THE NAKED ANIMAL

yes, even more notes for an autobiographical strip search

In third grade, my best friend was a black girl named Bernetta. Every recess and lunchtime we monopolized the strip quad between the third and fourth grade classrooms with our improvised, technique-free gymnastic tumbling runs. What we did have going for us were speed and fearlessness. We even started doing handsprings and flips on the black top, just to get a rise out of someone. Sure enough, we caught the attention of the playground monitor, and were pulled aside on separate benches under the monitor’s watch for the rest of the period. Keep it on the grass, the monitor told us when the bell rang.

After school, I would sometimes go to her house to hang out. There were always plenty of people there. It was a large, plain white house with a numerous family, all with their own friends. Something good to snack on never failed to manifest, and everyone was laid back and friendly. The house was a little stuffy, but the windows were always open. I felt comfortable there.

I felt weird about having Bernetta over to my house; I wasn’t sure why, but it gave me a queasy feeling to think about it. Finally, though, I overcame my mysterious squeamishness and asked her over after school to practice our tumbling and watch TV. We took our time walking through the semi-gated community to our spacious ranch-style house, where we luxuriated in the air conditioner and ate graham crackers with peanut butter while watching old sitcoms on television.

I think my mother was napping, but at a certain point she got up, newly made up, in a colorful dress, and immediately asked Bernetta to stay for dinner. We were having pork chops, which were pan fried with Shake ‘n’ Bake; not one of my favorites, but Bernetta seemed pleased. We were out in the backyard practicing one-handed round-offs (I had to pick up the dog poop first) when my Dad came home. I could see him looking at us across the patio through the kitchen window, and talking to my mother.

Despite a nagging inkling of disaster that gave me goose pimples, I took Bernetta in through the sliding glass door to meet my dad. They said hello to each other, and my dad turned away to unpack his briefcase on the kitchen table and read some report. I looked at my mother, who was firmly turned towards the sink, rinsing lettuce, then Bernetta and I crept out the laundry room door. As we headed toward the lawn, we heard my dad through the open kitchen window whisper-yell, “I don’t care. I don’t want that little nigger in my house.” Yup, that’s exactly what he said, and we both heard it clearly. I suddenly understood my dark premonitions.

Bernetta and I could barely look at each other, but we stopped in our tracks, then took a left turn toward the rear gate. We started running when we hit the driveway, and didn’t stop until we had reached the other side of the neighborhood. We were still in shock and unable to exchange words on the walk to her house, but we laughed and pointed at things, and conversation started to flow again around her mother’s dinner table.

But we didn’t talk about it. Our eyes communicated with their liquid eloquence, but we knew we couldn’t handle putting it into words. I remember watching TV after dinner and telling her, out of the blue, that my dad thought I was a sissy. She said, “Hmmm. That's wrong," and I shrugged. Her mother asked if I wanted to stay the night, so I called my mom. She said no, after speaking to my father, whom I could clearly hear in the background, and arrived in her blue station wagon in what seemed two minutes to pick me up and take me home.

I was secretly stewing, but I let my confusion and indignation run acid through my arteries while I carefully choreographed my good-little-boy front. As long as I didn’t make any waves, the parental units seemed to behave on a more even keel. I hated being around them. I was terrified of both, though I couldn’t pinpoint why. They made me paranoid, nervous, uncomfortable. It was probably because my mother was an always perky repressed anger bomb that could detonate at any time for no reason, and my dad was a sometimes surly, sometimes overly enthusiastic alcoholic, but I only had incipient inklings of those notions at the time. In my childish wish-life of love and order, I formalized my parents’ barely contained havoc: I thought of myself as a scientist clandestinely examining the weird and wily ways of these all-too-humans, and I tried to ignore what these ways were doing to me. Instead, I imagined fantasy worlds.

I imagined that a spaceship would swoop into my backyard and, finally, after god knows how many lifetimes, pick me up from this out-of-control freak show of a culture. I wanted to escape my parents, yes, but I also felt at a very early age the cold shadow of the narcissistic patriarch looming over the planet, and I swore I wouldn’t let it get me. At heart I connected with Ferdinand the Bull, and I spent a lot of time under trees, all alone and daydreaming. But I was not inactive or unadventurous. I would go on treks around the local park by myself, bushwhacking through juniper clumps and climbing whatever tree looked most accessible. I had the usual scratched up shins and parade of bruises to show for it, of course, but I had experienced a series of three quite serious accidents when I was about five that were still fresh in my mind during grade school.

The first took place in our backyard, where we had a department store jungle gym with a red metal rod in the middle, hanging from chains. I loved to swing on it, fantasizing about becoming the man on the flying trapeze. One day I was getting cocky about my expertise, and as I jumped off for my Olga Korbut dismount, I let go too late. My chin smashed into an upper bar on the jungle gym as I jumped, and the force made my teeth rip clear through my tongue. Half of it was hanging by a string of twisted flesh when my mother found me. In my memory she is screaming and hyperventilating. It was a Sunday, but we were finally able to find a doctor who was willing to come down to his office and take care of me. I don’t know why they didn’t just take me to the emergency room. The hospital couldn’t have been that far away.... My father had to give me the local anesthesia shot because there was no nurse on duty. The doctor stitched my tongue back in place, and the thread later dissolved, leaving a slight ridge that I can still feel. I ate nothing but ice cream and apple sauce for weeks after the incident.

As soon as I was deemed fit for normal duty, I was back in action. I had a new bicycle–a red, white and blue number with a three-tone banana seat and shiny tassels on the handlebars. Christine from across the street had a brother named Russell who always wanted to “wrassle” with me, which was my idea of hell. “Wrestle,” I told him, “not ‘wrassle,’ and no, I don’t want to.” He was a year younger than us, and these days, he’d be immediately diagnosed with ADD. Back then, he was just “rambunctious.” I called him hyperactive, and got slapped by Christine for it. Russell was always coming up with hair-raising stunts for us to do, and I always went along, as long as it didn’t involve “wrassling." Once he got his own bike, it was all about jumping curbs, popping wheelies and racing in the middle of the street.

After exhausting our usual repertoire one day, we decided it would be fun to ride across the steep slope at the side of our house, from either end–a game of chicken with the added obstacle of an incline. It was tough keeping our balance at such a slant, but I mastered it after the first couple of times. Russell wanted to try it on my bike because he thought my bike was better. In fact, they were virtually identical, but Russell was the kind of kid who always wanted to use other kids’ things because he thought they were better than whatever he had. I used to notice that and wonder about it, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. My mother told me to be nice to him, with an implied “or else.”

So there we were at opposite sides of the green strip, he on my bike and I on his. Christine chanted ready-set-go and we were off. As we passed each other, the world went wobbly. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but somehow we wound up in a tangle of legs and spokes. I felt a piercing pain in my left shin and yelled, seeing that the pedal of my own bike had jammed into my leg all the way to the bone. I yanked the bike off me, and saw an almost transparent white liquid lacing the currents of ruby blood. My mother came out, screamed, carried me to the couch, and wrapped a string of towels round and round my leg. A doctor came to the house, and I must have been given a sedative or pain killer because the rest was a blur. I remember crutches, and that the wound was too open for stitches. Even now, I often reach down and touch the scar, which is about an inch wide and shaped like Iceland.

And to complete this trilogy of kindergarten catastrophes: It is winter in Buena Park, unusually cold for southern California. Every morning the gutters are iced over solid. It is grey and cold and the trees are groaning skeletons, and no one is up and about yet. I practice my skating moves on the glassy ribbon at the curb, gliding along then turning, or jumping off the curb to land with my leg in a bent, baby spiral position. I’m going along pretty good, thinking, hey, I could be in the Olympics I bet, and suddenly my legs fly into the air and my head clunks on the curb.

I passed out for a bit, then woozily walked into the house and told my mother what had happened. Of course, there was blood, so a damp cloth was quickly wrapped around my head, and I was directed to lie down on the couch. My father said not to let me fall asleep. I watched TV, half cross-eyed and dizzy, and heard my parents talking about the possibility of concussion, which at that time I thought was something to do with an orchestra. I have no memory of any medical care, but we ended up going to Van de Kamp for breakfast. I had spaghetti, as usual–a habit that was invented specifically to drive my parents crazy, and it worked–which I promptly vomited back into my plate and all over my pants. Dinner was cut short, and I was watched carefully for several days. Again, I ate nothing but ice cream and apple sauce until I felt well.

These three episodes create a living triptych that hangs in my memory museum; it is known as “A Young Seeker’s Introduction to a World of Pain.” There are many other works in the series; so many, in fact, that a new wing had to be opened to house them. As I grew up, these injuries became far more often psychological than physical, but they pierced even deeper, dealt mostly as they were by the two people I was forced to depend upon. I continued to get myself into dangerous physical situations now and then, in later life always wondering if I were actually just taking out my anger on myself. But most of the pain I kept inside, in festering emotional quags untended but not forgotten. And a lot of it is still there--like soap scum and rust stains, that kind of pain leaves shadows even once it's scrubbed clean by therapy and time.

After the n-word incident, Bernetta and I stopped hanging out together, wondering why but letting it happen anyway, because confronting it was too painful to imagine. I became a loner, sitting outside the main playground on the lawn where we waited for the bus in the afternoon, reading two books a week.

At home, I started sneaking into the living room after midnight to watch the late late show on TV. I became a budding expert on the Hollywood classics that way over the years. I'd keep all the lights off and sit with my face about two feet from the set and its extremely low volume so that I could hear Bette or Joan or Rosalind, and hypnotically eat a whole box of sweetened cereal during each movie. I used my allowance for my stash of Captain Crunch with Crunch Berries, Count Chocula and Honey Comb, and kept the boxes under my bed. I'd go to sleep stuffed to the gills with corn syrupy goodness at three in the morning, then wake up at seven and have french toast heaped with butter and powdered sugar for breakfast. At lunch in the school cafeteria, I traded main courses or vegetables I didn't like for dessert. I stopped for a candy bar or two or three, depending on how much of my allowance I had left, almost every day after school, and I ate a huge chocolate sundae with the works nearly every night after dinner. I didn't need teachers, parents, or even friends anymore: Sugar, my first and still most ineluctable addiction, had taken sweet, safe hold of me.

Categories: backstory, bakersfield, friends, addiction