I've had a gun pointed at me four times in my life. Four that I'm aware of at least (it's a messed up world--who knows what lurks behind darkened upper story windows or grassy knolls).
That isn't very often in comparison to some people, I realize, but it's fairly significant for me considering just how incongruous that is in my life. Anyone that knows me can say that I'm not a big risk-taker, and I've never really lived in the type of neighborhood where those kinds of things are a concern.
Even more ironic is that not a single one of those times occurred during the time I spent in New York (which I'll touch on briefly later).
*****
Part I: The Perils of Youth
The first time was when I was about 15 years old. Like any other teenager, I had a lot of events happen during those years that have influenced my life (read my "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" post for another one.)
But unlike most other American teens it wasn't school or girls that caused my problems back then. I'll come back to that last part down the road--it will come full circle, so bear with me.
As mentioned elsewhere, my family lived in a rural area of Arizona at the time. Most of the properties were 5-acre lots separated by barbed-wire or heavy field fence. There was very little development--generally a single dwelling--usually a mobile home, and a handful of out-buildings, all surrounded by sage brush. The roads there were all dirt, and washed out at least once a year when flash-floods would come through, leaving you stranded either at your house for days, or conversely, away from home if you were on the opposite side of the road when the rain came.
We lived on one of the 5-acre lots--our house and the pens where we kept all of the animals were on the front two acres. The back three were filled with over-flow from an auto wrecking yard--my parents leased out the space to the wrecking company--and random scrap that we'd inherited when we bought the property. We were surrounded by similar lots on all sides.
Since we were so far removed from any other real activities for a teenager who was not yet driving and therefore stuck at home most of the day, I would wander the back part of the lot looking through the cars. Some had simply broken down and given up, but many had been thru traffic accidents of various degrees. Usually the owners' possessions were still in the car. People's whole commuting lives, and sometimes more, were there to be explored. It was fascinating and sad. The condition some of the cars were in, there was no doubt about whether the driver survived the accident or not.
So back to the gun... As I was walking through the rows of cars I heard a buzz pass my ear. Like I said, it was a remote desert area--I'd seen rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions, etc all on a daily basis. A large horsefly or bee buzzing past my ear was not an unrealistic thought, or even uncommon. Then I heard it again. And again. Then I started to hear the plinking of something hard hitting the car bodies nearby. The next buzz came past my ear so closely that I felt the heat as it passed. The plink that followed hit a car immediately next to me on my right. It was the late 1980's, and I'd seen more than my share of cheesy action movies with hyped-up sound effects--I knew what bullets hitting metal was supposed to sound like.
I hit the dirt.
I army-crawled back toward the front of the property, the buzzing and plinking continuing almost until I reached the back fence. I didn't hear anything more, so jumped up and ran the rest of the way to the house.
My dad didn't work at the time (or most of my life, for that matter--another long story), so he was in the house when I came in. My heart was pounding in my chest, and it wasn't from the belly-crawl or run, I can tell you that. I told my dad what happened. You have to understand that what he did next was VERY out of character for him, being the non-conformist, anti-establishment man that he was. My dad called the police.
The county sheriff deputy arrived about 30 minutes later. He took plenty of notes, and left again after 15 or 20 minutes of questions. He came back again some time later--I don't know how long--with an explanation. Turns out the guy that lived on the lot behind and to the right of ours had decided he wanted to sit on his back porch with a couple of beers and shoot his rifle, just for kicks. The guy had no idea that I had been out there.
So that was it. Nothing nefarious or dramatic--just a bored redneck neighbor. And technically I never saw the gun that was pointed at me, but the last bullet that I felt pass my ear was enough for me to know that it was at least pointed toward my immediate direction. And I don't know whether to thank God for the guy being a bad shot, or a good one.
*****
The second time was just weeks after my family had moved to Oregon in 1991. We lived in another somewhat remote locale, only this time is was on the edge of the Willamette National Forest, and my dad had sent me out to pick up some tools that he'd called about in the local Nickel Ads or some such thing. So I went out into the area outside of the small town we lived in, amid the ever-present rain of the Northwest, looking for the address among what was little more than dirt logging roads with houses built every half mile or so amid the numerous trees. Keep in mind that this is WAY before GPS and cell phones were common. I had to use a good old-fashioned paper map, and couldn't call for help.
I finally found the place I was looking for, and knocked on the door. I didn't get an answer, so knocked again, and then a third time without any response. I waited for several minutes, then got back in my car to leave. Only when I turned the key in the ignition, the car just made a rapid clicking sound from under the hood. The battery had gone dead from the time I left the house to the time I'd stopped.
I went back up the steps to the house and tried knocking again, without any more success than I'd had the first time. So I started walking back to the last house I'd seen on the way up the hill, where I used the phone to call my dad for help. Then I walked back up to my car to wait for him. When I got back to the car, there was a middle-aged man walking around the driveway with a shotgun in his hand, which he quickly pointed at me as I walked up. Naturally I stopped in my tracks, my heart thumping almost out of my chest.
The man proceeded to interrogate me on who I was, why I was there and had left my car, why I didn't knock. He didn't believe me when I told him I that I had in fact knocked, several times. Being called a liar by a man with a gun when you know you're speaking the truth is a strange state of mind to be in.
The guy finally lowered the gun, and my dad showed up shortly after. We bought the tools I'd come out there to get, we got the car running and left. And just like the situation in AZ, the local sheriff deputy showed up. He was coming up the hill as we were going down, and he flashed his headlights to have us stop. The gun-toting used-tool salesman had called him when he saw the strange car in his driveway. It was a a short conversation as we explained what happened, and the deputy made the comment that sometimes people live away from the rest of society for a reason. I've never forgotten that.
*****
Part II: Pride Comes Before the Fall
Fast forward to Thanksgiving 2012. My wife and I had been separated for many months as we tried to work some things out in our marriage, not the least of which was my inability to allow anyone to know that I wasn't perfect, despite every effort I'd made to appear that way.
My family life growing up did not encourage use of any support structure--it was all about self-reliance and always needing to be right. If you knew the berating I received every time I made a mistake that my parents saw, you'll wonder that something like what follows didn't happen sooner in my life. I'll tell you about the goat's head some day. Horrifying. (And like so many other life-shaping events, happened around the time I was 14-16). So early on I got into the habit of covering my tracks on anything that I thought could be judged.
I thought I'd grown beyond trying to cover up my errors as I became my own person, but as I found myself making the types of big "adult" mistakes (jobs, money, etc) that are more far-reaching than those you make in youth, as well as falling back into a psychological addiction that had started, again in my teens, I started reverting to old ways of trying to hide what I'd done. I hid it out of fear of the shame and damage it caused my pride, especially when it came to my wife. I wanted her to only see the man I was trying to be, not the man I slipped into being at times. The thing is though, she always knew or found out. Always. And that drove her crazy more than anything, because I couldn't show the trust in her to share what I saw as my troubles, my issues, my failures. I tried to protect her from them, and all that did was pull us apart emotionally--the exact opposite of what I wanted to do. We separated, the emotional distance becoming more formal.
Here's where the line earlier in Part 1 about girls not being one of my teenage issues comes back into play. You see, I didn't really date when I was a teen. In fact my first real, "take a girl out in my car and go somewhere" date didn't happen until I was almost 20. Tough to ask a girl out when you're poor, and the only reliable car is a Ford Econoline van with a bed where the back seats should be. Explain that to a high-school girl's parents.
So I didn't go through the break-ups and heart-ache, and emotional growth that comes with them, until later in life. And even then, I only had a couple of relationships that were "serious". One was hard for me--the first girl I'd really fallen for. At the time I would have said that I loved her, but I think it was more the idea of her that I loved. And she was fun to be around. What kept me sane in that instance was that something really good came out of being in a relationship with her--I'd moved to New York for a brief time to be with her, and kind of "found myself," as cliche as that sounds. Many of the best parts of who I am today came out of that time in my life. And I made some very good friends there that I still talk to, even with 15 years and 3000 miles between us. And if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have gone to work at Starbucks when I got back, met my wife, had our son... You get the idea.
The second one was a rebound when I got back to the Northwest from New York. It was a whirl-wind relationship that led to a brief engagement which I happily broke off. Nothing I regret about letting that one end, then or now.
I say all of this because as my wife and I were separated we'd hit these moments of lows where we'd be talking about the issues and reach an impasse, a stalemate in the conversation, and I would react not in a way that a 30-something with a steady job, good friends, and a family should. I behaved like a petulant teenager who can't get over his first crush, or can't see the dangerous path they're going down. I'd sulk, I'd rage, I'd spew mean and hurtful words that I didn't intend, but came from the child inside of me that was angry at the world for the situation I'd found myself in and didn't know how to correct. Angry at my wife for asking me to change to fit her ideals, but not willing to meet me in the middle. Angry at her for not being willing to stay with me while I worked through it. So I took it out on the person I loved most in life. Primarily because I felt like I wasn't living up to my own expectations of myself, let alone hers.
Pride, anger, emotional immaturity--that was me for most of 2012. Yes, indeed.
Over the course of the separation I'd had many friends offer to help, to
let me talk to them and try to get me to work through some of the
issues I was going through. She asked me to seek out more help. But
I turned most of it down. I still held on to the notion that I had to figure it out on my own,
because some of the issues were biggies that I didn't think the world
would understand, and worse yet, wouldn't be able to "fix" anyway. I was too embarrassed to talk about them. The things I'd hidden to protect her from having to worry about were the things that drove a wedge between us, not so much because they were in the open, but because they weren't.
So we'd been separated for a while, and Thanksgiving weekend she told me that she couldn't continue to try to work it out. She told me that it was too draining, we weren't making any progress, and she couldn't handle getting back together only to find some future point that I'd hidden from her another lay-off, or the fact that my "addiction" had reared its ugly head again. Ironically, when she told me this, many of the demons I'd been struggling with I had managed
to overcome over the course of the previous several months, including my "addiction". Sometimes having a therapist to talk to,
someone who you know will be objective in their response, can bring clarity
to things that seem impossible to understand or explain. Especially if you find a good one, like I did. Took me til I was 39 years old to let that sink in. I can thank my dad (insert sarcastic tone) for putting the idea in my head at an early age that asking for help, especially when it comes to emotions, is a sign of weakness.
I felt like there were other factors in my wife's decision as well--outside influences of people reinforcing what she was thinking, or giving her things that she felt I no longer could. I was angry at that too. To me it seemed like the whole "for better or for worse, in sickness and in health" concept was jettisoned.
It all fed into my notion that my self-worth was directly related to what people thought of me or what I did. Since I was already conditioned to think that I was never good enough, even when I was at my best, the smallest judgements of me or the way I did things were like being eviscerated. Worse still was the feeling of disregard. It would re-open very old wounds that had never healed to begin with.
I was devastated when she told me. When you spend a quarter of your life with your primary purpose trying to make someone happy, because you love them and they make you happy (the best thing to ever happen in my life up to the birth of my son), only to find out that you've failed.... It takes all of the wind out of your sails. I recognize that getting love from someone else should not dictate success or failure as a person, but I'd attached my happiness & personal value to her love of me.
So the third time I had a gun pointed at me, I was doing it myself.
Gun metal tastes terrible. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, no matter how desperate you get. And it hurts your teeth when it clacks against them as the sobs rack your body.
Feelings of failure in love and life had gotten me to that point. Real, unconditional love brought me back out. Love for my son and step son. Love from them. No matter how messed up I felt my life was, they are incredible young men, and I could not be more proud of them. I was still a mess inside, but I could not do what I was thinking of doing, knowing the effect it would have on them.
*****
I went through the 2012 holidays and first few months of 2013 in a blur. I had taken a new position at work, and was covering multiple responsibilities, working 70-80 hours a week through February. When we got to the point of finalizing the divorce agreement, I was tired, angry, and defiant. And part of me--the romantic, the piece that still held on to what we'd had our first several years of marriage--that part thought that as long as the papers weren't signed by the judge there was still hope, despite everything that had happened.
The fourth time is really an extension of the third. It was last week.
Seeing without doubt that she had truly moved on from me and our marriage, the last inkling of hope I had that we would reconcile and come out of this was shattered like glass on cement.
The thought of the boys brought me back again, but this time instead of bottling everything up and trying to cope with it on my own, I asked for help. I saw my therapist, I called friends, I wrote things here to let my feelings out, regardless of what people may think of me. I sobbed for hours on my kitchen floor and mourned what I'd had and lost.
And, I think most importantly, I stopped trying to fix it; stopped trying to change the situation that I no longer had any control over (and realistically probably hadn't for far longer than I realized). There's another line from Fight Club; “It's only after we've lost
everything that we're free to do anything.” It may seem like an odd choice
of movie to quote from when you're talking about coming back from the
brink of darkness, but I am Jack's commiseration. If you haven't
watched that movie or read the book, go do so--you'll understand what I
mean. It was liberating to let go, knowing that I had truly and completely hit rock bottom and was at my most raw, unprotected state. I thought I'd been there before, last Nov. I had no idea how much further down the bottom was.
How do I know I've changed? How can I be sure? The person that I was even a month ago would never have started a blog and posted for the world to see. Even the "me" of a month ago when I started this couldn't have shared what I have in the last week. If ever there was a time for my failures and demons to consume me, this last few months would have been it. Not to say that I'm good. I'm not that naive, but there has been a fundamental shift in me the last couple of days, so much so that I've physically felt it. I've been to the edge of emotional hell and waved at the devil. This time I'm flipping him off. I'm a little crispy on the edges, but coming back to Earth.
I found out that I'm not alone, even though I've spent the last several months--longer even--telling myself that I was. Thanks to those of you who've read this and contacted me, or read and kept silent about it, but are still my friends.
I don't mind saying that I'm scared. In many ways I'm starting my adult life over from scratch. Despite the fact that we couldn't work through our mutual issues, my (ex)-wife is an amazing woman, full of talent and unlimited potential, and a wonderful mother. I worry that I'll never find another woman that I'll feel that way about, and can love me in return.
I still wonder about not living up to my own expectations, but I'm pretty sure I'm done letting the voices of my past continue to tell me what is or isn't good enough.
All of this has given me a vastly different perspective than I've had the last few years, and my priorities have changed. I have a bigger purpose in life than I've been living out lately, even if I don't know what it is yet. Maybe it's as simple as being there for my boys and watching them grow. I believe there's more, but that would be more than enough.
If you've read this far and are thinking something snide or derisive, if you feel about me the way I used to feel about myself--I'll mourn that loss too. Not as deeply as what I'm mourning now, to be sure, but I will.
If you've read this all the way through and we're still friends, I hope that we're even better friends for it.
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