The End
I think I’m coming to the end of this thing. I’ve been roaming through all of the little films I see in my mind for months now and trying to convert them to strings of letters and words, always trying to make them seem as important or magical to you as they are to me. Just little flickers of old movie reels that roll like forgotten films shown at some revival movie house on which the marquee screams, “Mike’s Life and everything he’s done wrong! (and a few things right).” I suppose I could go on forever with these stories, all becoming more diluted than the last. But the time has come. It’s time to wrap this up and hopefully start an entire other life that might be worth writing about someday.
I never set out to create a history of things that I did and experienced strictly connected to times and days, and the vetting of so many others dragged into this thing. I just wanted to make these little, but powerful movies I see in my mind stand alone in text. So many of these stories might not even have happened. But they sure feel like they did, and maybe that’s all that matters. Our memories rule us. Our history is virtually meaningless.
I look over this thing and see my propensity for highlighting the pain. I glorify the suffering. The abject non-life of being a junky. And the fact is, I’ve had a beautiful life. I’ve been charmed by the sunlight of God, and maybe God isn’t real to you, and maybe you even recoil at the very idea, and that’s ok. I love you whether you think I’m a naïve puppet or a warrior in a garden protecting the gardener who’s never raised a blade. I can take it all. But my life, with all its derailments and sickness and heartbreak, has been nothing short of magical.
***
The other day I was interviewed on a podcast. My dear friend Jaymee, who was one of the small gang who pushed me onto the path I’m on now, has a podcast and asked me to be on it again. I’d been on two other times. But a couple things came up which I needed to say to him, and maybe a couple of dozen or hundred or thousand people listening. It’s this: I hurt an awful lot of people. I broke a lot of hearts. I wish I could say it was from love gone bad or something as romantic as what we generally think of heartbreak, but it was usually something different. I broke hearts because people fell in love with me, or maybe they simply fell in friendship with me, and I was so often, in their minds at least, on the verge of dying. Being with me for some people was to shudder and recoil at a phone ringing late at night. Was this the call? I had that call when my Mom called me about my dad. It’s a deadly call. You never expect it, yet you fear it every moment of your life. I put that fear of a simple telephone ring into people.
On the podcast, Jaymee called me a “dirty Saint.” His way of identifying the concept of the wounded healer. Those of us who have been dragged through the mud through our own choices and emerged in some fashion, someone able to help others going through the same pain. Surely I like that. Surely it makes me feel good that all the pain, selfish decisions, and botched moments of life put me in a position to help others. And I do. I do. I help people. But I railed against Jaymee’s characterization of me.
If I am, in fact, a “dirty saint” whose pain has enabled me to help others, then credit must be given to all those who paid the emotional price for my ascendence into some wholly fucked sainthood. What about them? I paid virtually nothing for my years of addiction and debasement. I wrapped myself in a Teflon cape of heroin and sex, and everyone who loved me whithered at my slow diminishment. They are the saints. They put me in this place. No equation which results in me being anything of value can not involve what they went through simply by loving me. I fucking hurt a lot of people. And I emerged all but unscathed, and they, I hope, barely remember me, but at times, at key moments, I destroyed them with my selfishness, greed, hunger, and solipsism.
And so to all of you. I owe such a dept. It’s a wholly unpayable debt, but it’s a dept nonetheless. I don’t say this to create a pool of guilt in which I’ll drown grasping for one half-deflated plastic seahorse, but I can’t pretend I did any of this on my own.
The only way someone gets to the point where their singular catastrophe can be translated into helping other people is to acknowledge that the fuel of the engine is the pain I jabbed into so many willing and hopeful hearts.
***
I think I wrote this thing in the hopes of being loved. And I felt if I exposed every part of me that was so awful and rotten that somehow you might take some second glance at someone willing to lie naked in the middle of Harford County mall, just a fat white kid exposed to all the taunting that such an act would bring. And maybe I thought it would lead to some sort of compassion and empathy. I think I thought you’d all see yourselves in my secrets and wretchedness and maybe as if by magic, look upon me with something like love or at least understanding. I think I did all of this for selfish reasons. I fear dying alone and unloved more than any conceivable fate. And so I put it all out there. And maybe I was a fool to do so. But that is why I wrote all of this and shared all of these secrets with you. I wanted to be loved. Not idolized or put on a pedestal but just loved how we love a friend who we know exactly what eats at them at three in the morning. Those kinds of friends. Coming right out and saying you want to be loved is almost surely to be dismissed. Who asks for such a thing short of a broken doll of a clockwork human? And yet, here I am. Asking for love. And so ready and dying to return it. As I age into what is likely the last chapter of my life, love is all I really care about. I fail at expressing it and embracing it all the time, but it remains the little pebble upon which my greying and diminishing body balances on. God, but I wish I could have embraced love so much earlier in my life. The things we put ahead of love on our list of wishes and proprieties are simply staggering in their inanity. The young who truly embrace love will rule this world, and they’ll do it with kindness and empathy. Complete empathy. Selective empathy is hate. I fell for that so many times.
***
I think it’s all out now. I think I’ve told you everything. Every petty and shameful and secret transgression I can remember. I think this thing is done. I think I’m empty. And you know what? It feels ok. I’m happy it’s all out. I’m an empty slate ready to create so much more scratches on my soul, and hopefully, I’ll keep them less buried. I just wanted to be loved. What else is there? This is the end, my only friend, the end.