The Posterior Lie

I vacillated. The “PUBLISH” button on the upper right… to click or not to click, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of self-loathing, or take up bytes against an ocean of memories and by exposing end them. To publish—to sleep, no more…

You get the picture. I’m not Hamlet, nor am I worthy of Bard status. But I agonized. The 17-year-old kid in my psyche has been holed up in a darkened room, hooded, ^shrouded, covered, numb. Curled in the dark. _{Afraid of the light.}

Now he’s the king of the children. I’m like Peter panning for gold with this ragtag clown-car of lost boys. There’s a five-year-old cherub with a hang-dog look who just wants me to pick him up and hug him and tell him the monkey bar thing was a bad dream and everything’s gonna be alright. You just want it to be okay… and that day we didn’t hate the po-po because the sergeant who took me to the hospital (after I broke my arm) knew he had a terrified, fragile soul in the back seat of his squad car in a blow-up air splint with his mom holding him tight as he was terrified, terrified, don’t take me to the hospital! And the arm… it was like the Macy’s Day Parade… with a PO-LEASE escort.

To a five-year-old kid in June of 1982, the hospital is as horrifying as Darth Vader and quicksand (I steal from John Mulaney here, who says quicksand never became the thing to worry about he thought it would)… but mein Gott, this little nightcrawler didn’t want to end up in a hospital _{[and when the night crawled upon him and he opened his eyes expecting to see the bedroom at 16 Fremont street he saw drop ceilings in a hospital hallway and he looked at the faint nursing station glow and said I told you I didn’t want to go to school today]}… hospitals are scary and the last time he was in one of them they told him his grandfather was like a spaceman so don’t be afraid when you see tubes in his face because that’s because he is an astronaut. _{Okay Mom, sure…}

I’m three but I’m not stupid. And why do my memories of being three, five, eleven—why do I always have the same consciousness when I put myself in those memories? It’s like I never really changed but everything’s changed. And I remember being in the back of Papa’s Oldsmobile turning left off of McKinley Parkway onto Lake Avenue going over the Thruway overpass and seeing the beautiful lake-plain clouds during sunset and saying, “Mom, that looks like a little red thread.” And she said, “Tommy, you have the soul of a poet…” and I didn’t know what that meant but I loved it and I kept it with me like a red thread that I’ve used to become my very own Anansi so I can steal the stories from the sky gods and give them back to the people, I guess.

I’ve always been quite Promethean in my ways because why should bliss be hoarded, when the hoard is there for all us leper-cons… but I digress as I digest. I think the spaceman thing happened before I ended up in the hospital, but if trauma has dislodged me from time and space and I’m a pilgrim unmoored from his Mayflower, April 1977 was when the shower began. 19:48 to the hour, minute made in time, orange and jaundiced and screaming a posterior lie who could only tell the truth, a bug that has become a feature even though it bugs me. It might make me go viral.

Then in 1984 Dad got ___________ . That blank is a breath that wasn’t really said out loud because of T-O-M-M-Y don’t say the C-word and it’s not the one that would make my sister punch me across the face, no it’s the one where cells start to act like robber barons in my father’s lymphatic system. Late-stage capitalism is a trigger and perhaps that is why. And he came home one day looking like Telly Savalas waving his red baseball cap yelling “Banzai!”—I had a Native American headdress (forgive me it was 1982 in suburban NYC—it was an unenlightened time and racism was the air we breathed; it’s a wonder I’m who I am but my father always taught me to treat everyone with respect and the only time my father ever went after anyone was if they threatened me or his values).

^{When the two Parsons Memorial Elementary School bullies decided to pile on to what was already the worst year of my life to that point, fourth grade where Mrs. Dragonlady (as my mother and I unaffectionately called her)—I’ll protect her name because she went to HS with my dad and her relatives might see this or she might see this and I’ve finally gotten past the statute of limitations on her flaming breath—but my goodness she was the worst teacher and the best teacher at the same time because she was a meat grinder for a sensitive empath like me but she also showed me that ableist assholes are around every corner and even adults can be complete and utter obtuse morons, especially when faced with acute sensitivity…}

So he had to go into radiation treatments terrified and buck naked so he softened it by making the technicians laugh and wearing his son’s regalia (PEACHY, ain’t it!) and using the loving humor strength that he has shared with me since I was born of his seed if you will. Before he went “away” to Yale New Haven Hospital for his ____________ treatments I made him a book or a picture with a caterpillar and if that isn’t a metaphor it should be. I had to butter him up lest he fly away, you see.

So I went further and further into my head. The body was terrifying. My head was lovely, dark, and deep and as a child I had very little promises to keep, so I thought, but I would find that choices would lead to ways and onto ways and the frosted path would thaw into a wilderness of mud and I’d get stuck and it would get dark and I couldn’t find my way back out.

_{And those promises that I thought I didn’t even have to keep froze over and I couldn’t let them go…}

And what happened in May of 1994, I couldn’t let that go. I couldn’t let it become what made me slowly fade away into an enchantment under the sea where human voices woke me and I drowned. ^{_{I’ll admit it. If you’ve read this far, this is proof that we rock.}} ~^_TS1

Click send. No. Wait. Don’t. It’s not about you. Let them have their fun…. but… but the anger. Every reunion, every old picture they post… the bile comes up. The chest empties, hollows, the cortisol rushes in. I want to scream. I want to flip tables. I want to tell them, “YOU BROKE ME!!!”

But they didn’t break me. The kid who assaulted me didn’t break me. The system broke us all.

I carried this weight for forty years. And recently, I finally put it down. ^{But that is a story for the next chapter.}

1. I didn’t want to waste more space in-line, but we needed a place for this to land. ↩︎