how i became brannon, part II

part II: life of pie
"When I was small I reached up so high and grasped at the morning star
Now the wormwood topples down on me and smashes all of my parts…

Not even ashamed.

 

I can’t remember how it started but it wasn’t always like what it turned into.  I think my parents had good times after I was born.  But eventually, everything turned sour.  Their disputes turned into shouting turned into full-scale verbal assaults on each other.  I remember one time my parents argued so loudly and it upset me so much that I beat my hands on my desk as hard as I could so as to drown out the sounds of their screaming.  I didn’t think about anyone else hearing it but it got my mother’s attention.  I felt the ground shake from her stomping up to my room.  She burst through my door and shrieked for me to stop.  I still remember the hatred etched in the lines in her face.  Her eyes were white hot fire.  She looked feral.  I stood, frozen, my eyes as large as two planets.  I stopped.

Another time my mother picked me up from playing with my cousins and on the way back home, she asked how I would feel if she and Dad got a divorce.  I started crying because I didn’t want my parents to split up.  I cried even harder when I walked into our home.

It was in shambles.

All the pictures had been torn from the walls.  Lamps were broken on the floor.  Pillows and sheets were strewn about.  Glass and light bulbs littered the carpet.  Furniture was overturned.  I cried so hard it felt like the tears were backing up in my eyeballs because they couldn’t fall down my cheeks fast enough.  It looked like the place had been burglarized or a hurricane had swept through.  Nothing was left untouched.  I couldn’t believe my mother let me walk through that.  I couldn’t believe she let me see that.  I don’t know why she didn’t have me stay at my cousins’ house a bit longer so she could clean up the worst of it.  Maybe she needed me to see why they needed the divorce, that it had gotten that bad.

I remember standing in my parents’ bedroom and confronting my mom about their fighting.  When they yelled, it scared me.  My chest flushed and my heart raced.  These two people were my guardians and protectors.  When they were strong and stable it meant I was as well.  But if they had problems, if there was dissension in their relationship, that threw everything off balance.  That comfort was gone and it left me feeling vulnerable, lost, without an anchor.  I hated the feeling of tension in the room when they fought.  I hated the way they raised their voices.  I could feel the anger radiating off them.  I didn’t feel safe in my own home.  And the fighting felt so random.  They went from having a perfectly fine conversation to climbing the walls with fury.  I never knew when they would blow up at each other.  Because of that, I always felt on guard, which kept my anxiety high.  I conveyed these fears and feelings in my own little kid way, which mostly consisted of looking at the carpet and crying and screaming as loud as I could, begging her to stop with the fighting.

She looked at me for a few moments before a hint of awareness flickered across her face.  It might have been the first time my mom actually realized how her fights with my dad affected me.  She said they would stop.  The fighting didn’t actually stop after that but it eventually decreased significantly.  They never got a divorce.

I don’t remember where my sister was during these arguments.  I know she must have been present for some of them but I also think she was old enough to stay over at friends’ houses during the latter stages of my parents’ fights.  She had an escape route, a place free from the screaming and tension.  But I simply could not leave.  I was caught in the middle of it all.  

Although most of my early memories are fogged with age, I can remember those events specifically and feel they’ve changed me.  To this day, I still get anxious when people raise their voices.

Around the time of the near disintegration of my parents’ marriage, I discovered fire.

Both my parents smoked at the time so lighters and matches were always within reach.  I don’t know what attracted me to the flame.  Maybe it was the lithe orange dance that reached up to meet my mother’s cigarette that first caught my attention.  Fire was foreign and interesting and something to be explored.  And so when my parents went to sleep, I did just that.  I used to sit in my room in the dark and light match after match and watch, mesmerized, as the fire flickered its way down the match stick.

One night, I stared at the flame for too long and didn’t notice the heat snake down the match stick to my skin.  The pain bit at the tips of my tender fingers and I reflexively dropped the match and lit a small portion of my carpet

on fire.  I put it out quickly but it left a black ring of char on the ground.  As the smoke hit my face, I started to cry because I knew I was going to be in big trouble.  I took a spiral notebook and put it over the spot.  I don’t know what I was thinking or how long I thought I’d be able to hide the spot, as if my mom would come in and clean my room and put everything away except for that completely obtrusive notebook lying right in the middle of my floor.

And sure enough, when my mom saw it, I got in big trouble.  She yelled at me and over the course of several days, she interrogated me many times, asking me what I was thinking and why I did it.  And when my sister found out, she had a field day with the jokes.  She teased me for years afterward.  Years.  In fact, I’m convinced she still would if she hadn’t forgotten about it.  It was an incident that brought me great shame because I was mostly a good kid and it was the only "bad" thing I ever did and I didn’t realize the consequences of fire until I came close to burning the house down.

 

My 1st art award in 1st grade. I won the globe to my right.

I remember thinking I looked really good in this photo.

 
When I wasn’t holding matches, I held crayons and colored pencils and markers and anything that would leave a mark on a piece of paper.  I not only colored in coloring books but shaded and highlighted them as well.  I made my own black and white drawings and then colored them in.  I made my own action figures out of cardboard paper.  It was much cheaper (and more fun) than buying toys from Wal-Mart, which I also did.  In fact, going to Wal-Mart was the equivalent of going to Disney World.  Living in a tiny town, we had to drive about half an hour away just to go to Wal-Mart and we didn’t do it often and when we did, it was a treat because I knew I’d get to pick out a new toy.  It probably wasn’t a treat for my mom, though, because as soon as I picked out my toy, I was ready go to home and play with it and pestered her to hurry up with her shopping.

I usually only bought toys to copy their design.  This was before the Internet was prevalent in homes (at least in my area) and so toys (and sometimes coloring books, depending on what character I was trying to find) were the only access I had to the way a character looked.  I copied that design down on cardboard and turned it into action figures.

The only other thing I enjoyed at Wal-Mart was their collection of Crayola products.  I was the only person I knew who actually enjoyed shopping for new colored pencils and markers.  I couldn’t wait to use them to create new techniques of shading and highlighting my action figures.  I felt so proud of myself when I looked at how I had progressed from coloring outside the lines to creating depth by using different shades of the same color pencil or texture by coloring over a rough surface.

I enjoyed the process of discovery, learning about tints and shades simply through the act of coloring, learning about perspective just by drawing.  From practice.  From experience.  My little mind worked overtime at getting better, not because I felt I had to, not because I was under any pressure to perform, but just because I loved it.  There was a joy in the drawing and coloring.  There was excitement when a new process produced a fantastic product.  It was pure back then.

I often stripped my sister’s Barbie dolls so I could examine their anatomy.  This wasn’t an exercise in perversion but simply a young, inquisitive artist at work.  The research helped me put limbs in their proper place.

This is when my penchant for perfectionism started to manifest itself.  Through years of trial and error, I perfected the art of action figure creation.  At first, my canvases usually consisted of the insides of cereal boxes but since they were brown, I couldn’t always get great color.  I soon discovered our grocery store sold large pieces of plain white cardboard.  That cardboard was a revelation and provided a truly blank canvas for me to get more creative with color. 

I always created my action figures in stages.  I always took an old action figure and marked on the paper where their arms and legs would bend so I would know to draw in joints for the new figure.  Then I sketched it out with a pencil and once I was satisfied, I pulled out my ink pen and held my breath.  I tried to tra

ce my sketchy pencil lines with a single, smooth line from my pen.  If a line wobbled or if I had to use more than one stroke to create a line and there was a break in the line, it gave me anxiety.  I had to start over.  Making these homemade toys was certainly a process but once I tediously inked the characters, I enjoyed coloring them because that was what really brought them to life.  Then I cut them out, bent them at the arms and legs and feet and added them to my collection.  It was so much fun. 

I liked to show off my pictures and action figures to my mother.  At first, she seemed impressed by my burgeoning talent.  Eventually, however, she only glanced at my pictures and gave a disingenuous "good job" or "nice" or "mmhmm."  It was a little disappointing when she didn’t share my enthusiasm when I had another artistic breakthrough but I didn’t let it bother me.  Not then.  Not quite yet.

I look back now and realize I was just a child and probably became annoying after a while because I showed my mother every drawing, every coloring book page, every sketch I ever did.  And I used to do them in rapid succession.  She probably glanced at up to 15-20 pictures a day and I guess I can understand how hard it is to maintain an illusion of amazement at my artistry through drawing after drawing.

I only mention it because I got the impression that my mom didn’t encourage my art.  She didn’t support it either.  She just tolerated it.  She was probably just happy I wasn’t playing with matches anymore

And then one day, my dad’s colon exploded.

I was fast asleep around 5am when I was jolted awake by my dad’s screams.  I was frozen in my bed, unsure of what to do.  I hadn’t heard my dad scream like that before, not even at my mom. No, these screams were full of agony.  It was terrifying.  My mom swiftly came into my room and told me she was going to take Dad to the hospital.  She said my sister would get me ready for school.  I didn’t know what was going on so I just nodded my head and eventually went back to sleep.

My dad had colon cancer.  He got a colostomy bag.  I remember passing through my parents’ open bedroom door as my mom changed his bag.  I remember the horrible smell and the filthy brown liquid sliding around the translucent plastic bag and the sound of paper ripping.  And that’s about all I can recall.  I was too young and not included in my dad’s chemotherapy treatments and process of recovery.  I think it’s a good thing because I wasn’t aware of how serious his cancer was and if I would have been, I probably would have been a complete wreck.

My dad has startled me awake several more times since then, mostly with coughing fits.  He’s a loud man.  He’s loud when he chews his food and swallows his drinks.  He’s loud when he talks and when he breathes.  He’s even loud when he sleeps (he snores).  So when he coughs, he practically shakes the walls.  And although his coughing fits haven’t been anything serious, a cold here or there, every time I’m rattled awake, I’m scared another one of his internal organs has exploded again and this time he won’t be as lucky.  It’s not easy falling back asleep after you fear you’ve just heard your father’s possible death throes from the other room.  It’s always in the back of my mind and every time I’m jolted awake, my body surges with a fear that it’s the time.