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5. Road to Reality
There were few people in my life. I had a sister, but I’m hard pressed to remember anything about her as a child outside of a few distinct and generally pleasant memories. My only memories of my father at that age were of him at the head of the dinner table. Even my mother only holds slightly more real estate in my memory banks. It was not that my parents neglected me or were particularly aloof; it was that I gave little attention to the world outside my bubble. People were never my thing. I much preferred spending the day alone in the desert catching snakes, lizards, and scorpions, and adding to my large collection of black widow spiders (I liked their red underbelly “logo”) than interacting with other people. Perhaps that’s why my parents decided to take in a foster child when I was eight, or maybe they had other reasons I was not aware of at the time, such as the fact that the state paid them to have a foster child. It would be good for me to have a brother, they said. It sounded like a selfless act of humanity, but I didn’t trust them. Maybe I was projecting my general lack of faith in people onto my parents, but in any case, I didn’t have much say in the matter.
His name was Richard. To Richard, we were just another fiefdom to which he was indentured. He too did not trust people, but he had far deeper scars than I did to back up that mistrust. He seemed emotionally dead and acted as if we were like all his “owners” before us, and there had been many. He immediately adopted the role of a servant. He asked for nothing and, unlike me, did his household chores without complaining as he’d been trained to do by those before us. After many months, Richard began to defrost. He started communicating with us, sharing his experiences. I began to feel he was less of an estranged houseguest and more of a real brother. The slightest sign of connection on his part made me feel I could get closer to him in my own unorthodox way. If Richard had any optimism, it was held close to his chest; no doubt he feared the inevitable disappointment he was sure would follow. At no point did it enter my mind that we too would betray him.
One night my father came home from work, walked straight to the liquor cabinet, took out two wines glasses, and in silence filled them. Although he was a solemn man, he was particularly somber at that moment. We all stood dramatically silent waiting to hear what he was going to say. “We’re moving to New Hampshire,” he stated in his dry, Scottish, matter-of-fact way.
Huh?!
“Where?!” I asked, hoping New Hampshire was a street nearby. What he should have told me was “It’s a miserable little state, cold, gray, and unfriendly, with the second-worst education system in the country.”
As the reality of leaving my suburban sun-drenched, orange-filled life sank in, my whining, crying, and complaining increased. This, of course, had no effect on my father, whose stoicism made him impervious to the suffering of others.
That stony, impregnable wall of resolution became even clearer when my parents told me that Richard would have to “go back.” Go back where? My parents were really tossing him “back”? Into what I did not know, but I knew it wasn’t good. At the time, fortunately, I had no idea how “not good” the bureaucratic wasteland of child services really was.
California had a rule that Richard was not allowed to leave because he had a sister who lived in San Francisco and the state didn’t want to “break up” families. The fact that Richard hadn’t seen his sister since he’d been a toddler, or that we were the first family to feed and clothe him in a manner befitting a human and not treat him like a slave, were insignificant details to the State. The State had its rules, its unbendable, irrational rules.
It was Mrs. Brown all over again, but this time her phantom had transformed from a heartless bitch embarrassing children in the name of education into a soulless bureaucrat destroying lives in the name of the State. This time I was not excited to defend myself—I was genuinely terrified. I was discovering that the State, the institution of which I was just learning about, could ruin anyone’s life for whatever senseless reason, and there seemed to be no defense. If the State could take my brother, if compassion, reason, humanity, and decency were irrelevant to the State, why couldn’t they take me, or my mom or dad or sister? When we broke one of their rules, would obedient men knock on our door and take us away? Of course, this was the logic of a frightened, angry child who knew nothing of the law, state, politics, society, etc., but if I could go back in time fifty-two years and speak to my frightened eight-year-old self, I would say, “Yeah, kid, that’s pretty much how it works. Prepare yourself.” I’d been shown a line that I didn’t know how to cross, but unlike my lost battle with Mrs. Brown where I knew what I had to do, here I was clueless. I could not push myself beyond the limits of my abilities to battle this injustice because I had no idea how. That was the day I began searching for the answer.
I stood on the front lawn and watched Richard’s captors carry him away. I was numb, not knowing what to feel. It was as if an anvil had fallen on my heart and I was living in that moment between realization and pain. As the State car pulled away, Richard didn’t even turn around to wave good-bye. He stared straight ahead at the road that was taking him to what would likely be, in my mind, another prison, clutching his small bag of possessions like a life jacket. To him, we were just another stop along the way, another roof that kept him dry, another monster that destroyed his faith, his heart, his life a little more. At the age of nine he was defeated inside, and I felt I was a helpless party to an unforgivable crime. Despite my hopes, feelings and promises, I was guilty and there was nothing I could do about it. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t a monster, that my mother and father were good parents, that I would’ve stopped the State if I knew how—yet there he was, being taken away because we let him be taken away. My world was painfully torn in half for the first time. Now there was a world I wanted to believe in and the world I saw.
What was even more frightening was the knowledge that I’d have to abandon my only friend, Jamie. We became blood brothers under the burning desert sun—two seven-year-olds cutting into our skin with a knife and holding each other’s hands tightly. His blood still moves through my veins, if only in spirit. I would be ripped from his life just as Richard was ripped from mine.
As the numbness wore off, anger rose; anger at the nameless men for holding up blind obedience as a virtue above all else; anger at my parents for placing a job over a life; anger at all the “bad people” for smashing into my world.
Soon we too were in a car heading to a strange new destination. I did look back. I watched my happy childhood disappear into the suburban blight I had called home.
In hindsight, the one consolation was that my eyes were about to be opened to a new world, one that I’d never imagined existed, one that could only be discovered traveling down Route 66 in 1965, even if it was in a ‘57 Nash Metropolitan with three chain-smokers for three thousand miles. By the end of the trip I was secretly full of anticipation and hope that New Hampshire could be a new paradise.
The pain of losing Richard, Jamie, my home, everything I knew, combined with the discovery of a world I had no idea existed remains as a bittersweet memory. The moment we pulled away from the house and into a world I’d never seen before, I was as excited as I was anguished. It was my first experience that life can be, is, both beautiful and miserable. I felt like a string being stretched in both directions.
In the years to come the many strings of my being became stretched in many directions, and my desires and expressions, be they to save, destroy, escape or immerse myself in the world, depended on how those tense strings threaded between pain and beauty were tuned and plucked.
As a child I could do little more than pluck at these un-tuned strings of paradox with no idea of how or why they made noise. Over time I came to learn how to make music with the taught fibers of life that held together the experiences that we use to give meaning to our existence. Sometimes the music I created with these cords of paradox was horrible, violent, and ugly and sometimes it was the melody of love and harmony. Learning how to tune theses strings would take another fifty years.
Next -> Between a Chicken Farm and a Slaughterhouse
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Duncan Stroud can currently be found dancing tango in Argentina. His book, "Legally Blind", is available in eBook and hardcopy