I was born with a bee in my ear. The bee was called Bradley. Bradley Bee who lived in my ear. Not deep inside, like to the eardrum, but just inside the earhole. He was a bumblebee, soft and fuzzy and warm in my ear. Sometimes he would bite, but not often. Mostly he guided me to things. Sometimes he would disappear and I wouldn’t see him around, but that seemed rare. No one else ever saw him. When not in my ear, he lived in my hair. When excited he would fly around my head like a blurry little jet. His buzzing never stopped.
I don’t think it’s at all fatalistic to say that we are born to die. Well, at least I know I was. I knew it from early childhood. Bradley would make hints about it all the time. Also, angels used to stand in my doorway at night, flaming swords and all. “Japhey,” they said, “You’ve got an important message to deliver. God’s word. Like these swords. You’ll be fine”
A bit weird, but they were just hallucinations after all. What can you do with a small child who houses a bee in his ear and sees things that aren’t there? I also used to see this old woman who just smiled. I described her once to my mother and she thought I’d seen a great grandmother or something. I always wondered why she never spoke up. I mean if I were actually seeing angels and ghosts and all that. Why not someone useful show up? All angels do is talk in circles and confuse things. Load of good they are pointing out omens and such.
My bedroom was painted a color I suppose might be described as Caribbean Blue. Not a hot blue, but like a drowsy turquoise. I’m sure that the intention was to repaint it every year, but I think it was only painted once just before my birth. I never repainted it, but watched over the years as it faded into near grey. I had a simple bed with a headboard and footboard, nothing fancy. I had a dresser. It was white. The clothes inside always folded neatly, though I never saw my mother folding. I think this was the birth of my magical thinking. Things just get done.
My entire life, things have been scurrying in my peripherals. This has added tremendously to a feeling of unease and paranoia. Though I must add for the sake of atmosphere, I’ve never been generally paranoid, as in thinking that police or government agencies are out to get me, and I’ve never owned but for a joke, a tinfoil hat. My paranoia is more like a certainty of things being generally creepy but not being bothered enough by the facts to actually address them. But I suppose if you’re going to die of sadness, the degenerative process must begin somewhere. And in this clean house, that’s where things began. On the periphery.
When put to bed, the affair was unceremonious. I didn’t get tucked in, which was OK with me. I’ve never particularly been touchy-feely. I liked crawling into my bed after making sure that the sheets and blanket were tucked tightly under the mattress. I liked the feeling of being pinned down under the soft fabric and feeling my body heat radiate outwards, underneath the covers. Bradley would crawl out form my ear and fall asleep on the pillow beside me. My mind was stark under the elective oppression, and for a few minutes, I would experience the bliss of silence.
I would leave the light on and stare into the naked light bulb. I would modify my gaze from sharp, which hurt, to soft, which didn’t. I would squint at the light. I would roll my eyes back in my head while trying simultaneously to stare at the light. But mostly I would open my eyes wide and let my gaze go soft and allow the light to spread, like my warmth under the covers. Often I would stare until a small, dark shape emerged from the center of the light.
This figure would dance inside the light bulb. To me it always resembled a baby chick inside an egg, kicking. I fantasized that light bulbs were pregnant vessels of etheric, angelic light, harboring amorphous black light from the universe, which would bring death on us all if the light bulb exploded. I was very superstitious about this.
But I would also imagine parades of musical notes that would go inside the grocery store and upset the shelves, especially the cereal and soup aisles. Musical notes despise soup and envy cereal. It is a well-known fact. But what is not widely known is their love of carousels and escalators. Most people think it’s auditoriums that musical notes love best, but it isn’t so. They get trapped in the high ceilings and can’t fully make their way back down to the ground where they become neutral sounds and energy, reabsorbed into the earth.
Everything has a secret life we don’t know about. It’s only natural. So I was unusual as a child in that I stared myself to sleep whereas most children drooled or snored or tried different things to get comfortable. I sealed myself onto my bed and stayed put exactly still and dreamt all the whimsical and insane things that would happen to me until the day I died. Which, come to think of it, was somewhat recent, I think. I feel foggy on this notion, but I am sure of it because though I’ve felt disconnected from my body most assuredly, I’ve never felt so completely disembodied as now. Disembodied but also connected in a strange way… Also, Bradley has been oddly silent and I don’t feel him in my ear, which contributes to the feeling that I am now dead.
Well anyway I wasn’t ever very good at solving mysteries, was I? So I stared a lot as a child, in this tiny house with my mother and myself. I stared into this light, which hurt my eyes but also brought out some tendency to the pain, which I enjoyed. Since I lived in my mind mostly, the pain brought forth a consciousness of my body, which I enjoyed even though it was painful. Nerve sensations would bring awareness to all sorts of things, which would turn into fantasy and all peripheral phantasms would erode with the grace of hot ice cubes.
One of these fantasies was that I was melting under my blankets, thinning out like running ink. I would imagine myself pouring out onto the floor and staining the blanket, the sheets, the carpet and the floorboards underneath the carpet. The alternate to that was that I was spreading out exponentially. I would first experience this as “getting fat”. Which now, having the experiences I’ve had, I might say becoming ripe or getting juicy. But my experience of that then was without body issues. I would feel my body balloon joyously.
I could feel the blanket become too small for my body. I could feel my clothing rip effortlessly from my skin. I could feel my bedroom walls give way and soon after I would feel the great pop of my house exploding out from around me. I could feel the cool, wet ground beneath my naked, expanding skin. I would feel the worms underneath the ground, listen to the gophers and garter snakes burrowing. I would crush the neighbor’s houses, their cars and listen to the soft squeak of small animals and the wooden sounds of bones breaking under me. This made me happy.
I could feel the earth and sky at the same time. The oceans and the mountains were all under me. I could feel the whole earth and the whole sky and I would keep going until the moon was in my navel like a Heathen jewel. Until Saturn’s rings were on my toes, until there was nothing but blackness. And after that, waking up was rude, completely.
Being that I was so young and hugely unaware that nobody else saw or experienced the things that I did, I would often prattle on about whatever I was experiencing. My tone was generally excited and punctuated with flailing arms or little jumps. I don’t think I would describe them as tics, but more like my body was a conduit for more energy than I could sustain, and without a proper outlet for that energy, shaking and jumping and sometimes yelping were uncontrollable. This does not mean I couldn’t sit still or that I talked non-stop.
The other side of this kinetic coin was my full, mental absence. I could liken this to a computer downloading. I would remain silent and still, staring but not looking, moving only if necessary. From the outside I think this looked like I was vegetating. And by a clinical definition, I was. But inside me there was a great whirring of sound and information. The content would be impossible to decipher because the speeds were so great, but the images, some of them indelible, were crystal clear glimpses at many, many subjects.
Sometimes it could be like watching a single film with one continuous story; it’s characters, a plot and fancy camera work. But that is not quite accurate, either, because underneath that very big layer, were dozens more stories and characters and camera work. They were like the whispers of insects, but without the threat of annoyance or pain. They were like butterfly wings- strange and beautiful noises that I hoped would touch me. Usually I would snap out of this very suddenly. For a moment I would be stunned by what was around me and then just go about my business like nothing ever happened. I would always hear Bradley first. Buzzzzzz Buzzzzzzz. My mother would float by and pat my head, calling me a strange child in her most loving voice, and then flit through the house doing whatever it was she invisibly did. Sometimes Bradley would follow her and I would have to follow him.
I had no siblings. I had no friends. I did not want or care for either anyhow, so this was not painful for me. My mother was largely absent in her way. To this day I’ve not the slightest idea what she did for money, if she in fact even worked or what any of her interests were. I never saw her cut or prepare food, yet it was always there somehow. Our refrigerator was always bursting to full. I never met her family and do not know if she had ever sustained a relationship to another person outside of our house. We had no phone, but we had a television. The only activity we participated in together was watching TV.
There was a show I liked a lot as a child. It was a musical variety show. The host was called “Lucky Lance”. You know, the “Lucky Lance Chance to Dance Show”. It featured all the latest top 40 songs, plus an in-studio dance team and weekly appearances from hot-shit local musicians. Of course when I was a child, the style of music that was trendy was disco, which is perfectly infantile and great for children. Disco satisfies the ego in very basic ways, by appealing to anything that feels good and keeps you moving. It fulfills a great purpose by maintaining a projection of joy and contentment. So long as you’re dancing nothing can go wrong.
I wanted to be a Lucky Lance Dancer. A Lucky Star. They were these beautiful women with amazing bodies who wore lots of black spandex and had hunky dance partners with crotch bulges the size of my head. Looking at it now, the ordeal is kind of ridiculous and simple, but as a little darkling, it worked perfectly for me. Being on stage in some outfit that’s both clingy and cloying, dancing with some guy named Rick whose hair has twice the height and feather as mine; smiling wide and white into the camera, shouting with my body language, “I love you, America! I LOVE YOUUUU!”
Even though I never got a chance to do that, the fantasy still holds charm. The woman I imagine as myself in that fantasy stops by from time to time and we sit like old people holding hands on the porch, reminiscing about our days as a Lucky Star.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of information in one little download. The pictures, moving or static, would sometimes randomly strike me. Once for three days, this image of an elderly woman being crushed to death, pinned to a brick wall by a large pickup truck, kept paralyzing me. I could see her perfectly.
She was about 5’2”, must have only weighed about a hundred pounds. She wore tasteful, black flats, hip-hugging, high-waisted, wide-legged, camel polyester slacks, a skinny black belt and a yellow, long-sleeved, silk blouse with bright red and blue floral print. She also wore a semi-sheer headscarf, which she picked up in Tunisia back in the Forties, with large, black sunglasses. Her richly colored red hair showed through the delicate fabric of the scarf in swooping flames.
She carried a Mexican oilcloth bag, which matched her ensemble sanely and wore clip-on pearl earrings, bright red lipstick, and had her eyebrows tattooed on just last year. She also had a thin gold chain around her right wrist, which had on it a charm- a tiny replica of the Eiffel Tower. It was a gift from her late Husband, Ernie, whom she missed.
Having just come from Temple, she was headed over to the kosher bakery for some bread and decided she’d take the shortcut through the parking lot of Frozen Custard’s Last Stand when the truck came barreling through and nailed her. She didn’t die immediately. She heaved and coughed up a lot of blood first. Her red painted fingernails scratched the paint off of the truck’s hood in clean lines. Even though she was lifted off the ground. Even though she was a beautiful and tiny woman, she valiantly fought until the very last second.
I tried to tell people what I had seen, but no one believed me. I sometimes had to concede that people just didn’t see the same things I did. I had to pretend that I was a liar, which I never liked. Even if I wasn’t seeing and experiencing the world in the same exact way as everyone around me, it didn’t mean I was a liar. It meant I was a minority. All that preaching about diversity and most people never bothered to be inclusive with psychological diversity.
Truth be told, I don’t think it even occurs to most people that psychological diversity is even healthy. Despite these lofty exclamations most people seem to make around acceptance, what they’re really speaking to is their own sense of belonging and their own need for homogeny, safety and identity. I don’t care if you look like me or not. I talk to things most people can’t imagine. Literally.
When I close my eyes, the ride begins. I am no longer able to control what happens. Most of the time I have this sense of spinning head-over-heels. When I was very young this used to scare me tremendously and so much so, that I frequently vomited in my sleep.
Once, when I was about 10 or 11, this happened while I was conscious. The spinning was terrible. I was in my bed, staring at the ceiling in the dark. I didn’t want to close my eyes because I wasn’t ready to go anywhere. I just wanted to be in the quiet dark. I was getting used to sleeping without a light on and I’d gone a whole year without bedwetting.
I remember that I’d been having some particularly disturbing dreams about a serial killer who looked like a young Milton Burle and was trying to kill me. Serial dreams are strange. It gets difficult to tell which reality is the waking one. But I developed a test. I’d jump. In a dream, one jump can take me 20 seconds or more.
This Milton Burle Character was straight out of a sixties television show. He wore a white jacket with a navy button down shirt, white pants and square, black shoes that were very shiny. He’d chase me in every dream- sometimes with a knife, sometimes with a rabbit that fired bullets from behind his long, sharp teeth. He always appeared to me like a gentleman at first and then we made the agreement that it was time to get to work and he’d slip the hosiery over his head and I’d run away screaming.
Sometimes he’d chase me up wooden staircases that just kept going up and up, one branching off the next until from far away, it was a great tree of staircases. Other times he’d chase me down a long, wooden dock that never ended. Once he chased me down into the basement of a house and at the bottom of the stairs in a room off to the side, I hid next to a bust of my head, which was pouring blood. I was sick of these dreams.
So that fateful night, I just refused to sleep right away, which was causing me to worry. The worry was too much for my ever-fragile stomach and I needed to vomit. I could feel it rising, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. I didn’t want to get up and go to the toilet and feel the wrenching pain of vomiting. I didn’t want to choke and cry and wake my mother and feel the guilt of another sleepless night in our house. I was always sick.
But I also didn’t want to fall asleep in my own vomit. I knew, in fact, that I couldn’t. The stench would put me in perpetual vomit mode. With Bradley tucked in my ear, I got up, ran into the hallway and just as I thought I’d make it to the bathroom, out came the hot pink projectile, spraying the walls and beige carpet. I fell to my knees, unable to move further, vomit pouring from me like a feeble science project. Bradley was annoyingly buzzing around my head. I didn’t have the energy to tell him to get back in my ear. I just kept hitting my head, signaling to him.
My mother heard my choking sobs and came into the hallway. With a look of sympathy, she wiped my mouth clean with the hem of her robe and took me into the bathroom. Once there, she proceeded to take my temperature rectally and then sent me to bed with a glass of water I was too afraid to drink.
If I closed my eyes, I’d have to endure the dizziness and unpredictable motion of my inner world. I’d have to again, meet Uncle Milty the Serial Killer and agree to the terms of my murder. So I closed my eyes with the acrid taste and smell of vomit consuming me, and vowed never to vomit again, which I mostly held up until my 20th birthday where I met a friend called alcohol poisoning. We can talk about that motherfucker later.
The next day sitting at the table with a magical breakfast, I remember wondering if this was what being an adult was like? I was unable to appreciate anything about being awake. I hadn’t had much sleep, I felt vaguely sick and nothing smelled or tasted good. My head hurt and I was nauseous. I still felt like I was free falling, sitting there at the table. I knew my feet were on the floor because I was tapping them, but the spinning was taking me to a place where I could feel beyond the floor, or at least see the artifice of the floor’s construction.
Over and over again I was being removed from my settings and being shown the greater picture and yet I was learning that the more I spoke of this, the more people mistrusted me. So I said nothing. On my way to the bathroom, my mother floated by, looking for the first time, haggard.
“Is that a black eye?” I said to her
“No, honey, it’s a broken heart”, she whispered.
Her whispers trailed off as I shut the door behind me and vomited once again, into the toilet.
I grew up with very violent ideas about sex. Partially, or maybe entirely, I base this in an experience I had while 4 or 5. Sitting in my living room one day- and this was before I started school- I was talking to Mr. Space Bear, my stuffed animal friend. He was a tall, thin bear in a silver astronaut suit. We were having a convivial disagreement about his place of origin. I thought he’d come from Orlando, Florida as a result of him being manufactured for Disney. He was an emissary of Space Mountain. He said, no, he was from Taiwan. Because of his accent, I thought he said Tijuana.
I heard a noise coming from the garage and I went to investigate. It sounded to me like children playing, but at what I had no idea. I hadn’t heard many other children at this point and felt fairly certain that my fears of other children were justified. Walking through the kitchen and through the door to the garage, what I saw changed me in a terrible way.
There were a group of children standing around something. These were all boys... older boys... tall boys. I couldn’t see what they were crowding around, but I figured it was a puppy or something because the sounds they were all making weren’t genreally sounds you'd direct at a person. One boy there, the oldest boy, had his pants around his ankles and was saying,
“You’re gonna suck my dick cos you’re my fucking whore wife and everything I tell you to, you’re gonna do, ok?”
And kneeling before him with his penis in her mouth was a little girl my age. Muffled, she agreed. She’d do whatever he told her to. The other boys Giggled and cheered the older boy on in a way that told me he was someone to fear. He then took the little girl and laid her down on a flattened cardboard box.
“And this is how you fuck. Take your panties off, whore wife!”
She complied and he lied on top of her, moaning and wailing. She squirmed and yelped and began to cry. He demanded to the other boys to hold her down, so they complied. The little girl began screaming and crying. The boys holding her down looked panicked and all averted their eyes. I just stood there, dumb as a tree.
After a couple of minutes the boy got up. He was flaccid and covered in blood and urine. He was violently sobbing as he pulled his pants up and ran out of the garage through the side door. The other boys were stunned as I, and the little girl slowly bleached out and faded to nothing on top of the tawny box. I left the boys there in the garage, eyes eternally wide.
After that, I thought that was how you do it. I started by fucking Mr. Space Bear. I ripped a hole in the crotch of his tight, silver space pants and fucked the stuffing right out of him. Not that I had an orgasm, but, who does at 4? And this is how you fuck always played through my mind when my pants came down and the space bear came out. Probably on some deeper level, I heard that every time I had sex for my whole life.
One of my therapists said to me once that depression is a hypnotic state; that the vegetating, which sometimes occurs is a form of trance. None of them could properly explain the downloads to me, though. None of them could explain the psychic thread of them, either. Not that I could or can, mind you, but it would have been nice to have had some sort of guidance while living.
I suppose that’s the exciting part of living though (in retrospect). While you’re living you don’t really see struggling to pay rent as an adventure unless you’re an optimist moron. You don’t really see mental illness as a unique form of diversity unless you’re a different kind of moron, like me.
The psychic threads were interesting. Sometimes I’d know what people were up to underneath their words or actions. I’d know, for example, which teachers were shagging each other, which ones were pedophiles and which ones were getting shit-canned. Once, I told Miss Carol that it didn’t matter if I could do the Fucking ABC’s or not because she didn’t have a J-O-B after today.
I’d see her in tears, putting a box of crap into her trunk afterschool waiting for the HandiRide bus. I know she had to have felt betrayed, but I didn’t know what I was doing then.
It took me a long time to learn how to control my mouth. And even then it still never got pretty. A stab of guilt doesn’t magically go away. It stays on your tongue and lingers in your words.
I spent a lot of time focused on death and transition as a kid. Maybe it had something to do with the light bulb thing? Staring into something that’s a source of light, like the sun and having the power to flicker it on and off gave me pause to think. I wondered constantly about the big switch behind the sun. I wondered who had control of everything? I mean, angels were coming to my bedside. Angels were dead people, right?
That meant I’d be a dead person. I’d be an angel. But I really didn’t want that. I didn’t want to receive downloads of lovely old women being killed, or foreign alphabets or schematics for new machinery or child rape or blueprints to the Chrysler Building. I just wanted to be a kid. Bradley understood this. He always seemed to know when I was feeling vulnerable in this way. I could feel him nuzzle into my ear.
