My childhood was broken. But the bones have knitted nicely.

Have I ever wrote about growing up? We all have to do it, though some come into maturity much later than others. I’m one of the late-bloomers. It’s funny to me. Most assume that wisdom comes with age. But wisdom comes only with pain. Sad but true. Not just pain, but the present confrontation of it, standing firm with both heels planted in the tide mud as that seething black wall of brine and fish-guts comes barreling toward you.

                

We’ve all had a mouthful of that piss.

               

Some of us acquire a taste for it.

                

I grew up long into my twenties, where I still reside, like some bug watching its legs curl backwards in the confines of a jar much too small for its body. For this particular flashback, my childhood is more interesting (in a gory kind of way). Certain parts of my brain were forced to develop quicker, than others. 

Motor Function: hiding from my step dad when he started yelling or breaking dishes. 

Frontal Lobe: lying about the bruises on my body. 

Hippocampus: consolidating memories of what to do, and not to do, if I expected my nights to be peaceful. 

Mostly,  the reactionary areas; while those that fostered emotion, safety, and trust of the world remained like twisted weeds half-roused from the soil. I'm not writing this to make you feel bad. I'm writing this to make me feel good, to remember, to breathe deeply of what I was, and what I've become.

                

Tears have their sweetness, but sadness is a decadent candy,  makes your stomach ache when you eat too much. I should know. For years, I survived on sadness, and little else. I grew up picking up the pieces of my perfect family like shards of carnival glass. I went to church four times a week and praised the Nazareth Nomad with the best of them. We stood in the crowd cheering while our friend Abe played Jesus during our church's production of The Crucifixion. 

I can still remember the agony in Abe’s glassy eyes, as he balanced on the wooden platform of the cross my stepdad had helped build, a smear of red paint slicked down one side of his chin from where the Roman soldiers had forced wine into his mouth. It seemed to me that Abe understood perfectly what it was to suffer, and like some of us, appeared to take pride in that. After the curtain dropped, he walked out in his torn smock with the air of an MVP, sharing shoulder-claps and laughs, a strutting Holy Peacock.

                

I wonder if he got laid that night by one of the flock, impressed by his self-chastisement. I wonder if he repented.

                

The church wasn’t my thing. I was amused when people attempted to impress me by quoting scripture, or recounting details of saintly lives, like they’d read them on the back of a trading card. I wasn’t affected by the passion. Most of that was due to Buster (that was my stepdad’s middle name). You see, Buster was the crème-de-la-crème of Christian refinement. A youth pastor with an impressive build, thick mustache, and glasses. He looked like the BTK killer, with a wavy all-American head of hair. He smiled often, and it beamed like the fuckin’ Torch of Liberty. Our grass was always cut. When things were broken, he would fix them. And he loved to polish his guns.

               

Guns and Jesus. Has there ever been a more memorable duo?

                

I used to wet the bed. When I was little. The doctor informed my parents this was because I slept too deeply. I still remember a man that looked like Donald Sutherland with a bowl-cut and glasses coming to the house with his piss-detecting mechanism. It was a rubber pad hooked up to an alarm. When it got wet, the sensors activated a world-war-two bomb siren that made your bones feel like they were grinding themselves to dust. This, he calmly explained to Buster, my mother, and myself, would wake me mid-mincturation. That, in turn, would rehabituate my neural pathways … and after a time, my body would alert me before it attempted to drown itself in urine.

                

Waking up with piss all over my sheets, cold, alone, embarrassed, was bad enough. But now the auditory equivalent of a neutron bomb was added to the confusion. Needless to say, man in his effort to reign nature, failed yet again.

                

I pissed the bed well into my teens.

                

And now I wonder if that little child misshapen by the hammers of misfortune was not the victim of a body trying desperately to recreate the warmth and comfort of its womb, a place robbed in a caprice of violent transition, cast into a world of cold bright light, a Washington world where it always rained and the woods were wet and the neighbors all assumed you were happy. 

                

So church, pissing the bed, and shooting guns up in the Big Sky, as Montana is known. We’d go there few times a year, to Billings where Buster’s band of cowboy’s was waiting. Buster’s dad was a gunsmith by the name of Butch, and Butch had 1300 loaded weapons in a basement arsenal. I remember being impressed by the way no one locked their doors in Billings, the way people walked into the super market with side-arms holstered to their belts. I remember being four-years-old and shooting my first 22 handgun across the lake, shooting at ducks and anything that moved until the gun was ripped away from me and I was beaten blue as a smurf for not respecting the weapon. I was used to such reprimands. Physical abuse was as prevalent in my household as physical affection is in most others. My mom was as much a victim as I. Perhaps she was drawn to his strength, a knowledge that he could annihilate threats with the same heavy-handedness she had occasion to endure.

                

That being said, he wasn’t all bad. He was just one of the unlucky little shits born into a family that was all calloused knuckles and back-breaking labor and the annual smile on Christmas. He didn’t have love. Didn’t have “good job son” echo in the hall as he pinned his report card to the kitchen cork-board. He hailed from a world where objects of intended ownership had to be conquered: and that included little boys from previous marriages. He was the prototypical country man trapped in the mindset of a troglodyte. What he wanted, he clubbed and dragged back to his cave.

                

But he tried.

                

I remember him building a tree-house above the shed, a two-story structure accessed by a pull-latter that came down from the inner ceiling. The upstairs had leaning walls that met in an apex, like the attic sitting rooms of many older homes. It was carpeted and filled with toys and drawing pads (I liked to draw), and had a double window fixed by a latch. Sometimes I’d invite a friend up there and we’d open it up and sit with our legs dangling and stare off over the fence, where Mount Rainier sprouted from the horizon like the tit of a buried frost-giant. I'd gaze for hours, craving an adventure, something magical enough to tear a hole through all that sadness germinating in my pre-pubescent heart. I craved to see another world, to be important, to be a hero.

               

Buster did his best to raise me, fists-included. When I was 22 and living on my own in San Pedro, I remember talking to my mom about him on the third story balcony, looking out across that windy night into the harbor, where tanker lights pierced the fog like the eyes of smoky angels. Until then I had seen him as a monster. A pervasive shadow that colored the corners of everywhere I looked. By then, I was four years sober, maybe three. I had fixed ideas about my childhood, my victimization. But that night she read me a letter from the divorce (a divorce that had been propagated after he knocked me unconsciousness at 8 years old). It said something to this affect:

               

“I don’t think it’s fair to pipsqueak…” (he used to call me that) “…all this fighting, and then just taking him away from me. I miss him. Can I still talk to him? Let him know I love him.”

                

When I heard her read it, the blood rushing in my ears fell quiet. A metallic chink rebounded through the darkness, and I was free from the monster’s cage, free from the created image of my childhood. Until then, my memories were an internment camp. The multitudes of therapists I’d had up until that point agreed with me, sympathized, gave me the right to be upset. But I had no right. 

We’re all just crawling through the darkness, after all, bumping objects and trying to glean their meaning by running crippled fingers along their cracks. We make names for the things that happen to us. We construct cages and live in them, feast on the refuse of old traumas. But the truth of is simpler:

               

Things happen.

                

Not to us. Not for us. Not against us.

                

They just happen.

                

Knowing this has transformed the old chaos into a fuel I've used for creation. Volcanoes spewed islands for which tourists pay millions every year to visit and grow fat along its shores. Why can’t human violence be turned to a similar purpose?

More memories to come. I have a lot of them.

                

An update on the new novel, The Sineater: 100,000 words into it, and just about to round third base. I expect it will be finished within a month. And then I can polish my previous novel for my Agent. Look for The Forest Whispers Her Name. There’s plenty of darkness, and plenty of light… 

From a witch hunter’s torch, at least.