It’s like this.
I knew there were some issues with my house.
So I went to see Al Germani, my therapist at the time — everafter to be kindly revered as Infallible Al, Homunculus of Hillcrest — to help me find out what those issues might be & what I could do about them. I figured maybe there was a leak in the roof or a couple of pipes that needed attention up there.
It wasn’t long before we were in the basement.
“Cool, look at the wreck room dad built us!” I punned. I’d been there my entire life & had never known it was there. But now, returning somehow, I noticed those linoleum squares.
“Do you notice how they’re a little off-kilter from the others?”
“Well, no, but yes,” I answered, returning from the garage with my broad-blade putty knife.
It wasn’t long before the basement floor was exposed from wall to wall of the foundation. I discovered a subfloor, decomposed, of a variety of materials & textures, not uncommon for the way dad “did” construction, concrete, brick, some tile, dirt; in one corner, where the washer had been, there was exposed dirt. I started digging there.
Already, I’ve digested several layers, but I see there’s more to exhume; ah, “I’m stuffed,” I quipped. The next visit was the day I found the bones. Now the deeper I go, the more bones I find. I’m not fond of them, though I know I’m my own mummy.
Only now do see that I never had a childhood. Do I understand that? Perhaps not really. Not yet anyway. Although I do recall the taste of dirt, a universal bleagh, I was never a dirt-eater. I guess everything is subject to change; revison, even.
Starting yesterday I think I’m having visions, wobbly memories, remembering non-specific beatings that I hadn’t experienced until just now? Did that really happen? But I was so little…
Like the time I told the music teacher, Mrs. Short, “Mrs Short, you’re a shit.” Oh I just could not stand it, being scolded for singing the high counter-melody to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” — when the entire chorus was diggin’ it & beginning to improvise with me.
Scary & hard & painful & confusing. The worst of it erupted after lunch last week. But I made it through that night & the next day. And the next day & the next.
I think I’ve been through worse. Then I disagree. I think if I got through ’89, I can & will get through this. I’m strong & I’ve always been determined & I’ve succeeded. That’s realistic. There is hope. Although there is a Guy I know who’s gone into repetition, “Hope is a four letter word”. I can’t disagree with that.
I’d researched PTSD on the web; my findings were troublesome, so I asked my next therapist about suicide. Like, “Am I at risk?” “NO,” she therapeuted, “Typically, the ones who go through this & lose their ability to dissociate, that happens at about 9-14, they’re the ones who kill themselves. Maybe your brother tried to do that when he ran out in front of that car when you were 9. Who knows. You survived”.
“The ceremony of innocence is drowned”. ~Yeats
The clinical name for what I’m up against, the mess that’s been left for me to live up through, is PTSD. But nothing simple for me. I’ve PTSD with a couple of other clinical handles. Like the day my son was jetting blood from his neck &, as I saw the blood drain from his head, I heard my inner lifeguard saying, “Jon, you’ve got maybe 10 seconds to save his life”. Or dad’s stories about that dawn at Pearl Harbor.
I kept going online to see if there was anything to learn about how to “cope” with this process of recovery. Like, “Is there a process of recovery? Will I ever get to a place in my life when I am not, in the midst of an unrelated upset, vulnerable to this body-wide internal quivering?” I got the antidepressants today.
Another thing they say is that now is the time for me to be with family, to talk & let them know what I’m up against. But not my family. I abdicated years ago. And girlfriends? Well, let’s just say girlfriends aren’t much in the way of family when it comes to stuff like this & that.
Then, when Wednesday happened, I was like a man with all of my skin rubbed off. In Ovid’s story of Marsayas there’s that poignant moment, as Orpheus begins to skin him alive, & Marsayas moans, “Why are you tearing myself from me?” It always reminds me of my first divorce. Marsayas was the last of a series of threshold monumental sculptures; I completed it the day before my arm was severed & then, just a few days later, the Loma Prieta Earthquake was epicentered at my home & studio. Although I’d already lost everything, twice, that summer, in just a few seconds the earth shifted beneath me & I lost everything else all over again.
I grew a blank twin to survive. Ward was his name. “What? PTSD? Not me. That was my twin brother, Jon. But he died back in ’89”.
~jwl
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2004-10/24, 2009-04/10 & 2019-02/23