3. Living in the Land of Nightmares

I was born on July 30, 1966, in Staten Island, NY. Like most autobiographical statements, the depth of story behind that simple statement could crack open the universe. I hope to fully explain all of that here, one day, to have it finally all told. While I haven’t been posting much lately, this blog is always on my mind because I want to do this correctly. I have been trying to figure out how to tell my story so that a reader can understand what it is like to be a Manchurian Candidate.

The problem with PTSD is, sometimes it seems as if there is no bottom to your world. Like history, there are no definitive answers and no real truths. Everything is someone’s point of view, what a particular person saw and felt. There are a million stories about 9/11, a million stories about Hurricane Katrina, a billion more about every single significant event in the whole long history of mankind, because truth is just not absolute. Once I believed it was, that black was black and white was white, that there were things that were unchanging. I still believe in unchanging realities – gravity, the speed of light, horsepower, and the colors of black and white, no matter if they are called noir or blanco. But everything else? Everything else is perspective.

From my perspective, Staten Island was the land of nightmares. What I remember is being afraid of the elevator; afraid of the playground across the street; afraid of the girl who pushed me off a piece of playground architecture, which broke my wrist and knocked out my two front teeth; afraid of the dark; afraid of sleeping; afraid of my father coming home. I remember my mother, waiting in the living room of the tiny project apartment we lived in. I can’t remember if it was the third or the fourth floor. The hallway was like the tile you see in hospitals, cold, and dirty white. You opened the door and there was a short hallway with either two or three bedrooms off to the right and a small bathroom off to the left. My bedroom was the first room on the right. My youngest sister’s crib was in the hallway against the left wall. At the end of the hall was the kitchen on the left and the living room on the right. It was small, but our windows faced the street, so we could look out of the windows and see the city park across the street, covered in concrete and gravel, and the light came in during the day.

My father worked at night and my mother did not trust him. She would wait up at night for him to come home in complete darkness, the curtains shut against the street lights. There was a lazy-boy type rocker that she would sit in. It faced the hallway, so when he came in he would see her at the end of that hallway, a cup of tea in one hand, eyes shining out like search beacons. She would sit up, all night, waiting for him to come home with that tea cup in her hand that she would refill, and refill, and refill. I would wait with her, terrified of the fight that would come, the screaming, my father angry at her questions, his voice deep and full of menace. There might be fists through the wall and furniture knocked over and broken plates and crying, but most nights it was low whispers, my father’s voice betraying his rage and desperation. Somehow I knew my father felt trapped and caged, and that my mother was constantly afraid. I stayed up so he wouldn’t hurt her. I stayed up so she wouldn’t nag him. But I couldn’t stop any of those things, because I was just past four years old. So I would just watch and wait for him to come home. I had to be quiet, so my mother wouldn’t know I was awake and waiting, so I would try not to breathe hard, try not to breathe loudly, and try not to breathe so often. I would try to be as quiet as air, as quiet as stone, as quiet as the walls in the house. I tried to be as quiet as the dead.

At some point during the bickering, her nagging and his complaining, would come the inevitable question, just a bit louder. “Is she awake? She’s listening to us.” “If she’s awake it’s your fault, you terrify her.” “It’s your fault for making her so nervous and upset.” “You woke her up.” But that was never true. I was always already awake.

But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was when my father would come into my room and tell me everything was all right. Baby, everything is all right now. When he would lie in bed with me until I fell asleep.

I know that once upon a time, being in my father’s arms made me safe and happy; not because I remember being safe and happy there, but because there are pictures of me happy. These pictures were in my paternal grandmother’s possession, and I didn’t see them until I was 31 years old. When I saw them, book upon book of pictures of me with my father, tiny and happy and glowing like any other child, it was like a shock of the iciest water on my body, because up until that moment, I never knew I had experienced anything but terror during the first six years of my life. But when I was in my early thirties, I found out my father’s side of the story. It was self-serving to a very large extent, but he made an honest attempt to explain things. In fact, he wrote me the story of his own life. In it, I found out that not only did I not remember many, many things about my first six years of life, but I also found out that a lot of the things that I knew about those years were not only not as bad as I thought, but that some of the things I had been told were patently untrue. I found out that my father, who I had long believed to be the King of Lies, had nothing on my very own, long-suffering, victimized mother.