Fagen and Becker’s partnership, which was rolling off the rocks into dissolution at an expedited rate. But Gaucho, at its core, is a record about survival, about living through an era that’s outgrown you.

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In early 2010, only a few years removed from losing my last baby tooth, I paraded around with my drawings of chainsaw-wielding zombies and developed an irreversible intolerance to gluten. I was a late bloomer, wildly uncool, unpopular, annoying as all get out, and eternally cursed by lousy genetics. As my friends hit puberty and started spending weekends at the skating rink or at McDonald’s, I was at home, grounded, listening to my dad’s AC/DC CDs on a five-year-old boombox radio he gifted me, and counting the mountain ranges on my bedroom ceiling. Guys all around me started sporting toothpick-thin mustaches and their biceps grew as big as my head. I was deeply, deeply jealous about what their bodies could do and ashamed of what mine could not.

Some years later, I learned that my body’s alchemy moved at a sloth’s pace because of a sex chromsome disorder. I eventually spent three-fourths of my high school life on hormone therapy, first by applying testosterone enanthate onto my stomach nightly—which welcomed a canopy of hair there and nowhere else—then by getting inoculated in the shoulder weekly with an insulin needle full of translucent goo. Twice a year, a doctor would examine my naked body and log the measurements and the way the space between my breasts dipped downwards into a concave pool.

I used to think those days were regrettable because of my behavior at school, or the fact I was a dispensable friend. Relationships I’d cultivated all year quickly became lifeless by summertime. I tried so hard to be liked, to translate my only-child singularity into a school day spotlight. I never shut up, always taking a joke too far and getting caught by teachers. At school, I spent as many days in suspension as I spent out of it. At home, I’d spend hours in front of the mirror, strapping a back-brace around my breasts until they passably shrunk. Doctors prescribed me ADHD medication for my behavioral problems, but I was still two years away from taking a genetics test and adding a pediatric endocrinologist to my growing rolodex of doctors—three years away from seeing a child psychologist to treat my “adjustment disorder with disturbance of emotion” after starting testosterone and having a nervous breakdown, in fear of someone at school finding out.

I think about all of that as often as I don’t, if that makes sense. It’s like Quincy Jones once said: “Looking back’s a bitch, ain’t it?” Retrospect is an insidiously large pill to swallow. In 2018, when my adult endocrinologist, straight up, told me I’m intersex, it’s like everything I’d considered about myself had, synchronously, been cleared up and cracked open. New answers created new questions. My previous doctor tiptoed around who I was for five years; my parents followed suit.

My mom stepped up by handling my injections when the time came, but in those days, I really needed a father to assure me I could survive through using needles for the rest of my life. We never talked about any of it. When a Cleveland Clinic doctor told my parents that my chromosomes were XX, not XY, there was a look of disappointment on my dad’s face. Living room talks never included check-ins, not even when I started getting red welts across my stomach from the T-gel. It was always talks of what could’ve been in his own life, as if he wanted to go back and rewrite his own story.

He always preferred dredging up the past, talking about how he quit basketball because he didn’t like the coach—or how he quit football because he also didn’t like that coach. He’d talk about hanging up his cleats just as he was about to make starting quarterback. For a long time, I wanted to be a professional basketball player myself, because I was pretty good at shooting free throws, but then I put on weight, got afraid of running suicides, and quit. I do wish I’d stuck with it longer. My dad and I are similar like that.

It was always talks of what could’ve been in my dad’s own life, as if he wanted to go back and rewrite his own story.

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Steely Dan’s Gaucho is a denouement, an enterprise centered on sensory triggers, like “the smell of prickly pear,” “studs that match your eyes,” and “charisma poured from the shadow.” It’s about the good, fleeting luxuries in life; worlds once familiar but now lost over the course of a changing time. In “My Rival,” when Donald Fagen sings “I still recall when I first held your hand in mine,” I think about the better years with my dad: how I’d fall asleep on his side of the bed and he’d carry me to mine, or how I’d write an imaginary song for my fake band and he’d ask me to sing it to him anyway. All of that came and went so quickly. He doesn’t remember those days anymore; I asked and he doesn’t. But still, I must carry them with me and watch them drift further and further away from where we are now.

Steely Dan’s songs speak to what many men my dad’s age do: They covet a life lost, or a life never started. When my mom gave me injections in the kitchen, he’d lay on the couch and watch Pawn Stars, M*A*S*H, or a car auction. Either he was uninterested in the medical marvel going on in the other room, or just plain ashamed of the organic boyhood nonexistent in his son. The only dangerous part about me was the worry I’d leave my femininity all over the place. I didn’t inherit his bad boy quarterback genes, only his penchant for quitting things. My dad is a character in a Steely Dan song reincarnated in the suburbs of an uninteresting town; a real-life wayback machine, because previous versions of himself are all he has left to talk about.

I suppose that eyes-in-the-rearview mentality stems from the lack of panash in his upbringing. Fathers would go to war and come back absent, abusive. But my Papaw, merely a toothless semi-truck driver from the boonies of central West Virginia, was a strict and physical disciplinarian at home for no outspoken reason. Junior, my uncle, hated him so much he ran away multiple times before dropping out of high school, joining a biker gang, and, eventually, getting hooked on PCP and killing himself with a shotgun on his parents’ patio. There are grumblings that he wasn’t Papaw’s son, which would explain why they never got along. But the only question I have the wherewithal to find an answer to is why is my dad so messed up.

When he tells my mom that he had a normal relationship with Papaw, it’s supplemented by stories of yelling fits, of ass beatings, and of nit-picks turned into unnecessary—and loud—arguments. When he quit the things he loved in high school, Papaw wasn’t there to tell him things would get better. When his brother died, it was more of the same. That’s what masculinity became for him: leaving loved ones behind to fend through the muck alone.

What do we make of the Average Joes who didn’t become Hollywood cokeheads and, instead, have shouldered generations of mental illness and death into their mundane, uninspired lives in the thick of a dying Rust Belt town? It’s the same type of guy who yells at the TV during sports because they think the players can hear them. They’ve hardened and put up walls only pierceable through nostalgia. So we dare them to throw a football as far across the backyard as they can; we tap the most unlikely storytellers and ask them to write the suburban cowards and alcoholic divorcees into the narratives. We give people like my dad an undeserved voice and make them the heroes of stories they’ll never live through. We give them albums like Gaucho.

But of course, all of this isn’t about Gaucho or masculinity, really. It’s about trauma, about breaking a cycle you didn’t consent to entering. Maybe it’s human nature to be a quitter, a loser. But I resist the idea that we must enter this world and, eventually, inflict harm on those we bring into it, too. But as far back as civilization stretches, humanity has been touched by trauma. We are born broken, shaken. The Silent Generation abused our Baby Boomer and Gen-X parents mercilessly and they gifted us with the same emotional beatdown. I can only speak about men, but the blueprint for how to raise a son has been so deftly fucked by the sons who came before them. It reaches backwards and backwards, and Gaucho, like its older sibling, Aja, glamorizes that generational agony.

Who wouldn’t want to sing about pornos and drug deals when you can hide behind the gaze of fictionality? Nobody wants to put their son’s body being ravaged by hormone withdrawal and body dysmorphia on a pedestal when they can, instead, bask in the glory of the polaroids taken of them drunk and shirtless with their high school buddies. Yes, Fagen and Becker were raucous drug addicts at the time of Gaucho. No, their benders weren’t cinematic, nor were they all that memorable. What made two strung-out nerds so cool? Nothing, so they made the juicy stuff up.

We give people like my dad an undeserved voice and make them the heroes of stories they’ll never live through. We give them albums like Gaucho. 

Once I’d taken hormone therapy long enough to grow into my age, I, too, started dreaming of better places to go to, like New York City or Hollywood, and living lavishly beyond a medically stunted future. I spent so much time catching up that I’m just now starting my life. My dad is quick to talk about his proclaimed recklessness—how he got his ass beat for busting up a family stereo for no reason or how he would get so drunk he’d sleep in cars—by sauteing his stories with a pathetic seasoning of could’ve-beens—just as Fagen and Becker lauded the debauchery of the men they dreamed of being. This is what the sons of men who didn’t go to war have become, carriers of trauma and hurt that is much more generational, much more intrusive.

I don’t blame any of them for wishing they were greater than they actually were. My dad was going to be the quarterback. He could’ve been somebody and earned a real story to tell and made an offspring good enough to carry whatever torch he fashioned. “Living hard will take its toll,” the backing chorus on “Glamour Profession” wails. Dad’s got diabetes from drinking too much and doing too little, and his life is now dictated by the direction of an insulin needle. Him and I, we still don’t talk about survival, but you can see it in his eyes now, how he wishes he’d done so much more. But you can’t tell if he regrets not being braver, or whether or not he wishes he’d raised me gentler.

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