tears

my brother and i were chatting over a bare knuckles stout recently when he suggested i should write more about my childhood, about all the shit we went through when we were kids and i know why he asks this. i think the glimpses of my writing about those things he has seen have spoken to him. these are things he knows about and my perspective as the brother who was five years older is probably important to him.

what he doesn't know is that from the time i was 25 until i was 35 that shit was all i wrote about. i wrote about it. i cried about it. i read what i wrote and cried some more. i stayed up late talking to girlfriends about it in cars at night in parking lots of book stores and supermarkets. these things that happened, the events themselves, spilled out of me constantly like the pus of an infection. it was constantly, constantly oozing forth like a tide unstemmed.

prior to 25 i had no feelings whatsoever. nothing made me cry. i didn't even think i was capable of crying. when dog's died or relatives, i found myself greeting well wishers in lines at funerals with hundreds of guests offering up their support as i feigned tears, as i worked up an earnest tear or two. i felt abnormal in those days. i was damaged and i was worried i was deranged.

i used to ask myself how people cried so easily. i wondered if everyone was faking and it was just a device to connect with people or win support for this thing or that thing. i saw moviegoers emerging from films crying in those days and could not even imagine those tears were genuine. i thought they were the product of an overwrought, cry-baby emoting public trained like hounds to feel, to feel so deeply, to feel and to emote and to hurt and to be joyful all in extravagant ways and in public places and as if they owned these emotions. fuck, i hated these people, these emoters.

then it happened. i stopped writing poetry in iambic pentameter as i had been taught in some classroom or another and started writing some prose about my life and i started to believe i had some talent for writing. at the very least, i found i enjoyed reading what i had written, which was new by comparison to the crap-ass journal i had kept when i was in basic training for the air force or any other writing i did pre-25. that stuff was a joke and an embarrassment but suddenly when i began writing about my life and my mother and my brother and the things i went through as a child and how i felt about those things, about a crazy relationship between heroin-addicted parents trying to raise children practically on the streets of downtown los angeles, of late night car chases stretching from los angeles to san bernardino in the dark, still, 2am traffic less night on the 10, of cockroaches on the floor of the apartment, of sammy's small brown hand on my mom's white ass on the sofa in the middle of the night when i awoke from a nightmare, of dog's thrown from 2nd story windows, of strange friends who provided refuge to an 8-year-old kid when his stepdad was raging around an apartment like a maniac, well, i began crying.

i cried a fucking river. i cried for 10 years with only brief pauses of dryness. i washed my heart with my tears. i scrubbed it good, crying often when i wrote and experiencing a catharsis that must be a common experience among men. i conjured the events of my childhood, of visiting my mother in prisons all over the united states, of violence against myself or my brother or my mother by her codependent fuck of a loser-lover-husband, of moving in with my fundamentalist christian aunt and uncle before i was 11 and spending teen years in church with people speaking in tongues and anointing one another with olive oil and all other manner of hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo, bullshit feel-good beliefs and practices, in tomes nightly scrawled in low light on notepads purchased from drugstores or typed into an ms-dos computer sold to me by a girlfriend's dad for $100 in 1994, which i never paid him for.

near the end of those 10 wet years my writing changed and i began to move away from my "autobiographical fiction," as i was prone to call it in flattery of an idol of mine named henry miller. in fact it was miller who spoke so glowingly of the writers who seemed to lack any sense of style but wrote rather like robots, distilling language out of the equation and conveying instead pure thoughts unadulterated by colloquialism or the flavor of region. (i may have missed something since miller was renowned as much for his brooklyn vernacular as anything else.)

still, i cried. i cried at movies, at the drop of a hat. everything touched me-i was like a sieve. the human experience was vast and i was a complex, sophisticated human being, who knew the poignancy of life, the sensitive and rough-gentle vulnerable side of humanity and who identified with every fucking character ever written for the big screen by an independent film maker or some obscure artist of a writer. i remember crying the night i read the bridges of madison county in under three hours. i soothed any cheap feelings i may have had by telling myself it was about me not the pop fiction that lay in front of me on the floor of a living room in an apartment in san dimas in a small puddle of salty tears. lost love was something i knew something about. i had loved my childhood and i had lost it as it spun out of control in a world filled with adults smitten by ignorance like so many victims of the plague in a camus novel awaiting certain death in a walled-in city.

i cried goblet-sized tears the afternoon i watched central station in an art house theatre in pasadena, identifying with young josue as if i was watching super 8 films of my own tortured childhood dreaming of reunification with a biological father i would never, ever know.

and just about then, as if a faucet was turned righty-tighty to the off position, i stopped crying again. and i stopped writing about my childhood excepting a rare occasion when i found a topic from that time that allowed me the distance i needed. (that or i wrote in such a way i brushed over topics as in this little essay, without delving to a level which might give rise to emotions i had set aside for a season.)

i chalked this change up to growth. i had needed the rainy season. it was representative of me dealing with things that had affected me. but in moving beyond them i felt a sense of maturity. i felt like the crying was over, like i understood the random nature of my existence and had quit choosing to be so unshakably injured. it felt good to stop crying and it felt better to not feel like i needed to write about these events that had heretofore defined me if only in my own mind.

so when tommy brings this subject up i find i am in no rush to revisit the scribblings of my mad self. and now that some time has passed i find no strong aversion either. this, to me, feels like balance, which is of my highest values.