Chapter One
Where was the ‘have-a-penny, leave-a-penny, need-a-penny, take-a-penny’ box anyways?
“I’m sorry, everyone pays full price and in case you’re curious, no credit.”
“I’m not asking for credit, I’ll come right back with what I owe you.”
“That’s a form of credit. If I give you credit…”
“I know, I know.”
This was just too much; four cents short and she wouldn’t budge. I just wanted to slink out the door with a pack of cigarettes in my shirt pocket, next to my heart. She could have had a laugh watching me try to leave the store unnoticed, a guilty recipient of credit. Instead, I left weed-less and embarrassed. Alone with a keen longing for nicotine I went home to look under the couch cushions for a nickel.
Languor had always pointed the way to the nearest store as my source for tobacco. It was a handy shop that treated me shabbily. I swallowed my pride when I went there as they knew I’d lost my marbles and treated me in a way that was my apparent due. I wondered if she would have forgone the pennies if she thought I was sane.
In Bridgenorth, a town small enough to have only three stores, it’s fair to say that everyone knew everyone else’s business. It didn’t matter what you were doing, buying smokes, booze or just passing the time, you could be victimized, gossip could smoulder long after you’d left wherever you’d been or whoever you’d been with. Rural insulation from the big, bad world could end up costing you your carefully cultivated reputation. A sign at the outskirts could have read: All Who Enter: Relinquish Privacy In Exchange For Bucolic Bliss. The brutality of it all was enough to drive a paranoiac like me to the outer limits of inappropriate behaviour.
I feared going on about the abuse that was directed my way whenever I attempted to buy cigarettes. I knew that idle words once spoken have their own life and can come back to haunt. But to be refused over four copper coins, an amount that no one would stoop to pick up off the ground? To hell with paranoia, my mind said she’d simply disrespected me.
I always wished she wasn’t working, yet I became a piece of well-fried onion whenever I entered the store and saw her ringing up someone’s milk or a chocolate bar for some guy whose pimply face made you scratch your head. I’d like to clue him in, but no one listened to me anymore.
The cashier had answered a longstanding question. Did I stand a chance? Would I get close enough to say, “What’s that in your eye? Here, let me have a look.” She knew I wanted to peek at her soul, to navigate from there until I knew her every move, what every glance or gesture meant. Now I knew what she thought. I was no different to her than others with pining hearts. To her I was the guy who was four cents short. Someone might say, “He’s a few bricks short of a full load, or “That one’s not playing with a full deck.” The blonde-haired girl who deflected my crush while making change could knowingly reply, “He’s four cents short of a full pack.”
I walked home. Feeling miserable, I took a nickel from my mother’s purse while our black cat looked on. I started back to get the cigarettes I needed. The couch hadn’t yielded a penny. The way I saw it I had no option to petty thievery.
Why was everyone looking at me? I saw greyish shapes, men and women in the windows of houses, laughing and whispering to one another. A few windows looked empty. I believed the people who lived there were hiding. I didn’t know why they avoided being seen but I knew it was spun from pure evil. In a state of alarm, I put my head down and walked on towards a cure for my nicotine fit.
The people who were gazing from their windows breathed, ate, drank fluids and needed sleep. I believed that our kinship ended there. They frightened me and that amused them. I had seen the satisfaction in the eyes of the townsfolk who witnessed me fidgeting, squirming and unable to maintain eye contact. I was wrapped up in fantasy; truth had bummed a ride out of town and I didn’t realize it.
Simple things could intimidate me. Someone jingling their car keys, two or three having a conversation out of earshot, someone revving their engine; everything was filled with dark meaning. The way someone laughed tipped me off to impending danger. The colour of a woman’s eyes, dog and car could tell me more about her private life than anyone would believe possible. But I believed. I knew I saw truth and wondered why I’d been given special sight that revealed so much while hurting my head. Life was full of significance. I couldn’t focus on what was important as everything was vital. Common things, misinterpreted, would turn my cheeks red hot from shame and make my stomach twist in knots.
Finally I reached the store and purchased a pack of smokes. It was another night in what had become my existence. Life was different and less pleasing than it had been. It was now often a horrifying journey wherein I was missing the paraphernalia needed to fit the mold and be normal. I longed for my lost sense of well-being and belonging. I was becoming distressed; something bad was happening. I remembered when I’d been sane and compared it to the present and it seemed that life had dismissed me.
Hunched down against the side of the store I tried blowing smoke rings in the wind, knowing there was a trick to it. I knew I could do it and kept trying. A feeble attempt to squeal a set of tires stole some of my attention from idle frivolity. I imagined an old man with white knee socks getting out of a blue car.
But no, just when I was getting comfortable there was that beaten up brown Pinto, brimming over with red-eyed locals, higher than they had a right to be, dreaming of giant bags of Cheesies and buckets of Coke to subdue their unquenchable teenage appetites.
I got up and walked away, not being in the mood for their wholesomeness. Someone’s words followed me. Spoken behind my back they caught up to me quickly. Talk is all business when its intent is to injure and its target wide open. I heard someone say, “What a freak.” Then, he may have said, “Creep”. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
I filed it away as a putdown, but that’s kind. It was a dagger plunging and twisting before I could brace myself. I would have liked to confront those kids but I knew that if I asked them what they’d said they would have lied, claimed they were just saying hello and then ask me how I was.
That I might be hallucinating because of a slowly ripening mental illness was an idea I didn’t entertain. Schizophrenia was a word foreign to me. The frosty reality of my situation was that I was considered creepy, a distorted character in a Leave-it-to-Beaver village that was frigid towards anyone different. The cold village stance was too judgmental to consider mental illness as a possibility in my case. The local gossip painted me as weird. This caused me pain that contaminated everything I tried. Each putdown, real or imagined, hurt; I was crystal, waiting to be broken. On that punishing night I grew fearful and ran, making a beeline for the nearest field where I could sit and smoke cigarettes in peace.
Tobacco, a member in good standing of the nightshade family is toxic, as are many of its relatives. Still, its poison felt good mixing with my blood; I had developed a tolerance early in life. There was nothing like a strong smoke to calm me down.
As I sat and smoked the knowledge that I was half nuts frightened me. I was prey to repetitive thoughts of being on a friendless road that led to complete madness, of being forever and utterly crazy. Crazy is such a cruel, profane utterance.
I was a nervous wreck. Paranoid, anxious, suspicious, depressed – a regular teenager times one hundred. I was going crazy but was smart enough to realize that my time of normalcy was a small puddle quickly drying in the hot sun.
I was also a guy who loved a cashier. I suffered as Goethe’s Werther, from unrequited love. The difference between Werther and me is that I lived and he didn’t. The torment of love invested with no possibility of return was too much. He took his life. While sitting in the field, I looked inside where it was dark and knew there was no need for heroics. It was just another day. Still, I couldn’t believe that there would ever be another blonde-haired cashier.
Though the blonde-haired girl was my answer to Charlie Brown’s red-haired girl, I had feelings for others. My interest in the opposite sex was healthy. That seems to bear out the common belief that the male sex drive doesn’t rely on logic.
My world was crumbling; I was having a psychotic breakdown complete with everything needed to fail properly - erosion in my ability to think logically, confidence shattered and lying at my feet, confusion and agitation eating me up. Still, I remained convinced that every time I left the house I would hit it off with a hot girl. It never happened. The more disturbed I became the less appealing I was. The girls weren’t interested in someone who was unravelling. Who would bring someone home who was entering adulthood on the run from his shadow?
One of my prehistoric ancestors with whom I shared a prominent gene was probably driven from his cave and forced over a cliff for being different and unfruitful. I was aware I could meet the same fate. Metaphorically speaking, I could be pushed to the brink of a precipice. I only asked for the courage to jump before some jerk in a loincloth decided to give me a shove.
Of course, there was school to contend with. What can be said about high school, a world that seemed so immense but was the size of a pinhead in eternity? It taught things we had no use for and things we had no business knowing. Some maintain the only useful thing high school taught them was how to cheat. Nothing I learned there prepared me for mental illness.
I was a kid who was one in a hundred, because schizophrenia strikes one percent of the world’s population. What should a well-meaning student do if a one-in-a-hundred is wandering the hallways and showing overt signs of psychosis? If you took your cue from my teachers, you would turn your back and write on a blackboard. Admittedly, I didn’t know what to do either - it wasn’t on the curriculum. It was the one thing high school could have taught me about that would have been useful. I hadn’t even learned to cheat well.
I knew I was in over my head. Sensing the horrid days and ghastly nights ahead, I quaked. Whatever was coming I had a feeling for. It was upwind and its stench warned me to tread carefully. A sense of impending doom and the understanding that my life would never right itself danced around me, two sprites lost in a hypnotic trance. My teachers ignored my budding schizophrenia. My parents weren’t sure who the kid pretending to be me was but they didn’t like him. In the future, there would be those who would try to convince me I was full of demons. I would wonder what possessed them.
When pseudo-reality visited and I could see through my growing psychosis, the knowledge that I may have a sick mind for good was too much. I would lose control. Sitting on my bed in my parent’s house I would rock, cry and hold my head. I didn’t have two personalities; schizophrenia isn’t like that. My mind was a seesaw though – one minute convinced of the cruel intentions of others, the next questioning my convictions. This type of back and forth thinking was futile and exhausting, but I couldn’t shake it.
I did have a friend from school, Joe, who could free me from this private, dull brand of self-abuse. I tormented myself quietly and harshly but I wasn’t a slasher, didn’t set myself on fire, burn myself with cigarettes, eat glass or swallow cleaning fluids. I was hampered by a marked thought disorder coupled with a persecution complex and this turned me against myself
“There’s nothing sensational in that,” Joe would say, “you’re like Napoleon. He was obsessed, but his fears were less imaginary than yours because he was a prick.”
But the other kids were laughing at me and putting me down. I’ll take that with me to the grave. When you’re given the nickname of “lunch bucket”, it all seems real. The humiliation I felt was painful. I’ll never believe the disgrace that clung to me was imaginary.
When I was hanging around with Joe I was a bit in awe. He was accepting. Sometimes I thought he must be simple-minded, but his grades were high. Sitting with him in a field and drinking beer, he’d puzzle me. Sometimes he’d just drink and drink and not say more than two or three words. His quiet acceptance could annoy me. He looked right past the walking hullabaloo I’d become. He must have heard what the others said at school, though if he did, he never let on.
Lounging in a field putting back a few cold ones, the red sky on the horizon calling for darkness to come and shoulder its burden, there were times I saw what he wanted me to – a world without stigma, without one-upmanship. The world seemed to say that if you brought enough people down you could climb the pile and reach your dreams. When all was said and done, I knew that tall and lanky Joe didn’t buy into that and I was grateful.
School finally came to an end. The final day arrived and asked me to quietly leave. I wanted it no other way. I walked through the gymnasium door on that day, leaving behind echoes of squeaking shoes and memories of being forced into square dancing with the girls’ class. I avoided the graduates. My yearbook, unsigned, made a funny noise when it hit the bottom of the garbage can into which it dropped. It had been my third attempt at grade ten. I was fed up. I’d finally made it through, lasting until the bitter end of the school year. All I had to show for it were four credits and a thought disorder.
The other kids my age, the healthy and happy ones who were graduating, were under the impression that the planet was a yo-yo tucked in their back pockets. The world was a ripe peach from a tree growing in the backyard, juicy, sweet, always within reach to nourish and satiate. I heard them everywhere, but I couldn’t look back. It’s been said that if you look back when you leave somewhere unkind you’ll return there. In no time I’d be a small stick on the skyline, hardly moving and then gone.
As I left the institution I choked on resentment. Disappointment fueled the hatred I harboured towards everything. I was conscious of the contrast between my depression and the happiness on the faces of those passing in bright cars. Office buildings emanating industry and money also struck a foul chord. Intuition whispered: “You’re too shattered to ever belong in a company that furnishes both a desk and responsibility.” Where was I going to work? I thought that I might not work anywhere. I had no qualifications, not even a high school diploma.
On that June day I saw couples sitting on benches chatting or strolling contentedly in the warm, perfumed air. My envy was so fierce it stunned me. I was convinced that I would never be desirable. It was a small step from there to loathing those who seemed to take the give and take of love for granted. They didn’t get it; none of them understood what it was like to have turned into a toad.