Nikolas P. Robinson's Blog, page 54

An Interlude: Part 10.5

I began writing this for a couple of different reasons, first and foremost because I needed to get back into the habit of writing something, anything at all…and we all know that rule number one is to write what we know. Where my fictional writing is concerned, it mostly concerns horror, and I felt it might be beneficial for me to explore the horror of real life and how it influences who I’ve become and what I do.

Almost as important, I felt that this might just be a healthy bit of self-exploration and would certainly be cheaper than therapy. It was almost arbitrary that I opened up and shared myself with you, without restraint, and I figured that there would be a couple of people who might be interested in seeing me vulnerable and exposed…If only out of morbid curiosity or spite.

I could not have anticipated the overwhelming show of support and encouragement I have received, from friends and acquaintances as well as total strangers. I expected, at most, to reach one or two people like I usually did with the things I’ve written in the past, and that was fine with me…it was relatively safe and provided me with the illusion of openness without the reality of truly being laid bare in the eyes of anyone. I am not the most interesting fellow and I definitely don’t expect anyone to hang from my every word, so I have been floored by the unprecedented number of people who have been showing an active interest in what I’ve had to say.

This shocking development led to another impetus being adopted behind my decision to continue writing all of this, one that only came about after a few of my stories had been shared…that is my hope that maybe I could potentially reach someone and speak to them in a way that might resonate somehow for them, and maybe improve their life in some small way. Through the sharing of my experiences I started to hope that I might make a difference somewhere, for someone. I dismissed that as being a damned silly thought almost immediately, but I am starting to wonder if maybe I wasn’t too quick to cast it aside…maybe I will be able to help just one person by continuing to open up like I have so far.

I have a small request for you, whether you take me seriously or not…share all of this with anyone you know who might benefit from it, whether because you know they are hurting or because you feel they would derive some pleasure from a total stranger making an ass of himself by sharing these deeply personal aspects of his life with anyone who happens to come along. There is no sense in my exposing myself like this if no one is there to witness it. The vulnerability is a sham if I am not putting myself out there without hesitation…in for a penny, in for a pound.

I am not special, though, and my story is not unique or original…the details may be individual to my life, but the overall theme is not a new one by any stretch of the imagination. There are countless men and women, boys and girls, who have suffered through experiences quite similar to my own and many of them even worse. They are everywhere. If you don’t open yourself up to them without judgment and allow them to reach out to you in their own way (on their own terms) and with their own timing…there is no safe assurance that anyone else will.

It’s up to you to try and make a difference for the broken and the damaged, even if you are among them…don’t you dare second guess yourself like I always do. You might be surprised at just how much healing can come from two broken individuals coming together and simply focusing on the parts that don’t bear the scars left behind, until they can look at one another and no longer see the scars, but the person as they are meant to be.

The world around us and life itself are full of darkness and horrors beyond our everyday imaginings. That darkness has a way of penetration us when we are at our weakest, and consuming us from the inside if we let it. I am the first to admit that it can be seductive in its own way, and that it can be a relief to grab ahold of that darkness and embrace it. Once you do, it never really goes away…and I honestly don’t know if that is even a bad thing, but I am in no position to judge that without bias. Even with that darkness everywhere you have to remember that there is also so much light in the world as well, and you have to insure that other people are seeing it to.

Fuck what I have had to say so far, as well as the rest of what I’m going to share with you after this. None of that is important. What matters is that you take one small lesson away from all of this and make a positive difference in someone’s life, even if that life happens to be your own.

What are you doing still sitting there? Get off your ass and make the world a better place in some infinitesimal way. One person can’t change the world, I know that, but a population is constructed from nothing more than one person and another and another…if you all choose to make a difference, then it will fucking happen.

Don’t worry, I’m not done…I have so much more to share with you.

Part Ten: When You Gaze Long Into the Abyss

My maternal grandfather was quite possibly the most important influence during my childhood, and after my father was functionally removed from the picture he stepped in and took over in the role of father figure for me. Quite sincerely, I could not have asked for anyone better to have fulfilled that need in my life.

He was a hard working man right up until the decades of smoking took their toll and forced him to require an oxygen tank just to breathe. I spent summer months and weekends in the spring and fall accompanying him to flea markets and threshing bees, assisting him with small engine repair (a skill that he picked up during his time in the Navy). At the time, being barely even an adolescent, I sometimes got bored and looked at the days spent thus way as a bizarre form of punishment…and I wish that I could go back and smack that ungrateful little shit and teach him to appreciate the lessons he was learning as well as the time he was fortunate enough to spend with a great man.

My grandfather was well respected in the small community where I grew up, and with good reason. As selfish and stupid as I could be when I was younger, my grandfather was the one person I was least inclined to behave disrespectful towards. There was something about him that elicited a degree of compliance from me that no one else ever really could.

This story isn’t about my grandfather, I just wanted you to know a little bit about the man because he plays an important role in the story I am about to share.

I made a passing reference to the violence that punctuated my childhood, both at home and in the outside world. I’d like to take this little bit of time here to discuss the violence outside of my home, so sit down and pay some damn attention…maybe you will learn something.

I told you before that I didn’t make friends easily (and still don’t, as you’re probably aware), and that may have been a bit of an understatement. I don’t know what it was about me as a child, at least not specifically, but I apparently rubbed people the wrong way pretty badly. It could be something as simple as the fact that I was taller than all of my peers until right around high school, it could have been because I was smarter than most of them (if not all of them) and they resented me for it, it could have been due to the fact that I was always a little bit different (and I know I’m not fooling anyone by trying to pretend it was some miniscule bit of peculiarity I exhibited), or it may very well have been a combination of some or all of those things…I never did learn why I was singled out the way that I was.

I don’t remember when it started, the years back then blur together for me this far away, but it may have been as early as first grade when the beatings started…and they continued for years.

There was a certain group of kids consisting of classmates as well as older friends of theirs and family members who determined, for whatever reason, that I was something to be broken. I played basketball with some of these boys and later participated in Cub Scouts/Boy Scouts with them, but there was no sense of being comrades between us outside of those circumstances.

Looking back from the vantage point of the present, it seems like I was subjected to their bullshit a couple of days a week all through the school year, but I know it couldn’t have conceivably been that frequent; they would have had to get bored with it if that had been the case. It was frequent enough that it hammered itself into my memory pretty severely though. It wasn’t always the same faces taunting me, hitting and kicking me…some days it was only two or three of them, other days there were five or six of them. I’m not ashamed to admit that I was scared. Anyone would have been frightened under those same circumstances.

It had to have been one of the first times that this happened when my grandfather came out yelling and chased the boys off before helping me to my feet. My grandparents lived diagonally across the street from where I attended school and had a clear view of the parking lot where most of this violence took place. I actually feel bad for my grandfather sometimes because I know that he had to witness the same thing happening to me with far too much frequency. That first time though, he made me promise that I would not get into fights with those boys. He told me that I was not supposed to fight back, that I needed to avoid them and get away from them if it happened again.

If anyone else had asked me to do the same thing I would have dismissed it and done whatever I had to do. But I did not take that promise to my grandfather lightly.

Over the following years it happened again and again, some days I could get away without a scratch…but there were plenty of times which ended with me on the ground, beaten and sobbing out of frustration and pain, and none of those times did I even attempt to fight back. I took what they dished out with as much dignity as the situation allowed, escaping if the opportunity presented itself. I could run like a motherfucker if properly motivated.

For the longest time I almost resented my grandfather for insisting that I not fight back, most profoundly during and immediately following one of the beatings.

As I got older I looked back on his request and tried to understand why he would ask me to just take it without raising a hand to defend myself. When I was in a particularly negative state of mind I worried that he saw something bad in me, something possibly passed down to me from my father, and this was his way of doing the best he could to help me overcome that potential monster hiding there beneath the surface. I know that wasn’t his reasoning at all, and that he was simply teaching me to be a better and stronger man, and that violence wasn’t a solution. The funny thing is, when I have really let myself look closely at my life, I wonder if he wasn’t unintentionally killing two birds with one stone there. I still suspect, and fear, that there is something down there, lurking beneath the skin…and I learned to keep it there through the lessons my grandfather taught me, of discipline and self control. He may not have seen something terrible inside of me but I know myself well enough to suspect that it is in there…and that is where it can damn well stay.

All of that aside, there did finally come a time, perhaps it was after a particularly bad beating that I experienced (or maybe he was just tired of seeing those smug little shits beating on his grandson), when my grandfather told me that I had his permission to fight back the next time, but only if they hit me first. I can still clearly recall a sensation that can only be equated to having shackles removed at that moment.

As it turned out it wasn’t me being hit that served as the impetus for my bring able to respond in kind. I was in the next yard over from my grandparents’ house, playing with the boy who lived there. He was the nicest kid, a bit on the slow side, but he didn’t treat me strangely…which may explain why I have an easy time building rapport with individuals suffering from various sorts of mental handicap.

A few of the boys who routinely beat me up showed up and started behaving like the assholes that they were. I don’t know what led to it but one of them shoved the neighbor boy over and I felt like I was free to retaliate. I do not exaggerate when I tell you that I hit him hard enough that he went over the white picket fence that separated that yard from my grandparents’. It sounds like embellishment, and you are free to assume it to be just that, but I assure you that I have been entirely forthcoming in this, as with the rest of what I have shared with you.

I’ve always been stranger than I look, and I was justifiably angry at the time. My grandfather was right, that was the last time I had to worry about those boys after school. There was only one other incident during grade school when I used violence as a means to an end. This time it wasn’t justified and I felt terrible about it. In the hallway one day another student began saying some rude and cruel things to me and I didn’t catch myself before I could react.  I hit him once in the chest and cracked five or six of his ribs…I was 11 or 12 at the time. I immediately felt awful for hitting him and worse after learning how badly I’d actually hurt him. After that I got myself in check and really internalized the importance of avoiding violence.

There was another period of a few years after the accident when I lost track of the lessons I had learned from my grandfather, when there was nothing but anger fueling me, but I did finally get myself back under control…too late to avoid leaving some damage in my wake, but I never claimed to be perfect.

I could have turned out much worse though, and almost certainly would have without my grandfather providing me with his influence and teaching me that violence is almost never the correct answer.

Part Nine: I’ve Gotten Around a Bit

Speaking of sex, before I move on to something entirely unrelated, I have had a lot of it. That is not meant to be a boastful statement, in fact this is one of those things I am not entirely proud of, I’m simply trying to lay out the facts so that you can determine how I should be weighed and measured.

You may find it surprising, to look at me now, but I was apparently a handsome and appealing young man once upon a time…I know, that seems pretty alien to you, and I feel the same way, but all evidence seems to support that being a factual assessment. More surprising than my erstwhile sex appeal and good looks is the fact that I haven’t always been as socially awkward and terrified of human interaction as I am today. Sure, I have always had some deeply ingrained insecurities and a poor self-image, I have often thought of myself as having less of a personality and more of a collection of assorted neuroses…but I was better able to compensate, or overcompensate for those things when I was younger, sometimes even with a degree of charm and charisma.

These factors played a large part where my promiscuity is concerned, the good ones as well as the bad. The positive attributes, that I sometimes wonder how I might have ever exhibited, made me attractive to members of the opposite sex (albeit those with questionable taste, if you ask me), and the negative perception I had of myself led me to be inclined to use intimacy as a method by which I was able to obtain some sense of value and worth. Yes, I am aware that I have just transcended my physical form and become a troubled adolescent girl right before your eyes…those of you who know of my constant battle with body dysmorphia may argue that I reached that state of transformation quite a long time ago. Check mate, mother fucker!

Having embraced a fairly hedonistic philosophy in my youth, I can’t pretend that I actually regret my sexual history. It would be disingenuous of me to force out some tears and beg you for understanding. I enjoyed sex, and I enjoyed providing pleasure to others who similarly enjoyed it. There is nothing to be ashamed of in two people, or sometimes three, finding pleasure and comfort in the joining of mind and body.

I try to wax poetic there, but I assure you that I mean it quite sincerely as well. Sex has always been best for me when I feel that the participants are losing themselves in the experience, when the rest of the world fades away like something ephemeral. Admittedly, that has been a rare enough thing…that is, sadly, not how it always works out. A lot of the time sex is a drunken, rutting experience punctuated by grunts and slurred expletives, the sort of thing that would make Ron Jeremy cringe.

My admitted enjoyment of sex isn’t the greatest contributor to the number of partners I’ve had…though it would be a better story if that was the case. My biggest problem has always been that I have a damnably difficult time saying, “No,” to anyone of the female persuasion…and that has included a handful of women I wasn’t even particularly attracted to.

When I say that I wasn’t attracted to them I don’t exclusively mean physically, though the women in question didn’t appeal to me that way either. I am able to find things that attract me to most women; whether we’re talking about physical characteristics, a certain degree of intellect or artistic ability, personality traits that thoroughly captivate me, or even some more nebulous quality like the sound of her voice or the way she carries herself. I need you to know that I am able to find attractive aspects in most women without much difficulty because that is important to understand when I tell you that I have slept with women I was not remotely attracted to, solely because they displayed an interest in me and refusing them was something I couldn’t bring myself to do…also, there is a distinct possibility that I might have been a sex addict.

Thankfully that unsavory element of my psychology has become marginalized over the years, though I always do wonder if it isn’t just lurking there in the darkest corners of my being, waiting for an opportunity to emerge again. I think that I am ok though. But I would say that, wouldn’t I, if i were an addict?

Most of the time there was a mutual attraction, and I am grateful to my good fortune that this is the case. I don’t have numbers that I can toss out here for you, and I might have a difficult time doing so even if I were inclined to do that. I think it is safe to say that we’re still talking about double digits rather than triple…and I am not going to examine that any further because I don’t want to, and because memory isn’t what it used to be which leads to a margin for error in my calculation that I would prefer to avoid acknowledging. The specific numbers don’t matter, it’s sufficient to say that I honestly feel that it has been too many; not that I regret the experiences, I just believe that there could have been far fewer and that I might be a less deplorable human being for it. To my credit, for whatever it might be worth when it comes to salvaging my dignity, the number of one night stands can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There has to be something that can be said for quality combined with quantity, as long as we disregard the times I have been unfaithful, because there have been quite a few over the last two decades since I started actually having sex. Those indiscretions are fewer than you might think, but more than there should have been…because even a single instance was more than was acceptable.

Back to the topic of quality though, that weighed pretty damn heavily towards my becoming intimate with so many women. It was one thing I was good at, though I’m sure that I have my detractors…everyone’s a fucking critic. Within actual relationships the sex was never really a problem. I may have been emotionally distant, difficult to communicate with, intensely critical at times, and sometimes actively hostile or aggressive when not wallowing in depression…but the sex was healthy. There were times when I felt that I communicated better with my respective partners that way than with words or any other potential medium. The problem being that they weren’t satisfied with that in lieu of more traditional forms of conversation. Damn it though, I was just trying to play to my strengths, working with what I had. If only we spoke the same languages I night not be perceived as such a terrible pain in the ass to have been involved with by so many women.

As much as I would like to edit some numbers from my history, I have to say that each individual encounter was a unique experience. There are those who claim that sex is sex and that a hole is a hole…those men are fucking idiots. Each woman felt different from any other, she had a different scent, taste, and texture…a different rhythm and motion. Each kiss carried nuances that another’s kiss did not. Each body felt worlds apart from those before or after. I may be a piece of shit in your eyes for being a whore with flimsy rationalizations to justify my behavior, but I assure you that I never accepted payment for intercourse. I can sincerely state that, though there were definitely partners that rank as being essentially incomparable to me, each partner was able to bring something wholly different and special to the situation…even those I would honestly not have slept with if I could rewrite the past.

Ultimately I recognize that I am not a good person by any stretch of the imagination…but I know that already, so who the fuck are you to judge me? I can rest comfortably, knowing that I never used anyone for sex or took advantage of anyone. My morality may be questionable but I have always had a strict code wherein I would not sleep with someone who was intoxicated unless we had already established a sexual relationship together. That may not be much, but it is a damn sight better than a lot of people can say.

It’s a stretch to call me a gentleman, but I like to think that I might fall somewhere closer to that end of the spectrum in some loose, poorly defined sense of things…as long as we disregard a lot of what I’ve said here. I strongly recommend that we consider doing precisely that.

Part Eight: Let’s Back Up a Bit

When asked, my usual response is that I lost my virginity at the tender age of 15…this is not an entirely accurate statement, but the truth is a bit more complicated and would require more of a convoluted answer than is typically being requested with that inquiry.

What is the truth, you ask? Well, you’re probably going to be disappointed that you asked by the time I’m through…but I can oblige, though I remind you that you have been warned.

My first sexual experience was when I was around eight years old, maybe a little younger, prior to the divorce. Next door to our house in Piedmont there was a girl, a few years older than me, who I ended up spending a lot of time with…it could be said with some accuracy that she was my only friend at the time.

I don’t know anymore how it could have began, but at some point while we were playing together she decided that she wanted to see my penis. I didn’t know what I was doing, this was a different time, when children weren’t exposed to semi-pornographic material during prime time television and I hadn’t yet seen my first pornographic magazine…so you would be safe in assuming that I was entirely out of my depths.

Over the next couple of months she would regularly lead me into a shed that was essentially an expansion on a chicken coop, if I recall correctly. She would touch me and ask me to touch her in different places. One of my clearest memories of those experiences was of her having me kiss her vagina, though that word wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time. I remember her telling me to keep licking it and holding my head down there, I also remember that I wasn’t enjoying it because it smelled and tasted like pee…which was the word in my mind at the time.

These experiences were brought to an end when her grandmother walked in on me standing there with my pants around my ankles after the girl had left briefly. I told the woman that I was taking a pee, because I knew, even at that age, that the truth would get me in trouble. I was told to leave and that I was not welcome over there anymore. I remember the way the family next door would look at me after that and knowing that it wasn’t fair that I had gotten in trouble the way that I had while I was keeping my mouth shut to keep the neighbor girl from being dragged into it. To this day I don’t know if anyone ever told my parents or grandparents about me being caught over there like that, literally with my pants down.

There was no penetration, though probably only because I wasn’t physically capable of it, so I don’t know if this would have counted as me losing my virginity…but it certainly stands out as my first sexual experience with a girl, or anyone at all.

Even after becoming sexually active by my own volition, it took me some time before I was comfortable performing oral sex on a woman…those first experiences had kind of soured the whole idea for me. I feel almost silly about that now, because I have come to enjoy that particular intimate act a great deal.

This is where things are going to get a bit more interesting. During the remaining years of my childhood I really only had a couple of friends. I wasn’t well-equipped for making friends and influencing people, as my mother would occasionally describe things. One of these few friends factors heavily into the story I am sharing with you now…it would be safe to say, I think, that he was my best friend during the following years.

A homophobe reading this might do themselves a service and skip forward a little ways, since I wouldn’t want to upset those tender sensibilities…or maybe they should just stick it out and discover some previously unknown fuel to burn in contempt for me. If you’re still here I can assume it is safe to go on…but that is sometimes an erroneous assumption to make. I have shared the following information with some people over the years, close friends and some family members…and it has been those I most expected to display open mindedness that were the ones who typically expressed disgust. People can be funny like that.

From around third grade through eighth I had one friend with whom I probably spent substantially more time than any other. I don’t know if our shared experiences were common, or if he and I were just in a unique place where we were comfortable experimenting and exploring with one another. I don’t rightly know why or how it happened, but he and I developed what is, to date, the longest sexual relationship of my life. Of course, it could be argued that it doesn’t really count…but you can decide that for yourself.

We spent the night with one another quite a bit and wandered around by ourselves through the mountains which were practically in our back yards…and during these times we spent together we occasionally began to explore our sexuality and one another’s bodies. It began innocently enough with touching one another, watching each other touch ourselves, and learning what felt good to us. Over time our exploration became more intimate, performing oral sex on one another…sometimes even making a sort of game of it, waking each other up by performing oral sex on each other in turns. I recall one occasion where I pretended to remain asleep just to be selfish and not reciprocate. Yes, I admit I can be a bit of a prick…seriously though, I was a kid, fuck off.

I will avoid sharing the sordid details with you here, at least most of them. We only took things beyond oral sex once, while wandering through the hills together…neither of us seemed to particularly enjoy anal sex too terribly much, and our mutual exploration was pretty well at an end by that time.

I’m one of those people who has trouble saying that I don’t like something unless I have experienced it for myself, something that has gotten me into trouble a few times. It was from experience that I determined not only that I wasn’t exactly inclined towards homosexuality but that I also wasn’t a big fan of anal sex. Aren’t you happy to know that detail about me?

So, there you go…that’s the long-form answer to the question of when I lost my virginity. Don’t you feel special now?

Honestly, either of those stories is probably better than the story of the girl I slept with at 15, the one I say that I lost my virginity to. That night itself was fantastic, seven times we had sex in that one night…and that wasn’t just my interpretation of it, she ended up promoting me sexually to another girl only about six months later. It was the events that followed shortly thereafter where my perception of things become a bit jaded.

A month or two later a couple of my friends felt that they had to tell me about her going down on a mutual friend of ours while they were all driving through the hills together. I stewed for a while, waiting for one of those friends to get off work, at which point we drove to the apartment my girlfriend shared with her older sister.

This is where shit gets well and truly fucked up, and I hope you enjoy it, because I did not. When we arrived at the apartment it was to discover my girlfriend drunk, in the bathtub with our mutual friend she was blowing a week or so before as well as another of our mutual friends…this one being the person I considered to be my closest friend at that time in my life.

I was livid, if that word even approaches describing what I felt at the time. They all slipped out of the back door after I had been briefly distracted and a chase did indeed ensue.

There was no violence though. I had spent my whole life, up to that point, learning to reign in my violent impulses to avoid becoming my father (something I will discuss at another time)…progress that, sadly, ended up hitting a major setback less than a year later when I became little more than an animated vessel for anger and self-destructive impulses. You know how that came about already though, so I thankfully don’t need to address it again.

Needless to say, that spelled the end of my relationship with the girl who took my virginity.

Part Seven: Post Script

My first couple of hours in the hospital consisted of numerous x-rays and images being taken. I realized how badly injured I was when asked to stand for a series of x-rays and, upon reaching my feet to the ground, it felt as if my spine was collapsing like an accordion on raw nerves. I have never felt anything before or since that has compared to that pain, and I sincerely hope that remains true. I was assisted in laying back down and advised not to move until they had a chance to examine the images they’d already taken.

The doctor who came to see me expressed a sort of admiration when the first words from my mouth were essentially my begging him to tell me about the two girls who were brought in with me. He indicated that he was pleasantly surprised because almost anyone else, in his experience, under the circumstances would have started out by asking what was wrong with themselves before even thinking about anyone else. I didn’t deserve his respect or admiration, at that point I couldn’t have given a shit less about my own condition, even if I had been rapidly dying. I was there by the actions of my own stupid hands, but those two girls were there because of me as well.

It was then that I was informed that the one girl was being airlifted to Sioux City, IA due to the severity of her injuries (which consisted of a shattered ankle and pelvis along with numerous other fractures). It was devastating to hear that she had been hurt so badly, enough so that it took me a moment to collect myself and recognize that he hadn’t told me anything about the one person I was most concerned with. I had to ask him directly about her and his hesitation before answering was all it took to confirm my worst fear. I don’t recall what he was saying and was only able to focus a fraction of my attention on his words at the time, he was telling me that she hadn’t made it to the hospital…he was telling me about the extent of her injuries when I interrupted him, insisting that I needed to see her.

Her mother had been contacted and was on her way to the hospital to identify and claim her daughter’s body. The doctor informed me that I would have to wait until she arrived and approved of it before I would have permission to see the body myself.

I had never met her mother before this and I was terrified. I knew that there was no way she would agree to let me see her daughter, not after I had helped to kill her. The wait during the following couple of hours was horrible. I imagined numerous scenarios in which the woman tried to kill me after the trauma of losing her daughter hit home…and in none of those would I have lifted a finger to stop her.

I couldn’t have been more wrong, though. Her daughter had learned from a wonderful example in the woman I met that afternoon. I had no way of knowing how difficult it must have been for her to look at me and talk to me with compassion…but she didn’t shy away from it. She was kind and understanding and she didn’t decline my request to see her daughter.

I was wheeled into a room where there was one other occupant, still and silent. A nurse helped me onto my side so that I could face the girl who had been sleeping so peacefully only half a day before. My mind played cruel tricks on me. I kept seeing her chest rise and fall with breaths that she wasn’t taking and subtle movements of her eyelids that she wasn’t capable of making.

I had to stretch awkwardly and painfully in order to take her hand, muttering unintelligible pleas for her to just come back to me and squeeze my hand. I spent the whole time talking to her, and I have no idea what I was saying any longer. I remember trying to pray to any gods that might exist to simply let me take her place, crying that I would give anything to have me be the one who had died in her place…an exercise in futility.

The nurse was patiently waiting outside for me to tell her that I was ready to go, but that never happened…I probably never would have called out for her. I was finally removed from the room when they needed to prepare her body for being transferred across the state for funeral preparations.

I spent the next couple of days in that hospital, becoming acquainted with the god awful uncomfortable back brace that I would be wearing for months to follow. I was miserable and depressed, if those words even come close to describing how I was feeling…my interactions with others could probably best be described as being despondent.  Something about me made a positive impression on one of the nurses who was caring for me though, as she kept in regular contact with me for a few months after I was discharged.

The ride back home was a terrifying ordeal in its own right. The state had been hit by a winter storm and my mother and my favorite of her brothers had driven across the state to recover me from the hospital. I was more than a little bit uncomfortable being in any vehicle for a long time after the events of a few days before, and the steady snowfall did not help matters at all. It was even more uncomfortable being forced to face two people who expected better of me, two members of my family who believed in me and the “limitless potential” I had always been told I exhibited by family, teachers, and the like. I can’t imagine the disappointment they must have felt, and thanks to my own children turning out far better than I had, I doubt I ever will be able to.

I didn’t know whether I should attend the funeral. I felt that my presence there would be disruptive, that it would be an insult to her memory, that it was a sacrilege of sorts. I would likely have avoided the funeral altogether if I hadn’t been able to ask permission of her mother, to ask if my presence would even be welcome there.

It was at the funeral when I learned that she used to talk about me now and again to her mother and grandparents, that she had a fondness for me that I had been entirely oblivious to, that preceeded that single night we had together while she drifted off to sleep peacefully as close to being in my arms as she ever was. It wasn’t until some time later that I learned from the other victim of the accident that they had only joined the driver and I in that vehicle because I was there and they had trusted me…which taught me that people were better off not trusting me.

Between the cocktail of pain medication and muscle relaxers and the emotional turmoil of the circumstances, most of the funeral is a blur to me. I do remember not wanting to leave the grave site until well after most everyone else had gone. My mother was grateful (and I suppose I was too) for the two friends of mine who had also remained behind, because it was those two boys who finally got my attention away from the cold ground and helped me to my feet, encouraging me that it was time to go. Aside from the cemetery ground keepers, we were the last four people still there.

I honestly hadn’t noticed that we had been left alone. My mother’s fear may have been right, I might have intended to crawl down into that hole myself…I don’t adequately recall.

After the funeral, her mother kept in touch with me, and when it was time for her to return home in December, she asked me to join her and her parents on the trip. They were good people, better and kinder than I could ever hope to be, so I know that there wasn’t a malicious desire to hurt or torture me for my part in the tragic accident…but they wouldn’t have been more successful at applying torture if their motives had been cruel. I traveled with them for hours, welcomed and treated with more kindness that I did not deserve.

When we arrived I was shocked and appalled to discover that the bed I would be sleeping in for the next few days was a bed belonging to a ghost. I slept on sheets that she had slept upon countless times while staying with her mother. I lay awake at night staring at posters she had placed on the walls and listening to a stereo she had listened to while sleeping in that room as well. I went on walks with her mother through a town where they had walked together many times. I shared meals with a devastated family suffering from a terrible loss, and this was the one time in my life when I sincerely entertained the thought of suicide. It was, in fact, at that point when I stopped taking my pain medication…only partially because I felt that I deserved the pain, and was cheating somehow by deadening it.

It was only a short while later, after returning to school for the spring semester, that I swallowed those pills I had been saving. It didn’t work out as planned, I became disoriented and barely functional, and sick…but I kept breathing. Some friends, good friends I didn’t deserve to have escorted me from the school and kept watch over me to see if I needed to be taken to the hospital. I was high, but I was alive…and there have been times in my life when I wish that had turned out differently as well.

Well, there you go…that particular story is done. I’m sure there is more I could say, details I didn’t include…but you’ll have to live with it as is, because I am tired of sharing this bit of my life with you. There is a limit to my endurance, and we have reached it.

Part Six: Endings

The morning of the worst day of my life started off beautifully, which only serves to show how terribly things can change. She was still sleeping against me when we woke up shortly after sunrise. I don’t think I even recalled falling asleep a few hours before, the last thing I remembered was the quiet sound of her breathing as I ran my fingers through the hair of her sleeping head. That would have been the perfect moment to have opened my mouth and told the truth. I have no doubt that she would have been angry with me for the deception, but I similarly have no doubt that she would have forgiven me…she was that kind of person, the sort of girl who couldn’t even conceive of malice directed at another person.

Of course I didn’t say a thing, no matter how much I wish that I could go back and change that fact…if I had, we wouldn’t be experiencing the conclusion of this chapter of my life together. If I had simply done the right thing, I would be a better man for it…but I did not, and we’ll have to decide together what that says of me as a man.

I was short-sighted and took the beginning of the day as a sign that life was going to turn out just fine. I learned real fucking quick that the beginning of a thing has little to no relevance to determining how that thing will end, and if that is the only lesson you learn from me it will make this whole ordeal worth something.

Our agenda that morning was so simple. We were near some of the other girl’s family on the Eastern side of the state, so we were going to stop there and let her visit them for a short while and then we would continue on our way to dropping the girls off as intended. Everything seemed to be going smoothly for us that morning and we filled up the tank again before leaving town (without paying for it, as you could probably guess) after that brief interlude with her family.

We were well on our way down the highway when a police officer came along, heading the opposite direction, most likely due to the fact that the cops had been called because of a handful of kids in a minivan driving off without paying for their fuel. I don’t adequately know how to describe the feeling I experienced as I saw the cruiser whip around in the rear view mirror with lights and siren going, but terror and stomach churning nervousness fall monstrously short as far as descriptions go. In a perfect world my friend would have recognized that we had reached the conclusion of our strange little journey and it was time to call it quits…instead, he accelerated.

Nothing about this situation could have played out well for us from that moment on. The girls were terrified and screaming from the second row seat, begging him to stop the vehicle…but there was no indication that he was hearing them at all. Until that time I had never really considered that a minivan could reach speeds exceeding 100MPH, and I genuinely hope never to experience that again.

To my credit, the little bit that I might deserve, I tried to get my friend to pull over at least long enough to let the girls out. I pleaded with him and swore that I would stay with him to see it through to whatever end we met if he would just stop and let them out.

There was no getting through to him though, and under the circumstances I can understand how he would have driven on, oblivious to the pleading from the rest of us in the vehicle. He was as scared as we were; more so, I suspect, because he knew that he was behind the wheel of a stolen minivan. During the few minutes that followed the officer beginning his pursuit, there was nothing else going through my friends mind but a desperate need to escape and a cascade of fight or flight hormones.

I was angry with him for quite some time after this, and I liked to pretend that I would have done something differently if I had been behind the wheel, but I don’t know that events would have played out any differently had that been the case. Under the same conditions I may have had the exact same panic response that led him to run rather than stop and accept the consequences for our actions. The simple truth is that I don’t know anything of the sort, and it was unfair of me to be angry with him for reacting out of fear.

The high speed pursuit didn’t last long even though it felt like forever while it was happening. My friend pulled off from the highway onto another road as soon as the opportunity presented itself, presumably to try and lose the officer and extract us from the god awful situation we were in. Sadly, diverting our attempted escape onto this alternate road directly led to the horrible outcome that was soon to arrive. No one would have anticipated the sudden transition from pavement to gravel, but the inevitable outcome of hitting the gravel surface at close to 120MPH was highly predictable.

We were out of control almost immediately and the minivan flipped into the air before rolling a few times and coming to a stop upside down a good distance from the road.

The specifics of the accident are difficult to recall, having happened so damn fast. I remember my seatbelt snapping and I have some flashes of recollection of being thrown around inside of the vehicle before being apparently ejected from the rear hatch of the minivan. I remember bouncing and rolling along the dry, hard-packed dirt ground for a while before things finally became still.

I don’t recall losing consciousness at all, but I sure as hell wasn’t fully coherent at first. It was the sound of the other girl crying that shook me out of the daze that I was in. I picked myself up from the ground and stumbled over to where she was laying on the ground. I could see that she was hurt, and badly, but I tried to tell her that everything would be ok and that there had to be an ambulance on the way. She asked me if I saw her friend, and it took me a little while to locate her.

I frantically searched the ground for her, my eyes not focusing quite right, but I did finally see her a short distance away. She wasn’t crying at all and didn’t appear to be moving, so I began to walk over to where she was laying as quickly as I could.

I was almost there when the officer yelled from the road for me to lay down and wait for the paramedics to arrive. My body wanted me to listen to him, but I had to get over to her so I just kept walking that direction until I couldn’t stay on my feet any longer. It had been pure adrenaline that kept me going that far and I had just burned through it, I guess. I don’t really remember hitting the ground, but I was laying there again, my head tilted awkwardly to the side to keep my eyes on the girl who had only a short while before been sleeping peacefully pressed up against me. I swear that she was breathing and looking back at me, but the mind plays tricks on us during times of great stress and I can’t trust the things I believed myself to have seen.

I would later find out that the van had landed on her during one of its rolls and that her heart had burst from the pressure…something to that effect. My lies and cowardice, selfishness and stupidity had literally broken her heart. That was the lesson I carried with me from that horrific day.

She didn’t make it through that morning, didn’t even survive to make it into the ambulance as far as I know. I didn’t know any of that until later. If she was still breathing while I lay there on the ground with my eyes locked on hers, I may have been the last thing she saw before she passed away…and she deserved something so much better than that, she deserved to see something beautiful and peaceful to carry with her into the end.

Her friend’s injuries were severe enough that she had to be flown from the nearby hospital to one where they could properly tackle the rebuilding process required to repair the damage from the accident. I saw her again just a few years ago and she still walked with a noticeable limp, and it made me wince to see it.

Beyond numerous contusions and psychological damage that I will carry with me the rest of my life, I fractured five vertebrae in my middle and lower spine. My insistence on walking around immediately after the accident certainly couldn’t have helped that condition.

The driver was uninjured and taken into custody. He was ultimately convicted and sentenced to serve a year in a juvenile detention facility for the part he played in the accident. There was no attempt to convict me of anything, apparently determining that I was being punished enough thanks to the injuries I sustained in the wreck…but I would have gladly traded places with my friend, if it had been an option. Some part of me wanted to be punished, needed it…but I was not. The owners of the minivan did not press charges out of some sense of compassion for the children who had been involved in the theft and subsequent tragedy, but I remember halfway wishing that they had…just so that I could have been held accountable.

I was only a month shy of my 16th birthday, and I was a killer. I may not have been behind the wheel, but I was just as complicit in killing the first girl I loved as the boy who had been driving. Growing up Catholic taught me about sins of commission and sins of omission…and that is a lesson I took to heart. I was actively involved in the theft that placed the fateful Dodge Caravan in our careless, stupid hands…that was a sin of commission. I spent the couple of days during our little road trip neglecting to tell the truth, which would have saved us all a great deal of pain and suffering…that was a sin of omission. I may not believe in God, the dogma of the Catholic faith, or any of that silly spiritual nonsense…but the concept of sin is something that I can embrace, sin is the way that we wrong those around us, the choices we make that directly or indirectly hurt the people in our lives.

This is the point where I should tell you about the time spent in the hospital and the god awful, painful nightmare that was her funeral…but I can’t do it, not right now. I’ve spent too long thinking about this tonight, picking at wounds that I’ve never quite allowed to heal, and I need to step away for a bit. I’ll tell you the rest, just not right now.

Part Five: About a Girl

There was a girl that I met a couple of months before being expelled, and I found myself looking forward to time spent with certain friends because she was more likely to be around those people than others.

She had dated a friend of mine for a short while, and she was in 8th grade at the time…so she was off limits to me, not because of the couple of years difference in age between us, but because she was a close friend’s ex. I had a girlfriend of my own at the time anyhow…but that certainly didn’t stop me from admiring her from whatever distance I had to maintain. She was beautiful and sweet, exceptionally smart and personable in such a way that it seemed like no one could conceivably dislike her, a way that I could never dream of being. I only talked with her occasionally, in part because she made me nervous but also because I felt like she would be more inclined to think we’ll of me the less well she knew me.

If everyone does indeed have a first love, she was mine…that first girl to touch me in just the right way as adulthood approaches when emotional and psychological identity are developing us into the person we will become. I feel I may need to clarify that I do not mean that she touched me in anything approaching a sexual manner, I already established that she was off limits since you were clearly not paying attention. If life had turned out differently I might be able to look back on her as being little more than a crush, a passing fancy, but I don’t have the conviction required to believe that. As it stands, with the tragic way that things did turn out, she is etched into whatever passes for a soul in me as being the truest benchmark of what I could love. That girl is seared into my memory in a way that no other could be…so much so that, a few years later, I was accused of being in love with a ghost and there was no way anyone could compete against that.

I didn’t know it until later, but I had apparently made an impression on her as well…a bit of knowledge that, while comforting and flattering, served to make her loss all the more painful…but we will get to that soon enough, you impatient shit. I am having a difficult enough time writing all of this without you pressuring me to speed it along, let me get to it my own way.

During the week following my expulsion from school I reacted with characteristic lack of impulse control. One of my friends (the girl in question’s ex-boyfriend) had been expelled simultaneously, which stood to reason seeing as how he was frequently right there with me during those exploits that transpired while I should have been wasting away in the tedium and mind numbing monotony of the classroom. He and I took to the interstate with our respective thumbs out, knowing that returning to our homes after being removed from school was something that neither of us was willing to do right away.

He and I made our way to where a couple of my friends lived and we stayed with them for a couple of days after discovering our newfound freedom. During those days we ended up wandering through a residential neighborhood or two just checking cars for unlocked doors. One of those vehicles, a Dodge Caravan, happened to be the jackpot…not only was the door unlocked but the keys were right there waiting for us. As you can likely predict, we took the keys with us and took note of the location of that vehicle.

We were only able to stay with my friends one more night before we were left to our own devices again. If we’d had any common sense we would have stopped right there, called it good, and returned to our homes to face the music…but if we had been blessed with that sort of common sense we would not have been us and I would not have anything to write here, and we all both know that you would be terribly bored without my words to keep you company.

That night, with nowhere to go that we were willing to be, it was damn cold…As November nights in South Dakota are known to be. We walked the streets of the town, the constant movement being all that was keeping us warm. Finally we got too tired to keep at it and we happened to find a boat beneath a tarp in the parking lot of an apartment complex. It wasn’t perfect but it was where we were able to obtain some shelter from the wind and fall asleep in what was still painfully cold temperature.

That night was a deciding factor in what was to become the biggest mistake of both of our lives. We had two paths ahead of us and we brazenly marched down the wrong one with the sort of idiotic lack of awareness only total dipshit could manage to exhibit.

The following evening we returned to where we had found the minivan a couple of nights before and we put those pilfered keys to use (with him behind the wheel because he was more comfortable driving than I was). We drove toward Sturgis with no real plan in mind, entirely unaware that we were on our way to crossing a line that would  irrevocably change multiple lives for the worse.

I don’t rightly recall how it came about that we ran into his ex-girlfriend (the girl that I was secretly interested in) and her best friend. Similarly, I don’t know how it was suggested that he and I could take them across the state to where the girl’s mother lived…but that became the plan. My friend asked me to go along with a story he concocted about how we had borrowed our recently stolen vehicle from one of my friends. There isn’t so much as a week that passes, even now, almost 20 years later, when I don’t wish that I could go back and never utter that lie or that I could have spoken up and stopped the momentum we were building by simply telling the truth at any point over the following couple of days.

If I had the courage to be honest, all of our lives would have been quite different…and I am confident in saying that they would have been better. I was selfish though, and stupid, and I saw this as an opportunity to spend more time with this girl who I had adored in silence. It breaks my heart to know that, as her best friend informed me some time later, they only climbed into that minivan because I was there and because they trusted me.

It seemed like a good plan. He and I would drop the girls off and then he and I would continue on wherever the road and our continuing poor judgment led us. It started off quite nice, actually. That night we drove across the border into Wyoming, just to get out of the state since we suspected that the vehicle was reported stolen. We slept in the van as comfortably as we could and cut back into South Dakota briefly on our way South and into Nebraska the following morning. Without any money on us we shoplifter food, beverages, and cigarettes to get us by in addition to filling the tank and racing away from the fuel pumps.

Beyond my chance to bring this ill-conceived road trip to a grinding halt by being honest with the girls there was one other event that may have set us straight had our timing been better. We stopped at the college in Chadron, NE where a friend of mine was attending school but he wasn’t in the dormitory when we arrived. He would surely have provided a voice of reason and I wish that we’d had the patience to wait for him to return…but we did not.

We slept in the van again that night, in an isolated little town near the Eastern portion of the South Dakota/Nebraska border. That night is one that I remember with painful clarity, because it was one of the best nights I could have hoped to share with that particular girl. She came back to the middle row seat where I was attempting to sleep and fell asleep with her head in my lap. I spent a couple of hours watching her sleep and running my fingers through her hair. That night was a good one, it was a beautiful way to spend those hours and I was happy when I fell asleep, feeling the pressure of her against me. It was a good thing that I was so happy and content that night, because it was the last time I would be happy for a good, long while.

The next morning made a nightmare of what only that night seemed to be a dream come true…but I am not going to get to that yet, I want to end this on a high point for just a little bit. Maybe if I don’t document what followed, we can pretend there was a happy ending.

Part Four: Transitions

My sophomore year of high school was a turning point for me in a lot of ways, many of them of a more negative nature (which will be my primary focus here).

I had spent the previous two years attending Catholic School where the education was vastly superior to the public schools in the area and I had become actively involved in various athletic programs as well as Odyssey of the Mind. That is not to say that I hadn’t previously been involved with athletics and the like, as I had been playing basketball since I was in 1st or 2nd grade and participating in track & field activities since 7th grade in addition to being invited to the Governor’s Camp for the Gifted the summer between my 6th and 7th grade years…but I felt more actively engaged in those things while attending Catholic School and could have potentially gone to college with a football scholarship if I kept at it, according to my coach.

The religious component of the education there didn’t particularly bother me, having been raised in a Catholic household, and I just treated it as another mythology course and an opportunity to open the door to discussion and debate…which was something that my instructors did not seem to appreciate, and that is something I might address further in a later entry.

The precipitous drop in quality of education when I began my sophomore year in Sturgis, SD public school was a bit of a culture shock, as was the fact that I was barred from participating in athletics and other extracurricular activities due to the transfer from another school…a policy that has always struck me as being borderline retarded and highly paranoid.

Needless to say, but i am going to say it anyhow, I got bored easily and that led to me finding other ways to occupy myself. I somehow started making friends, a talent for which I had never displayed much skill…I haven’t always done a good job of fitting in with my peers (or anyone else, for that matter) and that is something I will discuss later on. It wasn’t long before I was skipping class to get high or to shoplift fishing reels (of all fucking things) from Walmart with some friends of mine for the sole purpose of returning them for cash in order to fund our impromptu extracurricular activities. I developed a knack for shoplifting, which was honestly quite surprising for how easily I stood out…the previously mentioned fishing accessories, cartons of cigarettes, books, CDs, and whatever else I thought I could get away with. It was fun, and it kept me more engaged than anything in school managed to.

It was around this same time when I began to hitchhike to and from home, not having a car or license and only occasionally having friends who were free to take me wherever it was that I intended to go. I had a bit of a romantic perception of hitching rides, in no small part due to my mother telling me how my father used to hitch his way from where he lived outside of Saint Paul, MN to the western side of South Dakota in order to stay with his aunt and spend time with my mother after meeting her while he had been on vacation there with his family one summer. Not everything about the man was bad, and this was while he had been in high school himself.

There was something romantic to me about his going to those lengths to be with my mother, and about the whole concept of hitchhiking itself…and hitching became a way for me to feel a sort of connection with a version of my father who had disappeared sometime before I was born. We’ll ignore that this sort of risk taking behavior can be a strong indication of unpleasant character traits yet to emerge.

The drugs, drinking, stealing, and thrill-seeking behavior weren’t new things for me after beginning that year of high school in Sturgis…but it was during this time when those activities became my preferred forms of entertainment. I was still a voracious reader (as I had always been), I loved simply zoning out and listening to music, and horror movies never for a moment lost their appeal to me…I just used more of my free time entertaining myself with those less wholesome interests.

These poor choices directly led to my being expelled from school just over halfway through the first semester of that year, something I knew was coming…I just didn’t care until it was too late to fix it. That was to become a trend in my life.

The worst event of my life to this day was similarly a direct result of my poor judgment and being expelled from school that November…but before I go into that I should probably tell you about a girl.

Part Three: Manipulative Bastard

Once upon a time, I was a musician; as unsuccessful in that artistic endeavor as I am with my “career” as an author. Some of you might already have been aware of this nifty little bit of Nikolas-related trivia. Those of you who were previously unaware of my former musical pursuits can certainly allay themselves of that niggling bit of ignorance by going to the following site ( http://www.last.fm/music/Alter+Noctvm…Alter+Idem?ac=alter%20noc ) or by just going to http://www.last.fm and searching for Alter Noctm…Alter Idem, and giving it a listen. It’s freely available to those with the discerning taste required to enjoy it. Our most, and likely only, notable feat as musicians was that we were the most successul goth/industrial act based out of South Dakota…which is similar to saying that we were the only male students in an all-girl boarding school.

There was a guitarist we wanted to work with on some material, a good friend and talented guitarist as well. The problem we encountered was that, once a guitar was in his hands, he lost touch with anything else going on around him. That single-minded focus on the act of playing guitar made it virtually impossible to work with him. He and I did, finally, record one song together…which, pointedly, lacks any guitar elements.

There were times when his almost obsessive fixation on the guitar could become just a little bit aggrivating, if only because it served as painful evidence that we would never work together as productively as we all wanted.

The following anecdote is about one such occasion…and it should serve as a relatively lighthearted counterpoint to the previous post, and one that will perhaps help to show you that I am the monster in this overarching narrative rather than the victim, regardless of how some of what I share may cause you to elicit some sympathy for me.

Our guitarist was dating a girl who occasionally came over to hang out at the apartment where my roommate (at that time) and I lived. She was a nice enough girl, but I didn’t really consider her a friend. My roommate however, was quite attracted to her.

One afternoon she came over and was greeted with the sounds of our guitarist playing by himself in what had previously been my bedroom until I began sleeping in the living room and treating that location as a sort of home recording studio and a place for me to do cocaine with my roommate. It may be worth noting here, though I don’t feel it is relevant, that during this particular interval in my life I was ingesting reasonably large quantities of both cocaine and LSD, often in conjunction because I found that specific state of mind quite appealing.

The topic of our guitarist’s focus on the guitar quite naturally came up as we sat in the living room conversing and being serenaded from the back of the apartment. It wasn’t long before I suggested that it might be interesting to test just how strong his focus was by having his girlfriend and my roommate casually walk down the hallway and begin having sex in front of him.

To their credit they both stated that they would need something to drink before even seriously considering such a prospect. I gladly produced the cash and sent her to procure the requisite liquor for the occasion.

She needed the alcohol to build up the nerve to do something so utterly deplorable to her boyfriend, though she did make it clear that the relationship was not exactly working out between them…and my roommate needed it in order to quell the fear associated with having the shit knocked out of him by our guitarist (who was no small man). I was happy to oblige.

After another hour, having been sufficiently plied with alcohol and manic encouragement by myself and my fellow musician, they made their way down the hallway and got down to business.

It didn’t take as long as we had thought before the guitar playing began to take on a more discordant quality and harmony became noticeably soured…and we laughed it up in the living room each time we heard evidence of the focus shifting, it was just too damn funny to those of us in the living room.

Shortly after that our guitarist came trudging down the hallway muttering, “That is some fucked up shit.”

He asked us if we knew what was going on back there and we acknowledged it, while neglecting to specify our role as partial impetus behind it.

I smiled as I informed him that I had a way we might be able to have a little bit of fun ourselves, as I took him to the kitchen drawer where I had a number of water pistols (yes, I was an adult, and in my early 20s at the time…and yes, I had a collection of squirt guns). I suggested that we rain on their parade in a quite literal sense and our guitarist was on board.

We filled up the water pistols and made our way stealthily down the hallway where we burst through the door and began shooting the naked figures entwined on the carpet. They predictably screamed at us to get out and chased us back through the doorway before locking us out.

I asked if he felt satisfied, but our guitarist did not appear to have reached that sweet spot where revenge has been obtained. It took me a minute or two before remembering that the window into my former bedroom was open, leaving nothing more than a screen separating the carnal activities between his (at this point it is safe to apply the term former) girlfriend and my roommate.

We quickly made our way outside, down the porch, and around the house. Upon reaching the proper location we managed to use the uneven brickwork of the lower floor to climb up to window level where we began our second watery fusillade.

We both felt satisfied with this second ambush by the time the window was forced closed and we relaxed in the living room until they had completed what they were doing.

There was no violence directed toward my roommate following the intercourse, which showed remarkable restraint on the part of our guitarist (or a pronounced lack of concern for his now ex-girlfriend)…and we simply had a nice but uneventful rest of the day. I don’t know if we ever shared with our guitarist that I was behind the whole stupid situation, but he is sure to find out now (if he had remained unaware) since he is still a friend and may very well end up reading this.

Part Two: The Origin of the Worthless

The sense that I was somehow second class and thus not exactly worth a shit is something rooted pretty deep in my character. There are literally dozens of things that contributed heavily to that state of mind (one of a deflated sense of self-worth) and I will likely touch on all of them (that I can consciously recall) in the process of this little venture. There is one specific example on my mind right now, so that is what you’ll get.

My childhood was less than pleasant in a number of ways which will be discussed at greater length whenever the fuck I feel that it’s something I’d like to go into…don’t worry, we will get there. I never agreed to do this in anything like a proper chronological order, and I would do a piss poor job of it if I even tried. For now it is enough to know that I had a childhood that was punctuated by a greater than average degree of fear and violence, both at home and in school. It’s the violent environment at home that plays a part in what I am sharing with you now. The specifics can wait, as I said, until another day and another entry, when I feel better about delving into them; but my father was an angry man, prone to violent outbursts directed at both my mother and myself, especially when he was drunk or high (which constituted a good deal of the time).

My little brother was born when I was halfway through my sixth year of life and he was right around three when my parents were divorced, so he was afforded a quite different sort of childhood than the one I grew up believing to be normal. It is the divorce that I’m focusing on right now.

I walked home from school one afternoon, like I did most days, only to find a number of familiar things missing from the living room, stereo equipment and various other items. There I was, alone, in a house that appeared to have been robbed; a child with an imagination that tended to lean heavily towards some fairly negative things. I don’t recall how long I was there alone, not knowing what to do, but I suspect that it felt like far longer than it actually was. The plan, I think, was for me to be scooped up by my mother after school in order to break the news to me in a way that was more conducive to my mental health. This did not go according to plan.

That bit of trauma aside, it was the motivation underpinning the divorce that hit me the hardest. Self-preservation surely played a major role in my mother determining that an end to the marriage was in order (because it seemed like only a matter of time before she ended up dead if nothing changed), as was her desire to insure no further damage was done to me than I had survived already…but it was something she said years later that hit me the hardest, that she divorced my father to save my brother from going through the same sort of abusive, violent upbringing I had lived through to that point. To me, as a barely adolescent child when I heard that explanation, that was distorted  to indicate that I wasn’t worth saving while my little brother was; that, until he came along, there wasn’t any particularly compelling reason to leave. I know now, as I have for a long time, that this was a truly awful example of reductionist thinking…but the capacity to know something does not necessarily impart the ability to internalized that knowledge. The scars of that initial misinterpretation of where I stood in the eyes of my own mother have never healed regardless of how well I know that interpretation to have been false.

I went through my remaining years of childhood perceiving myself to be the second class citizen I still sometimes think myself to be, an afterthought, or maybe just someone who had been written off as being beyond saving. I was already too damaged and too far gone to worry about repairing me. This is who I knew myself to be, and there are substantial residual effects of that thinking which will likely stay with me until the day I die.

It wasn’t until my early 20s when I opted to address this issue with my mother, which was ill-advised at best. It did not facilitate healthy communication that I was highly intoxicated at the time (which it may be worth adding, happened to be the middle of the night). Looking back, I could have tackled this a little bit better, and I feel terrible for waking my mother with a drunken phone call (in reference to such a sensitive topic), with what was little more intention than to jokingly accuse her of never loving me and thinking I was worthless. It wasn’t a particularly funny joke, and I realized that when she called me an asshole (and not the way she normally does when she’s in on the joke) and hung up on me.

The lesson there, kiddies, is that some subjects merit at least a modicum of delicacy and tact…things that I have never quite grasped. Also, some things are better left alone.

We meet people in life who clearly think little of themselves, and sometimes it is difficult to discern how they could conceivably half such a low self-opinion. Some of these people, quite unlike me, may appear to have all of their shit together and may have everything going for them…but that success could very well mask some deep and hidden pain that never quite healed, and quite possibly never will. Sure, they may be wrong about themselves, just like I might be (which is still up for debate in my mind), but sometimes you simply need to let them be and do your best to show them the value they hold for you. There isn’t much else you can do to change their minds, but at least you can feel confident that you are doing what you can.