So recently a very good friend of mine (Karen) mentioned to the group of gay friends that I hang with most "that she was concerned for me as to what would happen to me in the event of something serious happening to me. Why?, because I am perpetually single.
I don't like being single its not something I would have thought my life would be. I honestly thought that by now I would be in a relationship with a guy that loved me as much as I loved him. I have never not looked for love but admittedly should it have presented itself to me I would in the past have not pursued it either. There is a really long story to this and since this is MY blog I am gonna tell it.
My life has been something that I would not have wished to live as it has been lived. At a very young age I realized I was not interested in girls. When all the other kids were talking about Susie in the school yard I was looking at the guy talking about it and wondering more about him than Susie. I was also the last boy in a family of five kids with one younger sister. I was growing older with no male influences except my father who had an extremely stressful job and his stress release was to work his ass off on mundane projects around the house and the way to involve his youngest boy was to have me clean up after him or hold the nail while he hammered or hold the 4 foot chisel while he swung at it with a 20lb sledge hammer. He was not sadistic in any way or shape I was the last boy at home and the other two had paid their dues to the family and building with dad and up and moved out. I was left with two sister and my mom mostly and what this gave me most was a formal understanding of how to cook and how to clean and how to cry for what I wanted most.
This family is also staunch leftist Christian non-denominational. So staunch that going to the local pool hall to play stand up video games was considered a sin. But pretending to be sick on a Sunday evening during the Stanley Cup play off was not. Another taboo was having too much to do with young guys my own age unless they were kids I had grown up with or went to church with. Meeting an new friend would meet with much scrutiny or trepidation as to who this young guy was. Funny though one of my best friends growing up was a tom boy named Joyce. To this day we are friends and she was the only girl I had anything to do with growing up. Its no wonder either considering for a long time growing up if I got hurt she was involved or was the instigator of the stupid idea that would get one of us hurt. But she was my friend and I would have held that walnut any day while she took a swing at it with the dull hatchet ( thats a very long story too LOL).
Any way with all these variables I was not developing as a young man, No matter what I always seemed to be shirked off into feminine type rolls or activities that would see me involved mostly with things the women folk in the church or on the farm would be doing, simply because of my age and fat boy stature. Yes I was a fat kid.
Most of my grade school years I was a fat boy. It was grueling being the last kid picked for games in school gym class. Being the only one walking home when all the other kids went home in groups. Being berated by older boys or boys my own age cause I was the fat kid. It was really tough being fat and not having much support at home did not help. My father never wanted me to fight battles but to talk my way out of them or to run away and if that did not work he would talk to the father of the kid. We lived in a small town there was one employer in the winter and he was management and most of the other fathers were workers so dad had some push with male conversation about leaving his sissy kid alone. Which was never good for me the next day as it always made the kid in question mad as hell. I remember the most memorable occasion where I asked my dad to back off, he didn't. The very next day some of the older boys ganged up on me and started kicking me in the back so hard that I lost my footing. While lying on the ground in line to go back into school at recess they continued to kick me in the back. I layed on the cold ground under the watchful eye of the then vice principal as he watched the boys put the boots to me, kicking me in the back. The bell rang for us to go in they stopped went back into the building and I continued to lay there listening to the vice principal "Cramp get your lazy ass of the ground or I will tell your parents you are too much trouble to have at school".
I got up went into class, sat gingerly in my desk for the rest of the day, walked my sister home from school and never told a soul. I went about my tasks and evening chores knowing if I told my dad I would get a way worse beating the next day. What really happened late that night and next morning committed to my parents that I had been attacked.
I started pissing blood, I had had my kidney bruised so bad by the relentless pounding of the older boys that they were full of blood. This is what the fat kid put up with in school, my entire grade school years were like this. But to finish that story I stayed home that day and the next. My sister came home from school to tell me that if I did not return the next day the boys who had kicked me would all be receiving the strap and suspensions for one week. I look up from my bed with begging in my eyes for the very first time I asked my mom if she though I should go to school the next day. I needed at that moment, I needed her to protect me and to give me permission to get my druthers at the hands of the school penal system. With a twinkle in her eyes she looked down and me and said "not a chance".
The rest of the school year the guys left me alone but I sure wish they could have got the strap. But such is the life of the fat kid growing up in the 70's.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
When is enough, enough?
Not just a post but a question to all those who follow me. When is enough, enough? When do we stop giving to those who only take and never return in kind or in any kind for that matter the gifts you offer them. I am not talking celebratory gifts like birthdays and weddings where once in a while you go way over board for whatever reason and give extremely generously. (by the way people expecting re-gift visa vi your exuberant spending is wrong on all fronts). I am talking things like patience, going out of your way to do a favor you were asked to preform and against your better judgement or based on your friendship to that person, you did it as a "favor". When does one have the right or balls if you will to say no because you the person in question feel you have done enough for this individual? Is there a guideline to follow, is there an agenda somewhere that lists the check list of "do's and don'ts".
As I get older I find my patience for stupidity, arrogance and expectations of what should be right for all to be lacking at best. I find myself angered often by stupid ill thought out comments by juvenile minds in the bodies of adults or ridiculous self center actions. At times I grieve for my younger years of frivolity actions and precarious activities where though i was to be held responsible for those actions they were nonetheless my actions and it was an exciting time. I guess I know how my mentors felt when they observed me and asked the same question "When is enough, enough?
As I get older I find my patience for stupidity, arrogance and expectations of what should be right for all to be lacking at best. I find myself angered often by stupid ill thought out comments by juvenile minds in the bodies of adults or ridiculous self center actions. At times I grieve for my younger years of frivolity actions and precarious activities where though i was to be held responsible for those actions they were nonetheless my actions and it was an exciting time. I guess I know how my mentors felt when they observed me and asked the same question "When is enough, enough?
suicide
It was the summer of 1985 I had a decent job working in a kitchen of a fine dining restaurant at the corner of College and University in the bottom of what was then the Hydro building. It was called Erl’s Court and for all intensive purposes it was a good job. I was liked by Chef Freddie and had a good position as the cold prep and dessert cook. All seemed well to the untrained eye.
I got up every morning at 4 am got on the all night street car on Gerrard Street and headed into work. Thank God it was one car all the way to work. Our days started at 6am and the trek that early took very little time but getting up so early allowed me to prep with a jigger of vodka and a little breakfast.
It was prior to my win of 649. Life was boring for me. I had no friends outside work save a cheating girlfriend who had gotten pregnant by a mutual friend of ours and I found this out the day I asked her to marry me. If anyone really knows me they will know I do not have the ability to have children so there was no way the child was mine. When it was born that was solidified as there is no Black genealogical history in my family and the child was definitely black or mulato in this case.
So there I am lonely, drinking Vodka to wake up in the morning, my girlfriend is gone I have not decided on my level of homosexuality and do to her indiscretion most of our mutual friends had sided with her.
I got home from work at the time I usually did, approximately 11pm. Cause after a day on the line at Erl’s it was common place to pull up a bar stool at DJ’s Tavern as the restaurant owned the bar and as revered employees and cooks we did not have to pay for our libations. We would sit there from about 3pm to 10pm or whenever the Chef left and then go, our merry way and most of the time it was an inebriated merry way.
I would get home as usual clean up the interesting little piles of half pieces of buttered bread that the lady I was living with would place in various places around the house in hopes of remembering and consuming them later in the day. She was a lovely older lady but forgetful. She loved her little house we lived in but I was the last ditch effort to keep her in that home. She could not live alone she was way to forgetful but the truth is I was never home I was always at work or out at the pub so my presence was futile but it afforded me great rent and a classic 30’s style home to live in. Besides it also gave me access to an unlimited supply of Demerol she took for pain.
Arriving home I clean up the bread and the dishes from the day snuck up to her room and took her bottle of Demerol out of the bathroom vanity and got a full bottle of vodka from my room and settled down to watch some TV and end my miserable existence. At this point in my life I was worth nothing more than a drinking buddy and though I loved my job I hated myself and for me at this point death was an acceptable exit.
It’s amazing what you can watch on cable in the middle of the night. So I turned to my favorite station for the movie of the evening and proceeded to take approximately 40 Demerol and wash them back with a couple of swigs of Polar Ice. The movie started off slow but I do believe it was called the Morning After.
I did not have to watch too long to realize the movie was about a teenager taking his own life in a vehicle suicide and what the parents and family would have to go through because of this tragic end to a very young life. I watched intently in a stupor of induced sleep from the drugs and heartburn from the Vodka.
I had a waking dream of my mother’s face looking down into my coffin and her tears of pain. That was enough for me to take the few steps to the kitchen grab the milk out of the fridge and drink as much as I could and then the vinegar off the counter that the elder member of our house used to clean everything and down about a liter or so. The nature of spoilage took over.
Vinegar and milk do not mix well and within minutes I was hurling into the kitchen sink. I was cognizant enough to plug the sink so that when I was finished I could count the amount of capsules that came up. I was violently ill, wrenching bile and leftover alcohol from the day’s events and a few Doritos I had consumed at the bar. When I had finished or so it seemed I started to count capsules. Considering my inebriation I was impressed later on that I was intelligent enough to remember to count the capsules.
1-2-3….31-32-33-34 and that’s all I could find. I counted them going in and I was 6 Demerol short. Six had been absorbed into my body. This was evident as I was having a lot of problems staying upright. I would lapse in and out of consciousness and I knew I had to get to a hospital.
I called a taxi, ambulances cost too much and East York Hospital is just up the street. I tucked the bottle in the pocket of my jacked and headed to the door but I knew if I fell asleep I would surely be dead so I took a tack out of the bulletin board and held it in my hand so that when I drifted off I would squeeze tight and the pain would wake me up enough to make my body jolt to some semblance of drunken alertness.
I gave the cabbie $20.00 and told him to get me to East York Hospital and fast that I was having an allergic reaction and there was no time to call an ambulance. The fare would usually have been about $6.00 but I hope to instill in him urgency as my life now hung in the balance of his ability to drive.
We made it to the hospital in break neck speed. I walked into the emergency entrance slammed the bottle down in front of the duty nurse and said “I have decided I don’t want to die” and I collapsed in front of the desk.
The rest is blurry I don’t remember much of it but I do remember the tube for charcoal, I do remember the tubes and being covered in my own excrement and vomit from my body convulsing and vacating. I also remember waking up and looking at my hand and seeing the tack was embedded in my hand and showing that to the doctor. I lapsed back into incoherent though an or sleep I guess where the next thing I could see was my mother standing over me telling me I was an idiot and that it was a much better view than the one that a casket would have allowed.
When I came to the next evening the staff psychiatrist asked me how many I had taken and I told him. I told him 40 but had puked out about 34 before I came to the hospital. I told him about my miserable life and the whys for this action and how I had averted a much worse outcome. He just kept saying “Thank God for Television”. He asked was there some family he could call and I told him I thought they had as I had seen my mother there earlier. He assured me it was a dream that no one had been to see me and that there would have been no way for me to communicate with all the tubes attached to my body.
I told him “no this is my failure, my indiscretion and that I would as I had done most of my life face this task alone. I forbade him to tell anyone, I was old enough to fight my own battles”. I did however ask him to call my work and tell them I would be off for a few days and I also called the little old lady I lived with and told her I was staying with friends and that she should contact her daughter to come be with her. Knowing she would forget I called her daughter and told her that I would be out of town for a few days and that she should do what she needed to look after her mother.
For the next several months I gave up drinking and saw a shrink for about one hour a week. He attributed my successful recovery to his help. I attribute it to my moral standards of not wanting to cause my parents or family the pain of burying a child. That is not fair especially when the reason is so selfish and the way is so despicable. In our church we believe it you succeed in your attempt at suicide you will go to hell. That in itself was one thing I could not do to my parents. I will admit had the movie not been on I would not be here to write this.
I am writing all of this in response to a couple of personal experiences with suicide in the past couple of months. One in which one of my very best friends lost her brother to his successful attempt at freeing his life from the unbelievable alterations of depression and the other from an attempted world exit by a friend who believed that it could get no worse than boredom at the hands of sequestering provided at the hands of almost illegal actions of an Insurance company.
In review of my own attempt it was for all the reasons my friends brother succeeded. Depression for the most part had a grip on me aided by the consumption of alcohol and by my fear of showing my inadequacy to my friends and family. I too believed this was an acceptable exit. But the difference is he was receiving help to conquer his demons and there was no way I would stoop to the help of a shirk that would deem me unable to help myself and in my own mind condemn me to ostrasization, something I could never and still cannot handle. It is one of my greatest fears, to not be in control of who I really am.
My other friend decided that after taking lots of pain killers that he should say good bye to someone he felt had pushed him over the edge that his own mind could not handle so I he text him to say good bye. Was it a cry for help, only he can answer that? Was it his saving grace, yes by all means as this person could have the death of an innocent on his hands had he decided not to act on this selfish action. My friend hoped I am sure that this person would be asleep as he dosed himself late into the night. But for some reason he chose to be awake that night and in doing so was able to alert the parents and cohabitants of his home to his plight for social freedom.
In all our cases I find it interesting we all chose the easiest way out. We all chose to deliver ourselves from the evils of life and find a space for ourselves in eternal damnation as our lives had not offered us enough of that already. I was in control of my own mind, as was my young friend who chose pills on a lonely dark night. The brother of my other friend chose the swiftness of a train right outside the entrance the hospital where he was to be receiving much needed care and coaching to alleviate his feelings of pain anguish and stress.
Even though my life now in this moment is horrible, I am stuck in a fantasy of what ifs and if onlys and find now relevant exit that could help me see a higher opportunity for myself. Thankfully now I have a support network of friends, some who cared deeply and some who believe in tough love and to offer as negative a response as possible every time I solicit advice. They depress me but not enough to push me over a proverbial edge but just enough to make me realize I have a good life and how insignificant their opinions are and just how worse off they are then me. It’s rejuvenating actually to speak to them and see how comical their responses will be.
I have learned there is no easy way out. There is certainly no painless way out and even though depression sits on my shoulders most days I still draw breathe every morning. I own a shitty car that, allows me to escape to nature and go hug a tree if I need to (it’s a long story, I will tell that one some other time) and that all I need to do sometimes is retreat to that moment when I was bent over a sink looking into a pool of vomit to remember that there are better moments in life. That not seeking out the moments of passion and not giving ourselves the option to and permission be depressed for the moment is our failing. I am not a financial success but I am a successful listener and shoulder bearer to all who need. I have the energy to persevere or to look intently at what I am and how to collectively create for myself an exit strategy that does not involve the death of the person but certainly does involve the death of an ideal or stagnant movement.
I believe in my own reality especially if it means success for me or preservation of who I am in my soul, my indiscretions of the past are just that. I am happy and sad to say that the experiences of friends in the recent past have allowed me to review and acknowledge my life as a viable acceptable existence. I acknowledge that I will have struggle but I also acknowledge there is never an acceptable easy way out.
I got up every morning at 4 am got on the all night street car on Gerrard Street and headed into work. Thank God it was one car all the way to work. Our days started at 6am and the trek that early took very little time but getting up so early allowed me to prep with a jigger of vodka and a little breakfast.
It was prior to my win of 649. Life was boring for me. I had no friends outside work save a cheating girlfriend who had gotten pregnant by a mutual friend of ours and I found this out the day I asked her to marry me. If anyone really knows me they will know I do not have the ability to have children so there was no way the child was mine. When it was born that was solidified as there is no Black genealogical history in my family and the child was definitely black or mulato in this case.
So there I am lonely, drinking Vodka to wake up in the morning, my girlfriend is gone I have not decided on my level of homosexuality and do to her indiscretion most of our mutual friends had sided with her.
I got home from work at the time I usually did, approximately 11pm. Cause after a day on the line at Erl’s it was common place to pull up a bar stool at DJ’s Tavern as the restaurant owned the bar and as revered employees and cooks we did not have to pay for our libations. We would sit there from about 3pm to 10pm or whenever the Chef left and then go, our merry way and most of the time it was an inebriated merry way.
I would get home as usual clean up the interesting little piles of half pieces of buttered bread that the lady I was living with would place in various places around the house in hopes of remembering and consuming them later in the day. She was a lovely older lady but forgetful. She loved her little house we lived in but I was the last ditch effort to keep her in that home. She could not live alone she was way to forgetful but the truth is I was never home I was always at work or out at the pub so my presence was futile but it afforded me great rent and a classic 30’s style home to live in. Besides it also gave me access to an unlimited supply of Demerol she took for pain.
Arriving home I clean up the bread and the dishes from the day snuck up to her room and took her bottle of Demerol out of the bathroom vanity and got a full bottle of vodka from my room and settled down to watch some TV and end my miserable existence. At this point in my life I was worth nothing more than a drinking buddy and though I loved my job I hated myself and for me at this point death was an acceptable exit.
It’s amazing what you can watch on cable in the middle of the night. So I turned to my favorite station for the movie of the evening and proceeded to take approximately 40 Demerol and wash them back with a couple of swigs of Polar Ice. The movie started off slow but I do believe it was called the Morning After.
I did not have to watch too long to realize the movie was about a teenager taking his own life in a vehicle suicide and what the parents and family would have to go through because of this tragic end to a very young life. I watched intently in a stupor of induced sleep from the drugs and heartburn from the Vodka.
I had a waking dream of my mother’s face looking down into my coffin and her tears of pain. That was enough for me to take the few steps to the kitchen grab the milk out of the fridge and drink as much as I could and then the vinegar off the counter that the elder member of our house used to clean everything and down about a liter or so. The nature of spoilage took over.
Vinegar and milk do not mix well and within minutes I was hurling into the kitchen sink. I was cognizant enough to plug the sink so that when I was finished I could count the amount of capsules that came up. I was violently ill, wrenching bile and leftover alcohol from the day’s events and a few Doritos I had consumed at the bar. When I had finished or so it seemed I started to count capsules. Considering my inebriation I was impressed later on that I was intelligent enough to remember to count the capsules.
1-2-3….31-32-33-34 and that’s all I could find. I counted them going in and I was 6 Demerol short. Six had been absorbed into my body. This was evident as I was having a lot of problems staying upright. I would lapse in and out of consciousness and I knew I had to get to a hospital.
I called a taxi, ambulances cost too much and East York Hospital is just up the street. I tucked the bottle in the pocket of my jacked and headed to the door but I knew if I fell asleep I would surely be dead so I took a tack out of the bulletin board and held it in my hand so that when I drifted off I would squeeze tight and the pain would wake me up enough to make my body jolt to some semblance of drunken alertness.
I gave the cabbie $20.00 and told him to get me to East York Hospital and fast that I was having an allergic reaction and there was no time to call an ambulance. The fare would usually have been about $6.00 but I hope to instill in him urgency as my life now hung in the balance of his ability to drive.
We made it to the hospital in break neck speed. I walked into the emergency entrance slammed the bottle down in front of the duty nurse and said “I have decided I don’t want to die” and I collapsed in front of the desk.
The rest is blurry I don’t remember much of it but I do remember the tube for charcoal, I do remember the tubes and being covered in my own excrement and vomit from my body convulsing and vacating. I also remember waking up and looking at my hand and seeing the tack was embedded in my hand and showing that to the doctor. I lapsed back into incoherent though an or sleep I guess where the next thing I could see was my mother standing over me telling me I was an idiot and that it was a much better view than the one that a casket would have allowed.
When I came to the next evening the staff psychiatrist asked me how many I had taken and I told him. I told him 40 but had puked out about 34 before I came to the hospital. I told him about my miserable life and the whys for this action and how I had averted a much worse outcome. He just kept saying “Thank God for Television”. He asked was there some family he could call and I told him I thought they had as I had seen my mother there earlier. He assured me it was a dream that no one had been to see me and that there would have been no way for me to communicate with all the tubes attached to my body.
I told him “no this is my failure, my indiscretion and that I would as I had done most of my life face this task alone. I forbade him to tell anyone, I was old enough to fight my own battles”. I did however ask him to call my work and tell them I would be off for a few days and I also called the little old lady I lived with and told her I was staying with friends and that she should contact her daughter to come be with her. Knowing she would forget I called her daughter and told her that I would be out of town for a few days and that she should do what she needed to look after her mother.
For the next several months I gave up drinking and saw a shrink for about one hour a week. He attributed my successful recovery to his help. I attribute it to my moral standards of not wanting to cause my parents or family the pain of burying a child. That is not fair especially when the reason is so selfish and the way is so despicable. In our church we believe it you succeed in your attempt at suicide you will go to hell. That in itself was one thing I could not do to my parents. I will admit had the movie not been on I would not be here to write this.
I am writing all of this in response to a couple of personal experiences with suicide in the past couple of months. One in which one of my very best friends lost her brother to his successful attempt at freeing his life from the unbelievable alterations of depression and the other from an attempted world exit by a friend who believed that it could get no worse than boredom at the hands of sequestering provided at the hands of almost illegal actions of an Insurance company.
In review of my own attempt it was for all the reasons my friends brother succeeded. Depression for the most part had a grip on me aided by the consumption of alcohol and by my fear of showing my inadequacy to my friends and family. I too believed this was an acceptable exit. But the difference is he was receiving help to conquer his demons and there was no way I would stoop to the help of a shirk that would deem me unable to help myself and in my own mind condemn me to ostrasization, something I could never and still cannot handle. It is one of my greatest fears, to not be in control of who I really am.
My other friend decided that after taking lots of pain killers that he should say good bye to someone he felt had pushed him over the edge that his own mind could not handle so I he text him to say good bye. Was it a cry for help, only he can answer that? Was it his saving grace, yes by all means as this person could have the death of an innocent on his hands had he decided not to act on this selfish action. My friend hoped I am sure that this person would be asleep as he dosed himself late into the night. But for some reason he chose to be awake that night and in doing so was able to alert the parents and cohabitants of his home to his plight for social freedom.
In all our cases I find it interesting we all chose the easiest way out. We all chose to deliver ourselves from the evils of life and find a space for ourselves in eternal damnation as our lives had not offered us enough of that already. I was in control of my own mind, as was my young friend who chose pills on a lonely dark night. The brother of my other friend chose the swiftness of a train right outside the entrance the hospital where he was to be receiving much needed care and coaching to alleviate his feelings of pain anguish and stress.
Even though my life now in this moment is horrible, I am stuck in a fantasy of what ifs and if onlys and find now relevant exit that could help me see a higher opportunity for myself. Thankfully now I have a support network of friends, some who cared deeply and some who believe in tough love and to offer as negative a response as possible every time I solicit advice. They depress me but not enough to push me over a proverbial edge but just enough to make me realize I have a good life and how insignificant their opinions are and just how worse off they are then me. It’s rejuvenating actually to speak to them and see how comical their responses will be.
I have learned there is no easy way out. There is certainly no painless way out and even though depression sits on my shoulders most days I still draw breathe every morning. I own a shitty car that, allows me to escape to nature and go hug a tree if I need to (it’s a long story, I will tell that one some other time) and that all I need to do sometimes is retreat to that moment when I was bent over a sink looking into a pool of vomit to remember that there are better moments in life. That not seeking out the moments of passion and not giving ourselves the option to and permission be depressed for the moment is our failing. I am not a financial success but I am a successful listener and shoulder bearer to all who need. I have the energy to persevere or to look intently at what I am and how to collectively create for myself an exit strategy that does not involve the death of the person but certainly does involve the death of an ideal or stagnant movement.
I believe in my own reality especially if it means success for me or preservation of who I am in my soul, my indiscretions of the past are just that. I am happy and sad to say that the experiences of friends in the recent past have allowed me to review and acknowledge my life as a viable acceptable existence. I acknowledge that I will have struggle but I also acknowledge there is never an acceptable easy way out.
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