- Feb 3, 2024
- LitBits
- 0
New blog post by Jason L. – discussions in this thread, please
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This is a story of grace, not of sadness.
I’m saying that because it won’t feel like that. Not initially. I’m just going to take you on a journey with me, but only if you’re ready. We’re going to the fall of 1993. Take my hand. Watch your step. We’re going back to my high school. It’s a squat building with narrow windows peering suspiciously out at the surrounding territory like arrow-slits. If you looked at it and thought, how prison-like, then yes, I think it was intentional. The ecosystem that exists within is eternal and unchanging.
I know that, in the movies, when they do these jaunts to the past, they always use period music to the past. I can tell you that Nirvana is still on the radio and Red Hot Chili Peppers are still under the bridge. Sorry. Nineties joke. What I want to say that this is peak grunge time. I normally set the stage like that, but this time, I want you to be hearing things around you when we push in the doors and walk through.
They can’t see us. Of course they can’t. It’s class change time. And, wait for it…here I am. I am sixteen, before you make a comment. And yes, I am wearing a Duck Head sweatshirt. They were popular then. We’re not judging our pas style choices. We’re here to look at something else.
“Hey, faggot.”
Oh. There it is. I knew it was coming, I just didn’t expect it would be quite so soon. I want you to notice how routine it is, how casual. As if it’s my name. I don’t react. There’s no need to, because whoever said it—it’s a boy of some stripe, I’m fairly certain, has already moved on. I don’t look up at the teacher standing in the hallways to monitor us. They are there to rein in fistfights. That’s it. The one time I asked, Why are you letting them call me bad names? I got “What did you expect? Picture where you’re going to be and picture where that guy’s going to be.” I didn’t ask again. In October of this school year, I did a tally of the number of times I heard these slurs—queer, faggot, fag—in one day, times it by the 180 days of the school year, and then did it again by the number of school years left before graduation. When I got to over six figures, I went home and took the remainder of my mother’s Xanax. I woke up, deeply hung over, over a day later, with my mother irate and convinced I had a drug problem.
He’s going into English class. Third period, Mrs. Williams. We’ll follow in about a minute, but first I want to take you back in time to about fifteen months ago. Christmas break of 1992. Yes, yes, it’ll be worth it. I promise.
That’s my mother, lying on the living room floor between the couch and coffee table. In fact, she’s passed out so hard she thwacked her head on the coffee table. There are pills spread on the carpet around her. My younger brother, who is four right now, is watching Bambi. Again. He turns to look at her and is, briefly, upset. I take him and tell him that Mommy is just sleeping. She had a bad night. And then I make him a hot dog.
I do not love my brother. I am sorry, but I don’t have it to give. My mother’s marriage to his father is on its last legs. In a few weeks, he will walk out and file for divorce. Despite his assurances that he will take us with him, he does not. Mom, who never met a pill she didn’t like, oscillates between Xanax, which she eats like candy, and when they are gone, the corticosteroids in her system will give her animal strength. She has dislocated my shoulder and broken ribs in those modes. A few days before Christmas, she will lay into me, slapping me left and right while telling me I am disrespectful, and how she dreads it when I come home.
There’s noplace else to go, though. When I am not at school, I am forgotten. I have no friend group to call my own. There was an abortive friendship with a girl—the daughter of one of my mother’s pill friends, but that hasn’t taken off yet.
Yes, let’s fast-forward. The rest of these few days are tedious. I want to go to right after Christmas. Mitch is home. From this perspective, I pity him enormously. He is locked in a marriage with a nightmare, and I am not an easy stepson. We won’t talk about the time he handed me the phone and told me to call Social Services and see how many people wanted a queer son in their house. It’s the early 90s. You have to make allowances. Mitch is in the category of people who spends compulsively on gadgets. Computers, stereos, TVs, he cannot get enough, and when he decides to leave in a few weeks, he will go into my bedroom and take my computer and TV. But for right now, I am in my bedroom listening to music when I hear screaming from the next room. I go out and see Mitch battering my younger brother, his open palms slapping down rhythmically on the screaming child. My mother and I pull him of and I take my brother, who curls into my arms and sobs. This is the closest I will ever feel to loving him, I think.
But we’re back to 1994. In the interim, Mitch is gone, and we have moved into my grandparent’s house. My mother’s addiction has escalated, and, while I have not been asked to do more childcare, even I can see how badly my grandparents are messing this up. My mother is utterly uninterested in child-raising, and my grandparents are more programmed to spoil him than to guide him toward responsible behavior. The few times I have tried to intervene, I have been thoroughly chewed out. I am, after all, not the parent. I retreat into my head.
---
Get the discussion going – post your thoughts & comments in the thread below…
For more posts by Jason L. click here Grace Notes, Part 1 – Litopia
---
This is a story of grace, not of sadness.
I’m saying that because it won’t feel like that. Not initially. I’m just going to take you on a journey with me, but only if you’re ready. We’re going to the fall of 1993. Take my hand. Watch your step. We’re going back to my high school. It’s a squat building with narrow windows peering suspiciously out at the surrounding territory like arrow-slits. If you looked at it and thought, how prison-like, then yes, I think it was intentional. The ecosystem that exists within is eternal and unchanging.
I know that, in the movies, when they do these jaunts to the past, they always use period music to the past. I can tell you that Nirvana is still on the radio and Red Hot Chili Peppers are still under the bridge. Sorry. Nineties joke. What I want to say that this is peak grunge time. I normally set the stage like that, but this time, I want you to be hearing things around you when we push in the doors and walk through.
They can’t see us. Of course they can’t. It’s class change time. And, wait for it…here I am. I am sixteen, before you make a comment. And yes, I am wearing a Duck Head sweatshirt. They were popular then. We’re not judging our pas style choices. We’re here to look at something else.
“Hey, faggot.”
Oh. There it is. I knew it was coming, I just didn’t expect it would be quite so soon. I want you to notice how routine it is, how casual. As if it’s my name. I don’t react. There’s no need to, because whoever said it—it’s a boy of some stripe, I’m fairly certain, has already moved on. I don’t look up at the teacher standing in the hallways to monitor us. They are there to rein in fistfights. That’s it. The one time I asked, Why are you letting them call me bad names? I got “What did you expect? Picture where you’re going to be and picture where that guy’s going to be.” I didn’t ask again. In October of this school year, I did a tally of the number of times I heard these slurs—queer, faggot, fag—in one day, times it by the 180 days of the school year, and then did it again by the number of school years left before graduation. When I got to over six figures, I went home and took the remainder of my mother’s Xanax. I woke up, deeply hung over, over a day later, with my mother irate and convinced I had a drug problem.
He’s going into English class. Third period, Mrs. Williams. We’ll follow in about a minute, but first I want to take you back in time to about fifteen months ago. Christmas break of 1992. Yes, yes, it’ll be worth it. I promise.
That’s my mother, lying on the living room floor between the couch and coffee table. In fact, she’s passed out so hard she thwacked her head on the coffee table. There are pills spread on the carpet around her. My younger brother, who is four right now, is watching Bambi. Again. He turns to look at her and is, briefly, upset. I take him and tell him that Mommy is just sleeping. She had a bad night. And then I make him a hot dog.
I do not love my brother. I am sorry, but I don’t have it to give. My mother’s marriage to his father is on its last legs. In a few weeks, he will walk out and file for divorce. Despite his assurances that he will take us with him, he does not. Mom, who never met a pill she didn’t like, oscillates between Xanax, which she eats like candy, and when they are gone, the corticosteroids in her system will give her animal strength. She has dislocated my shoulder and broken ribs in those modes. A few days before Christmas, she will lay into me, slapping me left and right while telling me I am disrespectful, and how she dreads it when I come home.
There’s noplace else to go, though. When I am not at school, I am forgotten. I have no friend group to call my own. There was an abortive friendship with a girl—the daughter of one of my mother’s pill friends, but that hasn’t taken off yet.
Yes, let’s fast-forward. The rest of these few days are tedious. I want to go to right after Christmas. Mitch is home. From this perspective, I pity him enormously. He is locked in a marriage with a nightmare, and I am not an easy stepson. We won’t talk about the time he handed me the phone and told me to call Social Services and see how many people wanted a queer son in their house. It’s the early 90s. You have to make allowances. Mitch is in the category of people who spends compulsively on gadgets. Computers, stereos, TVs, he cannot get enough, and when he decides to leave in a few weeks, he will go into my bedroom and take my computer and TV. But for right now, I am in my bedroom listening to music when I hear screaming from the next room. I go out and see Mitch battering my younger brother, his open palms slapping down rhythmically on the screaming child. My mother and I pull him of and I take my brother, who curls into my arms and sobs. This is the closest I will ever feel to loving him, I think.
But we’re back to 1994. In the interim, Mitch is gone, and we have moved into my grandparent’s house. My mother’s addiction has escalated, and, while I have not been asked to do more childcare, even I can see how badly my grandparents are messing this up. My mother is utterly uninterested in child-raising, and my grandparents are more programmed to spoil him than to guide him toward responsible behavior. The few times I have tried to intervene, I have been thoroughly chewed out. I am, after all, not the parent. I retreat into my head.
---
Get the discussion going – post your thoughts & comments in the thread below…
For more posts by Jason L. click here Grace Notes, Part 1 – Litopia
