Fearless

I was anything but fearless. I was a thirteen or fourteen-year-old kid in a small town where being beautiful and athletic was everything. I was very far away from both. I could make people laugh. That was my saving grace. A fat kid who seemed to fit into the periphery of all different social groups. I had friends in all of them. I floated amongst the cliques with a laugh here and there and made out ok. When I think back on these years, they get jumbled up because they took place in two wildly different arenas. Two very different worlds. I started out at John Carroll High School, the private Catholic High school. I ended up at Bel Air High School, having been expelled with a month to go in my junior year.

 “Leave, we’ve decided you aren’t good enough for us anymore.”  I was ok with it. I became a hero. My parents were pissed. Especially my mom. Maybe I’ll write about it but suffice it to say that I got fucked on the deal. They’d just had it with me. And they made my parents go to bat for me in this little room near the library. They made them plead for me, and my parents told them to fuck off. They told them to just be done with us if this is what they wanted. I stood outside and had no idea that two people were fighting for me to such lengths. The door opened. My mom just touched my shoulder and simply said, “We’re done. We’re going home. What should we have for dinner!?” To this day, my mom roils at the mention of John Carroll High School. “Fuck them!’ she’ll say, and she’s not one to use that word much.

But before all of that and after the whole baseball team letdown, I fell into the groove that so many smart, weird, unlovable and unattractive kids do. I fell into drugs and music. I’ve told you about the Quaalude/Amphetamine caps we had as “samples” in the upstairs guestroom closest. My Mom the pharmacist bringing home free unit-dosage cardboard sheets of drug-rep samples. I had The High Time Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs inside every denim clad three ring binder I carried to school. I studied the effects and prices of hash and barbiturates and hypnotics across the globe. I was way into drugs. I was so into the very idea that you could put something into your mouth (at first) and within a measurable portion of time feel wildly different and in a way, absolutely predictable. I was obsessed with drugs. Drugs, and even the daydreams of drugs allowed me to pretend I wasn’t me. I wasn’t sure who I wanted to be, but I sure knew who I didn’t want to be.

And there was that very first yellow 5mg Valium I took from the amber plastic pill bottle in our family kitchen bathroom. Just five milligrams. I took one and swallowed it. It was a school night. I remember because I wondered if I should take another for the next day for Tim. (I did) I swallowed this little pale-yellow tablet and went to bed. Goodnight, Mom, Goodnight Dad. Goodnight Dusty and Bear. Debronich Eespatch, Novstrovya Woof! Woof! The evening ritual complete with three Polish tidings of love which I still don’t understand. One of the words means goodnight.

I lied in bed with the lights off and probably the little radio next to my head playing WKTK. I remember some feeling rolling through me. Everything was fine. Like there was simply nothing to worry about. Every conscious aspect of my life was just sort of funny. I giggled. True giggles. Those little, short, bursts of pointless laughter. I looked to me left out of the window and just kept giggling. This was alright. Valium was definitely alright. I slowly fell asleep with some new smile on my face. I’ve been chasing that smile forever.

I keep going back. At first this was all supposed to be a forward-looking trip starting from a single Violent Femmes song and my summer of trying to fall in love with Leslie. Little memories start to creep in, and it feels phony to ignore them. Holden Caulfield would hate me.  And so, I give them some space and they just open up wider chasms of a life. I’ve always thought of my life as a series of distinct single lives of a closely related person. I feel like I’ve been a distinctly different human living a distinctly unique 24-hour lifespan one day after another for years, decades, an entire life. The kid who giggled himself to sleep that night was no more me than you are. But I do know him. He’s a part of me. He’s another soldier in the Army of Me Against The World. And it’s not an angry war. It’s not hateful. At times it’s even a loving war but it is a war, nonetheless.

At some point if I go back far enough, I’ll get to The Thing. Who wants to talk about a thing like that? The hardest part of sharing something that happened to you that fucked you up is the absolute certainty that IT WASN’T THAT BAD. Almost everyone has had it worse than you. We spend a lot of energy dismissing and downplaying our “Trauma.” The word alone has been overused to the point of frivolity. We live in a culture where trauma is a currency, and we collect it like our grandparents collected trading stamps. But you know what? These things happen. And they fuck us up. And it doesn’t matter if we were raped, beaten, yelled at, looked at funny, never chosen for the team. It’s all the same and no one is immune to it. Some of us have more resilience, for sure, but again, it’s not a competition I’ve been lucky enough to have fallen into a life where I get to be someone people like this come to for help. I’ve become a “therapist.” I have the master’s degree and the hours and the love of it but I was denied the license and then said fuck the license, I can do it anyway. That’s a whole different story and I’ll get around to it. But the point is that I talk to people every single day who feel broken because of something someone else did to them. Usually, when they were little and couldn’t possibly understand what any of this world tilting behavior meant. Trauma is something that, in a flash, makes your whole world stop making sense. At least, this is what it seems like it means to me and again, even contemplating writing about mine makes me feel like a fraud. Maybe that’s how it get’s you. It hits you and makes you feel like a liar for screaming ‘ouch!’

What happened to me wasn’t anything that didn’t happen to all kinds of kids. To all of us. But it was how I managed it that screwed me up. See? Even here I’m taking responsibility for it. I have a distinct memory of being maybe 10 or 11 years old. Fuck, maybe it was 7 or 8, the whole period is a blur of sunlit backyards, closed-mouthed dinners and hours and hours and hours of TV screens and spinning records. It’s summer and I’m standing in my backyard in Homestead Village. I’m in the lower depression of our backyard where my mom has her clothesline. I see myself facing the house and staring into the window over the kitchen sink. It’s bright. It’s warm. I have little kid’s shorts on, and I say out loud. “No kid should ever feel this way, and this is going to fuck you up for the rest of your life.” I said that. Out loud. I remember it in a way that is so much more clear and bankable than the buffalo memory. The memory stops there. What else could it contain? But it seems such an odd thing for a little kid to proclaim out loud.

Whenever the thing happened it happened a couple times. It happened while sleeping over at a friend’s houses. It happened while “camping out” in backyards in Montgomery Ward tents. It happened from people who might very well read this, and I won’t name them. I truly believe that they did to me the only thing they knew to do given what had been done to them. That’s the problem with so much trauma. It’s just generations and generations and generations of ok people getting fucked and fucked and fucked and sometimes, actually fucked.

And so, nights sprang into being where the little kid me wound up happy and excited to be sleeping over in some other older, cooler kid’s house and bed. Older enough to be a “big kid” and “Wow! He want’s to hang out with me?!”

Nights sprang into being where he did stuff to me that felt exciting and wholly unknown. It felt good. There are things that can be done to you in the darkest moments of fear “that feel good” and you’ll pay for that good feeling forever. Nights sprang into being where he had me do these things to him and I still felt, confused and excited.

 And days followed when it was all over, and I knew I was a monster.

I didn’t know what “gay” or “homosexual” meant at that age, but I knew it was bad. I certainly didn’t know that nothing he did to me linked to being “gay.” He would have done the same thing to an 8-year-old girl. The concept of an adult wanting to fuck a kid was what baffled me. Confused me. Made all my circuits short out. Just like they do now. But all of it reduced to me being gay.

Little kids always take on the blame for everything that happens to them. They need to make their world make sense. If the father or mother beats them, everything falls apart. And so, they need to make their world make sense. They see their horrible parents as “good” and themselves as “Bad” because only a “good” person would hit a “bad” person. Now everything makes sense. It's s so much easier to see ourselves as the villain in our story. This is called “splitting” This is how kids process trauma.

And so, I became “gay” or “broken” or “dirty.”

I’d heard the syllables spoken on TV and in the house just enough to know that it was something that needed hiding. For years I ruminated on those nights as proof that I was something my parents would banish forever if they know. What’s worse I remembered it feeling good in my confused excitement. There’s no looking back. I was awful.

For years I carried this around always on the verge of confession. But confession meant banishment. I never slept in my bedroom again. Not because anything happened there but because I needed the TV noise to blot out my memories and allow me to sleep. My parents just let that happen. Who knows? I still think it’s crazy when someone tells me they can just lie in bed and close their eyes and go to sleep. Jesus. I can’t even imagine.

Eventually it all burst through. It was a school morning and I seem to remember walking down the basement stairs to get something and feeling all of it well up like a tsunami. When I walked into the kitchen I started crying like a kid on fire. My mother was out of her mind at what had so suddenly overtaken her son. Next, we’re sitting on the edge of the family room sofa and I’m confessing. I am confessing my sins. That’s how I’d shaped it over all these years. She held me and loved me and reassured me and had no idea what else to do. She did exactly the right thing. She never told my Dad as that would have meant me living through the whole thing again via his wrath. We kept it to ourselves. It’s somethings we have together. And now you have it with us. Just me, her, and you.

My mom’s expressed sorrow that she didn’t handle it well, that she didn’t act strong enough. Mom. You were and are perfect. And look at us. We’re still here. Together