If you read the introduction to this deep dive into my fierce honesty, you're aware I first wrote and posted this on Facebook.
This is how I began this section on Facebook: A few weeks ago I wrote y'all saying, "Good morning! I'm full of trepidation, anticipation, and a little intimidation. I'm aware of something that needs to be written down, using words real and true. It's a thing that's a thing that's said to be a long time coming, inevitable, and needful. Truth is power, right? Prayers that I'll be mindful, fearfully searching my heart." When I wrote that I knew some people might think I'd only begun to air my dirty laundry which is bad form and unacceptable on FB. But I know me and I'll do me. I knew when I started down this path that I wasn't writing anything to satiate anyone's morbid curiosity; I knew I was going to write to bring myself much needed healing and self-acceptance. Posts on FB never come with a requirement to be read. I decided if anyone thought I was only airing dirty laundry, well, Rhett Butler's line came to my mind, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." Beyond that, and frankly, more importantly, I'm well aware quite a few people have read what I've written since then. Some people need to know there is hope beyond the pain they feel. That pain is one I know very well and hope I've expressed here. But more than that, I hope I've expressed, well, hope! Yes, although it has been for my own healing I've written all these things, it fills me to think something I've said has helped anyone. And I believe it has—I guess FB has many purposes.
Anyway, a long time before I wrote the "Good Morning" thing, I knew I'd eventually have to quit hiding, that I'd have to dig deep and let the sunshine pour over some childhood pain. When I was a little boy growing up in Atlanta, GA—or Hotlanta, as we called it—my mother, my two brothers, and I lived in an apartment building named The Clinton House. I don't know when it was built, but I can imagine it was in the 1920s. Many of the doors inside the apartments still had skeleton key locks, and some of the bigger apartments had French doors leading to their bedrooms. None of the bathrooms were plumbed for showers, so you took tub baths in clawfoot bathtubs. There was no air-conditioning, or from a glass half full perspective, you got all the air you needed by putting a box fan in the huge windows. The "central" heat was radiated, fed by an ancient noisy broiler located inside the boiler room on the bottom floor. The coal used to fire the broiler used to be delivered via a chute that leads up to the street level where the coal vendors would shovel it as they made their rounds for delivery. It sounds nice, but in 1968 the building was run down, rodent-infested (at night you could hear the rats and mice as they ran the spaces behind the walls), roach-infested (the times we set off bug bombs we'd come home to find the roaches covered the floors like carpets), and almost every apartment had a gas stove where at least one burner didn't work. I'm very strongly suggesting the entire building was trashy. The neighborhood was full of hardcore drunks and druggies. Heroin was particularly a thing then, and I remember an alley adjoining the building always having syringes strewn all over the place. I remember my mom paying $160 a month for rent for a fully furnished, all utilities paid, 2 bedroom apartment. Sometimes when we lived in a 3 bedroom apartment the rent would be $168 a month. An inflation calculator shows that to be equivalent to $1,185.76 to $1,245.05 in 2019. I mean, in Atlanta in 2019 you might get an unfurnished one-bedroom and still pay your own utility apartment for that amount. It wasn't a good neighborhood is the point, but kids don't notice things like that.
Out in the front of the apartment building, which was divided into two wings, stood two Magnolia trees—one in front of one wing, the other in front of the other wing. My friend Chuck and I used to climb on the tree in front of the right-wing of the apartment building. Underneath that same tree, Chuck and I would sometimes strategically place tiny green toy soldiers so we could play war. You played war by taking a rock and throwing it at the opponent's toy soldiers to knock them down. The first kid to knock down all the other kid's toy soldiers won the battle and thus the game.
The question: when a boy is only 9-12 years old, he's just that isn't he, just a boy? I mean, is he expected to be wiser than his age proclaims? Yet, here I was, a mere boy expected to do something beyond my years, beyond my knowledge, and beyond the abilities my youth gave me. Still there we were. An apartment building in Atlanta, Georgia: my mother in one apartment; her boyfriend (my future step-father) in another. Why? They had argued and decided to separate, both emotionally and in proximity. Enter mother's number one son, distraught at the separation, perplexed, racking my young brain trying to be something and someone beyond my years to bring my mother and her boyfriend back together, back to only one apartment. I go from the apartment my mother is into the apartment her boyfriend is in to relay her message to him. Then I return to the apartment my mother is in to give her her boyfriend's return message. I'd go back and forth, back and forth, hoping for reconciliation, wanting more from life than the black, white, and gray they were living in. All the while I was fearing the never-ending separation of the two people whose gravity I always and forever wanted to hold me tight. In reflection, I was marching back and forth like a dutiful little soldier, just like the one's Chuck and I played with. For me, this wasn't the first time a rock had been thrown my way nor was it to be the last.
I feel three more things that happened to me at that time need to be spoken. First, with having un-diagnosed issues of anxiety, memory loss, as well as visual and auditory processing disorders, I had plenty of learning problems in school. Beginning in the fourth grade my parents would have me "clampdown" on school work. They first tried to use the classic carrot and stick approach to improve my spelling. My carrot was the $2 I'd receive for every 100% I made on the weekly spelling test. The hitch in the plan was that I had to pre-test with my step-father each week. So I could choose any day before Friday where we would sit down, and I would do my best to spell every word correctly. The stick was for every word missed, I either had to write that word a hundred times or get paddled ten licks for each one. I need you to understand that my memory is shaky here, so although this recollection is at least 95% accurate, the numbers of times as a consequence for misspelled words may be off. The point is, this served to inform me my worth came only through retained knowledge. That $2, which would be worth $25 today, meant a lot to me. But I would trade it all just to learn sooner how I have inherent worth, worth just for breathing!
As far as schoolwork went, I couldn't go outside to play until I finished my school work. With my intrinsic issues, this was very hard. There were plenty of days I didn't get to go outside and play, which became detrimental to me as a boy. What made this much worse was when my parents would leave me alone with my homework to go outside themselves. There I'd be alone, struggling and failing to do my homework, until I'd walk out to the back balcony where I'd cry as I watched my parents laughing and enjoying the time they spent with those kids, those strangers to my parents. This taught me that if I were only smarter and better at doing my schoolwork, my parents would love me enough to let me go outside with them, where they'd laugh and enjoy the time they spent playing games with me also.
As you consider the building where we lived, it should be obvious there was no place set up in an apartment or in the building itself where laundry could be done. So, our laundry was done on weekly trips to a laundromat next to the bowling alley where my parents bowled. Now to say my parents had great fun at the bowling alley would almost be an understatement. And while my two brothers and I were always lugged to that bowling alley 3-5 days a week, even during school nights until 9, 10, 11, or even 12 in the morning; being at the bowling alley was much preferable to being at the laundromat. At the age of 9-10, being responsible to do the laundry for my two adult parents, myself, and my two younger siblings was an undertaking. Now, while I'm well aware this doesn't compare to what kids had to endure who grew up during the harder and harsher times of around the turn of the 20th century, it still served only as more confirmation that I held little worth beyond what I could do for my mother. But even that worth would become minimized as my mother always had long and difficult instructions for our laundry. Wash this in cold water, this in warm water, this in hot water. Add this piece of clothing only after the washing cycle had been going for two minutes. Add fabric softer only during the rinse for this load. The same with temperatures for drying the clothes with some clothes having to be removed just before becoming completely dried. Then everything had to be folded this and such a way, or put on this particular hanger vs a different hanger. So on and so forth. With my memory loss and the other issues I had, my mother always set me up for failure! When she'd occasionally come over to "check-up" on me, she always found me not living up to her standards, and she'd scold me every time in front of everyone. As if it wasn't bad enough to be at the laundromat doing the laundry instead of being at the bowling alley having fun with the rest of my family! By the way, this was still in the same neighborhood I mentioned earlier. It was during one of those forced exiles to the laundromat where a locally known homeless vagrant and drunk found a couple of quarters and decided to wash his clothes. Mind you, the only clothes he owned were the clothes he wore, so he took them all off—yes, he stripped naked right in front of me—and put his clothes in the washing machine. To this day I can see him standing there at the washing machine, his back to me, his "dingle-berries" in plain view. It's a good thing I was a kid and a boy because I found it funny. But of course, that's not the point. I shouldn't have been put into that situation, to begin with. Again, when I craved attention and unconditional love, it never showed up for me.
As I grew up and got older, I never really knew why, but I always felt as though I was called to work a job as a mediator. Maybe it was all the years of running back and forth, trying to patch things up between my mother and step-father. Whatever the case, I'd never go into that line of work; and eventually, its call softened, until it disappeared along with so many things from that shit I called my childhood. As the years past, it seemed I was always battling so many struggles, but I'd never forgotten to at least try and get a glimpse of the sun's light. And when doing so, I would soak in every color from whatever narrow ray it shared with me.
In 1989, when America began hearing Martika's "Toy Soldiers" on VH1 and on the radio, from time to time you'd hear DJ's and VJ's talk about her backstory where she'd fallen into addiction to and dependence on drugs. I didn't know why, but I was drawn to her song, almost like an addiction of its own. I felt her words, "Only emptiness remains, It replaces all, all the pain" call to me like the sirens did the mariners of old. It never occurred to me that what she was saying applied to me, that emptiness had also replaced all my pain. But what really had me guessing was why those kids saying "Won't you come out and play with me?" held such a relentless grip on me. It was something so familiar and haunting, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Then she said, "Step by step, Heart to heart, Left, right, left. We all fall down Like toy soldiers. bit by bit torn apart we never win. But the battle wages on For toy soldiers." Something ethereal would happen to me then; it was like I'd dissolved into a world where nothing made sense and everything seemed to look odd and distorted. Still, even while that was so true, I always felt like it should have made all the sense in the world to me. It drove me crazy!
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