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March 11, 2009 - Wednesday
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Current mood:a bit goofy
Category: Writing and Poetry
A rare non-poem post. This is my narrative essay written for my English 200 class. Just got it back today--an A:
Reflecting on Shadows
It's probably before midnight. I lay on the ground in my stark blue bag, gazing, staring up through the breathing hole into a moonless night. Stars everywhere. Countless twinkling eyes looking on, seeing nothing. All around I can hear coyotes barking, yowling, giggling—or were they wolves? Desert shadows gape amid the darkness. A chill breeze dries my half-shed tears.
Will it always be this way?
A few hours ago near dusk a man driving a dingy brown sedan stopped and let me out near the Pumpkin Center, not far from Globe, Arizona. Probably a wise move on his part. He saw my thumb not far south of I-40 and pulled over. Usually I can smell a would-be predator the way a dog smells fear, a scent like mildewed sheets and rotting semen felt just behind and below the eyes.
Travelers like to talk. This is why they picked you up. A few of them hope for something other, which I've never offered nor allowed. This one, an obese man with mottled skin hung loosely from bulbous cheeks and chin, tried mightily for two and a half full hours to talk me into letting him suck me off, even going so far as to pull out his false teeth to assure me it wouldn't hurt.
I was careful not to express disgust, merely disinterest. I was also careful not to abruptly ask to be let out, since this is a sign of fear, and fear is what lets a predator know you're prey. Instead I declined his advances, changed the subject artfully, and maintained professional tones.
As I got in the car he asked where I was headed, as they always do. "South," I said simply. A 15 year old runaway has no real destination. Anywhere but back. Anywhere but back to the hell I left behind. So, for now, "South." It's where the road went. When I chose to let him know I was where I wanted to be, he wouldn't suspect I just wanted out. And I was right. One last solicitation leant grossly over the passenger seat as I closed the door, and then he was gone. A sigh of relief, and I hiked into the rocky, dusty desert to find my bed.
A rustle of sagebrush. The wind. And yet despite my startled attempts to make out the source of hidden noises, I feel strangely at ease, safe, tucked in this subzero bag. Not entirely at ease, certainly. Not entirely safe. But more so than I've ever been, than I've ever felt.
This is why I ran.
The sleeping bag was a random act of kindness. I found myself at the Grand Canyon National Park my third week free. A park ranger stopped me on the Bright Angel trail as I hiked down to the Colorado from the South Rim and tried to talk me out of the long hike—one, he told me, that was rarely attempted in a single day. When I refused to heed his good advice, he handed me a plastic milk gallon jug filled with water, and forbade me to continue unless I took it with.
It was indeed a long hike, and the water probably saved my life.
On my way back up, near dusk, I passed his station again, the last lone waif on the trail, dragging his blistered feet. He was actually standing outside as I approached, peering down the trail from under his trim green hat. He noted the empty jug, and invited me into the ranger's cabin to rest my unhappy heels. Once in, he sat me down at a table, offered something to eat, and began asking questions. Where was I from. Who was I with. Where was I headed. Why was I hiking alone. What happened to my ID. On and on. And I wove him a thatch-work of lies, nearly waterproof.
Finally, leaning on his elbows toward me from across the thick wooden table, he told me from under his bushy brown mustache—face straight, eyes level—that he thought I was a runaway. I looked him in the eyes with a face as straight and said, "Well anything's possible."
He admitted defeat, however, and told me that since I wouldn't talk straight with him, he couldn't really offer me some kind of help. By help I could only guess he meant help getting put back into placement. No thanks.
He let me leave, but as I reached for the front door he stopped me one last time, bade me wait a moment, and disappeared into another part of the cabin. When he returned he had this very light down sleeping bag in his hands, and briefly told me about how he had confiscated it from some men who were illegally riding an ATV in the canyon that they had packed down in pieces. They were made to choose between a several thousand dollar fine or taking the ATV apart again, packing it back out with their gear—along with this sleeping bag—a five thousand foot climb to the rim, and then receiving only a thousand dollar fine after having the ATV and their gear confiscated. They chose the latter, grueling hike though it must have been, ranger at their heels each step of the way. He handed me the bag and insisted I take it, much the same way he insisted I take the water before. And it, too, probably saved my life.
In fact, only the night before then I ended up having to sleep in a man's camper, who also tried to suck me off—For it was too cold to sleep outside. He must have been in his 60s, and looked the part of a grizzled old prospector, complete with salt and pepper beard, long hooked nose, gray furrowed cheeks, and dusty old Stetson. I made no compromise—I would have chosen homicide or hypothermia if it came to that—but eventually he offered the secondary bed anyway, grudgingly, moodily. He slept grunting and moaning in the overhead while I slept where the dining table dropped flat with the seats—eyes wide open.
Now this sort of thing hasn't been a problem since meeting that ranger. Cold and windy as it was I was warm. Dark as it seemed I lived. Though I know I dance with death, ghostly grin and pale white bones rattling a step away, it's my dance, my fate—not theirs.
In the treatment facilities and sterile wards I left behind, my fate was certain, signed and sealed by shrinks and social workers. Slowly, grimly, I would have been reduced to nothing more than a babbling misfit, ever overreacting to phantoms and fantasies.
Between the toxic levels of psychotropic medication—my thoughts muddled to a fetid mud, the complete lack of an education beyond puzzles and coloring books, the never ending belittlement that poisoned even the slightest shoots of hope, the assurance from all involved that I'd live out my days dependent on the psychiatric system—industry—one way or another, and the terrorizing staff and inpatients that permeated that system like dry rot, I could never break free, become independent, and develop into an individual.
It was a rare moment of clarity that made me realize that to live out my days this way was a fate worse than death, for it was living death—death of spirit, mind and soul. In a San Fernando Valley group home in the Los Angeles area, I was restrained one day by one of the staff during a destructive rage of mine. His name was RJ, a typical Valley boy in his early 20s. I don't remember quite what set me off, but because of the constant cloud of confusion and self doubt I suffered under, it didn't take much. I do remember smashing a closet door and putting my fist through my bedroom walls a few times—it was an actual house owned by the residential treatment facility—before he stunned me with a cuff to the head and slammed me face down on the shaggy dark brown carpet with my right arm pinned painfully behind my back. Once I was immobile he taunted me calling me a "crazy psycho", a "stupid mental patient", a "weak witted nut-case", and the like. Which of course enraged me all the more.
But it wasn't this that brought that lucid moment. I yelled at him, between curses, that he had my bad arm wrenched up behind my back and that it was hurting. Instead of loosening his grip he slowly wrenched it tighter until something audibly crunched, ripped, or both. I shrieked pain, cursing him all the more. He threatened to break it—again—laughing. It had been broken longways along the upper arm and across the ball socket a year and a half before when a car smashed into a box fort I built in an alley a few blocks from home—a brief interlude when I lived with my mother. He sneered as he said that he could just say I fell and that no-one would believe me. This was probably true.
His wife and co-worker, who had been chiming in insults as all this went on, kicked me in the face and said mockingly, "I don't know how he got that bruise. He must have been hitting himself again." And, well, yes I had been known to do that. I don't really know why.
This is when it hit me. That's when I realized that the only chance I had—if there was a chance—at a life other than exactly this, over and over again for the rest of my days, was to face my worst fear and escape this detrimental "treatment"—To strike out on my own.
The only chance I had then was this, these long stretches of highway crisscrossed throughout the States, nights sprawled out on dirt or nestled in snowbanks, soup kitchens shelter missions and motel vouchers, the surreal uncertainty of each new lift to anywhere.
My soul wells up to think on it. For now I've survived, like the last lone survivor of a shipwreck or plane crash. Still, I know it's far from over. This is dangerous, precarious living.
So here I am. Smack in the middle of the nowhere, waiting for sleep, waiting for dawn, waiting for my clear night sign that everything will be alright somehow—a shooting star. If I gaze on the depths long enough, I'll see one. I know they're just rocks falling from space or skimmed off the upper airs. But I feel a hand in it, an assurance.
My thoughts drift as I fall asleep. Sometimes I see something move in the shadows, and I start. Then I realize it was only a moment of dream, not yet wholly asleep, phantoms lurking amid my soul. Almost always I feel a presence outside my field of vision as I phase into dream. Even now as I come back to my thoughts I feel it near. Is it just me?
I'll survive for now. Just survive. A worthy goal until I know more about life, about who I might be, what I might be capable of accomplishing. Tomorrow when the sun glides to view I'll lift my head to see where I've ended up, pack my meager belongings, and hike back to the road. That's one thing I've learned about myself since running away. I have an uncanny sense of direction.
Maybe I'll make my way down to I-10 and head east. Oklahoma. Tulsa. A pretty how town where anyone lives. My mother's father lives there with his second wife in a drafty old two story house, nearly as worn as the ground it creaks against. I met him once 6 or so years ago, a rugged old war veteran, bald as a white-washed cannon ball—as my mom would say—full of stories and strong opinion, rasped out like a strong grip—beak stern, eyes strident. He might have some ideas for me, advice. He's one rigid old codger from what I remember. But maybe he'd be willing to take me on, help me figure out how to get my messed up existence in order.
God knows that, as much as these endless strips of asphalt comfort and assure me that I have in fact escaped the sulfurous pits of hell, I don't want to live this way forever. There must be a way to improve upon my condition. There must be a way forward, despite my lack of education, despite the pain and trauma I carry within, despite everything I'll have to overcome or learn to live with—
Ah. There it is. A long thin stroke of light against the canvass of night, already fading.
It shouldn't always be this way.
7:29 PM
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