blogger interrupted

You tend to spread your wings a bit in high school.  I wrote an essay on Americanism that won this medal from the American Legion.  At the same time, I was laying the seeds of my own disaster.

I don’t remember exactly how my first time with Bobby started, whether he made the first move or I did.  Probably one of those stupid penis envy games kids play to see whose is bigger.  Pull it out, get it hard, compare – the arms race of the teen years is brutal in its frankness.  Put ‘em next to each other.  O.k, now make ‘em touch.  Dare.  Double dare.  Triple dog dare. 

I do know that Bobby proposed the deal first.  I’ll suck yours if you suck mine, Bobby offered.  I froze, suddenly remembering that brief millisecond wrestling on the floor of Shawn’s living room, a pause that lasted just a bit too long, fully clothed, yet suddenly naked to the soul.

We moved out to the suburbs when I was in Catholic 6th grade, making public school 7th grade a nightmare.  Skinny kids with glasses and no friends gravitate toward each other, so Shawn & I did.  The pause that afternoon on Shawn’s living room floor lasted a bit too long.  Shawn’s arms weren’t where they were supposed to be.  He started talking about stuff he did with some other kids.  Took about 5 seconds for me to jump off the floor and change the subject.  Hey, let’s ride our bikes, ok?

Couple years later, Bobby’s back yard fort was just that little bit more private, I guess, built by all the neighborhood kids from the bits of plywood you find in your dad’s garage, sticks from the woods across the street, complete with ratty wall to wall carpeting gathered from people’s garbage, laid on the dirt and nailed down with sticks.  Dark inside, summer sunlight peaking in through the cracks of the walls, it was just the place to take the dare from the naughty kid two doors down who always got into trouble.

Afterward, I ran home as fast as I could and washed my mouth out with soap.  I thought I made a deal with Bobby.  Instead, I’d just made a deal with my own devil.

It’s pretty clear to me that Bobby never intended to hurt me with our little secret.  He just wanted to have fun and check shit out, like I did.  But something in me knew, deeply, almost uncontrollably…that someone might.  Or would.  Inevitably.  It was just a matter of time.  I assumed the wrongness of it all.  

Whether or not this fear was justified at the time, it built it’s own momentum.  Honesty of that caliber was simply not to be trusted to anyone other than the partner in “crime”.  And as life moved on, that honesty, with myself, and with others, became a risk that was simply not to be taken.  Ever. 

People have an incredible capacity to hurt one another, and they don’t even know when they do it.  You can’t predict when you hit the button on their control panel that sets off a chain reaction of their hang-ups, which leads inevitably to your own jugular.  Self-defence in the service of one’s insecurity doesn’t respect your vulnerability – it exploits it.  Fast.  Before you can even react.  And then you are left there, your honesty repaid with venom from someone you love, who doesn’t even know what they’ve done. 

Rational thought almost requires you keep those vulnerabilities to yourself.  Bury them as deeply as possible.  Don’t ever let love blind you, because when it does, the result makes even the use of the word love a cruel joke.  Don’t ever trust, because you simply cannot afford it. 

A 15 year old kid with his friend in a backyard fort would never know this, until he was an old man suffering from its consequences.  But from that day on, it spread.  It moved into every level of human interaction I created, leaving me old, tired, and vulnerable to my very core.  Until one day in 2001, it just exploded in my face, to the point that life as I knew it was destroyed. 

But the real damage was not done in one huge event splashed all over the news.  It was done brick by brick, in defense of my own perceived and irrational vulnerabilities, against the unpredictable offensives from everyone else’s.

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