We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
When I was four years old, before kindergarten walked me into its classroom and introduced me to the concept of peers who could break open my turtle shell and teach me that we are not all only children, I had a Dukes of Hazzard Big Wheel. It was the worst possible substitute for a 1968 Dodge B-body Charger, but it had the Confederate Naval Jack on the handlebar panel and could play all twelve notes of Dixie if I could think to yell them all. Not being able to regularly locate ramped shacks and bails of hay on a suburban, urban street in Danville, Virginia, I made my own bootlegger river jumps by pedaling as fast as I could and barreling down the hill. Sometimes I'd end up going all the way into the street. You can see it there behind me, if your eyes can adjust to the jogging britches.
You can't tell because of the angle, but the hill in my front yard was the steepest I could find, and we'd use it for summer rolls, dramatic charges of the armed forces, or Die Hard "holy shiiiiiiit booooom" dives to safety. We was, well, me. I didn't have a we. I had my Mom and my Dad and our house, gray and old on Glendale Ave. Sometimes we'd have pets. I had a dog named Poochie who "ran away" back to the pet store a few days after I met her. I had a dog named Smokey who ran away to being dead after he went crazy and bit through my right hand. I had some goldfish. They turned brown, and died. I had a lot of neighbors. They were all brown, and some managed to stick around longer than the goldfish.
I was that awful Everclear line about the scared white boy in a black neighborhood. It wasn't always like that. The two boys across the street were white and into the Transformers, and later the Ninja Turtles. The first next door neighbor I remember may or may not have been Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, an overweight, goateed, greasy white guy in a mesh cap and those hilarious eighties glasses with the thick lenses and black rims you see old players from the White Sox wearing on baseball cards. He had an Atari 2600 and was obsessed with Pete Rose. He was my first floor full of baseball cards, sprawled out faces like Harold Baines and Robin Yount, photo rub-downs of George Brett, bare walls and stacks of boxes. "This place is cool," I'd think. "I want one of these when I grow up."
When he moved away, a black family moved in, and I made friends with the three-to-seven little boys and two-to-three incredibly tall, clicky-haired little girls. Black girls scared me to death. They were gigantic and wore hot pink a lot, with animal shaped hair clips and beads that crashed together even when they were sitting still. Black girls would look down at me and yell things at me that I couldn't understand. WHY YOU BEIN SO STUPID. GET OUT A MY FACE. They'd click their tongues and go, "boooooy." I had no idea what it meant. I was just trying to use the water fountain. Leave me alone, you know? I'm supposed to be nice to people.
I can't remember the exact name of the boys, but I remember their nature. I remember how one day we'd be laying in the grass, dandelions in our ears, making shapes out of the clouds. I remember the next day, when I would be standing at the edge of my yard with a baseball bat, threatening to bash their heads in if they crossed the line to ride my Big Wheel.
They had Big Wheels! Some of them had bikes! I didn't have a bike. I had no clue how to ride a bike. I liked to sit and peddle my hollow contraption of orange plastic around and down the hill, and I didn't like that they could just come over and start using it, and I was supposed to let them. "You should share!" my Mom would say, oblivious to the situation, oblivious to the notion that they weren't sharing, they were taking, because there were so many of them in the house and they wouldn't get to play unless they walked up and took something to play with. They couldn't stand around waiting to ask to play. They would take, which would cause a fight, and an argument, and activity. Moms and Dads and whoever would tell them to stop it, maybe, showing interest. I had all the interest I needed in my house. My Mom would teach me to spell and my Dad would pretend bodyslam me. There was only one of me. I didn't think it was right to take away the one me of somebody else.
"You come over here and I'll bash your brains in!" I'd say, still holding the bat like Cal Ripken in the batters box. I can imagine a robber breaking into Cal Ripken's house, and seeing Cal come running out of the bedroom in his underwear with a bat to save his family. He'd make sure to hold the bat properly, bend his knees just a little bit, and follow through with his swing. The idea that Cal would bash someone's brains in without doing so beautifully was insulting to me. "Your brains," I'd continue. Then, when they were gone, I'd go back to using the bat to hit Skeletor into the side of the house.
I was so hilariously racist back then. I didn't see them as "black kids" but I thought something was wrong with their skin. Not the color, really, because they were just people. I didn't think they were different or bad. But the skin on the back of the hand was so dark, and the skin on the palm of the hand was so light. It looked like what happened when I put my hand on the stove. I'd touch their hands and they'd feel chalky, worn rough, and it just didn't make sense. How are you just like me if your hands feel that way? How are you just like me?
On summer days I'd join them in the alcove of trees behind the house that could be anything we wanted. Sometimes it was a playhouse and the black girls would sit on rocks, brushing the long hair of black baby dolls with tiny pink combs. Sometimes it was a bunker, where the kids across the street could hide behind rocks to plot strategies and get totally blind sided by my broken ass Skeletor, now a grenade, flying armless over the fallen branches and into their bunker. Boom. You're dead. Nuh uh, you missed me. I have special powers! I fucking hated those kids. The army does not have special powers, you fucking stooge.
I remember pushing my way through the briar and honeysuckle to explore, deeper than ever, the twists and turns of the woods. The least dramatic thing I ever found was more woods, more briar, more honeysuckle. A minefield of tiny scratches on my arms and legs and cheek. Dirty fingernails and sun-scorched skin. The most dramatic thing I ever found was a Scooby-Doo sleeping bag filled with rainwater. Some people find boxes of hidden pornography, some people find liquor bottles with a few drops of vodka at the bottom. Some kids pick up cigarette butts off the hot street and try to smoke them. I found a Scooby-Doo sleeping bag filled with rainwater.
One morning, I awoke to find that they'd stolen my Big Wheel. "They" meaning, "someone." It was supposed to be under the porch. This was a great, social injustice. That's the kind of kid I was. At age four I could read on a seventh grade level but I couldn't tie my shoes. I could point out and accurately identify 144 species of local bird wildlife but I was too caught up in whatever I was doing to use the bathroom properly. The stealing of the General Lee was a crime worthy of death, and death, as I understood at age four, meant a lot of yelling and crying, and somebody's parents getting really, really pissed off.
It was gone all day. I sat at the top of the hill, my highest vantage point, and watched Glendale well into the late afternoon. The lights inside of houses began to turn on and the orange haze began to disappear behind the barren, crackling treetops, and all of a sudden I hear fucking Big Wheel plastic tire on cold, hard city street, and it is ON. Five houses down came driving a fat black boy on a Dukes of Hazzard Big Wheel. I broke the sound barrier and was on him in a quarter-second, smacking him in the ears because professional wrestling was my only context for violence, and, in my rage, was not sure enough how to make the vertical suplex work for me.
"GET OFF MY BIG WHEEL!"
"THIS AIN'T YOUR BIG WHEEL, THIS MY BIG WHEEL!"
You haven't lived until you've seen a black child try to argue that the Dukes of Hazzard Big Wheel with the stars and bars on the front belongs to him. His mother, who has been replaced in my memory by Tyler Perry from those god-forsaken cornbread plays, dragged him away by the arm. That's what I remember. The foreboding sound of Big Wheel wheel and the kid being dragged away by the arm. I don't remember if my parents came out and browbeat him, I don't remember if he argued with his Moms, I don't know if it came to blows and I ripped out his heart. Coming of age isn't the thing I'm most afraid of. I'm most afraid of losing which parts of my memory are real, and which parts are imagination.
Since I can't bridge the two moments, let's say I pulled out a dolphin and beat him to death with it.
It wasn't the only time that they, meaning someone, stole something from me. A few years later one of the black neighbor boys grew up and became Rick, who became my friend. He was ten years older than me and tall. I remember him being the tallest person I'd ever seen. He played baseball with me in the backyard when my Dad wasn't around and let me be Cal Ripken in a less hostile environment, diving for ground balls that could've more easily been caught by taking a step forward and bending down with my glove to the ground. But I'd dive and yell, OOOH CAL RIPKEEEEN and pantomime throwing out the base runner by a step at first base, and Rick would laugh.
He'd stop over to hang out and play Nintendo, which was my first step to having the awesome Pete Rose bachelor pad. We would play "Anticipation" together, an old board game video game which was all about you buying it and keeping the box closed, and getting progressively more and more excited to play it. The game sucked ass. If they wanted it to be a good game they would've called it "Reward." I beat Rick in Anticipation every time, and he'd go AWW MAN and smack me on the back, and be my friend. He taught me about how the skin on a black man's hand is just like mine. Some people just have rougher hands than others.
A few weeks later we went to Myrtle Beach, because that's what poor people in the South do for vacation fun, and I spent seven glorious days swimming in the ocean, making gag faces every time I let salt water get into my mouth, and playing NARC in the Pavilion Arcade. Winners don't use drugs! Winners trick drugged-out attack dogs into walking over proximity mines and shoot rocket launchers at robot gangsters. This was so much better than Anticipation. They should've called NARC "Reward." They don't let you build up to anything, you're two seconds in and you've driven a sports car into some homeless guy and are shooting a clown to death.
When we arrived home, our house had been broken into. My Aunt was sitting in our living room, crying, and there was black dust everywhere. Nothing in the living room had been stolen. Nothing in the bedroom. Nothing in the kitchen. Just some stuff in my room. Just my Nintendo, and all of my games. And the VCR I'd gotten for Christmas the year before, because my Mom worked in a video store and brought an old player home. We didn't know who'd broken in, but the big black footprint on the back door was over six feet high, and Rick had "moved away" during my vacation. I thought about how moist his hands were. I missed the Pete Rose and Atari Boxing. I missed being little, but I had never grown up.
The important thing to remember about all of this is that it was my home. The house itself. Nothing abstract. Nothing you need to understand on a deeper level. It was the house I'd grown into cognizance inside and it was the street I grew up on. I'm the next step down from "Army Brat." I'm a Radio Brat. My Dad is a radio DJ, and in the radio business you don't always stay in one place forever. A station closes down, a program director gets switched, and you're gone. We've moved around a lot. Every few years we'd find a new place to call "home," and after five or six times I stopped knowing what that was. I'd switch middle schools and meet new teachers and forget them when I met the new ones. I still do that. I'll work a job and love everyone I work with. I'll be their best friend. When I start a new job, it starts again, and I can rarely remember my best friends' names. I'm not afraid of losing my mind, I'm afraid of the parts of my mind getting squished together.
The first time Dad told me we were going to move was the worst day of my life. This is my house! I've lived here my entire life! So my entire life has only been like seven years, and two of those I don't remember and lived somewhere else, but this is my life, and you're taking it away! It was all very dramatic. It was the kids on the last episode of your favorite sitcom telling the parents that they can't sell this house, and that they've been through so much there together, only the sitcom ends two minutes to early and you're on the road to Kernersville, North Carolina. I remember doing all kinds of goofy shit like clutching the porch rails and laying down in my empty room.
The color on my childhood memories keeps getting turned up. The grass becomes greener. Hulk green. Radioactive green. The flowers become fresher, the air becomes sweeter. I forget about dodging sprinklers to stay dry on my morning walks to school and blissfully remember running through them naked with a rose in my mouth like I'm goddamn Don Flamenco. It's weird, because I don't have these memories of Kernersville. I don't have these memories for when we came back from Kernersville and lived in my Grandfather's basement. I don't have these memories for Lynchburg, where I went to high school. I remember some people and some things, and I remember what happened and how, but I don't remember just BEING like I was on Glendale.
They, meaning everyone, stole from me. They scared me. Threatened me. Made me feel small. Inadequate. White. Weak. They made me run to school in the mornings through the sprinklers. They made me sit by myself under a tree at recess, writing out fake wrestling results to pass the time. They humiliated me and emasculated me.
They, meaning everyone, were there on the hill, yelling Dixie, rolling into the curb and flopping into the street. They... they meaning just me, I... was there in the grass, looking up at Dogwood trees and smelling the wet grass and summer cookouts. They climbed trees with me, they made castles in the red Virginia clay, they fought with me and knocked me to the ground and laughed at me when we were down there. They are the bright colors, man, the fucking bright colors. I thought the kid was gross because his hand was chalky, but I will never, ever forget his hand. I will never forget it.
I was always alone, but I was never by myself.
Where are you going? Where the fuck have you been?
On Christmas Day, I was riding through Danville on my way to visit my Aunt for Christmas. The family is different now, and I don't know them. My cousin has a hobo beard and tells stories about being dicked over at his factory job. My nieces and nephews have babies and they're all different colors, and that's pretty cool. My Mom gave out plastic guns as gifts to the black babies, and they spent all Christmas pointing them at each other, sideways, and shooting each other in the head.
Good job, Mom.
Danville is different now, too. I don't know it. I remember how to navigate the streets somehow but I don't know who lives there, and I don't know what they do. As we passed the Colonial Mart and Express en route to the old elementary school, we turned on to Glendale Avenue for the first time in almost twenty years.
The house is the same. It hasn't moved since we left it. The sides are still gray, the porch is still made of rickety white wood that can give you splinters from thirty feet away. I planted a tree in the front yard as a project for Earth Day, since I am a part of that first generation that always had to fucking hear about Earth Day.
It's still there, as you can see, and is taller than the house. It's the only thing that has gotten bigger. The hill I spent so many epic nights upon took about two and a half steps to get up. I'm part of the Earth Day generation, yeah, but I've always lived through the rise and fall of nostalgia. I've suffered through people remembering He-Man, remembering Transformers, remembering Ninja Turtles, remembering Care Bears. I've had to walk through Hot Topic and shuffle through T-shirts of Mickey Mouse giving the finger with DEEZ NUTS written under him. People have remembered shit they loved as a kid, magnified it with those new colors, brought it back, changed it. Made it dull again. Made it come and go again. All things must pass now again and again. I've nodded my head and bought my Spider-Man T-shirt and understood, but for the first time in my life I sat down on that hill and thought, "oh my god, where has it gone?"
This can't be the same hill.
Where is the hill? This can't be the same hill I conquered. It meant too much to me to be this small.
The windows are mostly boarded up. There's a big board over the backdoor where Rick kicked it in. It's all so small and dead. I want to scoop it up into my hands like a baby bird.
Through the last back door window I can see into my room. It's the only window they left open. I like to think they left it there for me on purpose.
I don't remember much about my room. One time I got bunk beds because being an only child was tough. One time I cut up a bunch of Pro Wrestling Illustrated magazines and pasted the pictures to my walls. One time I tore those pictures down and replaced them with versions drawn on construction paper. I made a life size Mean Gene out of construction paper. My life size. I remember having the brown goldfish on the dresser and being mad when my little cousin Ashley put puffy unicorn stickers on my toy box. I remember enough to write these paragraphs for the rest of my life. And there it is. Just an empty room. Lucky enough to miss the boards.
If I dove in the backyard today and yelled CAL RIPKEN OOOOH I'd crash into the side of the house in mid-RIPKEN and break it all like a Chris Farley sketch-ending pratfall. I commend my father for making this small stretch of land into a baseball diamond, a basketball court, a football field, a water park, a wrestling arena, an uncharted continent, Eternia, Cybertron, the New York City Sewers, and my home. The grass seems shorter across and farther down.
The alcove of trees where we threw grenades and did our babies' hair is exactly the same, but nobody plays there anymore.
The trees have No Trespassing signs up and chalked red X's on the trunks. The leaves are pristine and whole. Nobody has stepped on them. Nobody has picked up the rocks. Nobody has climbed the trees. The heaping mass where I found the watery grave of Overnight Scooby-Doo is nothing but briars and honeysuckle. Maybe I just grew too big to find the entrance. Maybe it was swallowed up when I left.
Those are the steps where I last saw Smokey. He was underneath them, right in the middle, with a plastic cup in his mouth. I reached in to get it from him. When I grabbed it, he let go and bit me through my right hand. I screamed and cried. It was a gaping wound, like a gunshot. It was probably just a scratch, and just a line of seeping blood. Smokey has been dead forever, now, but I can see him there, if I look hard enough.
Across the street is where Kevin White was showing off and fell out of a tree. He bit through his tongue. I remember his Mom giving him Sprite to drink to stop the bleeding, and I remember thinking how funny that was. Mom, I broke my arm, bring me a Sunkist. Kevin moved when I moved. I moved to Kernersville. He and his Mom and brother moved into a nicer house down the street.
My Mom mostly said "man." She'd look through the windows and see where our television used to be, and say, "man."
I asked her to hold on a second before she got back into the car. I didn't know if I'd ever be on Glendale Avenue again, so I walked up the steps and leaned against the porch to remember what it was like when I was little, a different kind of little than I am now. The memories came rushing back to me as nothing but a swirl of colors, vivid and constant. They filled me up, but only about half way up my leg. There's only so much you can take with you, and I've gotten pretty big. I took a couple of photos to remember what it was like being exactly the same.
Since 1987, I've become a man, somehow. I've lived in Florida, Alabama, West Virginia, Ohio. I've been to New York City. I've swam in the Gulf of Mexico. I've written a book. I've had people read the things I've written and tell me how much they mean, how much it made them laugh, how talented I am. I don't believe them as often as I'd like. I held a baby as it was being born and I've held my Grandmother's hands as she died. I've seen two girls kiss each other about an inch from my face. I've danced with a big foam Fred Flintstone. I've read Dostoyevsky and seen Goatse. I've grown to understand love, life, women, wrestling. Love has bloomed and faded, died and become reborn. It has grown taller than me, taller than the house. Life goes on, and covers me. I've known women and they've crushed me, and I've found my strength in them. Wrestling is exactly the same, God bless it.
They say the journey is the most important part, but I've always hated the journey. It's the bearable nature of the journey's small endings that make the trip worthwhile. Where am I going? Where the fuck have I been? I still haven't found a home like Glendale Avenue, and as much as I missed it, I can't, for the life of me, know what it must've been like to stay. Kevin White still lives in that nicer house down the street. We saw him sweeping the porch.
Is it the journey, or that you journied at all? What I've done doesn't matter. But God, that I've done it.
And as we were leaving, standing in the front yard hugging each other for having come so far, two black kids wandered out of the house next door and stopped to stare at us.
"AINT NOBODY LIVE THERE," they shouted.
"I know," I said. "But I used to."