The Cape of Experience Tied around My Neck

People remember things in different ways–or so they say. My memories often flash before my eyes like old Polaroids haphazardly taken by a novice photographer. The photos, once taken, then embossed with emotional imprints, serve as proof of my existence. Their resolution diminishing with time, the fidelity of their imprints fading: old ones can feel like the memories of a stranger and I the unreliable narrator.

At a small farm in the high desert of southeast Oregon, a ginger boy ties an afghan around his neck. Bare chested and brave he stands on the arm of the sofa. He looks to his loving grandmother and claims to be Superman–she cautions him against his claim, yet he assures her gravitational forces don’t apply to him. A moment later the concrete floor contests his youthful postulations while proving the depth of his ignorance. Face and chest bleeding, he gets up off the ground.

I love this child. He was happy and optimistic. There was nothing he could not do. But this happy memory also serves as a metaphor for much of my life. Since then I have taken many dives onto unforgiving surfaces. These dives too were driven by an unrealistic perception of my relationship with the world around me. Somewhere along the way I lost the superhero inside myself. Through painful experience and bad choices, I became a villain.

The ginger boy sits pressed against the passenger door of the cab. His mother on his left, a crying baby next to her–his new baby brother. A strange man drives the boy away from his life on the farm.

This is where the darkness in my life began. I was now six and had lived with my grandparents since age two. Life would not be the same after my mother reclaimed me. The strange man driving the cab became my enemy and my father; my mother a battered wife; our trailer a dungeon; and I the redheaded stepchild who was beaten accordingly.

The ginger boy stands at the entrance of a dark hallway, his mother screaming for help. Above her a man tears off her clothing, beating her with his fists. The boy grabs for a weapon–a fire poker–and swings the implement. The man turns, and the boy flees. Barefooted, the boy flies through the grass in the moonlit night. The sheriff lives next door; he only has to make it across the field. Banging on the door, he calls for help.

While the grownups pick up their pieces, the boy plays Lincoln Logs on the sheriff’s floor.

Other photos exist from those days. Happy ones do not. Moving became common. We would run, relocate, and begin again. I stopped feeling the difference between all of these various places. There was Portland, a new brother, then Yakima, Kent, Lacey, Olympia, and Vancouver.

The abuse didn’t stop when my mother left someone. Not for me. What she endured, I not only witnessed, but became the outlet for. I struggled at home and at school. I was nine when I first ran away, thirteen when I ran away for good. Foster homes, group homes: nothing could restore the broken trust.

The streets called to me like a siren that led me to crash along the rocky shores of incarceration. Waves of despair crashed over me every time they threw me in that cage until my vision of a future eroded away with the tide of my youth. Those repeated stints in detention taught me my place in society.

No matter how hard I kicked and screamed for my humanity there was always a darker hole for me. The darkest hole in Thurston County juvy was a cell with no bed, sink, or toilet. In place of those amenities, a single hole in the floor–covered with bars–served as receptacle for human refuse. I spent weeks at a time in this cell when I misbehaved. The abuse I endured in juvenile was equal to any other–only this time, there was no way to run from it.

The ginger boy stands before the court. The prosecutor, caught in the zeitgeist of the super-predator narrative, demands that the boy be expelled from the juvenile system and declined to adult jurisdiction. The boy stands alone, without parent or advocate. “Anything to get out of this place,” he thinks, in no way understanding the consequence of his capitulation.