Damaged Goods

“We all bleed the same

We’re more beautiful when we come together

We all bleed the same

So tell me why, tell me why

We’re divided”

(Bleed, Mandisa 2017)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVKuA1s5I3o

            I had no idea when I was young just how difficult life would turn out to be for me. When I was a kid, I thought, I believed that everything would always be okay and that God, with all His mercy, would look after me. While these ideas may not be actual lies that I told myself, they pretty much hold the same validation. God does not assist us. He may guide us but the course is mostly in our head. I have had the opportunity to challenge my beliefs, something most other people don’t have the luxury of doing. Despite the challenges that have met me on the way, I have had a much easier life than most people. Yes, I know tragedy and have experienced physical pain beyond comprehension. I have struggled and I have lost. I am still standing but I’m pretty sure that life is easier for a white boy. It’s just too bad I’m also a homosexual or I really would have been set. I am told that life is better as a breeder. Granted, I have never once in my entire life been called a faggot by anyone. When people see me they wonder for their safety, not whether I am a top or a bottom. I’m only stereotypical in private and even then it is mostly for my very own amusement. The most important thing I have learned along the way is not necessarily that we should be kind. Although this rule is significant and should be followed, there is something more important to remember. I try to put myself in the shoes of the people I am exposed to. I tend to take the time. It’s easy to be kind to someone when you understand that the same way you are feeling is usually the same way everyone else is feeling. All the pain and all the chaos are the same for everyone but the circumstances are different. Instead, we do not tolerate each other. We seem to function on apathy these days. We don’t see that there but for the grace of God go all of us. It’s no surprise that this can be easier said than done. I too am limited as a human being so I can only do my best. Sometimes my best isn’t good enough and I fail horribly. I do what I always do. I pick myself up, I dust me all off and I start over once again.

“I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don’t understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.” (Neil Gaiman, English author)

            When Robert was a child, he slowly watched his mother dying in a hospital bed. For four long months, his innocent life suffered at the hands of a cruel world. This was the beginning of a slippery slope. After the death of his mother, Robert’s father showed his true colours and abandoned him to foster care. Robert never saw him again. What once seemed like a happy life now only seemed darker, as if it had somehow been corrupted.  There was not much sun in the little boy’s sky. He was always such a troubled lad. As the years of bouncing from guardian to guardian went on for much too long, Robert got lost in the rejection and eventually turned to injection. He grew cold and callous. It was all about the escape and protecting himself from becoming a casualty. In his teen years, he went from being angry all the time to crime. He would steal anything just to get a fix. His flavour was heroin. He was fifteen the first time he met a needle. The evasion was so much more than he expected. This otherland was the very best place. By the time he reached twenty-one, Robert looked like he was forty. His entire existence was at the end of a prick. His teen years had fallen away and he couldn’t even remember most of them. Life was a blur. Life was the buzz. If not for his friends, he would have been on the streets. He woke up one day face down in his own vomit. The paramedics came and they took Robert away. For 28 days, they forced him to get better. No matter what they said, he would not let go of the hatred and all the bitter. It ate him alive, or at least it seemed to. When his sentence had been served, and they finally let him go, he went right back to the life he had come to know. It was too hard for him without the drugs. He couldn’t function, at least not to some standard of human decency. I do not know what ever happened to him. He is as lost to me as he was to himself. I hope that he is somewhere safe rather than the stronger possibility. I am not sure anyone could have survived that kind of lifestyle. The very last time I saw him, we sat talking on my couch. I asked him what he wanted from life. I felt for him as he walked away without saying a word. I remember thinking to myself that he looked more like a concentration camp survivor than the friend I once knew. Speaking from experience, I understand addiction and what it feels like to stick yourself full of junk on an hourly basis. I can only suppose what the world looks like through his eyes, if he is still somehow with us. I hope that he is and that he has found the peace that once was so elusive. I have tried to picture him better. I try to imagine it but I am not convinced.

“Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to

understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is

as meaningful as your own.” (Barbara Kingsolver, American essayist)

            She was not what people expected. She seemed quiet at first, the silence and the space offered were the best things she could grant to other people. Calling her a bitch could seem quite redundant. She knew what she was and she didn’t care. She had trouble with relationships. Not only did she not understand people, she never tried to. She liked being alienated from everyone, including herself. She never got close to anyone. Try as she may, she just could not push others as far away as she wished she could. She was alone by her own making and unhappy at her own hands. She didn’t feel, at least she tried not to. In private, she was sorrow and sadness and invisible tears. She came to this place, she was not planted here. It was hard to feel for her. I didn’t know that she lost both her parents to the whims of a drunk driver. I didn’t know she was raped when she was twelve. It never occurred to me that she might have valid reasons for being the way she was. It didn’t really matter, she was just miserable and everyone around her knew it. I tried to be understanding, to empathize with whatever experiences had set her on her course. It was hard, month after month, to not exclude her from any kind of social gathering. We worked together for over two years and I cannot recall ever seeing her smile or laugh, not even a giggle. A few months before I left to work in Radio, we sat beside each other at a convention for media specialists. I didn’t know it at the time but we both grew up in North York, part of greater Toronto. We got along the entire day, at least I thought we did. After dinner together, we started to consume scotch like it was apple juice. We ended up in the hotel lobby talking for almost all of the night. I let her into my world and she seemed to let me into hers. It could have been a friendship in the earliest of stages. Understanding some of her history made it so much easier for me to put myself in her shoes. What she claimed somehow filtered past my own reservations and allowed me some insight, some clarity and a moment to comprehend. It was strictly on a limited basis. Come Monday morning and things went right back to normal. For all the sharing, for all that artificial closeness, it turns out she was exactly what everyone thought she was. It was like I wasn’t even in the room. I get it. It’s hard for some people to feel almost anything at all. We are broken and quite often unable to recover. We become damaged goods. I haven’t seen that woman since I left to live in Toronto with my first partner. I have no idea where she is or if she is doing alright. I’m not sure if she is even alive. If somehow she does still exist, I can only assume she is probably consistent. I have little doubt that she is still a bitch.

“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.” (Daniel Goleman, American author)

            I was twenty years old when I sinned against God and His Church. I didn’t know that I was doing so, at the time, but that has always meant little to the God of my salvation. I didn’t know he was a minister when I had sex with him. I did not ask and he did not say. He neglected to mention anything but his need. I did not know he had a wife and several children. I discovered the truth when I walked into his Church a few weeks later. I was visiting friends in London, Ontario when they suggested I attend a service. I was much into theology and enjoyed church-hopping despite being an abomination. I don’t think he saw me swimming in the congregation. He lingered up at the front like some holy man, even though his proclivities would beg to differ. It was not really an issue for me that he stood there claiming to be a man of God. Even a guru will get an erection. It was his spouse and his offspring that put a bad taste in my mouth (so to speak). My friend pointed them out, sitting in the front pew, while he dangled the Lord Jesus over their heads. This was the ultimate hypocrisy for me. His sermon that Sunday morning was apropos. He preached about the absence of forgiveness and the struggle people have with accepting God’s, a love which seemed irrelevant as we had sex a few weeks before. It was hard not to be angry. It was all I could do not to stand up and yell, “He swallows!” I kept looking at the back of his wife’s head wondering if she knew anything about it. All his ranting and raving, all his empowering us with the love of Jesus seemed artificial in light of his true inclinations. He might as well have cheated on his wife with another woman, not that it mattered. It wasn’t about homosexuality, it was about conviction. I ended up feeling sorry for him. I thought about all the trouble I had with being gay and what he must be going through in spite of his man-made divinity. It was difficult for me to understand his position at the time. Hindsight does grant one a clearer vision. Every time I walk or drive past the place, I notice his name is still on the marquee out front. It is still a Baptist Church and he still manages the reigns. I cannot imagine what it must be like for him. I cannot fathom the conflict he must maintain within himself. Most gay people know what it means to hide. We mostly do it out of survival rather than shame. I thought the days of having to hide who you truly are, every day of your life, were over.

“Look at Christ, my dear friend: His life was divine through and through,

full of self-denial, and He did everything for mankind, finding His satisfaction

and His delight in the dissolution of His material being.”

(Mikhail Bakunin, Russian founder of collectivist anarchism)

            Earl is an ignorant pig. His whole life he has been reckless and had an inappropriate disregard for people in general. He is misogynistic, racist and homophobic. At least that is how he seemed when I met him. My friends warned me that someone nasty lurked about on the other side of their property. He looked the part, at least the part of Georgia that he crawled out of.  He played the part. His nasty disposition only worsens as one gets closer. He puts Duck Dynasty to shame, and not just because of his appearance. Granted, it’s not like his mother lives under his bed, not that I know of. At least he doesn’t walk around with a loaded gun like many of his brethren do. Still, the longer I observed him and his lifestyle, the more I did not like him. It’s hard not to judge someone so judgmental. Our interactions with each other were brief but succinct. On the first occasion, I simply walked on his part of the grassy knoll between the two driveways. Most of that path was tree-lined, so I only fell out of step for a moment. Out of nowhere, someone screamed, “Hey faggot, get the fuck off my lawn!” The rest of my friends filled me in on it later. Although I only stayed a week, there was plenty of time to find some amusement while having my morning coffee on the front porch. One morning, he hung a Nazi Swastika out to dry on his front lawn. I don’t know if he meant to provoke but it worked. I wanted to get up and go kick the shit out of him. The least I could do was tell him off, you know, for my friends. As soon as I started to walk over to his place, he walked out, grabbed the flag and then disappeared for the rest of the day. The day before I left for home, I was sitting out back near the pool. I heard the brakes squeal and the wheels spin out and I heard it drive away. I walked around front to see what had happened. My friends joined me near the porch. Lying near the side of the road was a dog, writhing in pain and agony. Our gut reaction was to help it but before we could, Earl walked down the lane, across the street and he snapped the dog’s neck in one motion. He picked the beast up, petted its head and took it out to the back of his property and he buried it. I didn’t see him cry. He barely noticed us, not that it mattered either. I am rarely surprised by people but I was by Earl. We don’t really ever know a person, not all of them. We only ever know what they show us. I have to believe that there is good in all of us, if only in degrees. I have Earl to thank for my position. He would hate the fact that he influenced me for good but I can live with that.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to

what lies within us.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist)

            It is the life I have led that has made me empathetic. I try to write through that empathy rather than through experience. It is not always easy for me to put myself in someone else’s shoes. By the time that idea even comes up, I am usually quite angry. No matter how I try to be kind and no matter how often I stop myself from attacking, circumstance always gets on my last nerve. It’s hard not to understand why most human beings just can’t get along. We focus on our differences instead of our commonalities. It is difficult to have empathy towards every person that you know or encounter. Too much information can short out your give a shit button. You have to distinguish where this method is applicable. The easiest part of being empathetic is the ability to relate. I understand pain because I have known pain. I have been abandoned and I have lost my way, more than once. Having gone through your own life should make it easier to identify these symptoms in others. One must be careful, however. You cannot dish out empathy like it’s water. You can’t dissect every bug in the yard. You try to do your best well knowing that we all are damaged goods.

“We may not know one another but what if we treated each other

Like we were sister and brother

And say it with a kiss, no matter what it is

Put love back at the top of our list

Find a better way, to make a better day

Don’t you know, don’t you know, don’t you know that

There’ll be more happiness when we do that

Oh what a wonderful way to live”

(Say it with a Kiss, Amy Grant 2017)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe6b6GRYjPk

Photo

https://en.paperblog.com/excuse-me-no-damaged-goods-here-222216/