Gregory T. Janetka
When I was nine years old my father had a seizure and drove his pickup truck through the living room. I say his pickup truck but actually it belonged to my uncle. I say uncle but actually he was just a man my dad knew. Anyway, I was watching Ninja Turtles and then there comes this beat up white truck through the front wall of the house, sending dust everywhere. I could tell you my life changed at that moment, but it didn’t, not particularly, but it was the first interesting thing that ever happened to me. I just wanted my mom to stop screaming so that I could finish my cartoon.
We moved a lot after that, that’s true enough, so I guess things did change, but Dad didn’t. They told me the seizure was caused by a tumor pressing on his brain. They knew about it and knew he shouldn’t be driving, but we needed money so what could we do? Occasionally he saw a doctor but the only one available to us hated Medicaid cases. I guess Ivy League colleges don’t teach compassion, or something, because he rushed us out as quickly as possible, always with a prescription, but what good they ever did I never knew.
Anyway, it’s all chaos right? I think I always knew that and that’s why the crash didn’t affect me. Predictions are for fortunetellers and other grafters and so I never bothered to do anything but watch the endless parade of chaos, including within myself. Especially within myself. What else is there to do? Believe in God? Believe in love? Believe in other people? Think that their brains aren’t chaotic like my own? Please.
If you’re wondering about Dad, don’t. You know exactly what happened—he died, naturally. Not in the truck that day but a couple years later, at a prison rodeo. The tumor kept growing and pushing on his brain until it popped. I wasn’t there, and neither was my mom or my sister. It was him and his buddy, the one who lent him the truck. Right when the two of them were laughing about how rubber bands are put on the bull’s testicles in order to get a better performance, my dad keeled over, apparently. Mid laugh. I guess the bull got the last laugh, at least when he got those rubber bands off.
Turned out that my dad had a lot of buddies cause they all came around after that. They wanted to help but none of them had money, so instead they mostly slept with my mom. At least she seemed happy, or something.
Of course a lot happened between then and now, but honestly none of it’s very interesting. It unfolded just about how you’d expect—we moved a lot and struggled, and I did odd jobs until I was old enough to get a job in a discount department store, where the apoplectic chaos of other people’s minds is laid bare.
All of which brings us to last night, back to God and love and chaos, to when the second interesting thing happened—I took my own life.
Did I know what I was doing? Of course I did, or at least I could tell you that, and you would have no way to know if I was lying, but I don’t know you so believe what you will. Anyway, after Dad died Mom put me in charge of cleaning out his things because she couldn’t get herself to do it. She told me to throw everything away, and I mostly did, but I kept a couple things, including the thrash metal records we’d listen to while building models and his meds. I didn’t know if we would ever be able to afford a doctor, and what if I got a brain tumor? I didn’t want my brain to pop one day at a prison rodeo so I figured I’d be prepared.
After a twelve hour shift, half of which was spent picking up the same pairs of pants that people threw on the floor over and over again, I came home to feed the cat and then drove to the shore. During the slow season no one was around and I’d lay on the beach and pretend one of the rental houses was mine. I picked out my favorite—a classic two story home from the 60s, done up in blue and white. I named it the Villa for Life. Most of the others were designed to temporarily fill the emptiness of the rich. My house, on the other hand, was a home.
Anyway, I laid out my towel and watched the moon go in and out of the clouds, jealous of the power it had over the tides. You can call it a dead lifeless rock if you want, but it has more power than every single human being who has ever walked on this earth combined. Once the rhythms of the waves melted into the rhythms of my heart, I pulled out Dad’s meds, took one pill from every bottle, and washed them down with diet soda. Then there was nothing to do but relax and wait for high tide.
Here’s the thing though—I don’t know as much as I thought about the tides, and high tide never came. It was meant to be a one-two punch, the second of which would carry me out to sea. I’d be a part of the waves and that dead rock forever. The pills did their job well enough, but an overeager real estate agent found me at first light and called 911. As you’ve figured out, (unless you believe in nonsense such as ghosts or God), they brought me back to life. But as they’ve repeatedly told me, (patting themselves on the back), I was dead, good and dead, flatlined, gone. And they brought me back. But here’s the thing, (the other thing), I don’t know whose life I have now, but it sure as hell isn’t mine. My life is done, gone, ended. I left my life staring up at the stars, and I started a new life smelling the antiseptic white walls of the hospital room with tubes up my nose and in my arm.
But what if I wasn’t brought back? How could I possibly tell? What if this is the hell that I was destined for? In the end I guess it doesn’t matter, as long as we try to live, even if we are dead. Most people nowadays eat themselves to death—what is that but a slow suicide? Why aren’t they punished like I am? Why aren’t the providers of the nutritionless garbage that we call food punished?
They asked me endless questions when they brought me back but all I could say was that Donatello was my favorite turtle because he was the only one whose weapon I could re-create. Boy was mom angry when I sawed the handle off her broom. How else could I protect our house from the chaos?
But like I said—punishment. That seemed to be the order of the day. Bring me back so that I could be paraded, made an example of, shown to children as what could happen if you don’t make good choices. But you have to have good choices to make. Sometimes all the options are shitty, and you just have to try to choose the least shitty one. That’s what I’ve always tried to do, but it wasn’t good enough. Mom was mad, sure, but she was more worried I had a tumor and it made me do what I did. I told her with how many meds I took that was impossible. Still, they put me in a giant metal tube that made the most deafening din you ever heard and scanned my brain. Just like I said—no tumors. “Irregular activity” they said. “I was dead,” I said. Semantics.
When I finally went to sleep I dreamed of floating out on that ocean, watching the sky, listening to the echoes of time, peaceful and free. That’s where my life lives now, in my dreams. This one is some joke, a predictable show green-lighted by some executive without the smallest ounce of creativity in their soul. (If any of us have one, maybe it is them).
#
“Ready to go home?” Mom said.
“As soon as I can find one,” I said.
They pushed me out in a wheelchair and I waved as I went, a one man parade that no one knew was coming or was particularly interested in. I guess I wasn’t a celebrity in this new life either. So what the hell should I do with it? What did I do with the old one? Traded it in, I suppose, but was it for the better? Hard to say.
I say this as if we aren’t constantly having new lives, rather than pretending that that’s not true. Holding on to what we think we used to be, only when we look at what we were we don’t even recognize ourselves, not really. That doe-eyed kid in the pics my mom still has strewn about the house? I pretend that’s me—well, I used to, but others still do, my mom still does. That ain’t me. We love to create ceremonies of one life ending and another beginning, but it’s bullshit. Whoever became a man, or woman, or anything, from some trumped up party where relatives you barely know and don’t give a shit about hand you envelopes with cash and you act grateful because you want the cash but all you can think is, “Why the hell are you giving me money? I didn’t do shit.”
Now, when I finally do something, something BIG, no one hands me envelopes, only lectures. Hope in the future only sets you up for pain when it doesn’t come true. And the more you grasp at hope, the more crushing it is when your dad’s brain explodes when he’s at a goddamn prison rodeo and you’ll never have a dad like everyone else and you would have been much better off playing in the dirt than believing in hope.
So what’s the point? Damned if I know. I suppose we have to do something, and since I tried suicide, and that didn’t work, I guess I’ll try something else. In recent years the Turtles were also born again, more ripped, more intense, more slick—and a hell of a lot less fun. Just like the way of everything else, or so the algorithm tells me. Much like a kiss ass, it tells me what I want to hear, or what people have paid for me to hear, but it never tells me what I need to hear. That’s what a father is for (or mother, but mine still believes in that doe-eyed kid, bless her). No one tells us what we need to hear, because no one wants to be the villain, even though the true villains are the ones who tell us over and over and over what we want to hear—if I just buy X, Y, or Z, then you’ll be happy, really happy. And we believe them.
There’s no need to believe in fate to realize we’re little more than ticking time bombs, with the clock never stopping. Be it a tumor, car crash, stabbing, war, drowning, or the catchall, “old age,” I can’t look at a person without hearing the ever present metronome, steady, unchanging, leading us to our end. I tried to speed mine up, but it’s impossible to do so. Tick – tick – tick, an ever present friend, keeping us from true loneliness.
#
“Welcome home,” my sister Gwen said when my mom wheeled me through the front door. Gwen only existed when life was assured, facing death only when there was no other option. She said I had “a panic attack,” nothing more, even though that had absolutely nothing to do with what happened. Since I was little and first learned of dad’s tumor, Gwen delighted in reminding me that tumors ran in the male line, and I was all but assured to get one myself. Years of hearing that, and watching my father’s erratic behavior, and I shouldn’t have panic attacks?
“What do you know? I died. Panic attacks don’t kill you,” I said. “Why are you even here?”
“Psycho meds couldn’t have killed you,” she said. “You were in a coma, tops.”
“What are you talking about? I took dad’s tumor pills. I died.”
“Did you? Did you even look at those bottles? Dad was a schizo, a psycho, get it?”
“Gwendolyn!” Mom rose from the couch and for the first time in my life her face terrified me. “Stop it, right now.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Your father…” Mom began, and then stopped. She took a deep breath and I girded myself for whatever was coming. “He was sick, but not like you think. There was no tumor. People were nicer to him when he acted out, thinking he had a tumor. They forgive a tumor, they don’t forgive trauma.
“But you told me,” Gwen spit at our mother. “I had to know the truth.”
“But if he didn’t have a tumor, how did he die?”
Gwen laughed and Mom went silent.
“Ha! How did he die???”
“No, Gwen. No.”
“Our dear father shot himself.”
“Gwendolyn! Your brother doesn’t need to hear this. He’s still sick himself.”
“Right there at the rodeo,” my sister went on, ignoring mom’s calls. “He charmed the guard—you know how he could be—got the guard to let down his guard, then grabbed the gun and BOOM! Dad’s brain popped alright, but it was from a bullet, not a tumor.”
Mom collapsed on the couch, crying, while Gwen laughed. I sat, looking at the bandage on my arm where the IV had been.
“There, mother, now your precious baby boy knows the truth. Now it’s not just me who has to suffer.”
“Is that true? Is it, Mom? Gwen’s always lied to me, tell me she’s lying now. Please.”
The room was silent except for a clock ticking. Only we no longer had one, the antique grandfather clock being destroyed when Dad ran the truck into the house.
“We were trying to protect you.” Mom patted my hand but I couldn’t feel it.
“And you’re crazy, just like dad. You always wanted to be like him, didn’t you? You’re right, I lied, because they told me to. Tumors don’t run in the male line, but being a whack job does. You tried to do yourself in, just like dad, only they could pump your stomach. No one could put the brains back in the old man’s head.”
“Jesus Christ, Gwendolyn. Jesus Christ, what did your father and I ever do to make you so mean? Look at your brother. Look at him. Your father was sick. You didn’t know him before he went to the Gulf. I did everything I could but it wasn’t enough. He should never have gone, should never have seen what he saw. He was such a gentle soul—you saw that, didn’t you? How he was with animals? How he was with you two when he was himself? He was the sweetest man, he should’ve been writing poetry, not launching missiles.”
Now both of them were crying but I felt nothing. I did succeed and this was hell after all. Who was my father? I thought of the times he did unexplainable things and they told me it was the tumor pushing on his brain. But it wasn’t his brain, rather his soul that was being torn apart. When I was little we worked on model kits every weekend, they littered my room still. Military, mostly. Planes dangled from my ceiling, armored personnel carriers acted as bookends. Sometimes he’d tell me wild stories, like when he drank cachaça with Norman Schwarzkopf, and I believed every single one of them. Only he never told me what he’d done. I looked over and Gwen was now on her side, sobbing, while mom had her head in her hands. I stood up on shaky legs and went to my room. The models had been there so long they were part of the unnoticed scenery. The afternoon sun poured through the window, highlighting the accumulated dust. I locked the door then reached up to pull down an F-4 Phantom and threw it against the wall. A BOOM rang out as the plane returned to its 114 pieces. Is that what the bullet did to his brain?
I pulled down an F-15. Boom. A Patton tank. Boom. A Sherman tank. Boom. A series of the oh so famous Scud missiles. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. By the time mom and Gwen broke down my door the war was over, and just like every war, it was exhausting and unsatisfying, and I fell to the ground amid the shrapnel, wailing for my father.
#
My father neither ran from, nor embraced, his military service. He never flaunted the medals he won, or adopted it as an identity. He spoke of it with me at times, always in a straightforward way, relaying funny stories, or dumb moves by the higher ups. He expressed no anger, but it defined his mind—if Mom were to be believed. According to her that’s what changed him, broke him. But she’d lied about so much, why should I believe it? Maybe it was her, maybe she broke him. Or maybe it was me and Gwen, maybe he never wanted kids. The search for truth is nothing new, but it is for me. In a world of fallible human memories, how can anything be true?
It’s true that my father’s dead, and it’s true I died and came back to life. Knowing this does me little good. I suppose what’s important is that I can hear the waves on the sand, and feel my body sinking deeper, into the black, heavy night as the drugs coursed through my veins. Those waves will keep coming, as they do for all of us, and what we do about it is up to us. And if I too should some day put a bullet through my own gray matter, than so be it, but let no known lies be told in my name. There is no truth like the truth you’ve never known.
I never felt I belonged anywhere, but I belong in this tragic little family. My sister and her layers of armor, my mother’s unfounded hope and aloofness, my father’s quest to simply be at peace. And then there’s me. Just because everything’s chaos doesn’t mean you can’t carve out a little order, as long as you know it won’t last.
END