1. Clumsy Tourist Viciously Attacked by Hungry Tribesmen

 

I remember them beating their firsts into the outside of my makeshift cave like an African drum. They were almost singing, chanting “faggot” in harsh octaves of carelessness, of ignorance. And when the chanting subsided, I recall the cackle of tribesmen infected with the madness of power, with the glee of sacrificing someone’s life for the spiritual gain of another’s. I wanted to be in Africa at a tribal ritual. The lone tourist who fatefully stumbled into native village only to be bound by the limbs to a skewer and roasted over a steep bonfire. It would have been so right—cinematic and clichéd. But as much as I wanted my life to be a movie—an effortless plot shamelessly concluding when my one-time lover swung karate chops into the teeth of those renegades, holding and kissing me in a freeze frame that would go on for seconds, minutes—it wasn’t.

I was in the locker room of my high school, vibrating like the vocal cords of stuttered speech. A trash can was flung over my head suddenly and entombed my barely-living corpse. The darkness of the opaque trash-can drenched my vision as I felt the thump of empty spay-on deodorant cans on my skull. The boys were yelling and laughing with glee derived from scorn. When I heard the laughing mellow, I violently contorted my figure against the trashcan, battling it to let me see the fluorescent lights and the unfinished concrete. It was off; I dumped it onto the floor and listened to the booming thud it made upon contact. My pale face become flooded with three distinct shades: the red of a ripe apple’s embarrassment, the scarlet that cloaks letters of shame, and the pink hues of a blood’s livid rush to the surface of the skin. I stood still and looked over at the boy, David, who always changed next to me. His blue eyes were deep like mirages with concern but distance, and the corners of his lips were careless clouds floating off into the horizon. I could see in his locked vision what he was thinking: “There but for the grace of God go I.” I wanted him to say it; I wanted to choke him and make him gasp it up in coughs. But I remained still, finished dressing myself, and headed to class, my face embracing its neutral tone of beige for the first time.   

 

2. Shunners Anonymous

 

My lineage is rooted in a behavioral pattern that my mother and I affectionately call “shunning.” To shun is analogous to ordering a trade embargo. It’s a blockade on any communicational and emotional relations you may have with a person—an ordinance of ignorance. My family is almost stuck in the era of Jane Austen, where obeying the social hierarchy of the family comes before our own happiness—that happiness must be constrained by genealogy. Those who chose to disobey either became shunned—or shun everyone else.

 

This trait only occurs on my mom’s side, of course, but I have always believed that I was allotted a disproportionate amount of her genes. I’ve already found instances four generations back when my family has partaken in the ritual response to displeasing behavior. Curiously, they all involve an uncle of mine. The first, and my favorite, is the case of Ignatius Donnelly, my great, great granduncle: the writer of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, a politician, and an infamous Baconian theorist (surely you’ve heard of him—he does have a Wikipedia entry). By positing that the works of Shakespeare were actually written by Francis Bacon, he became shunned within his own literary community and was forced to publish under pseudonyms for some of his later works. Then, there’s my great uncle Harold, who was duly shunned by my family after he stabbed his third wife and was imprisoned. My grandmother still refuses to talk about it; my mom had to hear about it from the late crazy Aunt Mae. 

 

More recently, my uncle Jamie estranged himself from my family for a few years. I don’t know why. He decided to open up communication again when he was set to be married. We were all invited and the period of silence was over—maybe he wanted the presents. After that Catholic ceremony, it’s become a tradition for him to invite us to any ritualistic Catholic ceremony his family partakes in—and they’re the only context I ever see him in. I’ve been to the baptisms and communions of all his children, but I don’t think I’ve ever held a long conversation with him. I find this similar to when a criminal runs into a church and shouts “sanctuary”—the church becomes a holy place free of persecution and scorn. I did notice that he stopped sending me the obligatory birthday and Christmas cards. I guess I’d gotten too old for hand outs.

 

After I found out my father was cheating on my mother in high school, I shunned him. I got a copy of the keys to his bachelor pad and a copy of his work schedule, and for two years we rarely talked. I invited my friends over to help my dad drink the beer that was in his fridge; he occasionally called to complain about the vomit stains on the carpet. These days, I call him when I need my monthly allowance. I even found out from my cousin he was engaged to some woman before he informed me. I only received an invitation to his wedding this summer in Hawaii after I pointed out that there were no suitable witnesses to object to their institution, if they might see it appropriate.

 But it isn’t just my Dad that I shun—I shun friends, lovers, and friends who become lovers. When someone upsets me, when all I want to do is gouge their eyeballs out and sucker-punch them in the gut, I don’t. I pretend they don’t exist; I ignite the fireplace, reach deep into the public records of my brain, and chuck their birth certificates like paper airplanes into the flames. During this, I’m sitting on the leather sofa with my feet crossed on top of the cherry-stained coffee table, casually sipping a dirty martini with five, yes five, olives. Afterwards, I scatter the ashes everywhere, so I can still pan a room and find microscopic clues about the relationship we once had—the people they once were. At times, I felt filthy and shameful about this—when I encountered these ghosts, my shoulder muscles would tense, my lips would tighten and thin, and my eyes would over-analyze the painted brushstrokes on the wall. Fortunately, my most recent New Year’s resolution was to eliminate that bothersome “sense of shame.” It’s been fun so far.

 

3. A Word’s Worth

 

I can’t remember the first time someone called me a faggot. I do remember the first time I heard it. When I was in elementary school, I was obsessed with the singer Jewel. One song on the album was “Pieces of You.” During one verse she sings: “faggot, faggot, do you hate him? Because he’s pieces of you.” For a long time, I thought that faggot was the same thing as a maggot, until my best friend at the time, Michael, informed me otherwise.

 

“I can’t believe she says that word—it’s so bad!,” he exclaimed.

 

“What? Faggot? You mean like baby flies?”

 

“No, I don’t think you know what it means…” he said as his voice trailed off at the end with his eyes following. Later, he told me its true meaning. I still didn’t really understand until much later.

 

My real lesson in the power of a derogatory term happened in the sixth grade, when my mom, for the second and last time in my life ever, slapped me across the face. (The first time I pushed a shopping cart into her back and knocked her over at BJ’s Wholesale Club because of her less-than-willingness to buy me a box of three-thousand plastic straws. I think I deserved that one.) It involved a word, though different, that was equally filled with the compiling of decades of hate. I remember hearing the word , the “n-word,” everyday in conversations at my school. The guys who ran away from the security guards and walked through the halls like they were in knee-deep swamps incorporated it as part of their common vernacular. They scrawled it with knives on the metal sides of the mobile units. It wanted to burst from my mouth; my tongue was a pot of water on the stove about to boil over. That word was going to be the first drop to go. 

 

I was standing in my dining room, chatting with my mom when the that drop of water sizzled on the hot coil. She looked at me with the most stern expression; her face a brand new gargoyle with terrifying features embedded in rough stone.

 

“What did you just say?” she asked in the same tone that prosecutors have on detective shows when interrogating a suspect. I rushed for an alibi—anything.

 

“I said trigger…not nigger.” Oh God, I was one of those jackasses that forgot to read the fifth amendment before being brought in by the police. I should have asked for a lawyer. But it was too late, she was already stomping across the dining room on the wooden floors so hard that the cabinets full of delicate china rattled from the seismic waves of her footsteps. Right across the face. Pain. Tears. Apologies. Lesson learned. 

 

4. The One-Handed, One-Sided Showdown in the Stairwell

 

When I got punched in the face in the stairwell of my high school, the combination of sounds and pain that resulted still adheres to a severely aversive memory. It’s been imprinted onto my brain for years, and it shows no signs of dissipating quickly into the archives. It’s here to stay. Even the moments preceding and proceeding remain vivid: the social norms of the hallways, the classless characters of the public school system, and the minute details of the dreary decorations. 

 

Reflecting on the interior of my high school, the aesthetic qualities seem more and more contrasted. The hallways were a pasty, neutral shade sheeted with a clear coat of grime. The stairs had black glowing paint that reflected the fluorescent light too well. My school was a skunk that just spent a day somersaulting in the marshes. Sometimes it would smell that way too, when renegades would position stink bombs at the bottom of the stairwells, letting that stench rise like heat until some unfortunate janitor was asked to clean it up. Half-nostalgia about the interior design of my school always reminds me of the interesting norms one picked up by sheer experience, like how to avoid being trampled when a fight starts in the cafeteria, or how to pretend that you aren’t about to step on neon blue and black synthetic hair in the hallway. Those are hard, but the high-intensity rush of the staircases managed to put one or two freshmen into counseling every year.  

 

The stairwells are positioned in the four corners of the square main building. During class changes, they become heavily congested with two-thousand students. Proper navigation is crucial for survival up and down the snot-ridden rails to glide gracefully into the next floor. As a freshman from a single-story private school, I inadvertently took the immersion route to learning the rules of the stairwell:

 

One must merge into the stream properly, always in front of a person who looks lethargic yet friendly, with a smile hiding your contempt for physical assertion and other teenagers in general. Once in the stream, you must maintain a pace that keeps a one-inch distance in between you and the backpack of the person in front of you. Failure to maintain a constant pace could result in either a rear-impact collision (embarrassing), or a front impact collision where your head dents the backpack or back of a fellow traveler (scary). If you are going to talk, be sure you can maintain your rhythm while saying a few words to a friend. The stairwells are not for group meetings or excited hugs with a boyfriend. These things, as well as anything else that causes blockage in the arteries of the school, will result in: a fight, someone calling you a “freshman,” or at the least a curse word and an over-exaggerated mean expression.

I’d mastered the staircases; each step I took was deliberate and cold, my face muscles paralyzed by the psychological Botox I willed on my body every time I ascended or descended. I was good. I was really good. My stair climbing adventures all seem to meld together into a single experience, with the exception of one incident I had that would leave a bruise.

 

Everyday I would hike up to the fourth floor to Earth Science with Mrs. Allen. She was a puffy woman with a face ridden with blotchy red inconsistencies, a body figure often hidden under light denim shirts, and unkempt haired fried by the work of at-home bleaching kit.. Her curriculum seemed to bounce from one subject to the next , based on her interests and not on standardized tests, and she often would miss class because of some unavoidable major crisis (she would also take up whole class periods to talk about these crises). It was for these initial reasons upon which I built my unfounded diagnosis of alcoholism. I was surprised when she embraced me, the crying freshman, so tenderly. She transformed from teacher to counselor—perhaps she had been trained for these situations, maybe it stemmed from her maternal instinct, or maybe she pretended I was wine bottle that had been just uncorked, ready for consumption.

 

After middle school, I had completely cut out crying from my life. Crying was a sign of weakness; the first time one of my tormentors saw a saline drop form in my eye—it was over. They had no need for celebration, for my grief was their battle cry. For this reason only, after an anonymous figure’s hand made direct impact with my upper cheek bone, I paused and remained steady. We’d both broken the rules of the staircase—he by randomly punching me in the hallway and yelling “fag,” and me standing still for just seconds as the pain set in. The sound rang in my head the way it does when earphones slap against your ears forcefully. That vertigo-like vibration rang on like thousands of bells, and when it faded, I proceeded to go up the stairs and to the doorframe of the classroom. My lips were a flipped half-pipe, and when I made eye-contact with Mrs. Allen, the tears streamed down it quickly, like miniature snowboarders on a final run.

 

She gathered me in her arms and led me down to 205 (the infamous security office) to file an incident report. I sat in the dean’s office, and I think he assumed I was there because of my failure to abide by school rule, as most students who sat in that chair probably were. I wrote down all that happened and I placed it on his desk, my hand shaking from the adrenaline and the fear that held over from the incident. He looked at it and ignored it, and we waited in his office until I had the nerve to speak up.

 

“Am I free to go now?” I asked, trembling at the hands of an unforgiving authority figure.

 

“That depends,” he said and he motioned for his assistant to come in his office and summarize what I had just wrote down.

 

“Some kid sucker-punched him in the stairwell,” she responded dutifully.

 

“Oh, you can go,” he said casually. He had bigger issues to conquer; things that didn’t involve completely senseless acts of violence.

 

5. The Two Faces of Patrick David Link

 

After my one year stint in rehab, the paparazzi hounded me so much that my house became my prison. No. Wrong story.

 

I’m not much for Freudian psychology--too mired down in non-scientific theory, too controlled by the whims of a mind destined for the fame of Sigmund himself. However, I do like performing my own bastardized form of psychoanalysis on myself, relating the incidents of the past (not-quite-childhood) to some deep-seeded fake psychological disorder that I may have. And from this obsession, I have come to terms with my own dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder.

 

A rugged lumberjack has taken his axe to the stump of my mind, and perfectly split it down the middle. People who have known me for years know that there are two of me, one named Paddy and the other Patrick.

Patrick is the person who you initially meet that states in an ambiguous manner everything about himself, if he does state anything at all. He wants to remain neutral and is often initially perceived as overly defensive and aloof in large social situations, like the first class or a sober party. He wants to remain off everyone’s radar as a soul whose purpose is only to live and exist. His voice deepens unconsciously on the phone when you’re speaking with him, and when he forces himself to speak up in a group of large people. At times, he is impervious to others’ thoughts, and then suddenly they permeate the thick skin of his core and contuse his heart. He’s a soldier on the front lines, not quite knowing his battle or where it will be, even afraid and often apprehensive, but that knows he must fight.

 

Paddy is the younger boy who loves chatting about anything and everything. He wants human contact. He wants a clear sense of style; he wants to glean anything that Patrick might leave behind. He’ll talk to someone for hours and try to be humorous as often as possible, often bursting full of energy like a crushed grape at the sight of a close friend. He’s unafraid of his sexuality, of his sexual orientation, and willing to press forward into a new life of independence. More than likely, if he and Patrick ever came face to face, Paddy might murder him for all the failed social situations and other growth inhibiting lessons—but could also be too afraid to lose the fortification of the stonewall that he provides.

 

I’d like to consider, perhaps, that the four causes of my “disorder” are linked to the stories preceding. I’m afraid to be whole because of the implications that it may have; I don’t want to be attacked again by those angered by my tendencies and biological roots. Twice was enough--too often was I the victim when I’d have much rather been the bystander looking on with careless abandon. But I wasn’t just in fear of people, I was in fear of the sheer stigma that my identity has been soaked in for decades. Words hurt—they’re linked inextricably to emotions and notions and hate. And what’s the behavioral response that has been ingrained in my genes since birth? Shunning. So what do I do when I’m angry, upset, or even scared? I shun; I’ve shunned my own identity and pressed it deep into my psyche, so that only those willing to retrieve it—to become familiar with me, to know me deeper than the marble face I polish for public display—are allowed to see it.

 

The implications of this disorder are too broad to list, and they’re not all negative. It’s purely a defensive barrier that slowly layered its brick and mortar over time. But perhaps some day I can be whole like the Patrick I knew in elementary school. The youthful pretentious little man who knew how to open up at just the right time. Having an outer shell like Patrick only protects me from slanderous thoughts and forces Paddy to retreat back into a cell too small and too solitary. But with just Paddy around, the world would become a circus of absurdities and youthful glee, and a verbal filter would be lacking when its needed the most. If only I could take a pill to meld the two together, keeping with me some armor to protect me from malicious intent, but with the highly intrinsic social capabilities that will allow me to develop socially and romantically. I’m trying but Patrick is a sturdy bastard who’s too heavy for me to move on my own; Paddy’s too playful to get anything done around here.