—Age six, outside the McDonald’s on Industrial Boulevard.
Circa 1990, with my legs swinging as I sit on the cracked vinyl backseat of a police cruiser licking blood from my buckteeth. Mom screamed for me to bite down while he wrestled handcuffs onto her pinned wrists. She’s my only known world, so why would I ever second-guess what she tells me? When the world screams your name, pleads in fear, how can you disobey?
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Try to synthesize an answer: starting with the taste of this moment, draw from countless uncanny encounters with the other woman who sometimes wears the face of your only known world, in order to learn the subtleties of her dialect.
—Age seven, Jane Frazier Village housing projects.
The police killed our neighbor overnight. The one who gave his daughter a Pete Rose card in a plastic case that I ask to see every time I’m over there. It doesn’t really matter neither one of us knows who the hell Pete Rose is. No, the source of the card’s aura of significance lies in a weight between the fingers I currently lack the vocabulary to name because “father” isn’t a word I’ve used for a while and “legacy” isn’t a word I have any reason to know. This morning there’s a dark splotch on First Ave. Half the neighbors whisper “drugs,” which for another year or so will only loom as an abstract threat like acid rain. The other half whisper “mentally ill,” and these are words with definite existence in my vocabulary. I try to decode these adult insinuations to find the connection between mental illness and being shot, so I can keep someone I love away from that line.
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For further consideration: whose responsibility is it to wash aftermath away? Those who shed blood, those who have lost it in one way or another, or do we simply wait for a good rain?
—Age eight, walking home from South Penn Elementary.
This high schooler with a big-ass head named Boogie charges up and flings a fifth grader to the sidewalk. Boogie transcends the playground tussles I’ve seen when he kicks the kid in the face, and keeps on kicking. It’s a lesson in sound: squeals wrapped around an impact so much softer than what gets crafted for T.V., so at odds with the damage done. A very vivid damage, its hue, intensity, and saturation raising panic perfectly. This is a lesson in distance too, as measured in streets and in age. It’s only three blocks between the school and our efficiency, and Boogie seems so much older, so far outside the realm of my third-grade life, but here he is stomping through to teach me there’s no such thing as safe distances. Meanwhile inside the school we’re only starting multiplication tables.
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Supplement with experiential learning: soon, my own damage drawn by the genetic legacy of an absent father, ambiguous skin, the texture of my hair; later, the way I dress, who my friends are.
—Age ten, Sacred Heart Hospital.
Mom’s going to stay on the fourth floor again, where I’m only allowed to see her for fifteen minutes a day in the ultra-lavender visiting area. The hallways beyond the nurse’s station are a mysterious crucible into which the molten paranoia of her “episodes” gets poured, out of which she’ll walk remolded. Grandma is here this time because we caught it early. I did. I made the call, quiet and oh-so secretly, because I know by now that other dialect. When orderlies arrive in the ER with their practiced calm to escort her upstairs she leaves a pool of red on the sheet where she’d been laying. Grandma throws the top sheet quicker than I thought she could move. I ask why Mom’s bleeding and I’m told boys don’t need to know about those things.
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A guiding question for long-term research: How can we foster a learning environment in which the limits of what needs to be known are informed by the questions themselves?
—Age eleven, LaVale, MD.
A neighbor tosses a brick at a cat in the bushes. A hesitant, light toss, but enough. Violence has a density all its own that once set in motion will crash down independent of variables like youth and peer pressure. Everyone egged him on. Everyone. Bawling, I say he’s going to Hell, by which I really mean I’ll see him there. This is the second time in a single year an animal has died from my carelessness; I’ve learned too late and at too high a cost what I wish across years I’d intuited on a visceral enough level to keep my damn mouth shut–how fragile the lives around us are. How lasting our reckless moments can become.
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Translate this knowledge into practice: trap every spider, allow every bee to crawl what skin it may, attend to the ground and adjust your tread accordingly. Hope that through their various ways of seeing other beings discern my commitment to cause no further harm.
—Age sixteen, Allegany High School.
This second-stringer in art class likes to laugh when his friends call me faggot. It’s my favorite class, aside from not a day going by without the pill-addicted teacher finding a way to criticize me or instigate some petty argument. This week we’re doing scratchboards. Holding the benchwarmer’s attention, I etch a ticklish red line along my arm that says: can you do worse? At the time, causing the look on his face feels like power, to be able to perform an action so appalling and incomprehensible to someone with his sense of humor. The redheaded teaching intern from the local college comes over, and she quietly, cryptically says she understands. She sneaks me out to wash off before the actual teacher notices.
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Evidence of learning: to this day the raised lines on both forearms still catch a little shine in the right light to remind me of ways I’ve learned to heal.
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Pedagogical note: empathy goes a long fucking way.
—Age thirty, Queen City Towers.
They find my cousin face down in a blackened pool on the tile, knocked from his wheelchair, blunt force to the back of his head. The police won’t investigate. “Drugs” the neighbors never have stopped whispering. I hold my stepdad’s hand the entire day of the funeral to keep him upright because he’s walking on bandages instead of a wheelchair he can’t afford. The diabetic foot care appointment he’s just had will claim both legs up to the knee in a year’s time from infections. He came back from that appointment pissed, in his standing days a thing to behold, talking about how that got-damn doctor cut him without any warning or anesthetic. When I tell my mother-in-law, a CNA, she says this particular podiatrist is notorious in the local nursing homes, tales of sudden scalpels and torn-off nails, no warnings, no anesthetic, no reason. He’s a sadist with the face of a near-sighted dinner roll whose life must be pretty comfortable in this Appalachian town stripped by endless recession, where doctors are akin to aristocracy.
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For continuous review: consider what gets taken and from whom.
—Age thirty-five, Lawrence, Kansas.
What might have been. I don’t see this myself but I ‘ve lost it too in my way. An idea so profound it snapped me out of a deep, lingering depression when spoken aloud–so terrifying, but beautiful, and freeing. All those wondrous potentials, my eagerness to be humbled by countless moments of connection, smiles, discoveries, oh arguments and worries too I have no doubt, but only blood, in the end, I’m told.
—Age thirty-seven, Jane Frazier Village housing projects.
In her seventies now, Mom is living two blocks from where I chewed on that cop, one block from where his associates turned Pete Rose into inheritance, from where Boogie fractured facial bones with his off-brand sneakers. She tells me on the phone how a woman got stabbed the other day, and how on her own way to the library she walked through a dark splotch on the sidewalk, only realizing later what it was.
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Summary of findings: When I hear this, I’m heading into the final year of a PhD and life is a dizziness of lessons–those swallowed, carved, and otherwise absorbed long before dreaming possible what I’ve almost finished doing, and those I’ve attended, planned, taught, and graded. They swirl together in a tempest of double-sided impostor syndrome. All these years later, and still my mother steps in the spill of violence to pick up this month’s stack of the self-help books that she transcribes into spiral-bound notebooks.
o
And what can I do about it?
All my study, important I’m told and often find myself able to believe, and I’ve yet to locate the lesson that will place under her feet the flowering terrain she deserves, a theory that will carry her on innocent, barefooted, and fearless to a soft, bright reward.
o
So, what good are these dreams?
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How important is the high school dropout to first-generation story I’m trying to write day by day when every weekend she calls from the exact same material reality I left in the past tense on the way here?
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How do I measure any accomplishment when things so far outside my control feel like the most direct, damning personal failures?
With every step forward these questions circulate as regular as blood through this heart that she gifted me. And there, I think, is possibly where I find the central, continuous lesson passed to me by a woman who has survived more than most could ever endure.
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Working thesis: step forward, no matter the terrain.