It's funny, how these things arise, I think. For instance...
Yesterday, while the painters were working away, getting nearer the completion of painting the outside of our house, I occupied myself in a more or less desultory manner (I love 'desultory' -- it should taste like olives, I think), by putting away some clean laundry upstairs. As has happened more than once, one of the suspended baskets holding my tee-shirts has come loose -- because it's overloaded, because I won't take the time to pull everything out of the closet and weed through my clothes. It seems that I would prefer to curse myself each time I squeeze an extra shirt in here or there, hoping things won't let go... Until they do.
Standing there, with still more tee-shirts to put away, into an already lop-sided shelf of clothes, I suddenly wake up to the connection here, between this stubborn inability to take even simple actions on my own behalf, and a more general, overall indecision with which I live much of the time.
(Clothes, of course, are more complicated than, for instance, newspapers, or a plateful of chicken bones. Clothing, with traces of physical intimacy, ties to my past, and I can't believe that I don't have to keep the shirt around, because I remember where I wore it once. But like a car skidding on thin black ice, even though I set myself out with a clear, unencumbered destination in mind, I usually find myself off on a side road, slightly dizzy, surrounded by heaps of old garments, and not sure of where the time went)
But there's another element involved in the decision-making, that I don't think I've really considered, to my own amazement (being, I think, the most exhaustively self-examined person of my age in the solar system) (For all the good it's done, I also think); and that is the issue of permission. Specifically, what am I allowed to do? What am I supposed to do? What am I not allowed to do? And how will I know the difference?
I think, inevitably, about my particular up-bringing -- the negligence with which my mother treated my brothers and me, while she planned her escape from a marriage that wasn't as romantic as all the songs and movies had promised. Institutional living, with its leaden suppression. Life with my father's second family, and the even more specific, relentless application of rules and regulations, time-tables and immutable standards.
In a classic fictional account of such a life, the shift from an orphanage to an actual parent's home would be accompanied by a like shift in the theme music -- playing now in a major key -- as well as a brightening of the color palette, and a more generally upbeat tempo to things in general. But because the playwright in question was apparently on a coffee break or something, the lives my brothers and I were destined to live didn't conform to cliche, and if anything, in my father's house, there was a more severe and all-searching quality to the discipline under which my brothers and I lived. And 'normal' quickly becomes that to which one has become inured.
Understand, please, that I'm not complaining here, because my brothers and I weren't allowed to run rampant through the house, screaming and setting things on fire. What I found oppressive, then and now, was the constant surveillance, the expectation that we were going to misbehave at any moment, and what I still think were unreasonable demands made on little kids. Using the wrong door, to enter the house, earned a screaming fit of accusation. We weren't permitted to play with other kids, or have them in our house. We were criticized for how loudly we chewed our food; we were regularly reminded that we hadn't been wanted by our original family; we had to ask permission to wear certain items of our clothing; laughing or making jokes (who would think we'd be able to?) were forbidden; we were kept busy mostly with either homework or household chores, year-round. Because I couldn't tell my parents, precisely, every place I would be, if I went to hang out with my friends, I was never permitted to do so. And, hovering over this mesh of control, like some deformed parade float, was the palpable threat -- already realized once for each of us -- that if we misbehaved, we would be sent right back to the Home.
Maybe it wasn't so much lack of permission that stunted me, as the extinction of hopeful expectation?
After I'd completed high school, and spent the following summer working in a disreputable local amusement park, I entered the US Air Force, where I spent four years, following still more orders, whether I liked them or not. Aside from that first truly bad haircut, revealing me to have an unattractive, oddly lumpy skull, the military was a life-saver for me. The control had home had been relentless and degrading, punctuated with exclamations of impatience and scorn; in the military, the order of the day was refreshingly impersonal. A job could be done without a corrosive follow-up examination, sure to uncover hidden flaws and overlooked details, which only an idiot would have missed. You get the idea.
But there was still the matter of needing permission -- permission to leave the base, permission to wear civilian clothing, limitations to what I might want to do and where I might want to go. Early on in my Air Force career, while my pre-training group was awaiting the beginning of our computer classes, I openly expressed some puzzlement and frustration about having to spend such long portions of each morning picking up cigarette butts, and then the rest of the day marching around pointlessly. I even expressed the suspicion that the cigarette butts were imported, and scattered over the grounds at night, just to give us something pointless to do the next day -- because, after one day of 'policing' the grounds, I couldn't believe that any airman sufficiently conscious to light a cigarette would then go and toss the butt on the ground.
This bit of independent thinking led to my taking a battery of psychological tests at the base hospital (during which time, I couldn't help noticing, I wasn't picking up cigarette butts). I did an elaborate drawing for a classic diagnostic tool, the 'house-tree-person' test. I put captions in the speech balloons of simple cartoons, like the one in which a man's jacket has been splashed by a woman driving past in her car. I could have taken tests for months. I wanted to see if I could get the man in the wet jacket and the woman in the car go start going out with each other. But the battery of examinations ended too soon, and then I had to face the results.
This is really true, by the way.
I was given an appointment, and at the proper time, I entered a doctor's office in the hospital -- someone I hadn't met yet. He was probably in his 30's, with a florid, sunburnt face, buzz-cut strawberry-blond hair, and bright blue eyes. He was wearing his dress blues for the day, which meant a blue oxford-cloth shirt and a dark blue necktie, under his white lab coat. Sitting in a chair across from his desk, watching him look through the folder on his desk, I thought he looked familiar somehow. As I was trying to place him, the doctor said that, according to the tests, the Air Force wouldn't be good for me. Before I had the time to feel too smug about that, he added that, conversely, I wouldn't be good for the Air Force. Which felt more like what I would have expected, really.
"And if you like," he said, leaning forward, in his white coat and blue shirt, with his shining, coppery hair and bright eyes, "we can arrange for you to get out of the service, as soon as you like."
Of course, I thought -- this doctor is the American flag, just... rearranged a little. That's why I recognize him. And he's saying I can go home. And the thought paralyzes me.
Don't we all wish there were some channel down which we could shout to ourselves, from time to time -- forward or backward, who care? Because if there were, I would bust my lungs, yelling to my younger, 18-year-old self, sitting at that desk in Amarillo Texas, opposite an animated flag -- and I would be screaming just one word -- Paris!
But for the moment, all I could feel was failure, the defeat of not even managing to make a go of something as elementary as the military, where you wear the same clothes as everyone else, and marching around pointlessly. All I could manage to see, in my mind's eye, was me, packing my few civilian clothes into a suitcase I'd had to borrow from my horrid grandmother, and then getting on a bus in downtown Wichita Falls, headed for Pittsburgh. Then I'd transfer to the 109 for McKeesport, disembark by the art supply store that smelled of oil paints, walk the mile or so up the hill, and go into the house. From where, within a week at the most, I knew I would jump to my death from the Ravine Street Bridge, like that breathtakingly beautiful high-school colleague of mine had done, just months before. If he couldn't face the life that was ahead of him, I reasoned, when he was so stunning, and a real young man, instead of what I knew myself to be, what chance in hell did I stand?
Well, my parents would never have allowed me to go to Paris anyway, even if it wasn't really theirs to permit or disallow. I was so inured to the collar they'd prepared for me that I was less like a son, and more like a fox that had long been caged. And, once released from my current military commitment, I knew that, like the beaten creature I was, I would almost automatically scent my way back, because I missed the cramping, and my bowl of food, and the dish of water.
Now, please don't get me wrong -- my life has been a wonder, with many amazing things in it, and many thrilling achievements, and exciting adventures. Compared to most of the inhabitants on this tiny planet, I live like a prince. Maybe it's ungrateful of me to bring these inward things forward, but for now, I can't help be amazed at the depth of the imprinting that was done, all that long time ago. So that, really, for a long time after I began to live on my own, if I was having lunch out, I would strive to guess what the waitress wanted me to order. Gaining permission, dreading the discovery that I've made a mistake, pleasing the closest human -- these are habits that continue to impact to my daily interactions, from the time I enter a room until I leave it again. To fall back again on metaphor, I finally begin to see how the past continues evidence itself, practically on a physical level. It's as though, when I was ten, I was fitted with a snug, open-work leather corset that I was never permitted to remove. So I grew, and I grew, and finally like a tree, I grew out beyond it and around it. And it's still in there, inseparable from the way I breathe.
The challenge now, I'm surprised to find myself saying, is to learn -- however late in the program it might be -- to dance in spite of the stricture.
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
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