7

I guess, looking back, I must've gotten fat on purpose.

R___, M___ and Big B were long gone. Life swooped them up and claimed Itself more important. The high that I had gotten from turning eighteen and becoming free was starting to wear off, and the disaster of my life was becoming more and more clear.

I was eighteen. I had been free from the house only six months. All I can say is that they were Sweet. What sugar and honey and cinnamon try to be, try to exude for the taster, were those days when I first knew freedom. Later it would be bittersweet, when the Roaring would remind me of the great Costs I paid for it, forced me to honor the price endured. But during those first few months I remembered nothing and enjoyed the absolute Sweetness of Freedom with no cost attached.

I was invincible. I had survived the House and that's all that mattered. In the back of my mind was the plan I had made when I was seven, when it first became apparent that the only honorable thing to do was kill this tired body .. but I had years before the self-imposed timeline was up, so I never expected a line on my wrist, didn't prepare myself for the final years leading up to it and its compromise of only a half-broken-kept promise: one gushing wrist and not the other.

Those six months was when I first knew what it was like to sit down and rest my long-been-split-wide-open-and-healed-years-ago feet and my old-man hands that made people stare when I sat in the break room at work, hands that even surprised me when at home I would peel the skin off of them they were so worked. I first knew what it was like to know the silence I met when coming home to my how-could-you-possibly-have-got-so-lucky townhouse, instead of the chaos and wild Darkness of the House and God's Country.

When I was seventeen I had gotten bigger than all of them in the House, even R__, he had to look up at me to call me stupid. That one time I had genuinely belly-laughed laughed in their faces, with the three of them standing in the living room as surprised, frightened witnesses, was still ringing in my ears, like a song stuck in my head. I hadn't even tried to escape actually, that wasn't the context anymore.

The House was mine. I was the biggest one in it and those had always been the rules. There was nothing they could do about it. I could come and go as I pleased, and if they locked me out when I got off work late at night, I just slept in the convertible under the stars. That pissed them off more.
They couldn't starve me anymore; I was hiding my money well. I realized that they weren't very current and I used it against them: they still thought minimum wage was four dollars an hour. I would fill a duffel bag with my stuff and claim I was going to the Goodwill store during my lunch break. Then I would return home with an empty bag. Really I was stopping by a storage room, slowly, methodically moving myself out of the House.

I had been doing that for two years. Two full years of different plans, schemes, exhaustive tries. Me thinking, _this Friday, you'll have escaped._ and _This Tuesday, they'll believe you're older, won't look to hard at the paper work and you'll be gone from here forever._ Disappointment and another try just behind it, or vice versa, it was all the same week after week for two years.

They thought they would catch me at home on weekends, my days off, but instead I just got up early and went to Rob__'s house and slept. The only place I ever got to rest in those days actually, was Rob__'s couch. My parents had set rules, that I couldn't sleep past eight in the morning ever.
I worked eighty hours in five days and would come home from work on Friday nights past one in the morning. Rob___ always knew I was coming, each Saturday morning, his woman would have food prepared for me and he'd have the Seagram's Seven ready and I'd sleep the whole day and into the night and not eat or drink a thing.
Once, as he sat in the recliner, watching sports, I woke and caught him looking at me in a lost expression. He joked it off, grinning with his sly, mischievous white-tooth smile, saying something like: _Never thought I'd ever meet no white-boy-slave in my lifetime._
It was then that it first occurred to me that I was a child of American history: a country not of blacks and whites and natives, but master and slaves, the Abused and the Abusers, always one or the other. T
Saturday evenings M___ and Big B would show up, ready to go fishing or play cards, laughing in a half-concerned way about the white-boy-slave.

When I turned eighteen I moved myself into the townhouse by myself, because the three of them were already leaving, they just didn't know it yet.
R____ had pulled out the gun and pointed at me and Big B with his half whine-half murderous pitch. M___ saying to R___: _Calm down, bro, just calm down. Have you met Ben? Ya'll like brothers .._
M___ had told me he had gotten some girl pregnant and his woman was raising hell, maybe she'd leave for good this time. Then he took a swig of Seven and cast the fishing line as if this wasn't his first time in this situation.
Big B was lying all the time, so high he never knew what he was saying. Taking me deep into the projects late at night where young black girls with grey, stringy, tired hair would cook me soul food in dark, worn out kitchens and ask Big B about the good old days when he was playing professional basketball.

I learned not to put Dawn dish detergent into the dishwasher after an I-Love-Lucy moment. I learned how to install and then fix an old washing machine and dryer. I slept under a beautiful blanket on the floor with my winter coat as a pillow, thinking carpet was an amazing thing.
M___ and I started running together in the evenings between my shifts since we were now neighbors. R___ tried to steal a television from work and ended up terminated after some long drama that went on for weeks while M___ kept shaking his head and telling me _You can't cover for R___ forever, I'm going to have to hire someone in his place eventually. It's a two man job._ Big B claimed to have a girlfriend and then kind of disappeared after that.

Three months later, M___ said no more, in his own way, similar to how his woman insisted the choice in her own way. Just kind of stopped talking to me and let me figure it out myself, just a little too late, but still it dawned on me the way he knew it would. I was smart, he always said. Shortly afterward, I transferred to another department, the bakery. I worked by myself in the wee hours of the morning in the spacious bakery, making fresh doughnuts and breads and hardly saying ten words in a whole shift.
Still it seemed there were so many people in my life, there was so much to do, so much going on, and the Roaring insisting itself vehemently; it made people think there was something wrong with me .. the fatter I got, the less people noticed me, the less people talked to me, the less they were around, the less there was to do socially, and the quieter it got. I guess it worked. The House had already taken much of my youth .. eighteen years. And now, using my weight and people's aversion to it, I gave up some more.
I knew I wasn't okay, I knew my life was getting out of hand, and that there had to be a stopping point, before things could get turned around, but it was a great cost to pay, a crime of self-abuse against my body.
During it, people claimed I was a quiet person with a quiet life, _unatural for such a young boy,_ one woman said, in gossip, as I walked through the back hall toward the break room at work. But they were wrong. The Roaring was louder than all of them.
I read a lot, at least four hours a day, the greatest literature the world had to offer -- the kind of words that could distract me from the Roaring.
Now that I worked in a bakery, it seemed time to learn to cook; I worked in the kitchen at home for hours each day, absorbed in cooking so that the Roaring couldn't pull me from it. Then there was the piano that was given to me by an old woman if I would just move it out of her house. At least an hour a day: Mozart and Chopin and Beethoven and Straus and Hayden and, at times, the Beatles.
The apartment, and later the House, was covered in art: Van Gogh and Monet, Manet, and Munich, anything that could pull me away from the Roaring, was all around me in the great Silence of my life back then, where I could go whole weekends without ever hearing another human being speak, and without ever listening to my own thoughts, except when they were busy with the work at hand.
I'm surprised pedestrians walking by the house, under the dogwood trees and oaks that shaded the street, didn't hearing the Roaring themselves, and stop and wonder what that was, what kind of ghosts and memories were swirling around that house viciously frustrated by the insult of not being heard by the one all this was for: me.
My life was disappearing. I just didn't know it yet. The House was such a Grand story with all the violence and chaos and beauty that I thought: of course I was alive back then. But actually the moments there were stagnant like still water, smelling of decay. The moments were like a mournful Waiting, a terrible price to be paid, but a fair trade of an unliveable life lived for the chance of a liveable one sometime in the future.
I was now nineteen. I knew that my survival was still a failure. I also knew that I had an old promise to keep, and was running out of time. What worried me the most about it was my life's lack of sexuality.
I didn't know what masturbation was until I was nineteen. I had been out on my own for a year. My first apartment was a beautiful townhouse with a loft and skylight. The House now a year behind me, I was starting to get calmer, the nightmares were still a problem, but I wasn’t waking every morning in this kind of underlying anxiety -- the kind that had kept me alive in the House.
One morning I woke up from a dream involving a girl and I was squeezing the pillow with the inside of my thighs and pelvis. Then I just lay there. After a week or so of sleep-thrashing, I woke up from still-sleep. My heart was not pounding, and I didn’t have the pillow or sheets or anything between my legs, I woke up like I did before, no strange sex dreams, nothing. Even though things were back to normal, and my one week of sex dreams and sleep-thrashing were over and gone, there was now this underlying worry in its place.

They had always accused me of it, all four of them in the House, in many different ways, indirect and direct, but I never had any idea what they were talking about. Just the idea of sex would cause me such internal pain I ignored my sexual education altogether, until I was a sex-less young adult, now absolutely numb, instead of just an adolescent who was growing more and more numb. It became clear, I had to make up for lost time.
It began with the catholic priest scandal. Oprah did an episode with the survivors. Turns out it would only be the beginning of the scandal, culminating with Pope John Paul II's public, politically-correct, abandonment of the children. The scandal tapered out with his extraordinarily timely death. The scandal would be a turning point in the mainstream America's treatment of Abuse.
The scandal was the talk of the work areas and the break room, colored with clever asides and innuendos during the fifteen minute break in the morning, and opinionated discussion during the lunch break. Meanwhile there was only one line of all this talk that I heard: _The reason they raped all those children was because they were living a celebate lifestyle._ It was spoken a few times, and acknowledged in general every time, by a slew of nodding heads, affirmative hums and moans, and comments like _you got that right,_ or _I heard that._
The line was silently remembered, though not heard right away. It became a part of the Roaring: a swirl of words, memories, ghosts, and truths that was always with me but were still not listened to or acknowledged by me. I was nineteen and for seven mornings of one week had awoken from sleep thrashing, now gone.
Like that one evening stepping out of the House, in the middle of a ravished God's Country, where I stood dead in the center of hurricane Fran, her beautifully assertive winds and storm suddenly gone, the clouds thinned out and a golden sunlight filtering through, the silence of the eye of the hurricane deafening. Because it wasn't a true silence, it was an absence.
Back in those days a culture was forming around the Overweight of America. Oprah somehow legitimized it, doing a string of episodes in which she reiterated the connection between weight loss and methodical Healing.
In those times America was a culture of Identities: Black, white, male, female, professional, blue collar, religious, secularlist, gay, straight, Abused, not-abused, etc. Change or Evolvement was simply not allowed. Oprah introduced yet another one: the overweight person educating themselves, through self-improvement and self-challenge, a process that would be deemed successful once the person was thin.
Identities are numbing. Actually they're fantastically numbing. With the priests on my mind, and the weight, and the intuitive knowing that I needed healing, I fell in line and began living a life that was acceptable to the people around me, and made me feel good because of it.
As I lost the weight, and learned how to learn, and felt better about myself, my thinking became clearer. It was a superficial confidence, but for a while there it worked well enough.
Well enough so that I could see how ridiculously civilian this 'Recovery' was compared to the House and its absolute Realness. It felt like I was only going through the motions of healing and self-development. There was nothing left for the civilian world to teach me; I joined the military and the war began.