Category Archives: Flashbacks

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Empathy

“Fuck your feelings.”

That was a phrase bandied about a few years ago from one group to put down others. They were happy, therefore, who cares how anyone else feels? I have seen this repeatedly since then, in words less harsh but ultimately meaning just the same thing. Of course, the vast majority of these people are white, heterosexual people.

As someone who is part of a mostly invisible minority, I know what it was like to have all popular culture for my early life be about people who weren’t really quite like me. Gay people were the punchline (figuratively and sometimes literally). They were people to be mocked, smacked down, or (at best) pushed to the side and ignored. That’s all I saw for a long, long time. At a high school reunion, I told a classmate that going through school was living in constant terror, that at any moment someone would figure it out and I’d be thrown into the garbage.

It wasn’t a hard leap of logic to make. In 9th grade, almost every single one of my friends dropped me like a hot potato. (There were some notable exceptions, but they really were the exceptions.) They might not have known why exactly, but as one of them point-blank told me back then, I was “different” from them. Even good friends could not entirely be trusted because at any given moment a “fag joke” would slip out of someone’s lips. Why wouldn’t it? Because that’s what everyone saw in books, in movies, in television. It must be all right.

I’m almost at the point in my life where I’ve been fully out of the closet longer than not. I still always expect friends to drop me. I regularly hear a chorus in my head of, “I don’t fit in / I don’t belong.” I know all too well where these trust issues come from, even as I struggle to not let them take hold. I say all of this as someone with a genuinely wonderful family and great friends. More importantly, as someone who is at the end of the day, a white male.

So imagine what it must be like to grow up as a minority who can’t pass as looking like the majority. To read children’s books and be regularly slandered. Encountering casual (and not-so-casual) racism and growing up with the world trying to teach you that you are simply not as good. Imagine reading The Secret Garden and getting to the part where one of the main characters declares that Blacks are “not people.” Getting to the point in Dr. Doolittle where a Black character asks to be “cured” of his skin color. What sort of damage are you doing?

“It didn’t bother me,” says the white straight person. Of course it didn’t. But is it too much to ask for a little empathy? To even try what it must be like to be the perpetual outsider?

There are a lot of physically damaging things that aren’t available any more. I joke about how it is a minor miracle that my sisters and I didn’t put out an eye playing lawn darts at my grandparents’ house, especially every time we would try and shake one out of a tree. Not all damage is physical.

It’s all right to let some things stay in the past.

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Schrödinger’s Kitchen

In a recent episode of This American Life (#399: Contents Unknown), one of the stories is about people who go to abandoned/seized storage locker auctions. There, they open up the locker (but no one gets to step inside) and after seeing the stacks of boxes and things contained, they’re auctioned off. You never know what you’re really going to get until afterwards; they talked about how usually you just end up with worthless stuff, but occasionally you hit the jackpot and find jewelry or such.

While listening to this at the gym earlier in the week, it reminded me of an old roommate of mine, whom is now referred to solely as “AR.” AR ended up being a living example of how having a friend become a roommate can sometimes result in no longer being friends. (It’s why when my friends Rob & Peter mentioned they don’t rent their English Basement apartment to friends, I absolutely understood and agreed instantly.) Within about six months of moving in he started paying his share of the rent and utilities later and later, he was an absolute slob, and generally an unpleasant person to live with. My biggest regret is that we believed him when he promised things would change (and let him renew the lease for another year with us), but as he turned out to also be a pathological liar and a thief, we were hardly the only ones to ever get conned by him.

We got rid of him by ending the entire lease when it expired. My other roommate was going to school at American University for a law degree and got an apartment near campus, and I got a one-bedroom place and have lived by myself ever since. AR skipped town still owing us two months rent and utilities, going initially all the way to Arizona (having burnt all bridges here) and then off to Greece to live with family for a while. Fortunately right before he left, I had the foresight to go through his bookshelves and retrieve all the books of mine that he’d taken (including a few that he’d even put into boxes already!). But it’s the boxes that are the heart of the story here.

About a year after he moved in, an aunt of him gave him some boxes of stuff; I think she’d moved out of the area, or at least into a different home, and given him things she didn’t want any more. One of the boxes was marked, “AR Kitchen” and it sat in our kitchen for months on end. When AR finally skipped town, that box was still sitting in the kitchen, taped shut, forgotten in his haste to get away. My other roommate and I had been wondering for ages what was inside the box, and had taken to calling it Schrödinger’s Kitchen, after the famous cat in the box that is both alive and dead until you finally open it up and see what’s inside.

With AR gone, the mysteries could finally be revealed. What excitement was inside this box? Would it be something good? Something bad? A dead cat? As it turned out, mostly garbage. I remember there was an old phone in there that had mold on it (ewwwww), which was promptly thrown into the garbage. Some old plastic plates and cups. The one exception, though, was a straight-from-the-’70s fondue set that was still in great shape. I’ve still got it today. And if AR ever finds out and objects, I’d be happy to sell it back to him for the cost of two months rent. (I’m offering a discount, no need to pay the utilities.)

There’s something about that mystery of what’s in the box that is always so exciting; it’s part of why I love Christmas, with the idea that anything could be under that tree even though you know the majority are things you’ve asked for. There’s that eternal possibility that you’re going to open up the box and find something you never saw coming. (I think it’s part of why I was so entranced by the “anything can be in the box” Disney Vinylmation figures on my recent trip to Disney World.) But I think I’m going to draw the line at storage locker auctions. I have stuff of my own to start buying it from other people!

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Ghosts of Christmas Past Gifts

I’d told myself that December would be the month that I really started updating online a lot more, but then everything hit at once. To top it off, my own site got hacked and it took the better part of a day to scrub it clean of all the nastiness. (Moral of the story? Some people suck.)

Anyway, I kept telling myself, “You need to update,” and not doing so. But then I read Kate Beaton’s latest online strip, and it’s one where she talks to her younger self, and it kicked up all sorts of flashbacks of my own.


(Go on, read it. I’ll be here when you get back.)

It’s strangely comforting to know I’m not the only one who can still carry around guilt related to past gifts. I remember getting a microscope one year and within about 12 hours having spilled some dark blue dye all over the kitchen table and the tablecloth. Stained for life. I remember years later still feeling horrible about that. And despite one of my favorite childhood books being one titled Greg’s Microscope (I have multiple copies, so please don’t think tracking one down for me is a good idea), I too had no idea what to actually do with a microscope once I had one. You know how that goes. I look back now and I just wince. Such a thoughtful present that never got used to its full potential.

Anyone else  haunted by the ghost of a past gift?

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The Other Time I Passed Out And Hit My Head

When I had my series of mortifying moments at the gym at the end of January (calf muscle problems leading to nausea leading to passing out leading to cracking my head on a wall leading to blood on the gym floor, for those who came in late), one thing I didn’t mention was that this was actually a faint echo of something that happened before. The same superficial moments were there, but a lot of the other parts are quite different.

It was February 1988, about halfway through my freshman year of high school. A bunch of good friends that I’d had from 4th through 8th grade had also gone to the same magnet school as I, and up until that day I still thought of them as being just that—good friends. Then I got sick and to coin a phrase, that’s when I really learned who my friends were and were not.

Because our school had people from all across the county attending, morning transportation involved everyone taking a bus or walking to their “base school” (the location that you’d normally attend if you weren’t accepted to Jefferson Tech) and then waiting for a shuttle bus that transported all of us Jefferson students to our actual school. When the weather was good, we’d wait out in front of the school, but winter meant that we’d wait in the main foyer. People would play cards, or talk, or catch up on homework. I remember that two of my best friends from earlier years, Will M. and Steve S., were both there. And that was when I went to school with a nasty cough that turned out to really be bronchitis.

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