Bruise colored sky, like the bruises on his arms. Purples, yellows, greens. The seventy mile an hour morning rush flies past, separated from his head by eighteen inches of concrete, rebar, and asphalt. It's hot and he's sweating, but he's freezing and shivering. Can't sit still. Can't move. He's lying in a concrete trough, part of a drainage system. Primer-green, rusting I-beams inches from his face. Pebbles and grit, bits of eroded cement stick to the skin of his arms.
He was in third grade, in California. He had just moved from New York, entered in the middle of the school year. He was the Student of the Week, because he was the only student who hadn't held that honor, which meant he had to write an autobiography and read it in front of the class. He stood up. He said that this was the seventh school he had attended, one for only one day. The teacher stopped him. She asked why he had been to so many schools? Was his father in the military? And he shook his head and said, "We just moved a lot. I don't know." The teacher slowed, saddened, politely asked him to continue. The students stared at him. He wanted to run out of the room.
Why was he remembering this now? Weird how the mind works.
It took all his strength, but he managed to sit up. He looked at his clothes. Filthy. How long had they been on? Where did they come from? The Nike running shoes? Where did they come from? He couldn't recall purchasing any of this. Did he steal them? Where they always his? When was the last time he had taken a shower or slept in a bed? Days? Weeks? Months?
In the biography he said he wanted to go into the army, and then be a chef like his father. Why did he say the army? Then, in the seventh grade, career day. He was back in New York now. Someone from the University of Buffalo was there talking to the class. The speaker asked the kids what job they wanted to have. It went around the room. Most of the kids said engineer, so when it came to him he said engineer. He didn't even know what an engineer was or what one did. Did he ever know who he was or what he wanted to do?
He wanted to leave, but where to go? There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. Everything was gone. No family, no friends, no job, no life. Nothing. He had shoved it all away. The only thing that remained was an insatiable hole in the middle of his stomach that said, "There's always something. Get some more. You'll find a way, and everything will be fine." But it never was fine. Maybe for an hour or two, until the next feeding time came around, and the panic came back.
Who makes an eight year old write their life story? What kind of person? They haven't lived enough. They have been acted upon by life. It's not like they are the masters of their destiny. They plod along, doing what they are told. They are products of their circumstances.
He starts to sneeze, can't stop, feels the tickle in the back of his throat. His gag reflex triggers and he leans over and vomits. The only thing that comes up is sour, green-yellow bile. Nothing else in his stomach. He watches it roll down the cement embankment. A river of pain. He wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt.
He wants to do something, anything, else. He wants to be a writer, not a chef or a soldier. He had the idea of being a writer since the sixth grade, actually wrote a story. He wrote another story when he was twenty. He didn't write again until he was thirty-four, when he tried to start a real autobiography. He got the opening paragraph down. It went something like this:
I was born on the West Side of Buffalo, New York to two seventeen year old kids. My father left when I was four. That made me a three time loser before kindergarten. So much disillusion at such an early age primes you for death or the arts. You are destine to become a statistic. You are likely to die violently, at your own hand or someone else's. You will live in poverty, no direction, on government assistance. Drugs and alcohol will be your coping skills, the respite from your miserable existence. Unless you find a creative outlet for all that pain.
And then he stopped.
He looked around. Concrete, metal, rust, nothing soft or kind. Nothing warm. He shivered as sweat poured down his back. His bowels could give loose at any moment, and he wouldn't be able to stop them. Not the first time he shit himself.
He could die, he thought. But where? How? The idea comforted him. There is a solution, like they say at the meetings. Get out of this. Leave all this suffering and misery for someone else. How long had this been going on? Eight years? Ten? Time to move on, one way or the other. Can't take it. The lies, the cheating, the alienation from everything and everyone he had ever loved. His daughter. Where was she? Would she be glad to be rid of him, or would she miss him? Is it too late? Could it be turned around?
His father used to tell him he was going to wake up under a bridge if he didn't change his ways. And then one morning he did.
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