The main character, Harley, narrates the story, and he does a hell of a lot better job than I do.
Pg 6. _I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She ran her thumb over my lips raw from kissing her and said survival was a talent. _
But especially, his words spoke to me, validated me somehow. To the point where I wished I had Harley in real life, all for myself. He knew about Abuse.
Pg 115. _The crack of his hard grown-up hand meeting her soft baby cheek was the loudest sound I had ever heard. Even louder than her screams. I watch the bewildered terror cloud her eyes and I saw myself in them. Not my reflection but proof of my existence, just the same. I knew Dad had destroyed her courage._
Pg 310 _I dropped into my chair again. Now I was ready for her. My past had taught me that the strength to face atrocity didn’t come from bravery but from reaching a certain level of numbness._
He knew about sexuality. What it was like to be a guy.
Pg 116. _Excitement. Dread. Desire. Disgust. I made myself sick with confusion. How could I feel opposite emotions for the same act? How could I feel so strongly about a girl I had never met? How could I want to love someone without getting personally involved. There was something evil about feeling that way. Something too arrogant. Even for humans._
Pg 339 _Legally I had become a man when I turned eighteen. Spiritually I had become a man the night Callie Mercer f-cked me. Emotionally I had become a man the first time my dad belted me. Today I was becoming a man chronologically. There would be no more ‘teen’ after my age._
He was dead on.
Pg 66. _Mom and I didn’t fight well together. Neither one of us had been able to put our hearts into confronting. Betty called it ‘internalizing’ I call it being lazy and chicken._
Pg 67. _She said it too easily and I understood all at once that she had accepted our new lives while I had only adjusted to them. I had never known there was a difference, but now it seemed clear to me that the first had been done willingly while the second had been done in order to survive. _
Everything he writes has an anger behind it, a power, and wit.
Pg 77. _I knew people on TV were fake but that didn’t stop me from wanting to be as smart and funny as they were; there was nothing like constantly falling short of unrealistic expectations to make someone feel like giving up on life completely._
When I listen to K___ or Mace__ talk, what they are saying always comes out of one category or the other: anger or humor. Their anger and humor does the same as mine: colliding, interweaving, until one isn’t clear without the other.
I don’t want to look closely at my anger or humor because I know each are underdeveloped, and the longer I stay disconnected from them the worse it gets, so the less I want to become aware of them.
I used to have a sense of humor. I used to laugh to myself in the House. Once, when R__ and Mom and H__ were telling me about my face, and it faults, I stunned them by trying not to laugh, then laughing out loud, holding my stomach, it was so boisterous and uncontrolled.
I use anger and humor all the time.
I laugh to K__ about how in my new section I’m considered the most normal one. Sgt Sch___ is a bonafide yankee. H___ is gamer geek. G___ is a manipulative dou-che, but likable, just not trustworthy. Sgt E___ is boring, I always regret the most casual exchanges. His voice is monotone and his stories unemotional.
LT is an overgrown gamer geek who’s high on himself. I’m pretty sure SSG C___ is bipolar. And SSG R___ is definitely a closeted-homo drunk. H__ and Sgt S___ regularly get into petty fights, each coming to me with his side of the story, one after the other, like children.
The other afternoon I snuck off to mine and K__’s room. The sound of K___’s labored breathing as he slept -- he has a cold -- and Mace__’s snoring next door -- both of them were out on mission all night -- was still preferable to the company of my section.
When Mace__ and K___ woke and smoked cigarettes outside, Mace__ got on me for wanting to hang out with K__ when he was sick.
_Look, I’ve been dealing with the kids all day_, I replied, _And all I want is a little adult conversation at the end of the day, is that too much to ask?_
A soldier in my AO was put on suicide watch. Our section pulled shifts for three days, keeping our eyes on him. I was scheduled to go to FOB ____ to run some errands for our section. Sgt Sch___ and H___ wanted me to do the night shift, then got to the FOB next morning.
_Bullshit,_ I said, _Not gonna happen._ They looked at me, exasperated, and immediately folded. I told K__ about it later. I told him that somehow, in that section, despite rank, I was the alpha dog.
I went to the porta jon in a hurry the other night. K__ and I had gone to chow, and met up with Mace__. We all ate the barbequed pork, and all of us had stomach pains shortly after.
Mace__ actually wanted medicine, because it felt like his insides were going to explode while a cork remained in his bum.
I went off to the porta jon, quickly checked for cleanliness, then heard someone enter the porta jon beside mine and stopped still. Holy sh-t, holy sh-t, holy sh-t, I thought, I gotta go. But there was no way I was going to explode into a toilet with an audience. Meanwhile the guy was taking forever, grunting, coughing, he wouldn‘t leave. Finally I gave up, and used the toilet.
The sounds I made started making me laugh silently to myself. _That’s what you get, buddy,_ I thought, _For taking the longest sh-t known to man. You get to hear the most violent, sickest sh-t known to man._
It feels embarrassing when I become aware of my anger and humor. It’s not just insecurity from the Abuse. It’s because the anger and humor are so underdeveloped. Maybe its that they’re so unfamiliar to me. It’s still the boy’s anger and humor, in a style that doesn’t always correlate with who I am now.
I make Mace__ and K__ laugh regularly with my anger and humor, so I know it’s not terrible, but I also feel how something’s not right about it, ingenuine about it. Like since it remains unclaimed by me, it’s still not mine.
I notice how when I allow myself to get angry I make people laugh, and I wonder why I hold back. I remembered more from the article written by Tony Schirtzinger, MSSW, CICSW
_Since we have been taught that anger is bad, we pretend that we aren't angry and claim to be _hurt_ instead. This waters down the intensity of our anger, greatly complicates our attempts to get what we want, and ultimately sets us up as victims or martyrs._
I was never an Abuse victim. I was always Angry.
___________
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