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i just started a book called The Center by Carolyn Meyer... i realized as soon as i started reading it that i've read it before, it makes sense, i found it the same way i used to find all the books i read- go to the 362 section of the library and browse. i'm not exactly sure what a book is required to have to qualify for the 362 section... girl, interrupted is in there, along with a shelf of books about people with mental health problems... and there are shelves of books about people with disabilities, and shelves about adoption and rape and homelessness and my 13 year old self found all of these compelling topics, so i spent a lot of time there. and when i decided to try and start reading again it seemed to be the logical place to start.
i thought this book looked familiar, but i wasn't sure, which makes sense. i read a lot of books, this is a relatively short book, i probably read it the same day i read some other book, and for the most part they're all the same. person has problems, person gets help, person recovers. and i only vaguely remember this book, i remember it the way i remember other books i read years ago- by one little scene, one image that stood out the first time and jumps out the second. i started reading it in the bathtub and got about a quarter of the way through the book, in the middle of reading about a very typical therapy session and they were talking about this kid and his best friend when they got to the, "so exactly how close are you guys?" conversation... and i know that conversation, i know it well... i had it many many times before i gave them the answer they were looking for. and it surprised me slightly that it was in this book and i didn't remember it, but i figured i probably just read this book before i really got to that stage, i probably was reading quickly and barely even noticing, concentrating on the girl characters because they're the only ones i ever really cared about, i was always jealous of them, in one way or another... but i kept reading, and the conversation ended with the boy crying (they always cry) and the therapist handing him a tissue (they never get their own tissues) and he asks, "Do you think you're a homosexual?" "Yes. No. I don't know." "Is that what you want to be?" "No. But maybe I already am!" "It's something you can change, you know. You have the choice. Just because you've had some homosexual experiences doesn't make you a faggot. Lots of people have gone through what you have. But they've changed. You can, too." I fought the urge to throw the book in the bathtub, remembering it's a library book and i'm broke, and read the next paragraph, where our favorite disturbed teenager has a conversation with the center's stereotypical gay teenager, and they discuss how much they hate their fathers and it's pointed out that they're both afraid of men. I read the "about the author"... the book was written by a mother, whose son was in the program. i wonder if that part's about her son, if it's about someone her son knows, if she knows that's what the therapist would say if something like that came up, how she knows, why she cares, why that seemed important, with all the other problems her main character could've had... i read the copyright, 1979. i try to tell myself that's the most anyone could expect out of a book written in 1979, i don't believe it. i scream, inside my head, no wonder i thought i was so fucked up! even the books about people who are fucked up agree that i was fucked up! because i chose it, of course. I spent two years not talking to my parents, because i couldn't tell them that and it was the only important thing and if i couldn't tell them the only important thing why should i tell them anything? i have scars where i cut myself, blood-stained journal entries, and page after page of tear stained, "what if i am...?" entries. i was hospitalized three times. my freshman year of high school i held hands with my significant other (an unbelievably normal thing to do, in and of itself) and suddenly found myself laughed at, threatened, and spit on. I recieved a death threat the same day a guy in the library offered me twenty bucks if i'd let him feel me up. (because all lesbians are sluts, everybody knows that) I went to the principal... he had the janitor wash my locker every day, and that was all he did. they thought up newer, crueler, and more explicit sayings to write on my locker, and then he paid someone else to scrub it off so they could do it again the next day. i had teachers laugh at my face when they heard the "rumors" and then go blank when they saw me staring back at them. i had teachers turn on me, suddenly hating me when a week before they'd loved me. the one person i'd ever loved was torn away from me, because it was all me, i was a bad influence, i seduced her, I made out with her in the auditorium, and suddenly every teacher in the school thought knew all about it, and were under strict orders to never let us be alone together. Forget the dozens of couples who made out in the hall everyday without a comment- we had everyone in the school conspiring to keep us apart. maybe that's how they knew i really was crazy, maybe that's how they knew to put me in the hospital, heavily medicated and locked up. you'd have to be truly crazy to choose that. yeah, so, i'm bitter. i think i have every right to be. I thought about writing the author of that book, ask her who she thinks she's helping by throwing that little scene in there... but i know it wouldn't matter. that book was written over 30 years ago. her son's probably the same age as my dad, i wonder what happened to him, i wonder if that was him, in the book, and if that was him if he grew up and got married and had kids and ignored what happened to him in the past or if he "chose" to be gay and if he could possibly be happy either way. and i wonder if there are some things that are sacred, i wonder if it's stupid to feel betrayed because she still quotes songs and poems she used to quote to me, i wonder if i'll ever completely forget, i wonder if she's forgotten or if she hasn't, i wonder what she thinks of now, when she sees those words, and i wonder if she's thinking of me or someone else or nothing at all... and i wonder why, after all this time, i still care. i don't think anyone is truly happy where they grew up, i think everyone feels the need to run away, to start over, to go someplace bigger and better or at least far away. i live in the kind of town the rest of the country has forgotten about, the kind that has a huge library and a huge video rental store because we have no where else to go, and will do anything to be distracted while we're stuck home. the biggest event of the year is the rodeo, or, if you have a car, the county fair. for almost half the school district, if a parent wants to call the school and talk to their kid's teacher, it's long distance. geographically, the district's huge, it has four small, "four corners" towns plus all the nothing in between, all the kids who live up in the hills in houses that just got electricity and phone lines, if they have them at all. in seventh grade, everyone learns farm safety, and then we're required to demonstrate by driving a tractor over a muddy hill without tipping it. my school has a green house and a barn, at one time future farmers of america was the largest club... they went door to door selling cheese each year and my dad always bought some. he was a member himself, at one time. the majority of kids in my school had parents who went to that school. our parents all know each other, most of them married other people who went to the school, not only did my dad go there but so did all six of his brothers and sisters, most of his cousins, and 12 of my grandmother's 16 grandkids. we're not an unusual family, as far as that goes. people rarely move into the school district, they get stuck in it, and farm families are notorious for having a large number of kids, the same goes for poor families in farm districts, there are very few people in the school who didn't fit one of those categories. I took my friends to the school for a basketball game, which we didn't watch, but rather we wandered around the school, going down each hallway until someone told us we couldn't. they tell me the school itself, the building even, is weird, different from any school they've ever been in, and they'd know better than me, it's the only school i really know, to me it feels normal. they made fun of everyone we passed, they made fun of the shuffleboard courts in the hall, and the little kids practicing wrestling in the weight room, and most of all they made fun of the pictures in the display case of honor students, and the little cards underneath that told their names and hobbies. and i will usually be the first to make fun of that school, and of everything and everyone in it. and so i tried to laugh along, but they were laughing at all the wrong things... i always liked the shuffleboard courts, and what do you mean you don't know what 4-wheeling is? and i realized as much as i try to separate myself from them, i am part of that school. there are things that i understand that i can't explain. In fourth grade we learned the words, "urban," "suburban," and "rural". We called our school district suburban, and i'm only now starting to realize how wrong we were. We were reaching, even then, for what we wanted to be, denying what we really were. By the time i started school, most people around here were commuting (another word from the same fourth grade chapter) working actual jobs in offices, in the factories before they closed, at grocery stores and gas stations afterwards. Michelle lived with her family of 6 in a "house" made of two small trailers joined together at the back doors, next door to her grandpa's farm. the place where the trailers connected always leaked, and, as far as i know, still does. Anne lived with her parents and her younger sister and always had marks across her back everyone must've noticed but no one talked about. Amanda lived in a tiny house in the middle of nowhere with more siblings than i could count and a father who talked about how next time we came to visit the new house would be finished and us kids could have the whole basement to play in... i don't know if it ever got finished, i never went back. I never went back to any of those houses, i never spent more than one night. I think they're why i hate other people's houses, even now, my family may not be perfect but we have room to breathe, we can all stay at home for days and never see each other, and i like it that way. i had other friends, families who were only mildly dysfunctional and whose houses were large enough to hold everyone in them. emily's father was a doctor who could've bought any house in the county but picked one as far out in the woods as he could get. partly because the school has one of the best special education departments, for her brother... that's one of the things about a school district with a high poverty rate... there's a big demand for special education classes. i don't know what the definition of "dysfunctional family" is, only that i've never met a family i wouldn't classify as dysfunctional. "dysfunctional" implies that there is an ideal, a "functional," but if it exists i've never found it. I'd like to. someday, i'd like to find a truly happy family and watch them, i want to study them, and find out how they do it. i've read about them, almost all fictional families are happy, laura's a tomboy and mary goes blind but the ingalls family is still mostly happy, even during the long winter when they don't have enough to eat and they're so cold papa plays his fiddle and they march in a circle to warm up. my friends are all looking at colleges, they're all talking about getting out, they don't want to stay home because they're afraid of getting stuck there, they tell me if i move home there's a chance i'll get stuck here. that's a foreign concept to me, i can't get stuck here. i have a car, i have a bank account, and even if i didn't i'd have feet and a sleeping bag. I can't get stuck here, because i can't live where i'm not happy, and i always get what i want. I am very proud of myself for dropping out of school, and at the same time i see it as inevitable. i've never gotten stuck doing anything i wasn't happy doing and i never will. i've saved money since i first started getting an allowance, (most of which was spent on nintendo games and christmas presents) and I had saved over $1,000 of baby-sitting money by the time i got my first real job. I got out of high school when i was 14, I got out of this town when I was 16, I got out of college when I was 18... if i chose to come back here now, it would mostly be for the community college, and i wouldn't get stuck here. my mother tried to talk me into finishing out my degree before i left college, but she didn't try near as hard as i expected her to. my dad didn't try at all- i think he's decided that i'm 18 and i've always gotten what i wanted anyway, so there's no point in arguing... my mother also told me that all her friends at work "think the way i do, because of the age thing," but i'm not convinced that it's what my mother really believes. I know she wishes i'd get the degree, i know she thinks that's important... but i know some part of her understands leaving and i think some part of her admires it. She got a watch today, a $300 watch, the back is engraved with her name, the name of the place she works, and "25 years" and she told me, "I don't know anymore if it's something to be proud of or if it just means i'm stuck in a gigantic rut." ..My mother's on year 2 of her midlife crisis. you said, "everything closes at five, after that, well, you've just got the bars you don't know how luck you are walking around with your little shoes dangling i am the one who lives with the ocean it's where we came from, you know and sometimes, i just want to go back after a day, we drink til we're drowning walk to the ocean, wade in with our workboots wade in our workboots, try to finish the job you don't know how precious you are I am the one who lives with the ocean you don't know how, i am the one you don't know how, i am the one. ~me |