2005-09-27 - 11:16 a.m.
There was a time shortly after I joined the military that I was having bad dreams about a childhood memory.
The same dream would assault me every night; it was an abstract amalgam of childhood feelings, wrapped up in the images of an incident that took place one night when I was age 4 or 5.
My first poem spawned from this dream. The only way I was able to stop the nightly occurrence was to write it down and it came out in the form of a poem. I don’t have the poem with me now, otherwise I’d share it with you, but I can share the memory.
I don’t know what woke me, but I can assume it was the yelling.
My mother and I were living in a house somewhere in New York State – I think it may have been Albany. She was “seeing” a Spanish guy for a while called Hector, but ended up leaving him because of his drunken and violent nature. I recall, one time, Hector chasing us out the door of one of the places we lived. He was stumbling and drunk, yelling as he came after my mother. I see the entire thing happening from over my mother’s shoulder as she runs from the house, out the screen door, across the front porch and down the stairs. I see Hector stumble on the high porch and then fall off onto his head. The images are jostled in my head as my mother runs from the house; Hector gets up, his face covered with blood, screaming in rage as we run away. I see it all from over her shoulder.
My bedroom was dark – that kind of smoky darkness with scattered, dim light coming from between the window blinds that you see in old movies. I opened the door and stepped into the hallway – a tiny specter in the darkness. The light from the living room reached up the hallway floor toward me, drawing me forward through the dimness, to the sights ahead.
I could see two men moving about; they were yelling in anger, but I couldn’t tell why. They both had knives in their hands – big butcher knives that they pointed at each other in judgment, shaking them, stabbing the air to drive home each point they made with their words.
I continued forward.
There was struggle and movement, shifting light and color. My mother was in the picture now with Hector - the other man was gone. Hector was holding her…tightly. He’s crying loudly and holding her.
I’m at the edge of the light, standing still, taking it all in…not truly comprehending the truth of the images before me. The last shreds of innocence are being picked clean from the bones of my soul by black things – the things that kill children and raise them again as grown people.
My mother’s eyes are blank as she stands there – there’s contemplation somewhere deep in her eyes. She waivers and steps back…now stumbles back against the wall beside the front door. She leans there for a moment, back to the wall and her knees slowly give way. Her eyes are wide as she slides down the wall, a large streak of crimson above her on the yellowed wall paper. She slides to sitting – she seems vacant.
Strong hands take me from behind and lift me onto a lap. Fred, the old guy in the wheelchair, he lives with us – he takes me into his lap and shelters me, wheeling back into my bedroom. The scene gets smaller and soon we’re in the darkness of my room. The walls are bathed in red and blue light; it pierces the blinds. Fred whispers to me quietly, reassuringly.
Darkness.
This is my first memory.
