Thoughts on Nothing (Or: 'Cigarettes')

Random Cognitive Gears Turning (80% memoir, 20% fiction)

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

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I’ve always felt alone. Like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I know, look at me: So dramatic. I don’t feel alone anymore. I’m married to a woman whom I cherish. This is a huge blessing.

For many years I felt as if I were floating in outer space, completely isolated, in total blackness, the absolute abnegation of sound and gravity. Just floating, just there. I felt misunderstood, a word that brings to mind childhood on multiple levels. (And it seems to be a childish idea in itself, so many say.)

What does being misunderstood exactly mean?

To me, for most of my life, it meant this: My mother’s eyes seeing above and below and around me but never seeing me directly, never looking into my soul. It was this lack of directness that instigated the feeling of being alone. It’s still there to a smaller degree, even now, tucked away in a tiny corner of my cluttered mind. Life itself, I reckon, is a misunderstanding, based on randomness and confusion shown in physical form a la The Big Bang. Elemental luck. Startling, shocking luck. Oxygen. Nitrogen. Land. Sea. Plants. Single-cell organisms. Atoms.

Religion soothes some of us. Ditto politics (religion). Also sex. Love. Money. Power. Status. But underneath all of that is a fundamental misunderstanding. We’re simply human scoundrels, each and every one of us. Do we actually possess free will? What is free will? How much of our language and behavior is dominated by genetics and environment and how much is genuinely chosen? Is it a binary? Or is it more like a spectrum? Say 80% determinism, 20% free will?

We may never know the answers here.

I think part of my being misunderstood all my life is the fact of my being a contrarian to the Nth degree. If you criticize A, I’ll come from position Z. If you criticize Z I’ll come from position A. If you try to be nuanced I’ll be binary. If you are binary I’ll be nuanced. Norman Mailer—that asshole genius—once said of himself that he was a contrarian and that this was a good thing because it created a natural and helpful dialogic dialectic. The back and forth, push and pull between two people is what ultimately brings out The Truth, or something fairly close to it. Social Media and the internet in general seem to be The Nuance Destroyers (TND). People tend to find their [digital] social cliques and tribes and limit themselves to what they’re told to do by said tribe’s narrative plot.

I am misunderstood first and foremost because I misunderstand myself. The golden arc of irony is long and wide with deep shadow. Time fritters itself away in 24-hour cycles, in and out, back and forth. The days, weeks, months and years pass by in a psychic, righteous blur. Things converge and split apart. You become older. At 35 years old I still felt young. By 38 I felt old and over-the-hill. Neither were exactly true.

*

I once knew a guy who carried brass knuckles with him everywhere he went. In his back pocket. He was half insane. One day he went to the gym in Oakland and went into the bathroom to change into his workout clothes. He forgot to lock the door. Suddenly a guy he’d seen—who’d always stared awkwardly at him—opened the door. The guy grinned sadistically. He called the guy I knew a faggot. Then he swung at the guy I knew.

Within seconds the guy I knew had the brass knuckles out and he thrust his fingers through the holes and started punching the dude in the head. The dude went down. The guy I knew got on top of him and—in a flying red-hot rage—kept punching the dude until blood was everywhere and he “stopped moving.” Fifteen minutes later the guy I knew called me and told me all about it. He was in a full-fledged panic. The dude lived. He sustained multiple head injuries; concussions. They caught the guy I knew and he served 15 months in jail.

Was the guy I knew misunderstood? Maybe. I grasp the rage that stems from feeling scared and disrespected, backed into a literal and figurative corner, feeling like a feral animal that can’t escape. Violence has a strong connection to sex, love, survival and terror.

*

I smoked my first cigarette at eight years old. My best friend’s older brother up the block where I grew up made me do it. Ventura, 90 miles north of the City of Angels. We lived at the top of a hill in a cul-de-sac. It was around 1990. My best friend—Carl—called me on the house phone and told me to come over. I did. Their parents were gone for an hour. Carl’s older brother Luke was smoking a Camel Light. It reeked, that nasty stench of tobacco.

“You want to smoke a cigarette?” Luke said to me.

Luke was two years older than us—10—and was tall and skinny with medium-length jet-black hair. He wore their father’s old beat-up leather jacket which was a few sizes too long. Still, he looked cool. He was almost 11. He had pink-red acne all over his face, earlier than most boys get it. His lips were thin and tight. He had gray eyes. He liked to cuss for seemingly no reason at all. Just his disposition. I feared him and respected him.

I felt Luke’s harsh gleaming gaze on me. My cheeks flushed red. My heart thudded in my chest. All of the sudden I wanted to go home. Carl stood a few feet away from me, short and dumb-looking, wearing Hawaiian shorts and sandals. It was late June, warm summer. Carl eyed me stealthily and tried to smile.

“I’m alright,” I said. I was nervous. Anxious.

Luke grinned in this Cheshire cat manner. It appeared sinister. He took a hard suck on the Camel, stepped over to me, and blew the translucent smoke right into my face.

“C’mon, pussy. Smoke.”

“I’m good,” I tried.