I find that I am moving farther away from life. I find it harder to see what makes connections between people, and I’m not sure that I ever really did. That may be an artifact of how today colors the past. I am an observer into someone’s life, watching how they move through a community, but I don’t know what or how any of the interactions are supposed to be like. Some of this comes from how I grew up. Some of it is from the daily reminders of the confusion sown by certain events.
A friend told me I was abused. Another gave me a label. Our laughably inept medical community has given me other labels, and then flaunted them. Abused doesn’t define me, it’s just something that defiles me, exists as a dirty little background to life. What comes with it is always a feeling of being broken, and I’ve been defined, described, labeled as broken for so long that I can’t remember when that wasn’t something that echoed behind every thought.
My dad, he’s a master at it. How many times he’s ended, or attempted to end, some discussion with the refrain that I’m just broken, not whole. Grim. As if that’s how I came out of the womb. And I’m sure that’s his belief- I’m just how I was made.
I have a question of precedence.
This is memory I’m talking about, which is the aggregate of how life molds a person. Time is linear only in experience, but each experience moves through the time you have lived. What happens now isn’t localized to this moment, no. It moves, weights those moments from yore. What was experienced changes with each new experience, and as such, the idea that time is always linear cannot be defended. What happens today affects what happened to me then.
What led to those afternoons by the creek. Alders near the creeks drop softer leaves, make a dry cover over and with the needles from the pines. The first time it was a game, a time for convincing. This will be fun- see, you’ll like it. Nothing like someone older to show you the ways of the world, yeah?
Six was a tough age in a lot of ways. The parents had split, Dad making his preferences clear when he took my twin brother and left. Left me with Maeve, so was that so bad? Sure, except that there’s a difference between the act of being left and being taken. When you’re taken, even if it’s not good, at least there’s an element of knowing you were wanted. Being left, yeah. Even if you’re left with someone who cares for you, you still know you were discarded. But that’s interpretation from now. At that point there was certainly some sort of effect. I don’t know if being a twin is different from being any other sort of sibling, but I’ve been told I didn’t sleep well. That was something that changed all of us. I can’t even tell any more what my feelings then really were because today is so much closer, and what’s happened in between colors it all.
Abandonment is something of a theme in my family. I suppose that’s why the parents had such an easy time of it. I’ve learned to be, well, callous about leaving. Or perhaps, I’ve just learned to pretend it doesn’t exist. What’s certainly come about in its place is a desire to be touched. But maybe that’s from the creek, some weird example of an option to replace… Whatever was lost. Johan, child of alcoholics, who’s father was abandoned by his parents by their death, and then abandoned to live in a cabin with his bad legs after that. Maeve, a child of rape, was abandoned by her mother, who had been abandoned by her mother. They both abandoned their parents to a greater or lesser extent, and both learned to leave their children.
Sometime about then, we’d moved to the Church of the Creative, a commune outside Creswell, Oregon. Dad had returned and found his new partner. We lived in a tent while building a house.
Where was Maeve? Ah, who knows. I think she was in San Francisco with Ron, the man she had hooked up with when Dad took off. Or maybe she was fishing. Trading one missing parent for another. Not like Dad was all that present at the moment anyhow, his new partner pregnant, a house being cobbled together, baking at the Excelsior Hotel in Eugene. Saturday market.
Smoking weed and fighting with the other people at the commune. We were trying to build a fort for a little while, and my Dad and another kid’s dad were always fighting about how it should be built. We’d get something done, then they’d argue and tear it apart. Maybe that was after? Doesn’t matter. At this point it’s just texture to the story. We’d go visit Bonnie & Barry sometimes.
Carl was older, the kid who would babysit us, as it were. Lived on a piece of land with forests and creeks. They had horses and we would ride up to the power lines. Or shoot bows and arrows. Play with knives, and shoot at cans out back. So much older, he was always the one with the cool things and toys, and music eventually.
I remember that’s when Johan started forgetting how to talk with children. Or at least with me. Maybe I was arguing. Boundaries were not his strong suit; it’s sometime around then, at 6 or 7 when I first heard his line “See, you don’t even have the words to say what you want to say.” It was his ultimate dismissal- if you don’t have the words for something, you can’t understand it. He’s a debate guy. If you can’t win the argument on the technical, then you’re entirely wrong. You lose. If he could push you to stutter, or to use the wrong word, then you lost and could be dismissed.
Maeve came back during one stormy night and packed us up. Water and damp, get ready, we’re going to go to San Francisco. Somewhere in the Tenderloin, we would walk to a bakery and buy bread from an old Chinese man who told us we were good kids, here, take a candy. We had a friend I remember vaguely. His name over time has faded, but we would watch Speed Racer at his house, and his dad took us all to see the Nutcracker Ballet at the SF Ballet. The tree rising is still a bit of magic.
You learn not to think of anywhere as home. Everywhere is just a place, a place you’re at for a while.
We would swim naked in the creek sometimes. That’s when Carl would come and grab a hug. The one time when he said “try this” and took my penis in his mouth. I didn’t know what to think of it, but it was nice to be touched. “Now you do that for me.” It was weird how his got large. I didn’t think to be suspicious, and it felt good to have my hair stroked. My Dad didn’t touch my hair much anymore and I missed being able to cuddle up with dad. Missed being held by mom.
When we came back to Oregon Maeve moved into the A-frame up on top of the hill at the Church. Ron was there- I don’t remember him in San Francisco. But he was there, at the Church, with Maeve. He was always fun when he was drunk; if he couldn’t walk up the hill he would pretend to be a dragon chasing us, and we could get away really easily. Lots of laughter in the late summer light as he roared up the hill. Watch out for the poison oak.
Carl kept that up for a couple months. If we visited, he’d come up with some way to get away to the creek. Off to the woods somewhere. Not that I’d have thought it strange to be away from the adults- we always had adventures. Then came a time he wasn’t very interested in playing. Didn’t want to go do anything with me. I do remember the shame, though, trying to get my friend back. Asked if he wanted me to do the mouth thing, if that would make everything okay, and he sneered “why, do you like it?” Lessons in how touch changes. It’s always needed, but then its no longer a thing of comfort, but a thing of confusion, risk, becomes a weapon. Now I can’t imagine why anyone would do that to a six year old. Maybe if I could it wouldn’t sit there like this, a sore that interferes with all my relationships. Maybe because it’s entangled with all the other losses.
It was good to go to Alaska after that. The A-frame burning down is, to me now, a neutral thing. Exciting, in that it was fun to watch. It was nice to have people acting like they cared. I can’t say I feel bad it happened. What did we lose except some baby pictures and clothes. Maybe some jewelry. But we got to move in to the house in Eugene and live with some other kids, go to a different school.
Magnet arts was an alternative school. I got to learn a little Japanese. I tried stealing things and then finding them for some reason. Some things are ridiculous in hindsight, although not growing up with a television turned out to be a real social problem. I got pummeled on the playground once because I didn’t know who the Fonz was.
So, yeah. Living on an island with just the four of us on it was nice. There were no people to have to figure out. No one to try to be friends with, or to not be friends with.
Those years loom large, they are a cloud I can’t figure out how to escape, and don’t know I want to. So many interesting things happened- we were there for the early years of the Oregon Country Fair. Living off the land (sort of). Living in all those different places meant exploring and a sort of freedom. They, too, are colored by what happened later, or in other places of this same time. What I experienced makes intimacy a conflicting desire. What if uncertainty becomes a refrain? Is it wrong to want? Is it a perversion to wish to be touched? What’s wrong with me that I want to be intimate when it doesn’t really mean anything, except for in the pull of the heart and the body?
Transience as a child has other dilemmas. Moving, changing homes and places, that places contacts in every area, but you don’t get to choose who these people are. When I was fourteen my dad asked me to come down to Eugene for Thanksgiving from Seattle. We had fought the summer before, so I wasn’t sure about going, but did. Sense of obligation, not enough of an understanding of choice. When we finished dinner and were having desert Johan asks me out onto the porch where he asks me where I am staying tonight. “I thought I was staying here.” He gives his smile, the one that says that you don’t have the capacity to understand, and shakes his head “No, you’re still not welcome to stay here yet.” That summer someone broke into the house and stole a few things, including their checkbook. He’d decided I had done it, and that night sat me on a stool for a family meeting and proceeded to yell at me. When I scowled he hit me and told me to stop frowning. So I smiled, and he told me to stop smirking. So I smiled wider, and he hit me again. And again. And again. My brother sat there, head down. My sister cried, but didn’t say anything. His wife, she sat there and looked angry, angry with me, then gathered the other kids and took them away.
Where do you go in a city you’re not living in? Not going to school there, so not sure where any other kids are living. We’d been taken to visit Carl that summer though, he was in an apartment near the University of Oregon where he was a student. So, I walked over there. Carl was drinking eggnog with a friend, watching movies. Come on in. Eggnog with Bacardi 151. I got drunk enough that I spent the rest of the night puking. They thought it was pretty funny. I still can’t stand the smell or taste of eggnog.
All those colors, the tints and hues of now that obscures, changes, modifies the past. Was it really such a bad thing to have a summer being sexualized as at six? Maybe I’m making a tempest out of a teapot of, as my mom said when I asked her about it “boys being boys”. Which was worse? The past becomes a little less immediate. Then again, getting slapped around a bit at 13 is a pretty pale problem, and kicked out for a night at 14 is barely a blip. I managed to get back to Seattle, nothing obviously wrong, didn’t lose an eye. Could have been worse.
Yet, there is something worse. It’s that at the end of the day, when I look at this, I do feel broken. That there are these things wrong with me. That at the end of the day, the fact that I’m broken does mean that I am not worth enough to really care about. I will be too difficult. I won’t be valuable enough to give that second chance. I know this, I can even prove it, because I’m more expensive to insure, I am seen as less reliable. Not because I’ve proven to be less of any of that, but because I have admitted to damage, and this is a place where to lie is held in higher esteem than honesty. If you’re hurt enough that you have to admit it, you will always be less. Less worthy, less valuable, less of a person. I know I just don’t matter that much.
