Excerpt 2
Where did I go wrong that my brothers didn’t?
“Didn’t you always push just a little too hard?,” I remember my brother asking me once; “didn’t you give Mom and Dad just a little too hard of a time?”
He didn’t understand! He wasn’t there! After Karl was already moved on from his tutelage at Yale, and was already living in the Big Apple working as an “analyst” in the Financial District and moving his way in precocious leaps and bounds up the corporate ladder—twenty-four and already with a personal assistant to call his own, to make his coffee and to schedule his meetings; twenty-five and already pulling in commissions in multiples of his already quite healthy yearly rate; twenty-seven, already head of his “department,” something to do with digits and numerals and stocks and figures and paper-weights, already with a team of mini Karls working under, reporting to him, but already ready to pick up and move both him and his equivalently Ivy-trained, equivalent mover-and-shaker fiancée to South Korea to spearhead a brand-new post for his firm’s brand-new “East Asian” division—twenty-eight, and the post already deferred at the behest of little Miss Princeton, who despised Seoul as much as was to be expected, as alien as “East Asia” was from the gentlemen’s brandy in the parlor to discuss “business,” women remain at the dining-room table to discuss the gentlemen, colors changing in the fall, eloquently refined world of Darien, Connecticut, in which she was raised, and which confines she never herself deferred holding out hope of returning to when she had children of her own—cut to the present, and Karl’s now, as I’m writing this, in his forties, and his rather lovely young and urban and professional Manhattan sweetheart are now divorced; her dream was realized, even as Karl’s were abandoned over a decade ago in the Far East, and my niece and my nephew are now shipped up to Bridgehampton every other weekend to play croquet and watch the ocean with my brother, their old man… but back then, back when I was still attending university at South Bay’s premier party school (just an hour’s drive, incidentally, south of the Yerba Buena Army base where many years prior, as children, Karl and Patrick, and more diminutive me, apparently used to tramp and play) and back when Karl’s rising star had yet to zenith, Mom and Dad payed for my flight to New York to spend a week with him—hoping he would inspire something latent in his flaky and impudent younger brother, barely pasting muster as a student of the sciences in between his, my, bouts of drinking and marijuana inhalation. “Why did you always have to fight so hard?” he had asked me, over—technically illegal since I was only nineteen, or twenty—martinis at a trendy, rooftop bar overlooking the skyline from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I tried to explain to him—after you left, Karl, and two years later after Pat was gone too—I got the idea for computer science from him; although unlike me, Patrick studied it at the premier institution for higher CS education in the world, Stanford University: set in the dead-center of the Silicon Valley and acting as its academic heart, Stanford was an even shorter drive from Yerba Buena… tauntingly close, in other words, though of course never so far, from my own pot-infested milieu, when I eventually came to study under his shadow… I tried to explain to Karl, with all the asperity the vodka had suffered to give me, that while he was at Yale studying econ and so wasn’t around to bear witness, and while he was moving to New York to take Wall Street and the world by their respective horns—after Patrick had gone to college but before Mom and Dad were officially “empty nesters”—in that interim I called high school—Karl, you don’t understand… then, it was all Hell! The two golden geese had left the roost and Mom, and Dad, they were stuck with the rotten ovum! All of their attentions, their anathemas, were suddenly on me. For suddenly they no longer had anything to distract them.
For instance, they must have been too distracted those past fourteen years—by Karl’s debate tournaments, Patrick’s track meets, Patrick’s hackathons, Karl’s college-app-boosting community service—to notice that their other son Peter, for his part, was “engaged” in nothing more than hours passed after every school day on his tuberous ass in front of the anemiating boobtube—too busy reveling in all the glowing notes sent home from Karl and Pat’s teachers to let themselves get too bummed about the worrying comments bandied about, on the other hand, my own parent-teacher conferences. In first grade, they had recourse in the public school system when I had misbehaved too greatly at Karl and Patrick’s school, Sacred Heart. They had recourse—off the recommendation of a child psychologist they had summoned for me out of arrant desperation—to sending me back a year in school, and in different surroundings, so as to give me an opportunity to be a leader to the younger students of a new classroom; they thought I might develop in this way into a leader. Then, of course, when that plan went rancid—a leader I was not, I stomped my feet as if to say—they had recourse to sending me back. Besides, it was Sacred Heart, and Missionary High, that served as my parents’s recourse of a social life: all the brilliant chums they made, and how impressed all these titans of Des Moines society were by the two young Schutz boys! Never mind the “eccentric” third one! the one with the issues at school, the one who pulled the girl’s hair and peed on the play structure… No, they wouldn’t move him again; they would keep him in place. There would be no more recourses. Things would work themselves out.
Things, alas, never worked themselves out. And by the time I entered Missionary, my parents’s patience had run absolutely thin—right along with their social life, their last good excuse for which had left them to study at Stanford. The parents of my classmates, Mom and Dad could never latch onto in anything like the same way. “Where are all your friends? Why can’t we meet them?” I don’t have them, I thought.
Their restrictions, strictures, were ruthless. Karl and Pat were both allowed relative freedom. But me, my developing years were spent, mostly, in the vise.
To be fair, their abuses were not indiscriminate. Pat was quiet and he kept to himself. At school he was meek and cautious, and as a student, exemplary. Karl, was more outgoing, and even more exemplary. At home they were both prudent, and solicitous. When I would fly off the handle, often at nothing, they would tactfully ignore. They repaired to their rooms and refrained from becoming underfoot as Dad chased me around the halls of our house, me, sliding at every hardwood corner in my socks, him, brandishing a folded up magazine like a hunting knife, like I was a wayward dog, like I was a fly he was chasing, and not a son.
Not, in other words, like I didn’t deserve it. In school I was the scourge of my parents, the cause of no end in suffering. Doubtless the parents of my brother’s old high-school pals—my parents’s own friends—connected as they were in the smalltown Catholic-school ecosystem, heard of my exploits through the grapevine, source of no little embarrassment for lonely Mom and hardworking Dad… Their only solace was that it didn’t reflect poorly on them, it couldn’t! I was one bad egg out of three, two of which were particularly good ones! At home I was imprudent and out-and-out mean. I would scream at the littlest thing. I was constantly grounded—doing poorly in school, acting out at school, in dire need, in other words, of discipline—and constantly at odds with being so. I would accept the discipline they placed upon me, only with a vicious fight. And the fight in me would renew itself at all hours, as if my last defeat hadn’t been enough to convince me yet of the adamantine stuff my parents were built with. Again I would thrash against them and their rules, an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object… The immovable object wins again. The immovable object didn’t even budge, not even when it meant withstanding my treacherous screeds dictated to the woodgrain of their locked-shut door well into the night, meant expressly to disrupt their sleep, meant expressly to wear them down so that they might budge; the next morning, they’d hit my sleeping corpse where I lay with that same door, right where I’d bundled over collapsed after a marathon fillibuster the night before; and where, thus having been woken, I’d commence with my “defendant’s brief” routine all over again… They hadn’t budged, and still, they wouldn’t budge. Dad would get up for work at three AM exhausted from my scream-sessions and still he wouldn’t budge. They refused to negotiate with terrorists.
The onus was on me, to if not get better grades, then to at least start running with a better crowd, to at least stop harassing the teachers, stop getting detentions for being rowdy and for shouting out cruel and unusual jokes during class, at least to start showing some respect for at least some of the school’s (not even that stringent) student conduct policies… the tardy and truancy policies, the drug policies, the dress-code policy, the respective classroom assignment policies… at least turn in some papers, some worksheets, at least study for some tests in at least certain subjects—dealer’s choice! Mom and Dad didn’t care, so long as I at least chose one, or maybe even two, classes in which I could promise to at least make an effort to make an effort. History, maybe? Did I like history? Or maybe math? Yep, I think that if I had dialed in to even one of these various subjects at school, had made an effort to lie low for just one period and avoid offending just one teacher, even such a paltry, solitary bright spot in an otherwise blighted sphere would have been enough to hearten my parents immensely. It would have helped to lighten their load, and my load might’ve been lightened then, too. But just as adamantly as they enforced, I refused! In fact, my brother had only caught the head-end of it. He left off to Yale before it ever got too-too bad. Even still, he remembered it enough to ask me—that evening over martinis at the fancy Brooklyn hotel—why, why did I ever consider all that worth it? Wasn’t it exhausting? Wasn’t I exhausted?
Or maybe—no, more likely—he had been kept abreast of my (what should have been, but weren’t, at least not by any more conventional, more positive interpretation of the word) “developments” by my mother on her weekly phone calls to Karl’s dorm room in Connecticut. I was the talk of the town—of course I was the talk of the household, splintered though it may have now been. Of course I was probably all my mother could bear to talk about—let alone think about, staying up late nights even when I wasn’t breaking down her door, and maybe especially then—with her beloved oldest son. Yes, he had probably heard of what’d transpired in his absence—the weed, the other drugs, the petty theft, the other petty crimes, of all variety of shapes and sizes—only sure thing, was they were petty, rest assured of that… He was probably my mother’s rock in times of need, as her friends grew more distant, as community social-hours hosted by the school grew less appealing to her by the infraction—it was easier for her to stomach staying at home knowing that her “trouble child” was an open topic of conversation, then to attend and have to bear witness to my reputation being spoken about in murmurs and behind shielding hands… and as, as far as these infractions go, my brazenness was growing too: soon I was committing them with increasing frequency, and to increasingly dire consequences—notwithstanding my ever decreasing impunity, notwithstanding an atmosphere at home that was ever increasingly stifling.
Forgive me if I’m speaking imprecisely, for I cannot precisely recall. When did it start, and what exactly did it consist off, all this misbehavior that troubled my parents so? I don’t know. I don’t remember. Part of it is a lack of training. I’m “rusty,” you could say, at calling these adolescent memories to mind because I’m out of practice, and I’m out of practice because I’m not in the habit of deliberately torturing myself with the image of cringe-worthy scenes in the back of my mother’s car, in my father’s hallway, at time-out (with all but a dunce cap) in the corner of Mrs. Zahm’s or Mrs. Johnson’s room or later, when I got older and my teacher’s began to lose patience with even just the presence of me in their classrooms, on the wooden pew outside the principal’s office cum teacher’s lounge—extracted from the neighboring cathedral, of whose diocese my Catholic school was a key component, when it was under construction for a major restoration project (trying to bring the church back to the splendor of its mid-sixties glory days, when it was first built) that had commenced before my brothers were born, and that finally finished when I was in sixth grade—cringe-worthy scenes, that, at the time, I not only felt fully justified in enacting but felt it was nigh imperative to enact—compelled either by of a sense of pride, or pique, or humanitarian rage against (whom I saw as) my captors. I do not find it fulfilling to recollect the image of a young me cornering some poor kid who (I saw as having) had committed some minor (though I saw it as major, at the time) slight against me—and so I don’t recollect it. I do not find it amusing to dwell on a past rife with (what I can now see clearly were) humiliating spectacles of emotional explosion. So I don’t. Incidentally, these days, and indeed, these past ten, fifteen or so years, I only seek to do things that amuse me. Much like a child. The difference is, now, I can fill the hours of my life with amusing things exclusively if I so please—like the shelves of a candy store stocked with things that will rot your teeth exclusively—and I can do so untrammeled, while a child is compelled, by those acting in their rights as legal guardians, to every once in a while spend his or her time doing things he or she would rather not be doing—like going to school, or visiting grandma, and listening to her stories; or (though my parents never made me do it, I’ve heard of such things being done) volunteering at a soup kitchen—and every once in a while, to eat spinach. A child wants only to amuse themselves, too. The job of the guardian is to advise them not to forget to do other things, too. A human being who only eats candy will not receive the proper nutrients they need to survive, and they will die. (Have I mentioned my mother was a dietician?) One can go on and on amusing themselves right into their graves. This is all a long way of saying that, probably by dint of the same hedonistic impulse that fuelled my wildly rocketing excursions into delirium, as a kid, when my mother insisted I study for (she requested the week’s homework schedule in advance from all the teachers, and they for the most part obliged her) social studies quiz she knew I had tomorrow, when I would rather go to sleep, and leave the studying for the birds—or the shuddering slumps I would fall into, from which no one could wake me, when my mother selected the “wrong” movie for us to rent as a family from the video store, against my recommendation, that we rent some different movie (one I clearly found more amusing), and my mother would then, stoically maintaining her poise as I melted into the carpet, right there in front of the fellow patrons of the store, and began to convulse, began lowing like a calf under the hot brand—my mother would then keep her calm, “salutarily neglect” me, paying no mind to my tricks, would then march proudly up to the front counter, her two older sons in tow, and rent the DVD that most amused her (or, more likely, most amused Karl), thank you very much, and the three of them (Dad would only be returning home later in the evening) would wait in the parking lot for me to collect myself; peel myself off the floor, myself stoically paying no mind to the fellow shoppers and the employees of the store who were worried I was under some sort of medical duress, and who ran out to the parking lot to pester my mother, wondering, what?—wondering if she had forgotten (how could she?) her deranged child, or was attempting to pawn him off on a national-chain video-rental company?—and then, later that night, even if, upon my family gathering around the television to watch the movie Mom (the devil take her!) and not me had chosen, I discovered—peering from between the gap of the balusters of the stairs leading from the living room, where the family was at, where the TV was, to my upstairs bedroom, where I had banished myself in protest—I was as a matter of fact amused by her selection, I would go on muttering imprecations, often deadly, sadistic imprecations, directed at my father, for siring me, my brothers, for hoarding his graces, and my mother, for choosing the wrong DVD—even if it turned out I actually liked the movie I was secretly watching from my vantage point above, even still! By dint of the very same childish impulse that once drove me into cataleptic shock, as a kid, every time it was decreed I do anything I decided wasn’t amusing enough—today, I stick my fingers in my ears, so to speak, every time a memory from those days bounces along. Back then, I had not yet learn to restrain, either in violence or immediacy, my reaction to inopportune, un-amusing circumstances. Now, I have at least mastered their violence: when that same childish impulse strikes, I just as immediately indulge—only now the indulgence is nothing so great or as cathartic as a video-rental-store free-for-all tantrum, no, but only the silent and invisible quashing of a memory informing me that I was once capable of such unbridled release. Truly, it has been childish, governed by childish whim, this instantaneous sprint, this spiritual fleeing, I take to in the face of these memories of yore and the nauseous, decidedly physical heat that accompanies them. But even to this day, even in hoping to confront my past—if not to fight, then to face myself head on—the immediacy with which this desire, this desire to always revert to amusement, or to flee from the unamusing, asserts itself, as though it were a reflex as deeply ingrained as the one which triggers my foot when a doctor taps me on the knee—remains as indomitable as ever. It is a constant struggle to sit with the shameful memories of the past. Even in writing them down—I feel as though I am only trying to find another method of running away.
And today, when I rise to face the world, and the world doesn’t deign to amuse me—I run away. Better, I hide. I no longer thrash and batter about and scream and scream and scream into the abyss until my lungs get tired of screaming.
Somewhere along the line, I think I actually convinced myself that these memories never happened—not that they never happened to me necessarily, but simply that, they never happened, not to anyone, ever—and didn’t happen to me only incidentally, following after that more fundamental fact. The stories of my past, I convinced myself to believe, were just that—stories. Fiction! I could sleep easy knowing that dragons and goblins and the monsters under my bed, along with myself, from the ages of three, when memory starts, to, oh, I don’t know, about seventeen—didn’t exist. Didn’t exist, and could not hurt me! If you think about it, it’s quite the ingenious loophole: at any point, any person, no matter their past, can change themselves into, virtually, a whole nother person. This is by all accounts, however, a rather difficult process, and I am notoriously lazy. So I took it upon myself to overleap the whole, persnickety process, of confrontation and trial and hard-earned change, straight into the conceivable world of having been changed, by way of a parallel world in which my past was a fiction, and reality was what it amused me to be—achieving something real, just through an imaginary conduit. I made it an indisputable fact that I had changed, and indeed, it is perfectly conceivable that I could have done so, same as anyone could, and at any time; that my change, however, was founded atop a void—based upon the imaginary premise that I had emerged into this present from a past as substance-less as any character in one of my stories. In fact, while writing The Bellicose Jar, it’s perfectly possible that what I was actually doing was rewriting my own personal history, wrote it in a bid to supplant my own volatile past with my protagonist’s sedate one. In fact—now that I think about it, sedation is the chief operating word here… Sedation’s the name of the game! I emerged, as if from a sedation—a deep sleep meant to transport me, out of one world, into the next… With the consequence, of course, that the life I lead now must be the life of the man under anesthesia!