Suicide
When I was in high school, my first year, a very popular and quiet boy on the verge of graduating locked himself in his mother's car and inhaled with sweet intent. The whole school, 1000 people, cried the next day. I called my mother from a payphone and asked to come home. Two tires nearly flat, she picked me up and promised to comb my hair later that afternoon.
My father spent 30 days short of one year in a country I've never seen. He watched a few of 50,000 men killed. He watched his friends die, I think this is true. He tells me now of andrenaline rushes like heroin, of heroin like adrenaline. He tells me what I missed.
The week after my mom picked me up, my best friend and I fished green buds out of a film canister in my father's sock drawer. We walked down Telegraph and ate pizza on the curb, we giggled because it was the day before homecoming.
The boy in high school, his name was Michael, was not my friend. And less than two years after my father watched his friends die, he saw my mother panic during labor, told her she wasn't doing it right. He tells me now what you do with soldiers who can't hack it - get the fuck out, we want killing machines. And while he says that he did not taunt the soldiers who shit their pants, or cried, he didn't take their hands either.
Wasn't doing it right. She has not, will not ever forgive him for this. But then he held me for the first time, held my wet bloody head in his hands and though I cried for the next six weeks, at night I slept on his chest. I think now I must've heard him breathe, been close enough to see him clearly, but I don't remember. It was December, 1972 and four months later, the last soldier was put on a plane out of Vietnam, going home.
In my formative years, the last thirty or so, they have estimated that at least 100,000 boys, like Michael, like my father, got into their mother's Cadillacs, El Dorados, headed for higher ground. I'm beginning to hear those deep breaths, feel that intent, I'm breathing in time with them, making a wish for each one.
My father spent 30 days short of one year in a country I've never seen. He watched a few of 50,000 men killed. He watched his friends die, I think this is true. He tells me now of andrenaline rushes like heroin, of heroin like adrenaline. He tells me what I missed.
The week after my mom picked me up, my best friend and I fished green buds out of a film canister in my father's sock drawer. We walked down Telegraph and ate pizza on the curb, we giggled because it was the day before homecoming.
The boy in high school, his name was Michael, was not my friend. And less than two years after my father watched his friends die, he saw my mother panic during labor, told her she wasn't doing it right. He tells me now what you do with soldiers who can't hack it - get the fuck out, we want killing machines. And while he says that he did not taunt the soldiers who shit their pants, or cried, he didn't take their hands either.
Wasn't doing it right. She has not, will not ever forgive him for this. But then he held me for the first time, held my wet bloody head in his hands and though I cried for the next six weeks, at night I slept on his chest. I think now I must've heard him breathe, been close enough to see him clearly, but I don't remember. It was December, 1972 and four months later, the last soldier was put on a plane out of Vietnam, going home.
In my formative years, the last thirty or so, they have estimated that at least 100,000 boys, like Michael, like my father, got into their mother's Cadillacs, El Dorados, headed for higher ground. I'm beginning to hear those deep breaths, feel that intent, I'm breathing in time with them, making a wish for each one.
posted by Tristani at 9:11 PM
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7 Comments:
my best friend and my father both ended their live's at the end of their ropes.
i got goosebumps reading this.
posted by backspin ( http://www.ianbacks.com )
The subject and feeling is so intense- that my head gets swirly from reading it. I think it is amazing how you are able to execute the images of good and bad in each person.... and how your family.. and your Dad in particular.. have stayed intact.
you write very well...I have chills.
I read about your blog in the Sac News and Review, and I just have to say that I think your fabulous!
Jennifer
Wow, thank you so much!
I was a grade ahead and new Michael better, but not by much. The thing that was exceptional about Mike was not that he was popular, I don't think the response (despite what Hollywood would portray) was just that he was another student, even a popular one, but rather that he was exceptionally fair and friendly to all. Interstingly, though, he was also the class clown and I have known at least one other distinctly like him. A man well liked, always in a good mood, laughing, joking, but apparently hiding a great deal of pain, enough to want to end it all.
I try to look at all the statistics, the cultural differences, I certainly remember my own dark pain at that age. But I wonder if the demands of our western society to be autonomous, find our own space, isn't part of the reason we feel so alone, even when popular. Living here in Vietnam now, suicide seems non-existent, violent crime less than occassional, and privacy and individuality foreign concepts. Isn't this why we lost the war? We as individuals were mixed, some for, some against, some simply political or power hungry. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, were united, group before the individual, the party is the people.
Though I do wish just once that lunch was a communal choice.
The weaving back and forth between time, death, your life, your Dad's life - life linked by blood - is a perfect string of raw emotion.
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