2 – Ego Death (18)
Two weeks before my high school graduation, West Point called me. It was all over.
In a chilling twist of fate, the officer in charge of my file, the one who called me, Major Penny, was diagnosed with terminal cancer a few days before calling me, a week after meeting in person.
“It could be worse.” He said. I never heard those four words the same way again. I learned a lot in those ten minutes. He died less than a year later.
Years of what I saw in myself, dissolved. The funnel clouds formed overhead. They said that I should try again next year.
My girlfriend of two years, Lauren, captained the dance squad, and I was a handsome, charismatic football player whose name could be heard repeatedly over the loudspeakers after scoring touchdowns on Friday nights. My high school ran on a block schedule like most universities, giving students plenty of free time to ‘study.’ I walked around and into other more interesting classrooms with impunity, played pickup games of basketball, and gathered in free classrooms with friends. What I lacked in the willingness to follow the rules, I made up for with charm and wit. I took an acting class, joined Lauren in a swing dance performance and stood between bullies and their victims if I was around to stop it.
I was in my assigned gym class when a front-office assistant entered, her business-casual garb standing out from the pack of students with authority. She whispered to my teacher, and then, my teacher looked directly at me. What did I do now? He beckoned me with an index finger. The dean wanted to see me.
Our dean, Ms. Late, was not on anyone’s shortlist of favorite people. She had a job that gave her authority and as the master of discipline, she wasn’t giving out any awards, which kept her stuck in a hard place, a hard place where she thrived. She browsed photos and text messages on confiscated phones that weren’t password-protected for no reason other than to find dirt—an illegal practice that bore no consequence because the school wasn’t going to stop her. If she found a message that alluded to drug use or drug-seeking behavior at the school, that student was almost always expelled, as the school’s infectious drug problem was no secret.
My name was mentioned in a text message thread between two classmates, only one of whom I actually knew. One of them got caught texting in class, and his phone—without a password—confiscated, which was immediately left with the dean and could be picked up at the end of the school day. I never found out what the messages said. I only knew that, the messages alleged that I, an unwitting third party, knew of a guy who might have some kind of prescription pills. In the days of 2010, half of the high school knew someone along those lines. The opioid epidemic was in full bloom.
They permanently suspended me, more or less, and gave me the remaining two weeks off and my diploma would come in the mail. The explanation was vague and arbitrary, but they didn’t want to risk that I was actually the one selling the drugs. Hell, what if I was the guy? I was not the guy, but it is ironic looking back. What made that my last day of my high school career—was my innocence, of all things. By default, they branded me with the guilt of the allegation. The judgement of the community and my peers—among whom I was once so highly esteemed—bore down on my glass castle with three-hundred-mile-per-hour winds.
The heartbreak amplified as my friends appeared to desert me. Because I didn’t get a single text message or phone call from a single person after that day—except from Lyle, someone you’ll meet soon. My reputation became the inverse of what it was, just like that. Someone saw me at the Wisconsin State Fair and asked, “Is it true they found bags of ecstasy and weed in your locker?” The rumors ran wild.
When I was pulled out of gym class and summoned to the dean’s office, they sent me to the locker room to retrieve my clothes, backpack, and cell phone. Everyone knew about the dean’s borderline illegal cell phone searches. Of the half-dozen times I was summoned to the principal’s office in four years, I rarely brought my phone with me, it was like an unwritten rule among students. I thought about the dean, swiping through one nude photo after another, Lauren’s innocence shattering. I thought about Lauren’s conservative and religious parents—revered benefactors who sat on the school board. Someone close to them, perhaps the principal herself, would almost certainly inform them; their daughter is not saving her virginity for marriage, unfortunately, she’s having sex with that boyfriend of hers.
I’m not catholic, I went to that school to play sports. But even in 2010, many people viewed premarital sex as a deeply sinful, even immoral. This view was force-fed by the same ego-driven institutions that force-fed fear-mongering via eternal damnation. This whole situation would be a repeat of the situation with Lauren’s older sister who, at the same age, was caught defiling her sacrosanct purity and was forcibly separated from her first love—by Lauren’s parents. Lauren told me many times, “If they find out, they’ll make us break up”—referring to the sex.
When I arrived at the dean’s office, she asked for my phone. I told the dean that I didn’t have my phone—a covert lie to mask the overt truth that I slipped it into a trash can. Since I didn’t have my phone, I couldn’t prove my own innocence, while also protecting Lauren’s innocence, and thus, associative guilt from the third-party text messages pinned me to the canvas. Everything I held dear, slipping from my clammy palms, one by one. The flag on the tug-of-war rope for my inner peace was not on my side, where it would stay for many years.
Lauren, my girlfriend of two years, was now in the crosshairs of the spinning vortex. To an eighteen-year-old, two years can feel like half a lifetime. We were in love, and we were good together. What I will always remember about the time we shared, is the laughter. It didn’t matter if we were in my living room, making gnocchi with her mother, skipping a party to watch The Notebook, or in a Maggiano’s, stuffing our faces with her favorite spaghetti—we were always laughing. Lauren’s parents were rigid Irish and Italian Catholics, and they were good people to me—a non-Catholic. They helped to pay my senior year tuition by hiring me to do landscaping and other household jobs for them. When the news of how the West Point-bound senior got expelled for drug-related conspiracy, they were the only ones who cared enough to find out my side of the story, because it didn’t add up.
Later that night, Lauren’s parents called my home phone. My dad answered. It was a beautiful night, full of moonlight, no clouds. As they exchanged pleasantries, I quietly picked up one of the wireless landline phones and listened in from the front porch swing. They quickly asked my dad the question everyone wanted the answer to: “Why didn’t Thomas give them his cell phone?”
He obliged, ignorant of the stakes, he said, “He was trying to hide the nude photos of Lauren on his phone.” To my dad, this detail painted me as the hero of the situation. And he was right. But Lauren’s parents didn’t see it that way. And I didn’t understand, until years later, that’s what my Dad was trying to point out. Because at the time, I didn’t see it that way either.
Winds of change circled me. In that moment, I threw everything I could at my dad through the phone, with Lauren’s parents on the line. “You fucking idiot, Dad! Fuck!” I yelled, then thought I hung up, and then yelled again unintelligibly, this time loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. Then I threw the phone onto the driveway, shattering it, which is when Lauren’s parents knew I had left the call.
After hanging up and throwing the phone, I put my fist through a thin wooden wall in the garage and then two nearby windows. Then, I walked out onto the driveway, where I saw my dad through the kitchen window, putting dishes in the dishwasher. I grabbed the first rock I saw, which was a piece of asphalt from our crumbling driveway – a perfect metaphor for the dysfunction within the home that raised me. I held the rock in my hand for almost a minute, stopping to confirm that I wasn’t being impetuous. I didn’t want to hit him in the head. I didn’t want to hurt him physically. I just wanted him to know what he’d done and how mad I was. I wanted to send a message. I waited for him to walk out of sight from the kitchen and into the living room, then I threw the asphalt rock as hard as my eighty mile-per-hour fastball. It traveled across the yard, through a kitchen window, through the kitchen and into the living room, where it collided with a white support column as he sat down on the couch with a bowl of ice cream. It detonated like a grenade. I wanted to be seen. Like somewhere outside of the ball field or in the newspapers. I wanted shock. I wanted my actions to speak for my inequality, to reach out from the box I was dropped into and then left behind.
***
In my family, I was the ‘tag-along.’ Everybody has their role—angles of the identity polygon. These things can’t be avoided. Because humans can’t circumvent their human condition.
I’m the fifth born, the youngest—the unplanned one. When I was ten, I figured that out, after counting the spaces between my sibling’s ages and mine: two-years, two-years, three-years—“Mom, why is everyone two-years apart and I’m three?” My mom, Catherine, cried tears of torment when she found out she was unexpectedly pregnant with me. She was terrified I’d be as difficult as my two older sisters. She did her best not to let the torment she felt at the time, translate into the life she gave me. My mom would make your great aunt Margaret Christmas Dinner with everything she wanted. Don’t know who Margaret is, or you, and it might come on New Year’s Day instead, but she’d do it since you asked nicely. Both of my parents always gave us four children everything they had the capacity to give us.
Growing up, I was an outlier in my family. I’ve always known it because, I was treated like that. Sometimes, I still think this will eventually change. In my heart, I know it won’t, even if I became president or saved all of the world’s dogs. Any accomplishment would always be minimized because it was just me. The role passively assigned to me became bedrock beneath my developing identity. It’s a role I’ve worked tirelessly to eradicate from my psychological makeup, the one built out of physical and emotional trauma.
My mom’s childhood dream was pretty simple, she just wanted to be a mother. And break the cycle of abuse and neglect passed down by her own mother, who was diagnosed as bipolar with borderline personality disorder, and traumatized her and her three sisters with most forms of abuse. In her mid-twenties, Catherine was elected as a city councilwoman and also brought my parent’s first-born, Jonathan, into the world. Three months after her lifelong dream came true with Jonathan, she was at city hall—a councilwoman ahead of her years. From the conference room windows of her meeting, she saw multiple police cruisers speeding into the busy intersection below, blocking traffic. She heard the emergency sirens crescendo from a whisper to a sonic riot, sirens and lights blazing through the vacant intersection toward the adjacent hospital. She’d never seen the intersection get totally blocked off like that, and she thought, How sad. It must be awfully serious. Seconds later, a secretary interrupted the meeting, and called my mom out of the room. She walked into her office, picked up the phone, and on the line, a voice faded her sights and sounds—to black. Jonathan was in that ambulance. Paramedics valiantly fought to resuscitate her infant first-born—but failed. I never met Jonathan. Forty years later, his life’s effect on all of us still ripples through our timelines. Losing a child is a momentary flash in the big picture—one that changes a person as quick as lightning. You become someone else in an instant—everyone you affect, too. That’s the byproduct of incomprehensible pain.
The babysitter my mom hired was a neonatal ICU nurse, of all things. While Jonathan was napping, she ran to the bank. Her husband became the babysitter for fifteen minutes. While my esoteric brother stirred, he managed to press the top of his head against the non-breathable, mesh side-walls of the playpen where he slept. The drop-side mesh playpen gently collapsed, and folded over his face. He silently suffocated. He never made a sound. When the husband went to check up on him minutes after his wife left the house, Jonathan’s face was blue. That young couple’s marriage did not survive the year. In 1980, Gerber refused to acknowledge the dangers posed by their products, until Jonathan was joined by six others. As the lawsuits piled up, and settlements kept the public in the dark, while warning labels were silently printed onto the products in Jonathan’s wake. ♣
My parents refused to settle for years, until the products were eventually recalled. Talk about a fall from grace—yet here we are, paths colliding; circumstances of unintended trauma rendered in-kind, but trauma nonetheless. My parents’ unconditional participation as subjects of the human condition were the catalysts to my upbringing, created my role, yielded my behavior, and influenced my decisions.
Sometimes, though rarely, they’d talk about Jonathan. It left me grateful for having a family at all, since my parents barely recovered and part of them never will, naturally. I searched far and wide for the answers to processing through my own childhood trauma. My parents did their best but fell short many times, like any parent, like any human.
During the many battles I waged in the coming years, I worked with a counselor who helped me put a name to all the components of my identity and trace their origins back to a handful of nearly forgotten early childhood memories. At one point, this counselor asked me to remember the very first time I could recall being upset and to write it down in as much detail as I could. I thought for a long time, then wrote down one memory. Then, I remembered an earlier one and wrote that down, too. And then, an even earlier one. This continued until a particularly painful memory surfaced.
I must have been three, maybe four. There was an argument in the front foyer of our house. My three siblings were there with my mom. I was standing on the stairs at the back of the foyer. I opened my mouth and said something to contribute to the argument. I don’t recall what I said, only that my statement was harmless. My eight-year-old sister, Carrie, recoiled aggressively at me and gave me a verbal lashing in front of everyone.
“Thomas, you shut your mouth! You need to learn your place in this family!” It was a form of communication I’d never seen before, and it was directed toward me. I was instantaneously crushed. I sobbed for hours. I don’t know how she did it, but her words cut right through me.
Memories can play tricks on us, especially our earliest ones. For a long time, I couldn’t recall any negative memories of my early childhood. But they were there. This memory at three years old and many others came back to the surface after I dug deep to find them, because my inner child, the one who threw the piece of driveway asphalt through the window, was deeply damaged.
Many things came together to create my mind as it was when I was eighteen. The challenges of my childhood. The circumstances of neglect. The way you grow up thinking your trauma is normal. The role that I was assigned at the age of my earliest memory. By the time I was a teenager, my identity was grounded in overcompensation for the neglect and inferiority I felt within my family hierarchy. The events of my early youth taught me that I should never depend on anyone—the tag-along, lone-wolf-alpha.
***
The night I threw a rock through the kitchen window after my dad, my mom put me in her car and called my sister. I was being relocated. She packed me a bag and told me to “get in.” I actually never even went back inside of my house after Lauren’s parents called our landline. The next day, Lauren called and broke up with me.
Getting me away from my dad was in everyone’s best interest. The only place I could go was my sister Heather’s four-hundred-square-foot duplex apartment in Madison at the University of Wisconsin, where she lived with Josh, her roommate and now husband.
I was disfigured inside. I hated everyone and everything. I lived an independent life there. I was angry, quiet, withdrawn. I thought the world owed me something. I sat and smoked blunts alone, something I never did before. I started plotting. My life became a mission to validate my self-worth again. I confronted losing everything I knew and having everything I didn’t know at the same time, ready to embrace the next adventure.
Most ofmy waking hours that summer were spent on the third and fourth floors of College Library overlooking Lake Mendota. There, I studied myself; how to be better at being me. I wrote manically through the night and day, a catharsis for me. That Word document became a 130,000-word novel about self-dissolution and self-reconstruction. It was crap that only I could understand. Nonetheless, it helped me heal.
At the end of the summer, I went to Beloit College, a small private college that I chose for a terrible reason: it was the only one I applied to that wasn’t West Point, and by all accounts is the polar opposite of West Point.
I’d lost West Point and my childhood dreams on Monday. The next Thursday, I lost my first love, all of my friends, my home, the pedestal of my high school glory and also my identity.
The melancholy in loss of self transcends the self entirely: it’s like the raw ascension of identity. Part of the self dies—a refinement process.
For the next eleven years through material wealth, fortune and misfortune, addiction, legal trouble, close-calls, traumatic brain injuries and intimacy with death, doors progressively closed in my face until eventually, the only doors that remained open wanted to kill me. I lost too much of who I was and when the lights went dark, a door cracked open with blinding light where, lying in wait was a gift that didn’t come looking like a gift.
I overcame the tragic demise of my image, my version of it anyways. I learned how to put my pain to use. I walked in with an ego that I’d learned to compartmentalize. On the outside, I seemed humble. In my heart, I just wanted peace. But my ego’s version of peace was very different than my heart’s.