I want to write a book. I need my “All the world's a stage...” I need my singular, punching line that drives the message home at the very beginning yet drives you on to get the whole story. Instead, all I can manage is a few broken phrases and hope that it'll be enough to get you to finish the whole thing. Not that it's horribly important that you actually read the whole thing. Skimming it is fine, too. Besides, you can't really say you've gotten the full story unless you've read the book. Listened to the CD. Wore the T-Shirt. Talked about it with friends. Joined an Internet community and discussed it at detail. All that mercantile bullshit people shove down your throat so that you can pretend to be part of the experience.
In all honesty, just reading the Wikipedia should give you the story. Just getting a summary should be fine. But let's all pretend to be part of the experience for a moment and drive on through to the end. We can do it together, if you want. We can throw together a few good times and a few bad and laugh about it later. Hell, let's make up some parts as we go along and make it flow a bit better.
It doesn't even matter if we make up the whole damned thing. As long as the message stays the same. Which, honestly, isn't much. You won't pull a lot from this text or this story, it won't change your life, it won't become a feature film, it won't have some defining moment that gets plastered on t-shirts. It won't become an Internet joke or leave you with a feeling of fulfillment.
But don't let me tell you how to read a book, and don't let me fill you with pretentious bullshit before you even turn the first page. Let's just get this over with.
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Let's start in high school. All great stories need to trace themselves back to the roots of the issues and bring you down to the very basics: And there's nothing more basic than a teenaged boy, striving for better music, better sex, and better understanding in why the hell everything is working out the way they are. It was pretty normal for me, on all counts. My mother died when I was in middle school, I was the only child, and my father took it understandably hard. He didn't turn to drinking, and this isn't a story about domestic abuse. In fact, it was quite the opposite. My father was my best friend, and to this day I think that I was his. We ate our meals together, we watched movies together, we found ourselves locked in a constant habit and a pretty standard routine every day.
We didn't have a lot of money. My father was a consultant or something equally generic, with one of those jobs that kinda fall from the sky and since it seems good and the pay's okay, you take it and you end up stuck with it for the large portion of your life. He made enough money for us to live in that big, empty house he refused to sell or move from when mom died, with the extra bedroom for the little brother that would never come, the garage with the tired old car and power tools that never got used, the bathroom down the hall we didn't use, since the master bedroom's bathroom had the shampoo and soap and tissue. He made enough money to pay medical bills, thankfully so, since our insurance didn't hold up much for my childhood allergies and asthma, my chronic pains, the insomnia, the dental work, and the various school-mandated therapy after Mom died in middle school and in high school when I attempted a simple suicide.
This isn't a story about suicide, either. Everyone feels down, everyone thinks about it, everyone wonders about what happens in the afterlife, so I decided to give it a shot. Freshman year of high school, a lot of pills in out-of-date prescription bottles, a lot of whisky stolen from my dad's dusty old alcohol cabinet, and a half-filled bathtub filled with lukewarm water, the tired sounds of an old man through the radio, selling the latest jazz and offering callers in flowers for that special loved one.
Needless to say, I found myself buzzed and lucid and out-of-body when my father came home from work, and looked for me when I wasn't laying on the couch, watching whatever our TV offered. He came to the bathroom, and found me laying there. In my stupid, drugged state, I rose the glass to him and asked if he wanted to join me. I didn't take it seriously when he said he wished he could, pulling my naked body from the tub, surprising me with his strength. Modesty is ever important, and I vaguely remember him dressing me on the bathroom floor, still wet, while he dialed emergency with his free hand. Or I think I remember, I at least remember him telling me the story a few days later, laying in that white room with the big windows, looking at a tree gently rolling in the wind with a absence of any birds or squirrels. I never apologized for the scare, he never yelled or grounded me. I went back to school the day after I was released and we never talked about it. When the school found out a day later, when they called my father to ask about my absence, they required that I seek help. So I did, every friday, for the final four months of the school year.
He asked me if I thought I could fly, if I thought I could lift a car, if I had any superpowers. He asked me if I thought about death to a large degree, if I had found God, if I had lost anyone important recently, if I had a stupid crush. I could only think how sad it must be to really want to help someone who zoned you out every week, mumbled responses and smiled a fake smile at you, so that you'd have to write okay responses and get paid for a job you felt like you weren't doing. The therapist who works with children who've tried to commit suicide or killed their parents or gotten into drugs, I wonder if they think about it off the job, or if it's a worry you can just turn off. I was fond of my therapist. We'd laugh at his bumbling attempts to catch the eye of a cashier at a coffee joint, we'd talk about books and movies instead of my mental health, we'd shake hands and he'd ask me to call him if I ever had the slightest worry. Told me to tell him about any regression or thoughts of a second attempt, to call him even I just needed to talk. I wasn't going to call someone off hours to do their job.
I attended graduation that year, wanting to understand if the four years of high school was really worth it. They laughed, they waved at parents, they accepted diplomas, they talked about college and work-study and how they had gotten a new car, and then they turned away to live their lives. Balloons danced in the air, fireworks crackled as the sun set, and a car crashed that night, drunkenly driven directly off the road into a tree. Two died after being in pain for weeks, one never could function correctly again. Smart people headed out to smart lives with high paying jobs, dead and ruined the night where it all started to actually mean something. Snuffed out, hearts broken, people crying openly at funerals I didn't care to attend, phone calls from people I hardly knew asking me if I had heard, if I even cared, if I was okay.
That summer I worked at a flower shop. I was being paid minimum wage to arrange flowers, keep stock, water and feed the things, and sell them. Summer months are depressingly slow for those kinda shops. It was a small business, and the largest order was for centerpieces for some veteran of war meeting. Weddings and funerals tended to pay top dollar for flowers, which seemed silly. We sold our flowers to local grocery stores, and they kept them in a refrigerated area for kids to buy for dates and for tired housekeeping wives to buy to add some color to their dull lives. They turned a better profit off their flowers than we did, and I guess that all comes down to convenience. You can't sell flowers without a date or canned food, apparently, and it must be too embarrassing to go to the pink and green shop and ask for just the right flower to say just the right thing to just the right girl. Easier to pick up the week-old flowers, already starting to wilt in the sterile grocery store and grab cigarettes and an energy drink, too. I blew all the earnings towards the end of the summer on nice restaurants and stale conversation about how exciting it was to be a sophomore in the next year, updated my aging computer, and made various other frivolous purchases on DVDs and rumble packs.
Midway towards winter, my apathy and dullness seemed to spread like a contagion to my father, who sunk into barely passable conversation and buying simple food to prepare and stopped offering to take me to the movies or out to buy new shirts. I refused to notice it, refused to give either of us the benefit of noticing our friendship was falling apart, and kept going to school and coming home to lay on the couch, watching the tail-end of daytime television before rolling over to opening cans and microwaves to showers to laying in bed. I broke promises, I failed to succeed, got average grades for an average lack of effort, sunk into a depression that I didn't have the direction to take out on myself. A relaxed depression, where I felt like if I just lived on like this forever, nothing would ever really sting. It was like being numb all over, all the time. Towards the next summer, I finally noticed that the house was always clean when I left for school, even when I left shoes on the carpet or dishes uncleaned. That we always had fresh towels, that everything felt spotless. My room was the only part of the house that showed any signs of being lived in at any point. Father had taken to keeping everything perfect, eerily and with that edge of madness. I felt guilty every time my wet feet dripped onto the bathroom tile, or I spilled something on my clothes, and did my best to keep up with his newfound cleaning, but it never seemed enough. He mopped the same floors twice a day, washed dishes that hadn't been used because they sat in the cabinets for a few days, threw out boxes and bags of food that had accidentally been left open.
I didn't work that summer. Friends would come by, or I'd go for walks, or I'd end up wondering into the unused parts of the house. The walk-in closet mom used for dresses, long since packed away, completely empty. The entire room for an other person, clean, always with fresh sheets, ready for a guest that hardly ever came. The bathroom that we never used that recently found itself stocked with tissue and soap and always had been recently wiped down. It was my house, and the unused parts suddenly felt alien. The kitchen looked like it was out of a magazine, and I almost always felt as if I had walked into a neighbors house. Dad started talking about moving, but we never did. He talked about switching jobs, but he never did. He talked about getting a new car, but he never did. And then, just before school started, he was gone. There where a few boxes, new clothes and school supplies, and an envelope with nothing but a thousand dollars in it. Bills never came in the mailbox, Dad never came back, but from time to time I'd get a new check from various parts of the world. And then, my third month into school, I got a letter.
He left the city, the state, the nation, working random jobs, dealing with his stocks, and apparently he was planning to keep himself busy that way for a while. Maybe a year. He'd keep supporting me, and even offered to fly me to him so we could travel together. He was in Egypt. I didn't want to miss school. So I never did. And to this point, I haven't seen him again. I don't know what happened to our house.
I graduated my senior year with no honors. The head of our class cried, we all cheered and threw caps into the air, we shared kisses secretly and got nice and drunk that night, but I knew that I'd likely never know these people again. I knew them well enough, my class of four years, but after this, it was all over. It took me a few months, but I responded to check with a letter, the check torn in half, for my father to stop sending money. I took up a job and had an apartment deeper in the city than our suburban house, and that was that. I had cut off connection with my father and the only person in my family I ever really knew. So there I was, alone in the world in my silly little apartment with my silly little job, selling cigarettes and magazines and gasoline.
