Half Drawn Fish (Part 2)

With each passing year and experience we are meant to grow in wisdom alongside age.  This pattern makes adolescents and grown-ups of us at each step of the way.  Children, in that we have yet to learn from what is to come and adults in the things that have already passed.  Throughout my childhood I managed to grow steadily in my maturity - never exceeding the standard of my age, but also never under the line to any significant degree.  I certainly had my moments of childishness such as the time I thought it good and fitting to take all the boxes of cereal in the cabinet, pour the entire contents in the couch cushions and proceeded to jump up and down on them just to be sure to cause my mother hell.  My brilliantly evolved brain conveniently forgot this ever happened  and my mothers brain put it on a list of things to eventually tell my first girlfriend.  I'm sure somewhere on that list is the time I broke the sliding door the first day in our first house by running at full speed through what I thought was the open end (I was 15) and the time I took a large black bag of half our kitchen supplies to the dump thinking it was garbage.  (I really miss those popsicle makers)  Outside of those moments I managed to stay the status quo.  Thinking back I feel it was a necessary place for me to be.  My father was continually struggling with his manic depression, my mother always trying to deal with my father and my sister - well, she never really had a chance for normalcy hard as she tried.  Somehow with all the troubles the rest of my family had I managed to slip under the radar.  My parents eventually conceded to trusting me entirely so that they had more time to worry about their own selves.  This turned out to be a blessing for me, but a curse for them once they realized how I had betrayed them.  On June 2, 2005 the static of my of youth burst into a whirlwind of defiance and action that was unlike me in every possible way.  The good natured boy who civilly obeyed and secured trust fell like a stone, suddenly and painfully, hurting myself and everyone I had ever loved.

*                    *                    *

The first thing we can remember in our childhood is always an interesting story.  It says something about us - how far back we can think, who was there, how we felt.  It becomes a defining characteristic of our later selves, kind of like what brand of peanut butter we were raised with.  Everyone is part of a group, crunching or smooth, JIF or Peter Pan, and they will stick by that tradition without ever realizing it.  Timothy, the oldest in a group of friends I never quite belonged to entirely, claimed on several occasions that he could remember all the way back to his birth.  Coming out of his mother he says he saw his dad standing there upside-down.  I could never grasp whether or not he was kidding.  My first memories don't go back quite that far but they do exist in faint glimpses of the very early days.  With all the years of torment I would eventually go through I had no room for the memories of my past.  I eventually lost almost complete track of what things were like.  But ever so slowly I have built pieces that were seemingly lost for good.  I have begun to put together the shapes of the places I lived, one a trailer another a hotel, the colors and smells trigger a response now when I come into similar environments.  Just yesterday I was dealing with kerosene when I suddenly recalled a kerosene heater we used in one of the trailers when the heat stopped working.  It was my task to go out and siphon the fluid from the portable can into the tank of the heater and clean up the accumulation of  burnt dust and debris that inevitably built up around the heater.  The smell was powerful and filled every room of the small trailer.  I don't understand a lot of what was happening in those days, the things my parents wouldn't let on to save us from heartbreak.  But something about that smell reminded me of the destitution we sometimes found ourselves.  The year we moved to Atlanta was filled with the presence of poverty even with the shield my mother used to hide us from the truth.  Sometimes we would receive packages of what I can only assume was a comfort where little light shown.  My father's parents never really loved him and my mother's parents often didn't trust him because of his illness.  Both my parent's were regularly ridiculed and looked down upon by the church they attended, often their only source of human contact as their families didn't live nearby.  But for reasons I still cannot understand my sister and I were thought of as somehow separate from them.  We would be loved in ways that were not shown to my parents and we received gifts of toys and comfort that may have been better spend toward rent and food.  I don't know how much help my parents received but I do know that when times sunk to the lowest possible place there was something that made the next day come.  The congregation that hated them so much would put together small amounts of money for their benefit.  But I don't think it was as much for heeding the call of the poor as it was feeding the beast of superiority within the network of families that composed the church.  I have no doubt I misunderstand and misinterpret many things in the early days but still many things became painfully clear when I went through my own suffering and when I realized people I had known for who they really were.

*                    *                    *

My parents were the fourth generation of a form of Christianity that sprung up in the 19th century around New England.  A group of bible students in the United States angered by the dense mess of ritual and tradition covering Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism (among many long-lived Christian faiths) came together to rework scripture and Christianity from the ground up.  Most of these small groups waned in the decades of false prophesy of end times that were so often made by these groups, but a few survived and are well attended today.  The group my family followed were the Jehovah's Witnesses, instituted by Charles T. Russel.  My mother, Amy Rochelle Biddlecome, was the oldest of three sisters and two brothers.  Her father, my grandfather, was an elder in a congregation at a time when there was only one leading per church.  I think he was most conservative with her upbringing and she lived her younger days trying to live up to the strict council of her father and of the very primitive religion he taught her.  I speculate, based on what I saw of her growing up, that she feared stepping outside the lines of Witnesses doctrine based more on her upbringing than of her reasoned faith.  To do so may not have brought as much wrath with it as I think she expected, but she never took the chance regardless.  I remember at one point my parents telling each other the most incomprehensible thing they could think of.  My father said it was seeing my mother with a beer in her hand and my mother said it was seeing herself leaving the faith.  The tragedy of leaving the Witnesses for her was worse than the pain and uncertainty of death.  It is that very fear that conservative religions play into their members from childhood.  My father was raised with two parents who strayed in and out of the Witnesses fairly casually from what he told my sister and I.  His mother would sometimes take him and his brother to church when his father didn't but that seemed to have been rare during many years.  That family of four, my father, his brother and their parents, was the classic case of dysfunction.  I remember being told stories of how my grandfather treated my father and the things his brother put people through.  His father moved them from house to house and school to school on an almost yearly basis.  My father attended something like 8 distinct school before graduating.  Though my father was older than his brother Tom he was not the favorite or even liked by his dad.  My dad was awkward and nerdy in his younger days, brilliant, but not able to rise above the books he read and the things he knew.  The insult to that injury was his own dad constantly making fun of him for tripping over his own feet (Must run in the family.  I used to trip over my own feet because I couldn't keep them straight.  I think it's genetic) and calling him despicable names to his face, putting him down to the level of nothingness.  Tom, on the other hand, a weasel by anybody's standards was favored and given the benefit of his father's love and affection.  After high school he wanted to be a stronger part of the faith that his parents had strayed from.  He had been reading scripture and interpretation alongside every publication the Witnesses had publish (Which there were many even then)  but his dad had plans for him to go to college, something that the Witnesses often frown upon.  I don't remember how it got to this point but their argument over this issue led to a battle of strengths.  Jesse Sr was tall and strong.  He had worked in construction for a large part of his life and knew how to handle himself, especially against a skinny guy like my dad who never had any intention of needed to overpower anybody.  It was decided that if his dad could carry Jesse Jr. the many miles into the local town with my dad struggling the whole way then he would agree to attend college, but if he was unable then Jesse Jr. would enroll full-time in the public ministry of the Witnesses.  Before the day was out my grandfather caught my dad unaware, held him down, duct taped him hand and foot and dragged him the whole way.  My father was helpless but could not stand up for himself and say what was right.  He attended one semester only.  Never could I understand why he still loved them so much and why he put so much of his heart and head in their hands.  His brother worked here and there always jobs nobody could understand how he could be qualified for.  Once a professor, once as a gold smith for the government.  He ended up marrying a deaf woman called Celeste.  She was beautiful and sweet and endured the years of abuse and cheating till she finally set herself free.  He later would fake marriages, hiring actors to play the parts of priests and best men, shams that women were helpless to see through.  When my grandfather died and his brother left my father became a much different person for awhile.  I had spent time with Jesse Sr both in his first marriage and in his second and at a time when death seems the most bewildering thing possible to a young boy I did not cry or feel sorry or change whatsoever.  It was a relief to put his ignorance and hate to the dust.  But I had a father who was good to me so I had not really lost what my father had.

The few details I have of my parents meeting and dating are few but they speak well of how things turned out for them.  They both attended the same high school.  Jesse spent his lunch break alone, a pariah from the rest, reading his books and scripture.  Amy, bound to her duty to find a faithful Jehovah's Witness, chose him as her mate.  That's the way things go more or less with Witnesses.  Very often the first person you date is the person you end up marrying.  Of course my parents went in and out of the relationship in the ignorance befitting their age and religion.  My father would later tell us that Amy was a walking cliche of relationships, one after another after another.  I think he held on to that so long because he needed to believe that he wasn't the only nerd, the only one who didn't know how to participate in social circumstances.  My mother hated him for remembering.  They had my sister and three and a half years later had me.  At some point between those two births my father began showing signs of his illness, a type of manic depressive bipolar condition.  Many things happened in the years of my childhood till early teens that were twined with the journey my dad took to get better.  I fault him now for few things and none of them are on account of his illness.  I tell myself that what he did to my mother, my sister and I was uncontrollable and an imbalance of chemicals, not because I want to believe that but because I have gone through many of the same thing he had, though under different circumstances.  At one point he left the church, the unspeakable thing, and ran off somewhere.  My family moved to find him.  When he was home it was temporary.  If there was a fight he would run off again and we would have to drive around around for hours looking for him to make sure he wasn't in trouble.  In vague clouds of memory I can see my mother putting chairs and stool up against the door handles to keep him from coming home drunk.  He never used physical violent against any of us.  I don't believe that he did.  He was unable to control his decisions but deep inside there was love and reason that he could not show.  We made a lot of mistakes along the way driving for hours and hours looking for doctors who could ease the pain but only following a fools path.  Many years later he found the balance but by that time it was too late to fix what was broken.  There was an instilled pain that never left the eyes.  My mother stayed with him throughout the most horrible parts and their was love.  Despite that I could see both my parents dying inside knowing what they had missed and they wore their failures on their chest where everybody could see.

*                    *                    *

My first relationships were with my sister and mother and very soon just my mother.  Alexis, my sister, was dealt her own hand of illness and could not be a part of my life for many years.  Before that we would play and make-believe together.  Often in her room we would set up blankets and chairs to act as a ship on the voyage to a faraway island.  Her barbies and cabbage-patch dolls were our shipmates and story lines.  But that time period was short lived and soon her own mental anguish overcame most sibling civility.  I was never really told what the problem was - maybe something passed down from my dad - and I never asked years later when we were close.  What I remember is Alexis growing cold and impatient whenever I was around her.  I would follow her to her room thinking we'd play like we always did but she was always unhappy and would often yell and scream at me for following her.  She kept alone and stopped trusting anybody with what was going on inside.  I think from most outside perspectives nobody would notice what was wrong.  Children go berserk all the time.  But in our house my sister and I never talked back, never raised our voices and never made a stand against the authority of our parents.  Not like the children I was raised with anyway.  So when my sister lost control it was something to be dealt with.  My parents took her kicking and screaming and clawing at the door frame to the doctor.  Her time in high school was the worst.  She never had someone throw her a saving rope.  In school she was not allowed friends by the 'virtue' of the faith and the few girls at our Church her age were worthless by many standards.  I was told she left high school after her freshman year when several lesbians started giving her so much trouble.  Homeschooling was little better and ended up extending her dreaded educational experience for over a year longer than if she would have stayed in school.  I did my best to stay out of her way but I was an early teenage boy and couldn't help to torment her more than she already endured.  In a family troubled by illness, conservative virtue and fear my sister and I dealt with life much differently.  Where I held the trouble inside and hid from everything she wore her woulds on every visible part of her self.  The anger she showed before had turned into a permanent scowl on her face.  Her eyebrows never relaxed and she never looked you in the face.  I remember hating the immutable expression she posed not knowing that it was formed by an inner angst that wasn't given the chance to be set free.  With nowhere else to turn she found two boys to rest her comfort, one my uncle and the other his friend, whom she ended up marrying after I left home.  Both of these boys I had a large amount of respect for but what Alexis really needed was someone much stronger, not just kinder.  Now, when I think about her I fear for her.

*                    *                    *

Through great amounts of pain come even greater feats of love and it was this turn around that saved my sister and I from at least a few years of the impossible life.  By the time I reached high school I was becoming more and more active with the Jehovah's Witnesses.  Among several responsibilities I took on were the part-time and then full-time public ministries known as pioneering.  My father did this when he was younger and then passed it on to my sister who now both convinced me to participate.  Pioneering didn't pay and in fact often took what little money we had.  It cost food, gas and supplies but most importantly time.  Between the ministry and school I also had to work.  In the end my schooling suffered, I was always tired and I struggled to fill the hours necessary for the door-to-door work and bible studies.  I hated it but never admitted I didn't enjoy god's work.  It was my sister who helped me out by driving for miles and miles and hours an hours to fill my time.  We began working together and then we began playing together again.  In the two years before I left home we had regular schedules together for the ministry, meals and tennis at the high school.  She started buying me the things I couldn't afford, clothes and food, gas and cell phone service.  Things were not just good but very good between us.  It was always a fear of my dad that Alexis and I would never be close as his own brother was not close with him.  He always used his life as an example - don't become like Tom and I, we don't even know each other.  She admitted once that she did these things for me because of the years we were not close, something she blamed herself for.  I've never known two siblings who were so close to one another as her and I, and never have I met someone so determined to turn a relationship around.  It is for this reason that it breaks my heart so much and brings me to tears even now to know that I would end up using every part of our closeness to betray her.  She was the first person in my family to say, "I will not speak to you ever again."  I swallowed those words in the discomfort of an unfamiliar room - one drink after another until I could no longer remember why it was my chest hurt so bad.

*                    *                    *

It's hard write about my own young life without the relationships of my family and even then it's not easy.  For one I cannot remember very much.  Out of all the people I knew growing up, people whose names I used on a daily basis, I strain to remember their names and most often ever fail to remember.  I can usually call to mind half of them but sometimes not even their last names.  Imagine a close friend, someone you have spent almost twenty years knowing and living with, and then within a few short years of not hearing from them completely forgetting who they were, down to their very names.  This is what has happened with me.  I was good kid causing far less trouble than most my age but I lacked in many areas.  I was quite shy, especially when very young, and feared adults, the foreign sights they were.  My friends composed of two boys and a girl, Christopher, Wesley and a girl I can't remember the name of.  They only lasted a few years and then moved away leaving me with nobody for a considerable time.  My parents would not let me spend time with anybody not a Jehovah's Witness and then would rarely allow me time with the boys in the congregation.  I was so distant from them and they so close to one another that I was included in the group out of pity more than of any kind of camaraderie.   I felt the loneliness of this constantly.  

From as far back as I can remember till around the age of 15 I was alone within myself.  Few things changed outside of failing at school, tempting myself with friendships I could never own and hating every facet of the faith I said I loved so much.  This faith, this religion infiltrated every thought and action and made me admit things I never felt in my heart.  My dad would sometimes ask why it was we believed in the true faith.  It was a bullshit question.  What was I going to say?  "No, I think this is rubbish?"  Of course I bought into all of it.  I really did believe that the Jehovah's Witnesses had the answer to every conceivable question.  But I did not enjoy the faith I was raised in and I had little desire to confirm the answers I was given through Witness publications like the Watchtower and Awake, countless brochures, tracts, books, videos, news and scriptural interpretation.  To be in the Truth, as being a Witness is known by, means covering your life with that faith to an extreme sense.  I knew there was no way out.  I did not desire anyway out.  And yet this subtle sense that I knew was telling me something was wrong.  The books were boring, even scripture, and did not answer the questions of life I had.  The ministry was exhausting, cash draining, and never led to any benefit for anyone.  The congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses were, for the most part (and I certainly separate particular members), little educated, enthralled with themselves and generally robots doing what they were programmed for.  I was a robot, yes, but there was a spark as well.  I became very close to Laurel Lehr, an elder in the congregation who was friends with my dad when they were younger.  Laurel had lost his wife and was living with his daughters family when I first came to know him well.  Before that the only contact we had was minimal and I most feared him because I could never remember his name.  He once made a nice comment about my hair (which I spent hours on when I was little trying to get it to look just like my uncle's with the perfectly combed wave in front) and I grew angry that he would mention something I was so self-conscious about.  Come to think of it I should have known then a part of myself was gay.  Far too much time grooming. We became close when I started asking for responsibilities at our weekly meetings (church) and then worked with him in the ministry for several years.  He was a high school drop out and unable to understand a lot of basic concepts but I loved him as a friend for how selfless he was in the most genuine way possible.  His grandson was the next person I endeared as a friend.  Michael was among the group of boys I was not allowed to hang out with but we began hanging out every Thursday night at the local pizza hut along with usually one or two others and my sister.  It was he who introduced me to coffee, work ethic and driving gloves.  For that and the consciousness he paid toward me I am eternally grateful.  As of two weeks ago he still hasn't replied to my repeated contact.  Neither have the others.  Most certainly not my sister.  The rest of the people in that church were lost without knowing and little worth my time.  Some never liked me for who I was and no other reason and the rest were complacent and nothing more.  

*                    *                    *

The jobs I have had are a good backbone to the path that led me to leaving that life of family, friends, faith and home.  The first job I had that was continuous was with a moving and auctioning service.  I got it through my friend Wesley's dad who had both moved away when I was little.  I hadn't spoken to Wesley in years but we started up our friendship quickly and only as a surface convenience.  I got my license and started driving after I had worked there for a few years.  It was my first taste of independence and one I abused.  I was a rebel underneath, at least for a Witness.  I spent all my money on tea, peach schnapps, gas and a suede jacket to match an Aussie hat.  I used my independence with the car I was driving, a 1994 black Jeep Wrangler, to see friends I wasn't allowed to have, get places on time without my family, buy condoms,  cigarettes and the most rebellious things I could think of.  It sounds cheesy because it is.  This was small time but for a Witness I was doing the unthinkable.   It only would get worse.  I also used the independence of the Jeep to perform my first suicide attempt.  After growing deeply frustrated with my mother's repeated ignorance of the boy I was and her constant hurtful statements I drove at full speed into an embankment on a Friday morning on the last day of the semester at school.  It was a complete failure.  I had unbuckled my seatbelt and aimed for an oncoming car mistakenly thinking it would double the speed of impact.  I was going pretty fast and was unfamiliar with icy roads at the time.  I missed the car and instead started sliding sideways on the road, quickly sliding off into the embankment and rolling over several times before coming to rest.  I was tossed around the inside of the Jeep like a rag doll and blacked out from a concussion when my head slammed into the windshield on the passenger side.  My mother thought I was just driving recklessly.  She was unaware of too much.  After that I needed a more stable job to pay for the damage to the Jeep and for the ministry I was still in.  This is when I walked into a store my sister had worked at for years, Goody's, and asked for an application.  Within a year of that moment I would have fallen in love and committed to leaving behind every piece of my past.  This action is the true beginning, a birth for me and a dying for my family.  Everything before it would end up being meaningless while causing me six years of anguish, suicide attempts, alcoholism, drugs, sex, theft, journeys and dead ends.