Off the Deep-End III
I am drowning.
Having spent all eleven years of my life at the shallow end of the kiddie pool, splashing anyone near me with loud, obnoxious, water hadoukens, I am struck by how quiet my struggle is beneath the water’s surface; but struggle I do. I am flailing my arms and legs in futile desperation, receding into the depth of the pool, further and further away from the sun. I curse Baywatch for leaving out the secret to floating, my mother for granting her first born son the freedom to explore, and my own bravery for being foolish and untrained.
The chlorine in the water burns my eyes, and since staring desperately at the surface of the pool does not propel me towards it, I shut them. Now blind, harried, and on the verge of panic, years of useless competition with my brothers comforts me. I know I can hold an inhaled breath for forty-five seconds and have fifteen seconds once I exhale before I need to breathe again.
But time flies when you’re drowning.
Before I know it I have exhaled the last air in my lungs. I struggle with my body.
If you breathe, you die.
I say this to myself repeatedly, matter-of-factly even, but fighting against a reflex designed to keep myself alive is much easier on dry land where there’s nothing separating me from the oxygen.
I say this to myself repeatedly, matter-of-factly even, but fighting against a reflex designed to keep myself alive is much easier on dry land where there’s nothing separating me from the oxygen.
In a strange moment of clarity, my mind falls on the panic I routinely experience playing Sonic the Hedgehog’s Labyrinth Zone level; the music turns ominous and quickens when Sonic is under water too long without having a breath of air; a campy blend of 32-bit sound meshed with the shark in the water, monotoned theme from JAWS.
The clock counts down five mississippis.
Dundun-Dundun…
And the faces of my brothers swim into my mind. My already cemented insecurity has convinced me that when I’m gone I won’t be missed. Mother has four sons after all, there is no shortage of princes in her line of succession.
Dundun-Dundun…
And I have never been to Paris. An American Werewolf untraveled. I will not join the ranks of Hughes, Baker, Baldwin, Gillespie, Fitzgerald, Armstrong, and others like me who have had the good fortune of living la vie en rose.
Dundun-Dundun...
And my soulmate dances in pirouettes, blurred outlines of the perfect woman, alone on the spot where if I weren’t currently dying, we would someday marry. She will go unmet, unkissed, and unknown by me, the boy who has loved her in his mind with all his nascent understanding of the word.
Dundun-Dundun...
And I think about a black spray can I found when I was eight. How I took it to a Brooklyn basement, my home, and spray painted a gigantic “J” onto the wall. I realized, when trying to erase the J, the definition of “fucked” for the first time, and in my fear of the abuse on my young self this vandalism was surely going to lead to, I followed that J with my brother’s name. I was not his keeper. Abel flashes in my mind, then Cain, then God.
I am surely going to hell.
Dundun-Dundun.
Our Father who art in Heaven, I recite fearfully in my head, hallowed be thy name. I don’t know what “hallowed” means, but I know I didn’t spend the majority of my life in Baptist Churches to wind up damned for all eternity over spray-painted technicalities.
I finish the Lord’s prayer, but before I can open my mouth to inhale my final breath, I am unceremoniously grabbed around the midsection from behind. Ignoring the sting of chlorine in my now opened eyes, I look around as best I can, lost in a sea of bubbles.
Disoriented, I shut my eyes once more, vowing to give St. Peter an earful about how Angels go about collecting the Lord’s lambs come their sundown.
Disoriented, I shut my eyes once more, vowing to give St. Peter an earful about how Angels go about collecting the Lord’s lambs come their sundown.
Suddenly, uneventfully, the resistance of the water gives way to the feeling of cool air against the water droplets on my skin; the sun, harsh and bright as it’s ever been, tints the inside of my tightly sealed eyelids blood orange; the deathly silence of Davey Jones’ Locker is replaced with murmurings of conversation, interrupted repeatedly by the loud, raucous laughter of children; I open my eyes and stare up into the face of the hand-in-mouth lifeguard; I am saved.
He swims with me, wrapped in his arm, to the edge of the pool, and supports my back as I climb up the ladder positioned there. He tells me to wait where I am, that he has to write a report about this incident, but he doesn’t have any waterproof paper. I get the joke, but am in no mood to laugh. People are staring and I’m sure I’ve become a healthy shade of purple blushing from all the unwanted attention. When he turns to leave, I sprint from the area as fast as my tired legs allow me to go, ignoring the eyes of the masses around me.
I will never tell anyone this story.
***
I am drowning.
I’m unsure if it’s the fireball whiskey I’ve been steadily consuming for the last hour or the statement just made in regards to me, but my eyes are narrow slits as I stare across the table at one of the people I admire most on earth. He is upset I am still friends with a woman he dated. He accuses me of wanting to sleep with her; of wanting to sleep with a lot of women from his past relationships. When he asks me why I still speak to her, I explain that she and I were roommates for a year after their tryst ended, and in that year a friendship grew. He brushes off my explanation, and to be honest, I don’t blame him. More than anyone, he knows my track record with women. I don’t get to have a defense here. But if I’m being honest, I don’t want to defend myself anyway; because I have already. And after the umpteenth time doing so, I’m convinced something has been lost in translation. I’d bet it’s trust, but I’m not a betting man, so I sit silently while he talks, and I listen.
I’m unsure if it’s the fireball whiskey I’ve been steadily consuming for the last hour or the statement just made in regards to me, but my eyes are narrow slits as I stare across the table at one of the people I admire most on earth. He is upset I am still friends with a woman he dated. He accuses me of wanting to sleep with her; of wanting to sleep with a lot of women from his past relationships. When he asks me why I still speak to her, I explain that she and I were roommates for a year after their tryst ended, and in that year a friendship grew. He brushes off my explanation, and to be honest, I don’t blame him. More than anyone, he knows my track record with women. I don’t get to have a defense here. But if I’m being honest, I don’t want to defend myself anyway; because I have already. And after the umpteenth time doing so, I’m convinced something has been lost in translation. I’d bet it’s trust, but I’m not a betting man, so I sit silently while he talks, and I listen.
“You don’t care, you don’t have any honor,” he says. The words connect in the same way being shoved from behind does, and I fall, head over feet, into the depths of my mind, drowning in my memories.
We are 11 again. Surrounded by “boys being boys,” in our middle school yard. He has just been attacked, and I have stepped between He and the perpetrators. I do not feel brave, but at 11, I never feel brave, only righteous in my understanding of right and wrong. I am teased mercilessly by my friends later on for being the only one to try for understanding of these violent little vagrants who’ve attacked him, but take pride in knowing I wasn’t silent when the pressure was on.
And I am 15 again, blinded in my right eye after He’s punched me over an argument stemming from a video game. An argument I tried to remove myself from before it escalated. I dropout of High School shortly after this moment, and although he and I bury the hatchet within a couple of months, it will be roughly twenty years before I settle the score with my education.
I am 16, front row, center, at my mother’s funeral. I am numb and no tears fall. I stare at her, lifeless in a rented wood grain casket. The funeral is over, everyone but me has left the room. He could not make it to her funeral; the only friend I had that she felt was worth knowing. I am not so young and religious anymore, I do not believe she’s “moved on.” I am alone in a room with a body marveling at how the world hasn’t stopped despite my world ending. I am alone.
And I am all of 33 once more, alone in my thoughts, drowning in whiskey, wondering who decides what honor is. Because the man sitting across from me has more than anybody I’ve ever known, but even he isn’t infallible in my memories, and I clearly am not in his present.
Smells like teen-spirit, I think to myself. Honor does, I mean.
I want to tell him that his honor is not my honor. I don’t have or take issue with anyone speaking to whoever they want; I have had enough friends be amicable with my enemies to know my animosity is not their animosity by default. I have had enough “noble,” “honorable,” people stab me in the back, with a twist for good measure, to realize an Honorable Nobleman’s sword is usually sharper than the daggers carried by the rogues that I’ve taken to sitting next to. Rarely has anyone in my life asked me how I felt about their decisions and the impact those decisions would have on me, and in those rare instances where I was consulted, it has always been as a courtesy, a prelude to an afterthought. In short, the codes espoused by others as doctrine on how to live, fall short in both my mind and heart when my eyes have seen these same codes unfold for each individual differently depending on the circumstance.
I think all of this, but unwilling to take part in a drunken altercation, I remain silent, get up from my chair, and go to the bathroom.
In front of the sink, I splash water on my face repeatedly in hopes of snapping my intoxication. Staring in the mirror, water dripping from the tip of my nose, I am wondering how I can remove myself from the awkward situation I’m in just beyond the bathroom door, when I think about a line a famous rock star once said; I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.
It has been twenty-three years since I was pulled from the water by the hand-in-mouth lifeguard, and what I recall more clearly than anything else that day is the sound of life happening all around me unfazed. There was no panic in the air, no overwhelming fear or dread hanging over the heads of anyone, nothing. And of course, I’m sure someone would mourn me, for some amount of time, somewhere, but that would not have changed me being dead and gone while the world continued onward. Someday, that will be the case for everyone. I leave the bathroom with this new thought in mind hoping to share, but this meeting has devolved into drunken attempts at equilibrium and Irish Exits. The moment passed, but the idea hasn’t.
Today, I live my life by a very simple code:
When stepping off the deep-end, help where you can, because you can, do what you gotta, to do what you wanna, put nothing before yourself, with an understanding that the world is much bigger than you will ever be, live your life the way you want to, and in all things worth doing, baby you gotta commit.
Honor didn’t make the cut.
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