Part two – Hanging Tree

This post will not make a lot of sense without the context provided at Resistance. Regarding the appearance of blind stupidity in this post, the Resistance post provides at least a few mitigating factors.

Children do not think in complex terms. They typically operate by trial and error and find a path of least resistance. From an emotional standpoint, children will guard themselves, sometimes in complex ways. You can call it instinct or hardwired knowledge or whatever you wish, but however you look at it, basic rules do apply.
Rule number one is, Violence Begets Violence.
Violence also encourages adaptation. By the age of six, I had already begun to develop a relatively sophisticated game plan to deal with the old man. Gauging the threat level was next to impossible; he was unpredictable and prone to explosive violence, where his temperament was concerned, there were only two settings, “Friendly” and “Angel of Death.”

At that time, vigilance was my only defense. In the coming years, a gradual evolution towards the use of subterfuge began to show promise, but at some point, the level of violence reached critical mass and my brothers and I turned on each other. It became a ruthless cycle of attack and retaliation. The old man beat us unmercifully. My brothers and I carried on his good works by beating the hell out of each other, and the old man beat us for fighting each other. By the age of nine, communication between my brothers and me consisted primarily of intimidation, insult and physical attack.

Vigilance and subterfuge were primarily threat management strategies. By the time I started experimenting with the hangman’s noose at the age of eight, it was not enough to affect a specific outcome where the beatings were concerned. I needed to find a way to stabilize the emotional damage. I found myself repeating, over and over, day after day, “I am amazingly well adjusted,” and “Other people have it a lot worse than I do.” Of those two statements, only one was actually true. I knew about poverty. I had heard of entire populations decimated by disease, war, and starvation. I became obsessed with the plight of the dead and the dying, and I maintained a constant state of mortification at my own sniveling weakness in the face of adversity. It might not have been the best strategy, but the conditions under which I lived were effectively trivialized nonetheless.

The idea of hanging myself in trees seems a little odd even to me, but I now view it as a primitive attempt to shore up and rebuild a shattered ego. If I could not stand up for myself against the old man, I could at least prove my worthiness through acts of what I considered at the time to be bravery. I was a kid, what else was I going to do? The adrenaline and self-satisfaction provided by hanging episodes faded quickly and it did actually hurt quite a bit so I moved on. Enter the obstacle course. I chipped a bone in my ankle while traversing a pile of sawed-off telephone poles and then broke my nose while dodging in and out of sawhorses and construction supplies. There followed a rapid sequence of burns, bruises, scratches, out-of-control fires, a near drowning and a particularly nasty fall that pitted one of my testicles against a very solid wood plank. My left testicle came out on the short end of that stick; the other lived to fight another day. While the list of injuries was well within normal parameters for a growing boy, manifestations of a life-long obsession with risk were becoming evident. I was also getting much better at pulling off successful (injury free) adventures.

Soon there would be the cactus incident, head first into a giant prickly pear and then a spear fight with big brother that ended with brother attempting to pull a large piece of wood out of my leg. The spear tip, buried deep at a steep angle of penetration, would not budge. Racing against the clock since the old man would be home from work soon, big brother retrieved a pair of wire pliers. The pliers worked like a charm but the wound festered for weeks before finally shedding the last splinters. A short time later, a similar wound in big brother’s hand became so infected, the rotten smell almost undid his efforts to hide his crime from the father unit. Blood poisoning be damned, it was retribution from the old man that had us running scared.

By the age of ten, things were heating up a bit. There were horseback ejections, hog mishaps, rooster gaffs, cuts, a punctured ear drum, gunpowder flash burns, stings and bites to name a few. I’m pretty sure if an animal has the capacity to bite, I have been bitten by it. It all started with dogs, cats, turtles and ducks and then moved on to squirrels, goats, horses, lizards, geese, a monkey, spiders, a possum, little brother, countless species of non-poisonous snakes and a milk cow. Who in the hell gets bitten by a goddamn milk cow? Me, the human chew toy, that’s who. It just goes on and on. I fell out the passenger door of a truck in a high-speed turn, rolled down hills in oil drums and found increasingly more creative ways to remove the skin from my elbows, knees, and hands. I assisted big brother in capturing wasp nests in mayonnaise jars. Wasps never attacked big brother, only me, and I had perpetually sprained ankles from sprinting across dried mud beds pockmarked with deep horse and cow tracks. I never made it all the way across without turning one or both ankles but I just kept trying, year after year. While all of this was going on, the old man had his way and never missed an opportunity to break his sons in the same manner that he broke his horses.

By the time of the amputations, I was exhausted from over ten long years of miserable family strife. The beatings had become more numerous and significantly more violent over time. The psychological stress of living with a ticking time bomb resulted in an aborted attempt to leave home at the age of fifteen and a successful exodus at sixteen. I landed a full-time job and promptly started a war with the local police department. Who could have seen that coming? Now fully endowed with an overblown sensitivity to injustice, I began showing my middle finger to any uniformed authority figure I deemed crooked or otherwise unworthy to wear a badge, as if that were my job. Consequently, I was manhandled, cursed, threatened, and/or arrested by a succession of police officers, one of whom had become so desperately bored with my antics that he finally just rolled his eyes, shook his head and drove away as I publicly questioned the legitimacy of his birth. Approaching a pinnacle of self-delusion, I proclaimed my anti-authoritarian behavior to be a service to the community. Apparently, society owed me something for keeping the system honest and I continued to marvel at how “amazingly well adjusted” I was. I won a few battles with the constables but ultimately lost the war after months of confrontation, two raids and the tiring effects of hypervigilance slowed me down long enough to graduate from high school.

--------------Me in the later years - Vancouver WA --------------

It was during this period, directly after high school, that something wonderful happened. I know what you’re thinking, but it had nothing to do with “Gawd having mercy on my wretched soul.” I went to work full time on an ironworking crew. On the first day of the job, I found myself creeping along on an I-beam high above the ground. By the end of the first week, I was walking narrow lengths of structural iron and scaring myself half to death. By month two, a circus trapeze could not have done a better job of satisfying my addiction to adrenaline. We were based in non-union territory, which meant freedom from the constraints of safety gear, i.e., no lanyards, nets, or harnesses. OSHA had no significant presence there so I rode the crane ball at every opportunity. The things I craved most, danger and adversity, had materialized in the form of gainful employment. The pay package was less than generous, minimum wage, no insurance, and no benefits. Even so, I considered it my own little slice of paradise.

I loved my job. Practically to the man, my workmates were psychotic reprobates dedicated to a life of beer, weed, fucking, and ironworking, not necessarily in that order. Hands blistered through leather gloves in the 100 plus degree summers and clothes froze to the iron during the winter months. Frayed blue jeans caught fire and lightening storms were of particular interest while clinging to what amounted to giant lightening rods. There followed a long procession of roach infested hotels, seedy bars with sticky dance floors, and paychecks that never materialized. Our jobsites, strung out from the Mexican border to Oklahoma and from the god-forsaken wastelands of West Texas to Louisiana, ranged from glorious to otherwise. Every jobsite had its peculiarities, one in particular sat adjacent to a huge fish mill located next to a shipping lane on the Gulf Coast. These mills turned unbelievably large piles of stinky fish into mountains of fish dust for use in cat food, fish sticks, and other tasty treats. The fish dust blew in the wind and coated everything, buildings, tools, equipment, and us. Rainy days came often. Rain transforms fish dust into fish goo and everybody knows that flies love fish goo. In no time, thousands of pounds of squirming maggots would appear, piling up like snowdrifts in nooks and crannies and generally getting into everything. On the first day of the job, one of our crew, a good friend of mine, pointed towards a dark protoplasmic blob on the concrete foundation. He mentioned that the gunk appeared to be boiling and asked me what it was. I told him it was maggots and he vomited where he stood. We were not wealthy people; food was a valuable commodity. He wasted a lot of food on that jobsite. Even years later, I could provoke a dry heave just by mentioning the phrase “live rice” to him at dinnertime.

I was mostly happy with my job and the rate of injury slowed a bit. However, even under those circumstances, I chaffed under the yoke of oppression. After about a year, I submitted an application for an Employer Identification Number, hired a crew, and started a steel erection business. Steel erection is the same as ironworking; it was just so much more fun saying the word “erection” every time I answered the phone.

I had found an outlet for a lifetime of frustration and I couldn’t have been happier. Unfortunately, acquiring a focal point for self-destructive behavior turned out to be a little counter-productive. In the next few years, there was a split kneecap, multiple car crashes, a broken collar bone, two concussions, one subdural hematoma, broken neck bone (not serious), bruised organs and internal bleeding, both arms broken simultaneously, rib fractures twice, multiple eye injuries including slag burns and metal debris removal as well as an unending list of punctures, cuts and nasty burns. I had no money or insurance so I stockpiled surgical tape, super glue, gauze, steri-strips, alcohol, and painkillers for emergency purposes. While I could handle most injuries on my own, for bone breaks, deep cuts and head injuries, I grudgingly sought emergency room services from the only game in town, a place known locally as the slaughterhouse. It took years to pay off my debts to that disappointing excuse for a hospital, which only heightened my hatred of the system.

At the time, even as I was getting comfortable with the idea that I simply could not be killed, I was pretty sure the odds were shifting in favor of a significantly shortened life span. I was sure I could beat the odds, but it was still inconceivable to me that I would live past the age of 35 or 40. Mutually exclusive concepts do make strange bedfellows. I did not intend to change my lifestyle so I guess it is obvious which side won the coin toss.

Then, I became a dad. If you are so inclined, click here for some of the details surrounding that momentous affair. My transition to fatherhood was a painful ordeal. It came as no surprise to some that I hated children. I hated the way they looked, sounded, and smelled. They were so needy and illogical. Most of all, I despised the misery they represented. From that perspective, it was beyond my capacity to understand why the human race had not gone extinct eons ago. Where my little girl was concerned, I had been impersonating a dad for a while. On this particular day, she was giving me that slobbery baby grin that I had seen a few times before. Instead of contemplating the contents of her stomach, and how I might dodge those contents should they spew forth, I had an epiphany. Simply put, it occurred to me that my history was not necessarily her destiny. This of course should have been self-evident but it was not. News flash! It turns out I was not so “amazingly well adjusted” after all. I was an emotional cripple in crisis mode, clumsily grasping at the simplest of concepts. Prior to that moment, I had wondered at what age my little girl would start hanging herself in trees. I never doubted that I would break the chain of violence; I would never put a child through the misery that I had known. Even so, it never crossed my mind until then that I might raise a child who didn’t want to kill me.

It may sound trite, but there is no other way to say it, with that one brilliant flash of insight, happiness and contentment settled into my life like a West Texas winter, that is, without warning and catching me completely unprepared. I had a lot of studying to do. Among other assignments, I had to figure out how to use the phrase “I love” in sentences having nothing to do with my feelings towards chicken-fried-steak and gravy.

Misery is an easy choice; the proof is all around. When offered an alterative to hate, people often can’t bear the thought of letting go of that old familiarity. It defines who they are and provides rationalization for a wasted life. I think understanding the self-destructive nature of hate doesn’t make it any easier to overcome it. But then I’m not qualified to make that judgment. I might never have broken free if not for my little girl. I’m certain she is largely responsible for my return to humanity. Don’t get me wrong, this was not a Hollywood ending. It took years of hard work with sporadic episodes of lunacy but I got the job done just in time to for Jilly to come into my life. Hooray! It doesn’t suck to be me.

Oh yeah, so much for my new year’s resolution to stop posting encyclopedic tomes. If you actually read this far into my post, I guess it sucks to be you. ;-)