One night, when she was a small girl, her parents stumbled in drunk and fighting. She crept to their bedroom door and saw her dad pass out on the bed as her mother still screaming opened the nightstand drawer, pulled out a pistol and began rooting around for the bullets. She bolted into the room, pushed her mother aside, quickly gathered the bullets and ran outside into the cold midnight air. Her mother yelped and staggered out after her. She tossed the bullets into a bush and clenched her hands white tight as if she still held them.
"Please give them to me, Sweetie, give them to Mommy." A gentle slurred voice. "Please Sweetie." She held her ground, silent. Soon her mother went in and passed out beside her father.
Those grandparents I never knew owned and ran one bar, then another bar and restaurant in north eastern Nebraska. They ran an illegal casino out of the basement on weekends. My mom seemed fairly straight laced to me but she could cuss pretty good and we played quite a bit of poker in our house and she’d place bets for us when we went to the race track and give us a hit off her bourbon and coke if we asked.
She could nail me with guilt as I’ve said before but she was a single working woman trying to steer the three sons of an absent, angry man safely through adolescence and that must have been hairy. All three of us did drugs, we all sold drugs occasionally, we drank too much quite often, passed out in odd places, drove her car drunk. I once drove seven or so miles home so drunk that I passed out several times along the way only to awake each time I bounced off the curb like a pinball boom off the right curb wake up pass out boom off the left curb wake up pass out back and forth all the way home. She once found me in my bed my face welded to my pillow with dried blood. It was years before I could remember what had happened the night before. And I was the easiest, the best behaved of the three.
She fell sick in California the summer after I finished seventh grade. She had traveled with my brothers and me by train from Lincoln to Las Vegas to spend time with my recently resurfaced father. Grandma gave us five dollars to eat lunch one afternoon in the dinning car, we had the largest most splendid hamburgers I’ve ever eaten. We spent a grave week in Vegas then Dad borrowed a large white pickup truck from a friend and threw a mattress in the bed. Mom rode up front with Dad. Scott, Jon and I bounced around in back. We drove out of Vegas across the desert and mountains to San Diego and Tijuana then started north along the coast highway. This was the first time my brothers and I had seen an ocean. Scott and I were cautious of the ten foot breakers we faced on that first beach but Jon threw himself in, was tossed and smashed onto the sand, got up and raced right back out, time after time. I’d never known he had that in him. Mom got real sick around San Luis Obispo and went into the hospital, then was flown back to Lincoln. I don’t recall how my brothers and I got home. I suppose Dad drove us.
She was real sick at first. The doctor’s in Lincoln didn’t know what to do with her, but one of them, the father of one of my classmates, got her into the cancer research center in Bethesda, Maryland where they gave her chemotherapy, an experimental procedure at the time. She got better.
Two years later they saw a spot on her lung and sent her east again. We were house sitting that summer, moving from house to house all summer as we waited for our new townhouse to be completed. Thanks to the Federal 235 program we were able to buy a small row house on the south side of town, we got to choose the colors and everything but it wasn’t finished yet and either to save money or because the lease had run out on our rental we were house hopping. Mom called the three of us into the study of the huge house we were sitting. Her sister Mary Ann sat out in the kitchen and Mom closed the door and lay down on the fold out bed. We sat around her on that bed. I knew what was coming and I figure Scott did too but when she told us she may not come back Jon collapsed. I’d never seen grief and fear like that, never heard begging like that. He’d had no idea until then that this sickness could mean death. I guess he must have been ten years old.
I was in two plays that summer. A children’s musical that performed at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo and Showboat which performed at Pinewood Bowl, the big time in Lincoln Nebraska. Both were directed by the same man. I was the youngest cast member in Showboat by about four years but the director gave me a speaking role. I played the slick talking, tough but soft hearted nightclub owner who gave one of the leads her big break. I couldn’t really act the part so I smoked a cigar and talked hard. My biggest fear when Mom got on that plane with Mary Ann to fly east was that I’d be informed of her death just before I went on for one show or the other.
Dad was there my first day of high school. I remember because I had a thin, wispy beard you had to get pretty close to even see. I thought it was cool to be sporting some facial hair but he told me to shave it. "But I like it" I said and he said "That’s not really a beard, you can grow a beard later if you want to but if you shave that peach fuzz now you’ll always remember that the first day you shaved was the first day of high school." He was right.
Scott, Jon and I were all pretty spooked about the eventualities if she should die. Would we be separated? Who would we go with? Mom didn’t want us going with Dad. I have no idea what he was thinking. When she got back east they couldn’t even find the spot so we all dodged that bullet, but cancer is a gun with many bullets and eventually she was hit again.
Fifteen years later, I’d just finished graduate school and I’m home for the summer before heading off to New York City. I had many dreams of that place before I moved there. Visions of brightly lit skyscrapers across a great river and an intense longing to be there and I would fly or swim to that fairy tale land of energy and hope and ambition. Before returning to Lincoln after graduate school I felt an urge to spend time with my father. I imagined some sort of communion with him. The final play I did in graduate school was obliquely about father/son love and maybe it set a yearning in me. It seemed important to me that we meet in the wilderness halfway between Lincoln and Las Vegas. I wanted to meet him halfway and camp. I found a spot on the map, somewhere in Montana I think it was and he agreed. Then Mom got sick and though she didn’t ask me to stay she did cry and thank me when I told her I was staying with her and Dad came to Lincoln but it wasn’t at all what I was looking for with him. It was all about Mom of course. I believe now that it was a mistake not to meet him in the wilderness.
I don’t know what it would have like alone with him, difficult and painful probably. But at least it was an impulse toward the masculine, I was setting off into the world and needed that energy and though my father was an odd place to look for that connection he was willing to show up and there wasn’t anyone else I could turn to. But the main reason I now believe it was a mistake not to meet him halfway was that by staying in Lincoln I now see I was yielding to the force of the dark mother. I don’t recall any suggestion that Mom was near death at that point, in fact she lived for nearly another year. She was very sick and she was hospitalized but both my brothers lived there in Lincoln and I was planning on returning after my week or ten days with Dad anyway. But I felt I should stay with her and that should is my pathology pure and simple. I think too I was somewhat afraid of spending time alone with Dad and that now tells me it was probably something I should have done. As it was he came to Lincoln and we had one focused stretch together, late at night. I bought a six pack and some chips and around midnight we sat at a dark picnic table in a city park and drank beer and munched and talked some. I wanted to know his side of the story about his sleeping around during their marriage. He said there was only one other woman he went with which may or may not have been true and he said he only did so two or three years after Mom stopped sleeping with him and that bit had the startling ring of truth to me. I can see my pathology in the pale mirror of that distant conversation. The urge to connect with him was genuine and it’s true that by asking him questions and listening I felt closer to him but I don’t recall sharing anything of my pain and disappointment with him. I was prying into him but I don’t recall revealing myself. So my crafty chocolate rabbit allowed me a brief middle of the night partial and false intimacy with my father, the man I’d long rejected.
I had a girlfriend at the time, a woman I treated worse than any other in my life. Pathology begets pathology and if I was a slave at the time to the dark mother I was balancing that submission by being a real jerk with that nice girl. This balancing act is typical of the pathology. It’s like the abusive husband who weeps and apologizes and showers his wife with presents after beating the shit out of her. Those gestures of reconciliation are no less pathological than the violence but they do seem to balance things so the situation can go on and on. God on the other hand doesn’t seek to balance the fruits of my pathology with goodness, he seeks to destroy them.
But I was still caught in the balancing act that spring and not thinking about God. I thinking about New York City. I was enjoying not having to get up for classes or a job or anything. I was thinking about model airplanes, a childhood pleasure I’d returned to. I was wondering what I was doing with Catherine who had accompanied me from the University of Iowa to Lincoln for a visit. I’d just completed my degree in Theatre Arts, hers was in Journalism. We went to my ten year high school reunion, poor Catherine. I spent the evening ditching her and trying to figure out some way I could get laid by Cindy Russell, a wild girl I ran with in Kindergarten. I’d done the same thing to Catherine in Iowa City before school was out telling her I wanted to go to a party alone one night. I wanted to get laid by someone fresh and found her. It seems a man is never so attractive as when he already has a girl. I did the same thing to her the following fall, taking her to a party in Manhattan then sending her home to Brooklyn with my disbelieving friend because I’d met someone fresh I figured I could fuck. A Chinese professor once told me it was a bit of old Chinese folk wisdom that if a man wanted an unattainable girl he first found a plain girl who was wholly devoted to him then carried a picture of the devoted one because it gave him strength and confidence to court the hotty. I guess that’s what I was doing. Of course there was no wisdom to it. I was playing Peter Pan, refusing to grow up, building model airplanes, spending a good chunk of the summer at home, making no money (I’d taken out a five thousand dollar student loan at the end of the year to subsidize my coming life in New York), catering to my mom, girl hopping. There was little in my life that was solid. All was shifting desires, plans, hopes and intentions.
Today, nineteen years later a big piece of my work is to "be the boy." "Being the boy is a far, though at times subtle cry from Peter Pan a.k.a. Puer Aeternis, eternal child or Icarus. Let’s look at Peter for a moment. He comes from an island of lost boys, looking for a mother, a role he fills not with a matronly woman but with a young, pretty girl. Psychologists speak of the "flight or fight" phenomenon, that is the tendency of certain neurotics, when encountering difficulties to either run away from them or lash out. Peter flew and fought and was full of pride. The only significant man in his world was the evil, frightened Hook, the dark father. We dream workers talk of being hooked by our pathology. Peter’s predicament seems very similar to mine as I stood on the brink of an already late manhood that summer in Lincoln. Now, what of the boy I’m to be today?
In a recent dream two wild boys pursue me, at times they have crazy painted faces. I’m afraid they want to rape me but there’s little evidence in the dream to support that fear. I run. The archetypal boy of my dreams also comes as my three year old Ian. Often times he is lost and my homework is to feel the pain of missing him and wanting him. Here’s a small key into my process. My first task is not to be the boy but to feel the pain of being separated from him. If I were told right off to be the boy I could only do so superficially, perhaps finding moments in my life where I could behave as I imagine the wild boys or Ian might behave. Peter Pan is full of schemes and plans and there’s plenty of room in the above scenario for my pathology to scheme and plan via my imagination. There’s plenty of room in that scenario for my pride. But pain melts pride and by feeling the pain of my separation from my true, unique boy self I am not only stripping off years of layered pride I am also digging a tunnel to that boy. My pain echoes down the decades from the time in my childhood when I split off from my true, feeling, passionate, suffering, ecstatic self in order to protect what was left of me from my raging father who hated spontaneity. That pain of separation is unadulterated by my pathology, a pure vein of gold I am following back to the mother lode. The boy doesn’t scheme or plan or fly or fight. He lives in his feelings and responds and relates from those feelings as they arise and forgets them as they pass. He longs for relationship with and guidance from his father God for he knows that he himself is inadequate. As Marc says the boy longs to live "in the adequacy" of the Father, trusting, yielding, Icarus gliding in his father’s wake rather than soaring alone.
Later that summer of 85’ this twenty eight year old boy crossing a wide threshold to manhood moved to the big city. I sublet a friends’ apartment in the East Village the first two weeks. I doubt that I was outside that apartment more than a few hours the entire time. I wasn’t physically afraid of the streets so much as overwhelmed by the pace, noise, energy, night lights, day shadows and possibilities of the city and my own lack of direction. I’d lived in the Bay Area of California for a year and a half but that seemed, even at the time, more a hiatus than a canvas for my future life. Nothing had prepared me for New York City. Later that summer a couple guys from my graduating class moved to the city and we sublet an apartment in Brooklyn. I was cast in the first play I auditioned for, an appallingly bad show that sold out because it was about an old couple and was advertised in retirement magazines offering two for one ticket deals. It was a bit of a shock to me to see how lousy theatre in that town could be. More of my friends from graduate school had arrived by that time and several said it was the most enjoyable evening they had spent in the theatre so terrible was the play. It was a comedy so their laughs of pain and derision were masked by the more polite laughter of the octogenarians.
Just after I was cast in the play I took a job teaching middle and high school in Harlem. I’d gone to the Board of Education to get a substitute teachers certificate, spent two full days there filling out forms, waiting in lines and being fingerprinted and I was so exhausted and stupefied by the end that I accepted a full time position which had opened mid term when a history teacher collapsed in front of her class in an epileptic fit. Each day I’d take the train from Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn to Harlem. The journey required one transfer and about a mile of walking so it took around an hour. After school I’d train down to rehearsal, then after we opened to perform. I had lines to learn and homework to grade. The school required written homework for every student every day and it had to be graded every night. I had over 160 students. Fortunately only about two thirds of them showed up on any given day. They ate me alive, little white boy from the Midwest. I had students who hung out of the third story windows, others made out during class, one boy, Silvio, a ninth grader couldn’t keep his hands off girls’ breasts. I never actually saw him, he was too fast. I put his desk way in the back corner of the room twelve or fifteen feet from the nearest girl, turn to write something on the board and I ’d hear a scream. "Mr. Keene!" I’d whirl around. "What is it?" "Silvio grabbed me!" and there he’d be all smiles in an empty desk behind the girl he’d just groped. "Silvio, you can’t grab girls like that." "I can’t help it Mr. Keene, they’re just so beautiful!" I’d send him to detention but he’d be right back. I asked him what his other teachers did. "They just get used to me" he said. The scariest students were the ones so whacked on drugs they would just stare at me stupidly and say nothing no matter what I asked them.
When the play closed I collapsed. Every day for several weeks I’d crawl out of bed, call the school to tell them I wasn’t coming then crawl back to bed and spend the rest of the day there. I was sick but I didn’t want to get better, not if it meant going back to that school. Finally I quit. About that time Mom got sick again back in Nebraska. It was right around Thanksgiving and my brother Scott bought me a round trip ticket so I flew home then back to New York. Then around Christmas things got worse and I bought my own one way ticket.
I can’t tell you, as Kipling did, what it is to be a man. I can’t even tell you what it is for me to be a man. But I know that as my mother lay dying I failed to be a man, failed myself and that failure echoes down through my life.
I thought I was being the good boy, doing the good thing. Everyone told me so, doctors, nurses, relatives, friends. I left New York, left an offer for another show that came on the heels of that first one. I ended up spending the next seven or eight months in Lincoln through her dying and the settling of her estate. It seemed noble but really I was hiding. I was relieved. I felt pretty badly beaten up by the City and was happy to get away, happy not to pursue my future. Content to split my brother’s job waiting tables at a pizza place so we could trade off spending time with mom at the hospital in Omaha. One week he worked the job in Lincoln and I stayed at a cousin’s house in Omaha, spending the day with mom and the next week we traded roles. Don’t get me wrong, she was my mother and she was dying and I loved her and her drawn out death was a powerful event to witness and be involved in but it was all hay for my pathology. I don’t know what I should have done differently, that’s not the way to come at it anyway. The way to come at it is to see and acknowledge how lost I was. To admit that I was wafted to Lincoln and her dying by forces that that were not deeply noble or of God. It may even be that God wanted me there, I don’t know. I do know that I wasn’t at all aware of what God wanted and I did feel noble though I suspected that I was cheating somehow. Cheating as I spent hour after hour building model airplanes in meticulous detail, cheating as I tuned into the Playboy channel on the TV in the guest room at my cousin’s, cheating as I tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce one of my mother’s nurses, cheating as I spent hour after hour with my mom even after she became delirious and no longer knew me. I was cheating because I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. I was cheating myself, cheating God.
My pathology loved it because the whole scene was keeping me from my life, keeping me from whatever pain and growth New York offered, keeping me from feeling and responding out of the anger, pain and confusion that lay beneath my family life past and present, all that and the carrot of nobility dangling before me always.
The evening of my eighth birthday I climbed up into my bunk bed, my mother came in to say goodnight and I burst into tears. I think I must have gone to bed early because my brothers weren’t there yet. My mother was confused. Why was I crying? The party had gone well, there wasn‘t anything I was upset about not receiving, I’d already tamed my expectations by that age. I don’t remember what I told my mom but I do remember feeling a great hole, a profound existential disappointment as if I‘d been counting on my birthday to at least relieve the pain of living and it hadn’t. I wanted to feel more but it all seemed so insignificant. I felt small and unknown, and though my mom seemed as good or better than most I knew, her love didn’t quite count, didn’t really connect because I was already hidden, already buried alive, already acting.
A few nights ago I watched "The Kid" with Ellen and Ian. It’s a Disney/Bruce Willis movie about a guy whose nearly eight year old boy self visits him and wreaks havoc and they learn from each other then spend a few quality moments with an even older Bruce Willis and everything’s Disney and there was some truth in that movie. The concept is great and the way it’s handled even better. No special effects, no time travel technology, everyone can see the kid so it’s not just Bruce’s memory or imagination and everyone who counts pretty readily accepts that it’s his nearly eight year old self come to visit so the whole "He must be crazy" story bit doesn’t even come up and impinge on the deeper story. The deeper story is that we can all learn from the kids we once were and nurse that wounded kid who remains in us. If these things weren’t true the movie wouldn’t resonate. The deeper implication is that we can all recover traces of our younger self through memories, dreams and inner work and that that act of recovery will enrich our lives. So far so good. The movie of course simplifies as movies must. There’s an obvious smoking gun in Willis’ past that satisfactorily explains the unfeeling, monetarily successful, loser monster he’s become. There seems to be a popular belief that re-experiencing childhood traumas can free us as adults and I suppose there’s some truth to that but for me it’s much more subtle and complex and ongoing than that popular belief, as I understand it, imports. The word trauma just recently came up for the first time in my work. Marc has no idea whether or not there’s a smoking gun in my past, that is a single or series of terrible events that I’ve blocked from my memory in order to survive. He said the trauma may be something as simple as waking up every morning into a family with very little love and I felt a lash of pain and recognition. For as long as I can remember I’ve had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. To this day I feel fear of and resistance to entering my day, unless I’m on vacation when I easily rise early even if I was up late the night before. I’ve been working lately on feeling this pain and fear that has been with me constantly since childhood. Pain and fear that my pathology has found many imaginative, for the most part socially acceptable ways to mask. This is the pain and fear which underlies my relationship and interactions with the world and which I have been unwilling to feel. Now I’m feeling them. Another task for me is to speak out of these feelings instead of speaking as I think the good father or good husband or good salesman or good dream worker should speak. I’ve had many pathological dreams about acting over the years the most recent two nights ago. The details aren’t important. What’s important is that out of resistance to feeling my pain and fear I’ve largely acted my life instead of feeling and living it. And now I sense that a small but very determined part of me is still resisting and that there’s something worse beneath this pain and fear, some trauma that may or may not include a smoking gun, something I still don’t want to feel.
In this work we believe it’s the divine child who can help free us. The divine child may be something we once were in childhood. We may dream often of a child who is five or six, maybe we were still our essential selves then, still trailing our clouds of glory and then we separated from ourselves and began building our neurotic and pathological constructs. I believe I began building my walls at a very young age to protect myself from my father. I believe I pulled psychic tendrils off my father and flung them onto my mother where they held, and that’s gotta be wrong. The kid in "The Kid" is just about to lose that divine kidness and the adult Willis tells the kid all the shit the kid’s about to go through. Somehow this seems to shift things for the kid and in turn adult Willis is transformed. Anyway I’m excited by how often Hollywood seems to strike a vein of truth and saddened that they never really seem to mine that vein. I spent quite a few years in the arts and it seems to me many artists stumble onto the truth of human and spiritual nature again and again yet none, not even the great ones, seem to be transformed by that truth, none seem to die into it, they seem merely to represent it with greater or lesser eloquence.
I digress.
Mom was hooked up to a heart monitor so I could see that she was slipping away. I called Scott, he had time to get to the hospital, Jon was already there. The three of us held hands with her in a circle. She’d been comatose for three days. The number on her heart monitor slid lower and lower. She never flat lined, maybe that’s just a dramatic touch for tv and movies. The monitor dropped to about seventeen beats a minute and just stayed there. "Goodbye Mom" we said.
I felt relieved.
Jon collapsed to the floor in tears.