(arriving home late Saturday night)
A lot has happened, some I can’t wrap my brain around. In the past, it would take a lot of writing to hash it all out, as opposed to being stuck with the flow of emotions my psyche can’t understand.
It’s hard to allow myself to act the way I really am. I go out of my way to act intelligent, as a defense. It was the fact that I was dumb that I fell right into child molesters’ schemes. I’ve always been on the dumb side of things, my whole life, always had to fight harder than everyone else. I know I’m from horrific and there’s nothing harder but that’s no excuse. I’m Him, I can shift to anything and still cooly keep a smooth How. I know I can.
__________
I had helped J__ for two days with his landscaping job at a local church. There are some things that have to be done once a year -- trimming, putting down straw, shaping hedges -- and he needed my help to catch up. I spent the night at their house so through face book I let someone I’d deployed with know I’d be in that town that night, in case he wanted to grab a drink.
The first night we couldn’t do it, because the baseball game he was at ran late. So the following evening, after all the landscaping was done and I would soon be on my way home, we met at a franchise sports bar.
He was one of those twenty-somethings who looked like he was nineteen. He wore a sleeveless shirt and necklace that he had gotten while in Puerto Rico post deployment.
During deployment K__ made fun of him a lot, considered him a cocky, insecure loser. I don’t know why I was in the cool group and Timothy wasn’t as far as K__ was concerned, but because we came from the same town I kept an eye on him during deployment.
After what happened with Adam, and how bad his post-deployment period was, I felt the need to check on Timothy. I basically told him that, when we first sat down, by telling the story of what had happened with Adam, and how his whole family had fallen apart right in front of me, mainly due to the deployment and their lack of age.
He seemed so on edge, he made me feel on edge. He would rarely look me in the eye unless I made him laugh; he kept stealing looks at everything around us, especially people walking by and attractive girls. Thing is, he was on edge before we actually deployed, he just has one of those personalities that’s really cocky and is always hiding behind cockiness. The lack of honesty inherent in that setup makes clicking with him difficult.
I remembered how earlier that day J__ had mentioned House, and I asked him how he knew so quickly that House wasn’t a good idea to have around.
_The way he wouldn’t look you in the eye,_ J__ had said, _He had a kind of act he played, a kind of routine, I knew he was trouble._
_They why couldn’t I see that?_
_Because you wanted to like him._
He was good looking, young, healthy, seemed to have everything relevant going for him. It was as if at some point he’d been hurt so badly that he remained on edge ever since. He seemed to treat Life as a challenge to be overcome, something to be kept at bay and fought against instead of lived, the living to him was in Being, and he couldn’t see anything beyond that. At least, that’s what I saw.
After pleasantries we exchanged post-deployment stories. He said he’d come back and everyone in town had been gracious. I noticed how he wore tattoos signifying that he was a veteran, and how easily he’d tell people he’d just gotten back from deployment.
He said the low point was when he’d had a hard time finding a job, and that at one point he’d gotten into an argument with his dad and his dad had kicked him out.
The way he described his parents they didn’t sound so great. Things started looking up when he got work, he made a deal with his parents and was allowed to move back in. His main identifier was that he was a veteran from Iraq, and he held on to that, and that’s how he fit in to town and the community. He threw the first pitch at the local baseball game on the fourth of July.
_I had a girlfriend from October when I came home on leave, to March. That’s not bad, that’s a good run,_ he said. He was like W__, one of those guys who’d use sex with women as a kind of measurement of his successfulness in life.
I told him that my main problem post-deployment was that I couldn’t get inebriated after deployment, and got as far as coke. I didn’t explain to him that once I’d gotten as far as coke and saw on a chart online what a dangerous drug that was, I then trusted myself.
I didn’t tell him about the shock of getting high at customs, and remaining high all through deMOB, and all the shifting, shifting, shifting, from one flashback to the next, even weeks after having gotten off the bus to Ms J__ and Br__, was so stunning that I had to fight hard, fight to remember everything, fight to get a hold of myself, fight to keep my psyche from being murdered by horrific memories.
He wanted to know if we had any mutual friends in town. He asked me what high school I’d gone to. I told him I never went to high school. What middle school then? I never went to middle school; the last grade I completed was sixth. It’s nice being able to tell the truth and still remain Him. It requires a certain sense of humor, a certain roll of the eyes, like isn’t life funny how harrowing it can be ..
He told me he was allowing his military contract to run out, which surprised me. Then I understood. The military had done him wrong, as it had most of us. We were young guys so we had wanted to be soldiers. While we were young we experienced soldier-hood properly, but when we got older we couldn’t help but see through the American military, being the wealthiest, being the most overpowering in size and strength on the planet, attracting a superficially-oriented leadership.
It was one thing to be a soldier, it was another to be a soldier of a middle-class country ran like an empire by a wealthy elite.
Afterwards we went to Best Buy, to look at televisions. He wanted to show me the difference between an LCD and an LED, which he bought post-deployment. I’d bought a plasma. He had to be the guy who Knows More, he liked being in that role. I understood that someone like him would only feel safe in that role.
We talked some more but finally it was time to go. On the drive back to J__’s where I was to pick up my bags before driving home, I felt the anxiety in me rising. It bothered me to see him so on-edge. The second person I’d met post-deployment was also doing just as bad as the first. The military, deployments, the idea of war, is a lot for the young to deal with while their psyches remain intact. I remembered Joe from when I was in Qatar, W__ when he got back from the first deployment and even still now.
When I got to J__’s house only Ms J__ and Br__ were still up, so it was easy to grab my bags and say good night. Ms J__ wanted me to spend the night but I said I couldn’t, and she easily allowed that.
I tried not to think on the ninety minute drive home, tried to just drive and drive only. The plan was for me to go home and get high, so I could make sense of things without having to slowly write it all out.
__________
Joseph Gordon Levitt (from 500 Days of Summer) is looking in the camera. He’s hosting Saturday Night Live but whenever he has lines he looks into the camera as he’s trying to be funny. None of the other players do that, they look at the audience, in the direction of the camera, but still at the audience.
This always happens when I get high, the television opens up for me. It won’t be long before the stream of important, yet random thoughts starts up, and I’ll have to concentrate to pay attention.
I wanted to flip the channel at some point, but didn’t, because Minday Calin (the Indian girl from The Office) is hot to me, so I continued to watch SNL.
I loved television. Back in the House, it was one of the few escapes. I knew the names of the writers, the actors, the heads of networks. When I had access to films I loved them, too. I watched the Rosie O’Donnell show and felt at home with her love of television and films. She had used them the same way. Television and pot go well together. I need the miracle of it. That these people are actually in my life, that there’s a real connection, like how there is when you see a Broadway play or go to a lecture.
At some point I’ve got to see how I hold myself back on purpose, so I’ll take the time to document what was previously undocumented back when I was in the House. It’s a selfish thing. To document what it’s like to be born in the House. What it’s like to recover from Abuse. Plus I have an adventurous-streak, a need to be in an adventure, one so adventurous it’s still interesting even when written down. A buffer between me and that final definition of life -- dust. It’s not true anymore that I write because I don’t trust myself to remember.
Timothy -- why did he have to be smarter than me about televisions? See how the high is fixing it. Feeling you need pot, IS a feeling; there’s nothing wrong with being dumb, killing the words, living like an animal, (sex sex sex).
Oh .. I was dumb. A slew of memories hits, like my life flashing before my eyes except I‘m shifting to them. I was slow. I remember how hard it was to learn to walk, the tricky feel of the area rugs, developing so slowly. I was easy to abuse .. This is all a strategy to survive. All this over education, all this defense, all this intellectual knowledge before I can self-trust. I was the Dumb one in the House, hence I was hurt the worst by the abuse, I remember now.
It’s strategy: that’s the final word. Evolution meets How equals Strategy. I can feel that. These sentences are my attempt to translate it into words. Life is a fight, and a fight is strategy.
So I’m dumb, and always was. That’s not so bad, it’s not impossible to live with. There’s a wisdom in being so dumb. Like how in the old westerns with Clint Eastwood, how with reverence he described the seemingly-dumb Native Americans as knowing the Old Ways.
It was Pride that refused me as Dumb. My reaction to the idea was sheer violence. Child abuse preys on Dumb, sexual abuse relies on it. I reacted to my own innocence, my own Dumbness, with sheer violence, hate, rage, self-destruction.
I don’t trust the dumb one. The Dumb Masculinity I used to chase, the Him I used to feel was me but taken from me.
So this is church, then? These marijuana sessions.
__________
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