Go With the Flow: A Selection from Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full (2001)
“Why had ‘go with the flow’ popped into his head? Why one of the favorite expressions of his dad, that past master of euphemisms and other ways of hiding from yourself what you were really doing? His mom was good at that, too, although not nearly so expert as his dad.
When his dad decamped from the University of Wisconsin in his junior year and went off to San Francisco, he didn’t say he had dashed the hopes and broken the hearts of his parents, who had made great sacrifices to send him to the university. He characterized it as ‘moving off of dead center.’
When he and Conrad’s mom-to-be started living together in a fly-by-night commune on Haight Street, they didn’t call themselves hippies. That was a word they detested and resented. They referred to themselves as Beautiful People, a term they used in the singular also, as in: ‘Shag? Shag’s Beautiful People, man.’
The fact that his dad had never held a job in his life, other than a temporary one as night desk clerk at the Sailors’ Home, didn’t mean he was lazy and shiftless. No, it meant he was avoiding that ‘bummer’ known as ‘the whole bourgeois trip.’
Conrad, like most little boys, had tried to work out in his own mind that somehow his father was an admirable person. His father did seem to be a big hit among other Beautiful People. When he told his marvelous yarns, they absolutely dissolved with laughter, to Conrad’s delight. His dad was a high-spirited, good-looking man, handsome the way a storybook pirate is handsome, and he had a certain foolish daring. When high, he wasn’t afraid of sassing figures of authority: policemen, bureaucrats (at the Welfare Office), restaurant managers, and the like.
Out of such elements Conrad tried to construct a picture of a man who might be a bit lazy and disorganized but who was an adventurer, a freebooter, a free spirit, a buccaneer—with his mustache, his beard, his ponytail, his single gold earring, and his wild eyes, he really did look like a pirate—who was ready to take on the world.
Alas, the picture never held together very long. One night, during a dispute over money, their hashish connection—connection, since they never used the word dealer—slapped his mom across the face, and his dad didn’t even lift a finger. Conrad could never forget that.
His mom was a very pretty, sweet, sentimental, but terribly lax soul who would smother him with affection one moment and neglect the most elementary duties the next. He always remembered sitting with his fourth-grade teacher in a tiny school office for thirty minutes while his mom forgot to show up for the conference. The teacher, believing Conrad showed unusual musical aptitude, had hoped to encourage her to provide him with piano lessons.
Home was a mess. Dishes piled up in the sink until the top ones began to slide off onto the floor. They actually slid off and crashed. Another thing Conrad always remembered was the time a dirty, used Band-Aid, mashed by footsteps, had lain on a door saddle for a month.
He was seven when he first asked his mom and dad when and where they got married. He wanted to hear about the wedding. They gave him foolish grins and vague, conflicting answers. Soon enough he stopped asking, because even a child could figure out the truth. By and by he came to realize that the imprecation ‘bourgeois’ was supposed to explain all such matters.
Only bourgeois people got ‘hung up’ on things like marriage, school, appointments, tidy homes, and hygiene. He was not even eleven when he first began to entertain the subversive notion that ‘bourgeois’ might in fact be something he just might want to become when he grew up.
By the time Conrad was twelve, his dad had given up heavy drugs in favor of being pretty much an ordinary North Beach drunk who also smoked pot. He would disappear for days at a time, and his mom would accuse him of staying with a girlfriend. Then came dreadful mornings when Conrad would find some strange man or other in the apartment, some specimen of Beautiful People who had obviously spent the night with his mom.
The worst morning of all, however, came one day when he got up to go to school and found his mom and dad asleep in bed—bed being a mattress on the floor and a blanket—no sheets—with another man and a woman he had never laid eyes on before, all four of them naked. He was never able to forget the flaccid areolae of the two women. He felt worse than wounded and betrayed; he felt shamed and dishonored. His father had awakened while he was standing there and had put a sickly grin on his face and said, ‘Well, Conrad, sometimes you just gotta go with the flow.’
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that this phrase, go with the flow, was supposed to put a mystical aura around being a weak sloven and giving in to your lowest animal appetites. His dad said ‘go with the flow’ a lot.”—Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (2001)
