Memoir Start?

 I know I shouldn’t be doing this but that’s how I got out into the world in the first place, a leap into the void. Looking back it seems like every major decision I made was rashly devised, out of the blue, thrown together. And most of them turned out wrongly I’d say now, except for the last one, ie: being with my beautiful beau forever and ever. Perhaps I’m finally settling down and safe now, from the vagaries of my own urge to surge. She’ll keep me grounded.
But to write a memoir detailing how I single handedly killed off a college by going crazy there, and then telling enough people about it that word got around, this does seem like a sad and misguided, random choice. But I’m not boasting, I promise, I’m moaning in pain. I’m weeping as, I may point out, I was when I was at that aforementioned college campus for the 10 day residency, and really, I just want to know why. Why did being there on the campus with all these exuberant & like minded people—albeit younger than me mostly—make me fearful and frozen and tongue tied. I went to the therapist and wonderful understanding person that she was, she said it was ok to cry... and where did it hurt? And I said my throat, as I recall, and when I thought about my throat the tears just came up and out. But why did I want, later, to go sit at that picnic table in the feng shui center of the campus and weep in public? I’d say that was the moment of my leap. Or fall. And even then, when the three people came by, two young women and a trans person, speaking gently and all concerned about me, “should we go find his advisor?” (I wish now they’d been touching me holding my shoulder, putting me into real life…) even then it was too late. I wandered off in a few moments and I don’t think my advisor did find out about it til way later. Or he probably would have talked to me. And perhaps helped make amends for the hazing I’d been through. Hazing from the theater wing of the school and the head honcho of that department. He’d targeted me with several hazing events and I was thinking that it was all according to some worthwhile pedagogy. Some plan for higher learning. This after all was a very progressive school.
Indeed, in terms of mental health, it was the perfect storm for me. And I went down hook, line and sinker. I went off from those gentle folk at the picnic table and back to my horribly empty dorm room up the hill, and everything was worse. How could I face anyone ever again?
I think I tried to leave but some faculty person or other said, no I could fold this into my studies (I had written that I was interested in psychology studies having helped start an DIY mental health support group recently). ‘Trust the process!’ was a mantra at that school. But I think the hazing from the infamous H.W., the theater honcho, was and still is, weighing on me, working its fearful poison. His eyes on my face, into my soul, invading. It’s playing into fears rampant in the world today, racism, since H.W. is black and that was his point. I knew that from his facebook posts, all about race and usually unanswered.
So the weight of racism, millions of people’s traumatic experience of the larger society, and my personal grief about I know not what, combined into some kind of Jersey Devil inside me. His leering laughing scornful hate and my self erasing fear combined into an irresistible urge to move, to get away, to mourn through motion, to go! Like the name of the first beat generation novel, like the game from China with simple rules but complex strategy, to the point of mist-in-the-trees, like my tried and proved wrong many a time method of shooting myself in the foot in order to fly -I was off and running into a monkey mind madness that took weeks to wear off. At least somewhat, the half life is unbearable. Suffice to say, I’ve not been the same since, and never will.
I think the word got around and my one sort-of friend I’d made at the school, J. decided to be my 'mad chaperone'. He’d also hazed me in a minor way, this seemed to be a tradition at this school, trickster activity, so maybe he felt bad about that. But the train ride home was too stimulating for me. The conductors seemed to me to be on my side too and were giving hints as to what to do. The significance of anything was everything. I decided to exit the train at the next stop and though J. said not to go, I even took that as further proof, and standing up I made a proclamation about the good fight or some such b.s., and fist in air (another student down the aisle raised his fist in solidarity) I jumped over J.’s legs and strode down the aisle, in some kind of ecstatic everlasting now.
Outside an old lady dressed in a long red dress was slowly proceeding across the platform pushing her stroller towards a gigantic puddle. So I of course walked beside her. And around the corner of the station house I spied a great machine a huffing and a puffing, pulling old ties out and massively shoving new ties in under its own self. The workers, they’d know where ‘the man’ was. The man I could sincerely tell that I was on their side. Because I knew that soon Anonymous was going to stage the uprising against capitalism, within a couple weeks! The moment I was most proud of and I’m awarding myself the blue ribbon for bravery, was for clapping a tall and burley guy on his hairy sleeveless sweaty shoulder, he was holding a shovel, and asking where the man in charge was. He pointe further back there in the train yard, and said, ‘steer clear of that machine though!’ Another railroad tie was wrenched free and discarded to the side and from the bed of the machine a new one was slammed into place with a grating roar. A large black-with-sticky-tar chunk of square wood! Further proof to me, with poetic logic. Everything meaningful is sexual, isn’t it?
I wandered the town of White River Junction for the rest of the day, confused and deluded. I tried to hitchhike out of there by walking up the hill to the interstate. On the way I met a homeless man who gave me a blue tarp, because he could tell what was going on. Which I stashed in some bushes for later. And I bought a sandwich from the food coop. No body would stop for me though, they’d just speed up at the on ramp so I went back to town to call my mother, a hundred miles away. She’d come pick me up.
While waiting I bought a pen and pad of paper from a stationary store, the lady looking at me quizzically and sitting in the coffee house of an ancient and dusty hotel in the middle of town I wrote a poem for one of my best friends, Bobby. He’d killed himself by hanging not but a single year before and I’m sure that was part of my perfect storm, the heart of fall weather being a direct reminder of that fateful day. I’d biked over to his metal shop way across town, just in time to witness the two workers (one black and one white) bring his body out in the blue body bag. I remembered the colors so bright, the poem is like a circus, the workers in their light blue paper suits, the ambulance van with its flashing yellow lights circling. The war is a circus, poems are a vision. A channeling. Perhaps the entire episode about Anonymous is a channeling of some sort, that I must do. Similar to writing this memoir, it’s a channeling too. Probably why I have to do it, regardless of the risk.
And finally my mother arrived in a hack cab from her town a hundred miles away. Amiable and amenable we chatted with the driver for a couple hours driving through fall trees and valleys, but she never really did ask me what happened. Didn’t want to pry, I suppose, though I’m sure her incidents of mental health struggle when I was young may be embarrassing to her still. I remember her as a Medusa, screaming with the agony of existence into the sky, snake eyes raging and freezing me into stone, in that long ago backyard of Hartford Connecticut. Maybe she was noticing the tail growing out of my 8 year old ass and the horns sprouting out of my head, the budding troublemaking devil that I manifested 48 years later, trying to go back to school. A white aging male devil hoping to join a secure middle class heaven by finally being anointed with a college degree, like the cowardly lion in Wizard of Oz.
So this is a channeling then finally of my story and it’s horrid shadows in the today. I feel the fear still, a paranoia, an extrasensory awareness that wants to be understood and connected with. When my mother was breaking down and melting, a single tear hung from the end of her pointy long nose and hesitated before falling. Both my sister and I remember that moment. It’s hilarious in the beyond. But wasn’t funny was my inability to go to her, my poor momster, and hug her, like my sister did. She willed herself forward. Or I willed her forward, I and my two brothers standing there in the wide open rutted grassy backyard, we willed her forward to hug our mother and bring her back to earth. My sister still bears the burn scars, I know, while I’m stuck like a stone, 5 billion years old, the breeze passing me by. My heart is full of hate and sorrow for that school and that person who stared me down. No answer from the universe on that one.