Years and events are arranged on a gameboard with little colored squares, each one representing something of significance. My squares aren't formed into a nice rectangle so that you have perfect symmetry and can loop around the board and maybe hit something you missed the first time around. No, it's all stretched out in a long line with a distinct beginning but no tangible end.
While the squares are all connected, they aren't necessarily consecutive. In other words, you don't have to do my imaginary life board in a logical order. That's just the way it's laid out, like perfect pieces of a puzzle that form a sort of dysfunctional road. Each box is a perfect square, and they're like Monopoly spaces with colors at the top and descriptive words. And just like that game there are good squares and bad ones - Park Avenues and jails.
My board has specific incidents on it, not big huge general time chunks like infancy and adolescence. It has moments, things that have happened that influenced or moved me or brought me to my knees. There's a box for an afternoon at a candy store in the Bronx in the mid-1960s when my parents took my brother and sister and I in and said we could "get something." My brother and I picked out comic books - he a Superman, me an Archie and friends. My sister spotted a dusty plastic bag above the counter, hanging with other toys. It was a package with a little cylindrical pump and a handful of balloons. She insisted she had to have it despite my quiet protestations of embarrassment. She got it and blew balloons up in the car on the way home, then never looked at it again, as i suspected she wouldn't. The whole scene pained me, though I'm still not sure why. Maybe it was the sheer impermanence, the little fit she had, my parent's willingness to make her happy at any cost.
There's a box for my first real drunk in a cow field beside the high school football stadium in Centerville, Ohio in 1973. I was with a guy named Mike Adams, a good-looking but painfully cocky freshman I couldn't stand, but hung out with because there was no one else. There was a football game going on, I can still see the rows of bright lights pointing down at the nearby football stadium and can hear the occasional single raw-throated voice of a Friday night crowd in Ohio. I was supposed to be there in the stands caring if Centerville High School won. I wasn't. I didn't. I threw-up.
There are boxes for my wedding and babies being born and for college graduations and rehabs. It's all there, step by step, inch by inch, a jumble of a road that in some ways I created and in others I did not. I only had to walk it.
I know this is a little ideal, this whole road thing, but it's what I see when I close my eyes and try to think back and remember where the hell I've been and try to reconstruct what happened back there that may have triggered behaviors and events later. There's much I've forgotten, and much I've had to re-create through research and phone calls and cigarettes at night on the back porch searching the stars. The questions have been the same for years: How? By what route? Why for Godsakes? Why? I've traced and re-traced my line a hundred times, stopping at various moments to examine them. I'm in bed once, just a kid, and I have the measles. I'm sick as hell and running a high fever. That particular day my aunt, my mother's twin, has promised to take me to the circus - the Ringling Brother Barnum and Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden. The Greatest Show on Earth. But I am sick and laying on the bed hot and aching, and my brother has gone in my place. That day I think I hallucinated. I recall seeing and "feeling" images around and on me. The images were animals, circus animals. They were drawn with simple white lines like stick-figure cartoons. One of them was an elephant. He sat on my chest and head, and his weight was light, but real. Years later in my journey I went to an acupuncturist who would push needles into particular points in my body that he said were connected to specific areas and fields of energy. He hit the elephant like a dentist accidentally tapping a root when he's drilling. I felt him again, his thin translucent heaviness pressing down on me. There was something there, some box, some step I had failed to see. I added it to my life line.
After so many years of holding these moments in my hands and sorting through them, I think I've discovered a flaw. I think it is this: my visual has a definitive beginning, and it begins with me, a nine-pound little fat kid born in a hospital in the northeast Bronx, NY. But in actuality, the line started well before that. There are boxes I never saw, though now I know I've felt their influence. Boxes that started with my parents, who were walking their own paths and happened to stumble on me like a baby left in a basket on a marble stoop. Isn't he cute?
It's like the singer/songwriter Elvis Costello wrote in Accidents will Happen, "it's the damage that we do and never know/ it's the words that we don't say that scare me so."
It's actually the little brightly-colored life boxes that I never saw that scare the hell out of me. What do you suppose I missed?
A lot. I know I missed my mother's parents, an angry mom of her own who ruled with the iron fist of an old queen. I missed my father's own parents, his dad a handsome but sad Irishman with a head of thick hair that turned grey early. He drank and drank and drank. He did not give my father anything - no decent home, no decent clothes or education, no real guidance. He brought all that into his own fatherhood.
I missed my parents, still with bad complexions, at the tender ages of 16 and 17, having sex one afternoon on the floor while my mother was babysitting. They conceived my brother right then and there, and several months later they were married because you had to be married. It was 1957. My parents were children. About a year later, I came along, chubby and cute with a mouth to feed and shitty diapers to change and they took me home because they had to.
I missed all those boxes, but I know they led to mine. That's the start, really, a couple of children in a hospital in the Bronx in the late 1950s with a one-year baby and a new one now in their arms and on their hands.
So that's how it started.
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