🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
As long as I can remember I have had a physiological predisposition to fight. Flight was an option I had to consciously choose through a deliberate override of my instinctual reaction. Born predator; never prey. A lifetime of conditioning reinforced that.
I do not remember how old I was when these events occurred, but my best guess is 6-9 years old. I know, I know… 3 years is a hell of a span at that age, but there are a few very good reasons for my vagueness. First is due to one of the specific ways my memory seems to work: I recall events by visual images, so I remember places, faces, and details. I do not recall names or dates any more than I can time another reason is that I smoked a very significant amount of marijuana when I was 15 and that affected some of the particular memories associated with that use. The same applies to prodigious amounts of alcohol in regard to coping with other matters.
As a side-note, I want to offer a prayer of gratitude to God for allowing me to find alcohol and marijuana at those times. You see, I was completely outmatched and utterly unequipped to deal with the emotional war I was then embroiled in. Those two crutches helped me limp and hobble through to a point where I could stand on my own. Now, I would never recommend such blissful ignorance to be self imposed. It is not a very good option at all. It was the option that quite possibly, even very likely, starved off any suicide attempts. Retreat is not just a legitimate tactic, but often a necessity.
Back to my 6-9 year old, blessedly uninebriated, self. I was at a stage in my life where a strongly sprouting self-awareness makes a kid self-conscious, so he would to like me to tell you this. Knowing his anger problems, he might try to hit me with something if he knew I was telling you. However, I do not personally believe in time-travel, so I believe I am safe from my younger self.
That kid, back then, was on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Don’t ask em what time. I already told you I don’t do names, dates, or time. I only know it was night and that it was odd for him to be up. Usually he did not wake up for anything, but he had good reason.
He was afraid of the dark.
If you think this was a poor reason for not waking up, you’re wrong. It’s perfectly reasonable. Here’s why: This was the time that his mother was going to school to be a nurse. She also worked to support them. That meant that when she was asleep you had better not, for the love of God Almighty, wake her up! That meant a beating, for sure.
What does any reasonable little boy do when he is afraid of the dark but knows he can’t wake his mom up? He stays up so that, just in case, he will know if anything happens to his mom or his sisters. But then what happened is he eventually falls asleep from sheer exhaustion. And since he is now asleep from an overwhelming exhaustion, I can tell you without him knowing that he seldom woke up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night because his exhausted fear often caused him to wet the bed at that age. Even that urge didn’t awaken him.
Oh, he is waking up now. It’s a good thing time is relative so I can put him to bed and wake him up when I need to. I promise I won’t let such omnipotence go to my head.
He is understandably groggy, but not from drinking grog because he has not imbibed up unto this point, and never did develop a taste for rum drinks anyway. No, just a sleep deprived stupor at the moment. It was in such a state that he drug his feet into the bathroom.
Our non-time-travelling 6-9 year old boy is going to again experience the relativity of time in the stretching of this moment. I will allow him 2 steps into the bathroom while I set some of the scenery.
He currently lived with his mom and 2 sisters on the second floor of an inner-city apartment. He lived in a racially mixed neighborhood with all of the racial tensions of a mid-to-late 80’s U.S. city. His building was close enough to the next that you could touch the walls of you stand between them. It was a rough, poor neighborhood, so his nightly fear was not at all unreasonable. It was actually not just sensible, but, as we have seen, conditioned.
As he now escaped the trap of artistic license and that easily manipulated relativity, he took another step into the bathroom and froze.
He knows he drug his feet because he feels drugged with lethargy, but he knows that sound didn’t match with what he heard. But nobody is in the bathroom. The only place to hide would be the claw-footed, cast-iron bathtub, but no one is there.
Just as he convinces himself it was nothing and lifts his foot, his eyes snap to the window almost before he knows he heard another scrape. Walking over to the window is easy because, now that he knows this is where the sound came from, his fear fled. What could possibly be at the 2nd floor window? A bird? A squirrel? Oh, he hoped so!
A Marty.
Wait. A what?
A Marty, unlike a martin, is not a bird. It doesn’t resemble a marten even a little, either, so there is no mistaking it for a squirrel. No, a Marty is a grown male human. More specifically, it is the grown human man who beat this boy’s mother half to death and forced her into a women’s shelter some years back.
Such a Marty cannot climb like a carnivorous arboreal weasel such as a marten, but he could scale the overly close walls of two apartment buildings. He could not at all figure out how to alit upon a window sill like a martin, however, and thus it was that I, then, found him struggling to open the screen to enter the window while holding himself between the two walls. It was not what I had hoped for, but much of what I had feared. Not in any particular sense at that moment, but in the more general sense that kept me up at night, afraid, until I passed out from exhaustion and pissed myself.
Unconscious fears often are far more terrifying in our imaginations. They often process differently when they put on flesh and enter the physical world where we can face them head on.
It also helps that I am biologically opposed to running away.
I closed the window.
Marty fell. No wings helped him slow his descent. No fur softened his impact. He completely shattered his leg and needed over 100 staples to close the ruptures.
As he fell, landed, and did whatever came next, I returned to bed. I didn’t tell anyone. Never said a word.
The next morning I awoke to a wet bed. I didn’t use the toilet after I shut the window. I also had to go in between the buildings and clean up Marty’s blood. The neighbors had complained to our landlord because we were causing problems, again, by getting people to attempt breaking in to assault us. And this time, we got blood on their alley sidewalk.
I remember being fascinated by how Marty’s yellow T-Shirt, which was used to staunch his wounds, was so stiff from the blood. Until then I didn’t know blood made a shirt as stiff as card-board. That’s not an impatient lesson for a 6-9 year old to know no matter how curious he is. When Marty’s not as light as a feather, his shirt is stiff with blood.