Isolation is the Gift

Isolation is the Gift

From the moment my mother squeezed me out, washed me off and took me home from the hospital I wanted out of the house. As a child I ended most of my arguments slamming a door and screaming, “I hate this place, I swear to God I’m out of here when I turn 18!” Since slamming a door meant another month would be added onto the sentence, I’d sit for weeks in my darkened closet with my pants hanging grimly above me, hugging my knees and losing myself in music. With the isolation hat plugged by a long cord into the radio, I’d imagine I was anywhere else but under the thumb of such unjust parental tyranny. I dreamed of streets that extended into neighborhoods that knew no bounds. There were no curfews, no school nights, no dinner times in the places I retreated to in my mind. Escape was only possible back then on the liberating wings of music. Without it, as a child, I’m sure I would have snapped from the pressure. It is, most definitely, the original gateway drug.

Before I was five, my grandmother suffered an aneurysm which left her paralyzed on one side of her body. She landed in a nursing home, and I realized from a very young age that provided I lived long enough, a slow rocking chair in Shady Pines was an inevitability for me as well… and that this was life. Having just recently arrived on this side of the womb, laying my first tracks into the vast new world stretching for eternity ahead of me, my grandma’s condition was a glaring billboard against the otherwise serine landscape of childhood immortality… a crass advertisement for the frailty of life, and it caught my attention with overwhelming clarity.

I remember her struggling to speak, tripping over syllables as if she were falling down the stairs. Her sickening deformation wrenched her body into a crumpled posture and entombed her long before her life ran out. Eating a meal, putting on clothes, even conveying basic thoughts became unaccomplishable feats. In the fraction of an instant, all of those dreams she may have hoped to accomplish, all of the romances, friendly luncheons and family vacations dissolved to nothing. Whatever she had planned to do with the rest of her life was irrelevant now.  For her, the carefree simplicity of the human experience was over.

I have no recollection of the woman my grandmother was before her trauma - the young, vibrant soul; firm, sharp and alert, as my mother describes. I watched her, unable to form even the simplest of sentences, and recognized I was looking at a life, a living story, just like mine. And just like her, in the single flash of a blown blood vessel, or a speeding car, or a fall from a roof, the gratifying pleasantries of life could be ripped away, leaving me a prisoner in my own body, wilting in wheelchair servitude as dear old grandma did.

I swore to myself, knee high at her bedside, that when the confines of my own old-aged rocking chair came, I would lounge in it with gratitude, having lived my life to the fullest potential. No way would I sit my brittle bones in that chair, regretting my apathy, reviewing my life and wishing I did the things… I was going to do them all.

As the years progressed the walls of my home were unable to confine me. Often I would escape and stalk my sister on her way to the elementary school up the street when she left each morning with books in her bag and a lunch in her box. I’d crawl along hedges, crouch behind trash cans and slither on my stomach, sneaking with her to wherever it was that she disappeared to every morning, since it would surely be more interesting than watching my mother scrub stains from my father’s work shirts, or crying in the kitchen over a sink full of onion peels.

Something about onions seemed to devastate my mother. Just handling them filled her eyes with tears, and she’d have to leave the room to regain her composure. I wondered what it was that peeling onions so vividly brought back for her; some painful onion related memory… but I hate to see mom cry, so I never brought it up. My father’s powerful lust for peppers and onions must have been the driving force behind why she continued to use them in her casseroles, knowing full well the horror that would be dredged up with every new roast that hit the oven. I’m sure, after coming home one night with a red, irritated work-hardened face, my father had sternly told her that from now on, onions were to be included in her beef stroganoff, despite the crushing effect that they obviously had on her.

This cross section of my parent’s prisonous marriage illustrates the carpet of eggshells that stretched from wall to wall to wall in my house growing up. It’s a reflection of the imbalance of power that existed between the heads of our household. So, obviously the imbalance between parents and kids were going to be exponentially worse. Nothing unlike every other household, I’m sure, but it was enough to send me trailing behind my sister like a tadpole Marine, diving behind bushes to avoid being spotted as I followed my sister to this brave new world she called school.

I never made it more than a few yards up the street before my mother scooped me up and brought me home, but at that young age it was apparent… I wanted the fuck out. I was thirsty to experience a life more than dirty diapers and daytime television. When I started kindergarten, my world exploded, becoming that much bigger. By the time I was in second grade my parents let me play at the playground behind Saint Michael’s church, ten blocks away. By the time fifth grade hit I was allowed all the way to the Dairy Queen on South Broad Street… on my bike! I was branching out. Already, I could tell I’d be going places. Soon I’d be allowed to cross over the furious traffic of Route 224, and then there’d be no stopping me.

Once I was driving, I could leave the city and someday maybe even the state. I was still putting playing cards in the spokes of my bike tires to make it sound like a motorcycle, and already I was daydreaming of being able to drive all the way to the beach on Lake Erie, by myself, whenever I wanted. I longed to stare off nostalgically into the water like the unsung hero of some movie or music video. Hands in the pockets of a worn leather coat, somber look on a rigid, stone stubbly face, gazing out over a lake and contemplating something that, at least from the outside, appeared to be deep and meaningful… that’s what adulthood looked like to me from the inexperienced age of ten.

The first movie I was allowed to see in a theatre by myself was Return of the Jedi. My dad made a big deal out of it as he dropped me off at the mall. Like this was a test and he might be there at any time, sitting behind me anywhere in the theatre to see if I was behaving myself. Of course now I see that he just had something he needed to do; and that I was probably very easily fooled as a child – but either way it was a milestone for me. For the first time in my life I was allowed to spread my wings as if I were an adult. Finally I was alone in public without supervision. It was a matinée showing and the theatre was relatively empty. So I stretched my arms around both seats beside me, and draped my legs over the ones in front, like a preteen peacock spreading its first plumes of freedom.

Most of my daydreams in high school began with my whole family taking a trip to Cuba and leaving me at home to watch the place for two weeks. I’d escape the harsh structure of third period Calculus by drifting off into the boundless uncertainty of what I’d do given that blessed opportunity. True story, two weeks was all I wanted, that was paradise to me. As I grew through my teenage years, I longed to be of the age where I could finally rent my own apartment with my own furniture, my own plates and my own bags of junk food in the kitchen. I would watch the movies that I wanted, and keep the thermostat wherever I felt it should be. I would leave dishes in the sink for weeks at a time if I didn’t feel like doing them. And I would come home each night from a brutal shift at the factory and sit by myself in silence until the next workday. No guests to entertain who used my house only as an escape from their own. Nobody to ask for permission, and nobody to hijack my time and attention so they can talk about themselves or complain about their day. I was not concerned with finding a wife to carry my children, or children to carry on my name. From the first innocent days of youth, I was sure I’d be infinitely happier with nobody watching over me, no one to please, no rules or limits, and no one to punish me.

All of my life, all I’ve ever wanted was to be left alone.