The Making of a Man
I have chosen to tell my story in pieces, much like chapters, since I can’t seem to put it into a novel format. Each piece is an event from my life. It is my hope that these events will interest and entertain you.
Perhaps they can also serve as a tool by which something can be learned about the human psyche and how mental states and mindsets are developed and destroyed.
These are stories about abuse, addiction, violence, mental illness, incarceration, success, failure, and much, much more. Enjoy!
1
The Sandpit
I stood in my place in line, shifting from foot to foot, pinching my wiener tight with my hands so that I wouldn’t pee on the floor. My kindergarten teacher would make us stand in a rigid line about fifteen minutes before the bell would ring to excuse the morning class. She droned on and on about permission slips, snack-time, and other useless topics that no five or six-year-old cares one bit about.
In hindsight I realize that what she was doing was truncating the time she had to actually spend engaging us in an educational capacity. It also seemed to give her some kind of perverse pleasure to exercise this punitive hold on us.
One major rule was that you did NOT interrupt her end of the day sermon. You were to stand in line, silent and at attention, until she was completely finished with her rant.
Sometimes, even the school bell could not bring the sweet release from that classroom we all prayed for. Nope. Not until that wretched old hag felt she had sufficiently exercised her authority over us and cowed us into complete submission. Any outburst, any deviation from complete attention, anything which could be construed as an affront to the “rules of the classroom”, would bring the wrath of Mrs. Braithwaite upon thee! Which, in itself, was traumatic enough to bring tears to all but the hardest of children. But worst of all, it could re-start the entire pointless oration all over again.
I did not need any of the above mentioned delays to occur on this particular day. I had to pee so unbelievably bad that every couple of seconds a few dribbles would somehow make their way into my underwear past my vise-like grip on my penis. It was unbearable. I could feel the outside of my pants becoming damp.
The bell rang, but this wrinkled old bitch rambled on as if she had another two hours to keep us immobilized for some perverse reason only she could possibly know. I couldn’t hold it any longer. Then, it happened. I had absolutely no control over my body at this point. I felt the warm pee saturate my underwear, then my pants. I looked down and saw that it was actually forming a little pool around my feet. Oh my god! If Mrs. Braithwaite noticed my mishap, I would be put on display and humiliated in front of the class. Then she would also proceed to make me clean it up while she summoned the principal, the janitor, and any other available party to join in the shaming of this wretched child. As if just peeing your pants wasn’t shaming enough. I swear, this woman lived for such moments. You could see that she derived a sick pleasure from inflicting embarrassment and humiliation upon children. I had witnessed this scenario a couple times before. Only this time, the victim would be me.
I did the only thing that my little brain could think of at the time. I turned and grabbed the girl behind me by the arm and pulled her into the spot where I had been standing, right into the pee puddle. Then I maneuvered myself into her spot. I was fortunate that Mrs. Braithwaite had decided to do a mobile speech today, pacing up and down the length of the line. I made the switch right as she had turned to make another pass toward the front of the room. Luckily, she didn’t notice the commotion.
The girl I had switched places with just gave me a strange look. She was oblivious to the reason behind my action. Thankfully, so was everyone else. They were all focused on waiting. Waiting to be freed from that damn line and from that school.
The old crone cast one last, long, disapproving look down the line. Then, with a flick of her hand that seemed to dismiss our very lives, she granted us leave.
“Class dismissed.” She said, almost imperceptibly, as if it pained her to release the grip of fear with which she held sway over us for those few hours every weekday morning. The attention span of children can be a wonderful thing though. Ten minutes after leaving that dreaded classroom and all was forgotten. Only the few minutes we could see ahead of us mattered.
Five of us drifted slowly down the street in the same general direction, towards our homes. There was a shortcut we would take which ran directly through a fenced in construction yard that was midway between the school and our neighborhood. To go around it meant an extra couple of blocks of walking past house after house filled with mostly elderly people who were usually out weeding their gardens, mowing their lawns, or monitoring the children on their way through their turf.
That’s what it seemed like anyway. They were a horde of nosey, gossiping, old people who had nothing better to do with their boring days than to lie in wait for the kids that were slinking their way, bent upon crossing the corners of their lawns, or worse, picking a flower, or causing some other heinous act for which they would rant and rave and wave fingers and shake fists and, by god, let the little devil’s know there were RULES in this land. In THEIR day, children had respect, and only spoke when spoken to, and blah, blah, blah. I’m sure you’ve heard some version of this yourself as a kid.
So, the shortcut through the construction yard was a far less stressful and shorter route. Although it usually took us three times as long because there’s just so much cool stuff to play with in a construction yard. Hell yeah. There were giant inner tubes we would jump on and roll down hills, and rocks to throw at the dump trucks and bulldozers.
The biggest attraction, however, were the giant sand piles. They ranged from a tiny little pile to literal mountains of sand which the huge cranes would scoop into the backs of the massive dump trucks. There were so many piles of sand that even if there were trucks being loaded in one corner we could play in the opposite corner and never be seen or heard. We called the place “the sand-piles”. Kids are pretty unimaginative when it comes to naming things.
Although the day was sunny, it had rained pretty heavily the night before. And since we were the morning kindergarten class we got let out of school at noon and were at the sand-piles fifteen minutes later. The sand hadn’t had a chance to get completely dry, which was awesome for us because it meant we could dig tunnels without the sand caving back in every time you pull a scoop out.
On this particular day, the sand was incredibly suited for digging and tunneling. The five of us, Guido, Johnny, Kevin, Zach, and I, got busy digging and became totally engrossed in our tunneling work. Guido and I had tunneled into a large pile about five feet. We made the tunnel big enough to crawl on our hands and knees. Then we began tunneling out a little room that would allow both of us to sit in. Once that was done, we began gouging the area above our heads until we could stand. It was awesome! We made a little hole, about head height, that went from the room to the outside of the pile. We could stand on our knees and look straight out of the hole and see the other three boys working on the sand pile directly opposite the one we kneeled in. We were spying on them. They had no idea. We watched, a little impressed, as the three boys went further and further into the pile with their tunnel.
Soon, they were so far in that they had to form a chain to remove the sand. Johnny stood at the opening to the tunnel where he would take the bucket of sand, which Kevin handed him, and toss it behind him, then give the bucket back to Kevin who would disappear into the tunnel.
Apparently, Kevin would crawl with the empty bucket into the hole and give it to Zach, who would fill it, hand it to Kevin, and the whole process would repeat.
As we watched, Kevin would emerge, then disappear, again and again. Each time he would be gone a little longer. We knew they had to be deep into the mountain of sand because soon after Kevin would disappear into the hole we could no longer hear his voice. Zach’s voice hadn’t been heard in a while. They were way deeper than any of us had ever dug. I was jealous. I wanted to go into that deep tunnel and be part of their fun. Our little hole was pathetic compared to the engineering feat we were witnessing. Guido and I looked at each other and without speaking we both crawled out of our subpar creation and headed for our friends’ wondrous work in progress.
We were laughing and giggling as we walked. A little more than halfway there we stopped suddenly and froze in our tracks.
As Kevin’s arm breeched the hole and his smiling face just barely became visible, there was a sudden slump in the pile, just above where the two had been tunneling. There was hardly a noise. Just a movement of massive weight that was picked up more by sight than by sound. In a fraction of a second only Kevin’s hand, still holding the bucket, was visible. His grinning face, along with the hole, disappeared beneath the sand.
Johnny grabbed Kevin’s arm and tried to pull as hard as he could. His feet just kept sliding due to the movement of all the sand he stood in. Guido and I looked at one another in shock and disbelief. We were little kids. We did the only thing we knew to do at that moment. We turned and ran as fast as our little legs could carry us.
We could hear Johnny, who just sat there in the sand, screaming and crying as we ran. The screaming kept going until we were far enough away and couldn’t hear him anymore. That sound echoed in my mind for a very long time after that. At times I can still hear it, mostly in nightmares.
At the time, however, I can remember having a few thoughts repeat themselves in my head as I got close to home:
1) We weren’t supposed to be at the construction site.
2) We damn sure weren’t supposed to let our friends get buried beneath a mountain of sand.
3) I was going to be in BIG trouble.
There isn’t much rationale when you’re six. I was just flat out scared. So, I kept quiet. I was as silent as the grave, no pun intended.
It was much, much later when the news began to spread around the neighborhood that a worker at the construction company had seen Guido and I fleeing the scene right before hearing Johnny bawling and screaming uncontrollably. Apparently, when they approached Johnny, they saw Kevin’s lifeless hand sticking out of the sand and began to dig frantically with their hands to get him out. One of them radioed to a crane which came rumbling over and took over the excavation. Since they couldn’t make any sense of what Johnny was saying they had no idea that there were two boys buried in the sand pile. They only discovered that fact after the crane had already accidentally torn Zach’s body almost in two while digging to remove Kevin.
When the story spread, and it became known that Guido and I had been present, we were treated with a mixture of pity and anger.
Since I was six years old, and Jonny and Guido were five, our account of the event wasn’t given a whole lot of credibility. A story somewhat manifested itself which was more or less a consensus that was reached among the adults, outlining what had transpired. Perhaps it was for the best that way since the true account was uglier and colder than most people wanted to accept, especially for the parents of the deceased children.
It was known that we were all in the construction yard that day, but as far as the timeline and who was where and at what time, well, no one could rightly say. Neither Johnny, nor I, ever revealed that we had not only witnessed the tunnel collapse, but we fled the scene right after it happened.
In the months which followed, Guido was enrolled in a different school and never seen again. It was rumored that he was never quite the same after that day and that he saw shrinks on a regular basis and was kept pretty heavily medicated.
Johnny was forbidden to speak to me from that day forward. It must have been seared into his brain because he never even so much as looked in my direction after that. He led a very sheltered life for the remaining year that I attended that school. His parents drove him to and from school every single day after the incident. He, much like myself, became a loner.
I can’t recall most of the thoughts I must have had at the time, but I do know that the experience changed something inside of me. Permanently. The idea of death became deeper somehow, like it took shape, it had weight, it was palpable. The tiny little world in which children live became suddenly bigger. The fun had been sucked out of too many of my days from that point forward. It seemed like a violation, and I suppose in a way, that’s exactly what it was. Death had violated innocence before the mind was prepared to absorb it and process it properly. Sometimes I think that it was that particular event which may have given birth to many, many things which would follow.
