Be Glad it Didn’t Happen to You:
A Story of Disaster, Misadventure, Triumph, and Hope
Sean DeCoursey
Copyright 2011 by Sean DeCoursey
Smashwords Edition
Be Glad it Didn’t Happen to You: a Story of Disaster, Misadventure, Triumph, and Hope
By Sean Douglas DeCoursey
Introduction/Author’s Forward
Originally, I wasn’t going to write an introduction to this book. However, several of my test readers seemed to think it was a good idea, and upon further consideration, I think they’re right. I’m not entirely sure what this part of the book should say, should I talk about why I wrote the book? How I wrote it? What’s inside? Given the nature of some of the content in here, I think some warning previews are in order.
As the title states, the book is about a lot of things you’re probably glad you didn’t get to experience firsthand. If you make up a list of the ten worst things you can imagine happening to you, I’ll likely have between eight and ten of them knocked out. And I’m not talking about the light stuff either like your grandma died and you got locked in the funeral home with her and a bunch of other stiffs’ corpses because your entire extended family forgot about you. (Note: this actually happened when I was ten.) I’m talking about the big stuff - war, death, paralysis, rape, child abuse, mental hospitals, violence, insanity, jail, etc. About the only really horrible thing I can think of that might come up commonly is animal attacks by like, sharks and bears and stuff. Everything else, yeah, probably.
Fortunately, the book isn’t all doom and gloom either. There’s lots of happiness and success and overcoming and self-actualization and all that other self help junk too. If I made a list of things that I want to accomplish in my life or just do or see or whatever, it’s down to the following items:
Go to Australia.
Fix the world.
That’s pretty much it. Not because I lack imagination or ambition or anything like that, simply because I’ve already done everything else. Seriously, if you saw someone doing it in a commercial or a movie and thought “wow, that looks cool!” I’ve probably done it. Mostly this has happened unintentionally, like the time I acted out some scene from “Dirty Dancing” with a fencepost and my truck during a rainstorm – I know about it because my girlfriend at the time was a fan of the movie and explained it to me later.
I know this was true for me, and I suspect it is still true for many other people, but the main reason we never do whatever we really want to is because we often idealize our goals and then assume we can’t measure up to them so we don’t ever try. I know in undergrad I never took business classes or studied abroad or any number of other things because I thought that was something that a better class of people than me did. Later I got over that bullshit and when I was in business school I studied in Italy and China. I didn’t go on spring break at all in high school, but in college I hit up Arizona, Miami, and Europe, in consecutive years.
I remember when I used to talk about doing stuff like this or any of the other random awesome events I’ve experienced, people would be all like “Wow, I could never do that!” or something. I didn’t understand it at the time but now I do. Self-reflection is a useful tool for understanding both yourself and the world around you. This would be an example of that usefulness. Stop holding yourselves back. If you want to do something, go do it. If you’re reading this book, you’ve got the Internet; if you’ve got the Internet, you’ve got all that info and access you need to do whatever it is you want. So get to it.
As far as the other topics of an author’s forward go… I wrote the book on my laptop, in Microsoft Word, from March to July in 2011. The most I ever wrote in one day was about 26,000 words. That happened when I was writing about my time in the Army, especially about Iraq, that stuff just flowed right out. Probably the hardest chapter for me to write was the last chapter, Chapter 13, mostly because it’s somewhat future-based and I’m not simply chronicling things that have already happened like I am in the rest of the book. This intro took about 20 minutes to write: 15 minutes to go get dinner from Sonic, then another 5 minutes to proofread it while I was eating my cheddar bites.
As to why I wrote this, well, see item #2 on my list of things to do: Fix the world, Specifically resource distribution, and by proxy resource generation. That takes money. I’ve got the tech mostly designed. It’ll get changed and modded and reconfigured to unrecognizability during development, but the designs all math out rather nicely. I know writing an autobiography is an incredibly unorthodox way of raising investment capital, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s one of the few viable options open to me. That's not because I’m somehow disadvantaged or anything, but simply because prior experience has proven to me that I suck horribly at the traditional options. I mean, at one point I had a Deputy Defense Secretary at the Pentagon asking me for prototypes of a rifle to include in field tests to replace the M-16/M-4. (Note: that’s a multi-billion dollar contract just from direct military sales, not even counting replacements, parts, and sales to police agencies, the public, and foreign militaries.) I had nice emails from Infantry General officers and DARPA program directors. I needed about $200,000 to build the prototypes. I got bubkus. Honestly, I never really even came close. So after doing a lot of other unproductive things to raise capital, and designing lots of other awesome stuff that nobody wanted to fund, I began to realize that the problem was me. I simply lacked the necessary skills and attitudes to set this stuff up and get $$ for it.
I’d been kicking around the book option since I got paralyzed in 2001 and everyone told me to write a book about it, but it crystallized for me when I was talking to a friend of mine who was in town visiting and he commented about how he wished he had stories like mine, even the bad ones, just to say he’d done something. I wrote the majority of the first chapter that night, and two days later had the outline set up and the afterword written. I finished up everything five months later.
The table of contents is next and as evinced by the chapter titles some of the chapters are kind of, for lack of a better term, brutal. I recommend reading the book in order, but the chapters are all largely independent of each other, each chronicling that specific aspect of my life from early on to the present. So if something just seems like it would be hard for you to read or whatever, or if one chapter looks more interesting and you want to read it first, feel free, it shouldn’t cripple the reading experience for you. Above all, remember it’s just a book, and while all of this stuff really did happen and a lot of it is/was bad, it didn’t happen to you (at least I hope not) and I’m hardcore enough to have handled it all.
Introduduction/Author’s Forward
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The part where I get raped
Chapter 2: The part where I do some despicable shit
Chapter 3: The part where I get drunk
Chapter 4: The part where I learn about girls
Chapter 5: The part where I go to psych wards
Chapter 6: The part where I join the Army
Chapter 7: The part where I get paralyzed
Chapter 8: The part where I suck at sports
Chapter 9: The part where I hate school
Chapter 10: The part where I can’t get a job
Chapter 11: The part where I blame my parents
Chapter 12: The part where I learn about myself
Chapter 13: The part where I fix everything
Afterword
“Man does not learn from his mistakes. He simply spends his life finding new ways to commit the same ones.” – Me, but probably cribbed from someone famouser and wittier.
“May you live in interesting times.” – Chinese curse and summation of my life.
PROJECT: MAYHEM disclaimer. No one asked me to write a book about them, or to be included in a book about my life, therefore, no one’s name besides my own appears in this book. With the exception of dead people, because the dead deserve to be remembered. I really hope Brad Pitt, Ed Norton and the ghost of Philip K. Dick don’t sue me now.
Credits: Adam Ross, for Editing.
Everyone who test read early versions/parts of this and helped me with naming it and coming up with cover ideas or just generally being supportive.
And of course, my loving family for not excommunicating me over chapter 11.
Chapter 1: The part where I get raped
I owe this introduction entirely to Alan Moore. Specifically, the story within a story of Under the Mask, the novel Hollis Mason wrote as part of Moore’s Watchmen comics. In the opening page of the story, one of the few parts of the novel the reader is able to read, Mason notes that he was advised to start out his story with something sad, the worst thing you can think of -- this way, the reader is on your side from the start and more sympathetic to your story. In the Hollis Mason book, this sad story is about the suicide of his father’s boss at the auto mechanic shop after the man finds out his wife is cheating on him. In my case, in this book, it’s the story of how I was raped when I was five.
In many ways I’m exceptionally lucky in what happened to me. Most childhood victims of sexual abuse are abused by a family member or family friend. They are abused repeatedly over a long period of time. Or they are abused by a trusted authority figure with ties in the community. All of this means that abused children often deal with doubt and divided loyalties when they come forward, and are often under threat of retaliation before and after they do so. In my case, I was fortunate that it only happened once, it was a relative stranger, and he had no significant standing in the community.
I think about some of the stories I’ve heard about other kids. Their father, their uncle, their priest. I hear about these guys coming out with their story, with the truth, and people doubting them, people accusing them of making it up, or worse, of encouraging it and being at fault themselves. The second happens far more often to girls than to boys, but it still exists. I want to say I have trouble imagining the kind of shattering blow that would deal to any victim who experienced it, but really, I don’t. See, the way I think now, the way you’re processing this information as you read the words on this page, that’s not what’s going on in the head of an abused kid.
That whole natural framework of trust and expectation about the world, your place in it, and what kind of treatment you expect and deserve, these things don’t really come into play. Your main thought, day in and day out, the thing dominating your consciousness, is about how bad you are. What an awful, terrible person, nothing, you must be for what happened to you to happen to you specifically, instead of someone else. I mean, you learn from a young age about how right and wrong work, and bad things happen to bad people, while good things happen to good people. That’s the overarching and continuously reinforced message hammered home by every “kids” book, story, TV show, and movie. All of these kids programs emphasize this message as a societal measure, because we want to teach children about morality and we want children to grow up as productive members of society who don’t violate our social norms. However, for kids who’ve already been victimized, the message received isn’t about “do right and good things will happen for you”, it’s “something bad happened to you, so you must be terrible”.
Even worse are the education classes about bad touching and when to go get an adult. You feel like you should have known what was going on, should have had the power to stop it. The kid in the video did, and now he’s got ice cream. You, meanwhile, must have done something wrong, something to encourage it, you didn’t stop it from happening, it must be your fault.
With all of this in the background, when a kid finally tells someone about what happened to them, they expect to be disbelieved, they expect to be told it’s their fault, that they’re bad and deserved it. But you hope it won’t be like that. But hope is a dangerous emotion, hope means you can be hurt again, hope means pain and suffering, and when you’re already hurting so much, it’s just easier to pretend. Pretend like you don’t care, pretend like you don’t need other people, pretend like you’re one of the good people, the regular people who are happy, the people who don’t hurt, who don’t know what it’s like to carry a secret, to know you’re worthless.
So yeah, I can, sadly enough, imagine what it’s like for kids who are doubted, disbelieved, and blamed, because that’s what you expect, so you armor yourself against it. You practice telling yourself that it’s your fault, that you deserve those reactions. You imagine telling someone in your head a hundred times, a thousand times, a hundred thousand million times, and every time, they get angry, they become disappointed, they turn away from you, they tell you it’s your fault, they tell you they already knew, everyone knew and they ask why you’re bothering them with it, they tell you you deserved it. And every time, it hurts again, but just a little less. You’re never going to tell anyone until it either doesn’t hurt when they reject you, or until it hurts too much to keep going.
I wish there was some kind of advice, some hidden perspective I could give that would explain this to kids who are suffering now, some tale I could tell that would let everyone know how to deal with this, how to make it easy for other kids to be identified, or to be helped. But this isn’t a story that has any part of happy in it. There is no good solution, there is no happy ending here. The only so called solutions involve lots of pain and work and no guarantee of that elusive “normal life” at the end. In many ways, the idea of being normal is an illusion, some sights you can’t unsee, some emotions you can’t unfeel, and some wounds can’t ever be healed.
But hey, this is supposed to be a book, a story right? Not a maudlin reflection on the intractability of scars. So. About me and my particular reactions to this scenario.
Well, the first thing I did, I went crazy. No, seriously, I flipped out. Hey, I was five. I was in kindergarten. Mature analysis, requests for help, self analysis and engagement weren’t really on my emotional responses menu. I got in lots of fights. I acted out. Threatened to stab myself with a kitchen knife. Caused big scenes in public. Screamed at the top of my lungs all night long. Did anything and everything to draw attention to myself. Ran away from home. Ran away from school. Not all at once of course, and not all that first year, but as much as possible, and as often as possible I did all of the above and more.
The first thing that happened was I was deemed “emotionally immature” and held back a year. I was also kept at the same school, so everyone knew I’d been held back, even if I didn’t really understand what had just happened, or why. I can’t give a terribly detailed account of those early years, because my memories of that time are incredibly fragmented and full of holes. I spent every night trying to forget everything about my life, and every waking moment I could reading novels of fantasy and adventure, hiding from the harsh reality of my life in the fictional works of various authors. I would often remember things for school without knowing how I had learned them. Or find myself in the middle of activities with no idea how I had gotten into them, or awareness of what was going on around me, my body and mind functioning largely on autopilot while my soul hid from the world. In other words, the following anecdotes are disjointed as all hell not for dramatic effect, or as part of an ingenious narrative structure, but because that’s how I remember them.
It’s Swimming class. I think sometime between 1st and 3rd grade. My grade school, Notre Dame de Sion, had an indoor pool, with a diving board at the deep end. We are taught to swim or practice swimming a couple of times a week. I’m on the diving board. It’s been a particularly harsh week, I think, I know I was feeling extra sad and unloved, and more suicidal then usual. So I came up with an idea. A test of those around me. I jumped into the water, and went all the way to the bottom. I touched the bottom and then sat down, using my arms to hold myself down there by constantly moving them in a reverse tread water pattern. I’d decided I would stay there and drown unless someone saved me. That way everyone would feel bad that I’d died right in front of them when they could have saved me. My funeral would be awesome. Plus, the swim teacher would get in trouble, and I didn’t really like her anyways. Then, all of a sudden, one of the other kids in my class noticed me at the bottom of the pool, realized how long I’d been down there, and, deciding I needed help, dove in to save me. When he pulled me up, the teacher yelled at him for “interfering with me”, and for diving off the side of the pool. I didn’t know whether to feel good and valued that someone had come for me, or bad and worthless because they got in trouble for helping me. Eventually I settled on bad because I’d gotten the one person in the room who cared about me in trouble. I never told anyone what happened there, or thanked the guy who jumped in and saved me. I still owe him. Also, my poor opinion of the swim teacher was totally validated.
It’s Art class. Fourth or fifth grade I think. I’ve won a contest to design a billboard for the local power company (I got $50, bought two Transformers), so the TV News comes to film us all coloring in the poster after some professional artists or computers or something blew up my drawing into a billboard sized poster. The power company rep brought paints and colors, and the picture is marked with numbers for where the different colors go. Seeing the drawing writ big, I am again reminded that my drawing was far from the best just in my class. I suspect that it was partly chosen for being bad, and mostly because I’d included some anti-drug nonsense in the power safety slogan, so my submission A) looked like it actually came from a little kid, and B) made the power company seem concerned about local issues and against the black/drug menace. (hey, it was the ‘80s, and Kansas City is incredibly segregated, just check how many blacks are west of Troost, Italians are in the southland, Croatians aren’t in Strawberry Hill, or Jews aren’t way, way southland). Also, I kind of stole my slogan, I mean, I came up with it, but another kid had a similar idea, which I made fun of, then stole and improved on – an early sign I was destined for greatness in Corporate America. So on a subliminal level at least, I knew my design had won not because of talent on my part, but due to lack of talent and borderline plagiarism. Then the other kids didn’t listen to me at all about how to paint it. Then the news lady started to interview me, but switched over to the art teacher instead. I didn’t understand, it was supposed to be about me! ME! My chance to be important, for everyone to pay attention. And it was utterly shit. Everyone was taking my prize, my glory, stolen. And… I don’t remember what happened next. I have a vague feeling of doom about the memory, so I know I did something childish and awful, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. Not how you expected that one to end eh? Sorry. Like I said, I was insane-o with a capital O. Not all of this is totally going to make sense.
I’m in kindergarten (the second time), it’s after recess and we’re being read to. I hate this. I can already read better than all the other kids, and probably our teacher truth be told. I remember picking up some peagravel from the playground and putting it in my pocket. All of a sudden, the teacher stops reading and looks at me. All wide-eyed and stunned. She tells me to go to the principles office. Starts yelling about how I almost put her eye out. I have no idea what she’s talking about. I say so. She says I threw rocks at her. I say I didn’t. My friend sticks up for me, says the rock came from the back of the class, and he saw it fly by him. The teacher says she saw me throw it and I go to the principle (rumor says he’s got a whipping machine in his office), but get diverted to the nuns instead. This will be a recurring theme for me at the school. I didn’t throw the rocks. I stick to my story. Later I check my pocket. The rocks are gone.
I’m on the playground. It’s somewhere between kindergarten and second grade. I’m with my friends from class. One of the older kids stops me. Tells me I’m stupid. Says he’s smarter than me. I say no, he’s stupid. I’m the smartest. I know this. I’ve always gotten all the tests done first and all the answers right. I’m the fastest reader and the best adder and I never had any trouble with fractions or division. He says I’m stupid and I failed kindergarten and that’s why I’m not in his class anymore, because I got held back. I look at him. He looks familiar. I look around, the other kids confirm this. I have no idea what’s happening. I can’t have been held back I insist. I’m smart. He laughs at me. They all do. I begin to wonder, and realize I must not only be a bad person, but also stupid. I internalize the concept that I am stupid because only stupid people get held back. However, I remain exceptionally intelligent. This causes massive cognitive dissonance that results in a huge inferiority complex which in turn causes me to humiliate my teachers whenever possible. That course of action ends poorly for me on numerous occasions. This is the first time I realize I have been held back a grade. Eventually we get students in our class who have been skipped ahead a grade. I am much smarter than them. I repeatedly ask my parents to let me skip grades ahead. They refuse, telling me it would be bad for me. I infer that this is a nice way of telling me I’m stupid, confirming my suspicions.
It’s fifth grade. We’re going to confession. I tell the priest what happened to me. He says some random stuff I forget as soon as I hear. I say some random stuff I don’t remember back. He sends me out with some kind of religious words of wisdom. The other kids are in line. They’ve been in line for awhile. People ask me how bad I’ve been that I was in confession for so long. I look guilty. More confirmation that I was bad and it was my fault. The priest never says anything to anybody about what I told him. Never calls me in to meet with him to try and help me. Just ignores the entire thing. Epic priest fail.
I’m on the playground. I’m about to get into a fight. It is the last fight I will ever win as a child. Its second or third grade, maybe fourth. I put on gloves to protect my hands for when I’m punching the other guy. I keep thinking in my head about screaming my pain out to the world. “You don’t know what it’s like! Do you know what it’s like to be raped??! DO YOU?!?” I have no idea what the fight is about. We go down by the statue and trees at the far end away from the teachers. It ends quickly, I punch him in the face a whole bunch of times and he starts crying. I keep hitting him until people say to stop, it’s over. I don’t say a word the entire time, but in my head I’m screaming about what happened to me. When I get home I get in more trouble for fighting. I am told that it’s not ok for me to hurt people. I take this to mean I can’t hit back, because they’re more important than me. I spend the next several years getting tortured and bullied by the other kids. The closest I come to holding my own is when I get punched in the face about 20 times in a row and the other kid has to go to the nurse because he hurt his hands. I feel no pain. The absolute low point comes when some older girls stop me from getting dragged into the boys’ bathroom to receive my regular beating. The alternative low point was when the head nun called me and the two kids who most regularly beat me into her office and tells them it’s their job to protect me because I’m weak. Later on things go even worse than you’d expect from that conversation.
I am very good at sports, but not the best. I run the third fastest mile. I play shortstop on the Cub Scout baseball team. I only make three outs all year. People say I can’t be smart and good at sports. My parents never encourage me in sports or for doing well. Sometimes I get compliments for getting all As. Mostly it is just expected and I am told I need to do better if I don’t. My sister has all As. I quit baseball because the other kids tell me I’m terrible. The coach calls our house several times trying to talk my parents into getting me back on the field. I am utterly confused because I am not good. I ask to stop taking violin lessons, which I hate. I am forced to continue, baseball is not important, violin is. I take five years to get through a sixteen song violin book. I never play sports again until high school. I will not be good (and by good I mean an average player on very good teams) at sports again until college.
I am six years old, walking through the kitchen of our house. I keep saying “The time has come.” I pick up a carving knife and try to stab myself in the chest. My mother barely stops me in time. This is the first time I will try to kill myself. Shortly after this happens we begin going to family counseling.
It’s the after school care program in grade school. We’re sitting in one of the lunch rooms waiting for our parents to get off work and come get us. Two girls are making fun of me. I’m angry and don’t know what to do. I want them to stop but I can’t hit them because they’re girls and I’m a boy. I pick up a metal folding chair and slam it into the wall repeatedly while yelling incoherently. Everyone in the room stares at me, stunned and afraid. I walk home four miles through bad neighborhoods. Some teachers follow me in their cars and try to get me to get in and go back to school. This is the first time I just up and left school. It would not be the last.
I’m in my room, looking at all my favorite toys. Transformers and Gobots and Star Wars and Legos. I have bought many of them myself because my parents won’t get me any kind of toy that has anything to do with violence, some, like GI Joe I’m forbidden from buying even with my own money. We also do not have a lot of money. I am frequently told they cost too much. I earned the money babysitting or raking leaves or mowing lawns or whatever other kinds of work you can do as a little kid. I really like all these toys, but I’m so angry. I want to hurt someone, but I can’t hurt other people because they are all more important than me. I want to destroy things to prove I can, to show I have power over the world. I pick them up and start throwing them against the wall as hard as I can, screaming. This continues for hours until the wall has a hole and my toys are all smashed. I look at my toys, all gone now, we don’t have enough money to replace them. I start crying because I’m so sad that I have no more toys.
I’m walking out of the house. I am running away from home for the first time. My sister follows me, asking where I’m going. She tries to hold me back. I fight her off and keep walking. She keeps following me, refusing to stop. Keeps telling me to come home. She forces me into a convenience store on the corner and tells the clerk I’m trying to run away from home. The clerk locks us both inside and my sister calls my parents. We all go out for ice cream and pretend things are ok.
Ah, you think, this is all very interesting, reading about what it’s like to be a crazy kid in grade school, but at the beginning of this chapter you were promised a story about a young boy getting raped, yes? And I mean, it’s terrible and all, and you’d hate to have it happen to anyone you know, or anyone at all really, and honestly, its just so awful, why not skip it entirely? But… A man surviving a shark attack is a horrible experience that would terrify us, but reading about it happening to someone else? Losing a limb, a loved one, a friend, killing in war, getting in a bar brawl, going to jail, getting raped… these are all truly horrible things, but we read books and watch movies about them to indulge in vicarious thrills, to be awed and horrified by experiences beyond our own. Well, you bought the book, so here’s the story that is equal to your pound of flesh, also, given the contents of the next chapter, and given the concept outlined in the opening paragraph, it’s time to get you on my side, so to speak.
I was going to the YMCA for swimming with my mother. It was 1982 or 1983. I started taking Judo classes because karate movies were the coolest. There was one big kid in our class who was super cool. He was always really nice to me, laughed and joked around, kept the other kids from teasing me for having red hair, a constant threat for Gingers before South Park explained to the world that we had no souls. The guy mentioned he did babysitting, my parents went to the opera or faculty parties and stuff sometimes, so we got a sitter on those nights. He promised we could watch cartoons and eat ice cream and play games. It was perfect when Mom agreed. It was going to be the best ever. Then we started watching TV and he asked me if I played cards. We went upstairs to my room to get my card deck. He asked me if I’d ever played strip poker. I said no, but poker was a grown up game, and involved whiskey and cigars, and doing stuff you weren’t supposed to was the coolest so I wanted to play. He taught me how to play. Things get cloudy after that. I remember being pinned down on the bed by a heavy weight. I remember awful smells. I remember my tummy hurting so much I held steggy my stegosaurus dinosaur as tight as I could. He told me it was a secret game we were playing, and I couldn’t tell anyone because I’d get in trouble and so would he, then we couldn’t play anymore. After, we went downstairs and watched TV and had ice cream. I never saw him again. My behavioral problems started immediately. No one ever made the connection.
I’d like to say I’m over it and he went to jail and everything is peachy keen. But that isn’t really true. Whomever I was before, whomever I would have grown into, is dead, murdered and gone forever. I had a chance to press charges just before I turned 18 and the statute of limitations expired. I didn’t because I was just starting to get my head, and life together, and I didn’t want to go through the hell of a trial, getting cross examined and accused of making it up and every other horrible thing the victim of a sex crime goes through in the American court system. I’m leaving the guy's name out of this book because I don’t know if he’s still using it, and I also don’t want to implicate anyone who randomly shares the same name. It wasn’t an uncommon one. I don’t know where the man is or what he’s doing now. If I did, he would be dead. That’s not a threat or a promise or anything, it’s just a statement of fact. It wouldn’t be voluntary, I wouldn’t have a choice, knowing that I let a chance to end a pedophile’s criminal trail and passed it by in order to protect myself, to an extent, that makes every kid he’s victimized since partly my fault as well. And that’s not something I’m capable of letting him survive. Some things demand blood. This is one of them. Hope you’re fully on my side and sympathetic now, because I’m about to use up every bit of that pity and sympathy you’re feeling.
Happy Hollywood movies and novels and TV specials always show people who suffer greatly overcoming and gaining strength and going on to great things always tempered by mercy etc. etc. But, as you can see, being a victim of a horrible crime as a child didn’t necessarily make me a better person. In some ways, it made me a far worse one, leaving dark stains on my soul that nothing will ever wash out. Which brings us to the next chapter wherein I do lots of horrible things to those that do not deserve them.
Chapter 2: The part where I do some despicable shit
You might be wondering why anyone would reveal doing any of these things, some of which are felonies. Well, mostly it’s because when you bought this book, you and I entered into a kind of contract. You gave me money, and in return, I agreed to tell you about the significant parts of my life, and what made it so unique and crazy and entertaining and different from yours. In order to tell that story, I have to tell you who I am, that’s one reason the abuse I suffered and dished out are front and center, to understand everything else I did, you have to understand those two intertwined parts where I came from, and what informed who I ended up becoming. I wish it was different, that I was some kind of ideal person. But I’m not. I’m real, and that means messy.
Some parts of this chapter will be in the “broken memory” format of the last one; these occurred before I really became cognizant of the world around me. I was, for all intents and purposes, essentially batshit crazy when I did them. Some sections also have follow up commentary afterward expounding on the ideas contained therein. While I don’t believe that people are not responsible for their actions just because something bad happened to them, some of these are about as close to that as you can get. Doesn’t excuse what I did, but it does serve to help explain it.
“I’ll tell them that fucking nigger did it.” Yeah, that’s me talking there. I don’t particularly remember the rest of the racial slurs I used, but they mostly centered around variations of “nigger” and curse words in new and interesting combinations. I’d just gotten into a fight with a kid that lived down the street while we were shooting hoops, and, like all fights I got into after I learned it wasn’t ok to hurt other people because they were more important than me, I lost badly. This was also after I’d quit playing sports, and without the outlet of athletics I’d developed an even sharper tongue. This was the first time I’d used racial epithets, and it would also be the last. The kid in question was walking home next to me telling me that I shouldn’t use terms like that, that it wasn’t ok. I was not in the mood to listen. My parents heard me and immediately yelled at me, apologized to the kid, and washed my mouth out with soap, then made me say sorry to him and to his father. A regular kid would learn not to use racial epithets ever, and feel contrite about doing something so horrible. I learned that blacks were an extra special protected class who got to beat me up and get away with stuff just because bad things had happened to their ancestors and became highly susceptible to anti-crime and Republican “southern strategy” talking points. It would be years before I shed the rascist stereotypes I’d picked up. Oddly enough, I lost them in basic training, where my “arch nemesis” was a black Drill Sergeant whom I didn’t like at the time and now, more experienced, realize was a huge dirtbag.
I think we need more words to describe racism than just racism. The words “racism” and “racist” conjure up images of George Wallace (actually didn’t hate black people, just liked getting elected to stuff, and at one time was a paragon of tolerance, before that prevented him from getting elected to stuff, at which point he declared he’d “never get out-niggered again”) the KKK, slavery and the worst sorts of discrimination. However, because the only word we have to describe bias is racism and its derivatives calling someone a racist is incredibly counterproductive and often inaccurate. Take myself in the previous story and the years following it. I would have never dreamt of judging someone based on the color of their skin, nor would I have eaten in a restaurant with a “no blacks” sign, though I might have picketed it. But I did worry about the threat of gangs and drug dealers and prison inmates being released due to liberal judges on technicalities. Nor did I credit stories of police racial profiling, thinking “of course they’re pulling over more blacks, blacks commit more crimes” and so on. When I was getting scholarship offers for college, I was annoyed that more schools weren’t offering me full rides, and thought “If I was black and had these scores and grades way more schools would offer me full scholarships than are doing so now. Affirmative Action is so racist.” I thought Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were anti-white media whores who wanted to make racism out to be worse than it was so they could stay important. (Actually, that one turned out to be a remarkably prescient insight.) I hated black history month. (Still do actually, same with all those ethnic themed museums and whatnot. We’re all American and we can all use the same American Museum or we can’t and we ain’t.)
So, was I a racist? A “resentful” white? I don’t know. Maybe. But I would have been angry if someone had called me a racist for holding those views, after all, I didn’t hate black people or think they were inferior or anything crazy like that. I dunno, maybe a majority of white and a majority of black people assign radically different meanings to the term racism, and that’s why so much of its usage is so counterproductive. That’s why I think we need more words. There were four different words for love in ancient Greek, ranging from “Eros” (erotic love) to “Philos” (friendship love). So I think we need more words to describe racial bias and/or excessive stereotyping. Also, in many ways, race has become more of a code for cultural attitudes and norms than anything else. I don’t think anyone would be confused by my meaning if I said I know a black guy who’s whiter than I am. Again, I’m pretty sure that’s not racism, but we don’t have any other words to describe that particular set of emotions and ideas, so having a useful conversation about the topic gets a lot tougher.
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“Come here puppy, yeah, that’s a good, who’s a good doggy woggy!” Yes, this is going exactly where you think it is, but kind of worse. For several years I would pull the dog or the cats close, then hold them down while I poked them in the eyes with flea collars, or just hold their heads still and stare into their eyes until they started wimpering or went fey. Then I would hold them and pet them and give them treats and tell them I loved them and pet them until they were happy. Then I’d hurt them again. Look, I’m not proud of this, and I realize I’ve just lost like 3/4ths of my readers permanently with that. I also realize I will now and for the rest of my life get huge amounts of hate mail. That’s ok, I probably deserve it. If you’re wondering, yes, that is some prototypical serial killer type action, both in abusing animals as a child in general, and very specifically in the ways I was abusing them. Like I said at the start of this part, I’m responsible for what I did, but when you’re assigning blame, you should also remember that I was pretty fucking nuts at the time. I’d just started attending therapy, and my therapists had absolutely no idea what was wrong with me, or why I was acting the way I did. But more on that part later.
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“So wait, you’re how old?” Yes, I committed statutory rape. But I didn’t mean to. Which is sort of ironic for someone who was the victim of rape as a child themselves. I mean, I totally meant to sleep with the girl, I just thought she was a year older than she turned out to be. I’m kind of ambivalent about including this one, and for a lot of reasons. For one thing, she was only the third girl I’d ever slept with, and I was still pretty young myself when this happened, so if you’re looking for a huge experience/age/emotional maturity gap, it isn’t here. For another, when I found out how old she was, I cut things off immediately, which unfortunately included telling her to put her clothes back on, which really wasn’t easy. Major hottie. Finally, we actually ended up going out together off and on for several years after she got legal. One good friend of mine has often commented that he thought we should have gotten married. I could see myself married to her and happy about it, but I also know why we kept breaking up, and it was pretty much entirely my fault every time. Also, the whole thing would have been legal if it happened a few weeks later, or in like 1/3rd of the states in the union at the time. Just not the one we happened to be in at the time.
This is one of those issues I used to think was black and white, right and wrong until I got involved in it. If I really didn’t know how old she was, and stopped when I found out, is that the same as if hadn’t done it? Or is it the same as if I did know? How sensible is a law that makes an activity legal or not strictly depending on which side of the street you’re on? If she’s mature for her age, and I’m immature for mine, does that make it better? Or worse? If she was more aggressive about it than I was, am I less at fault? If I was more aggressive than her is it more my fault? Legal questions like this are almost enough to make you wish there was some kind of person in the legal process who could interpret the law and apply it intelligently to specific circumstances in complex cases like this in order to better serve the interests of the state and justice. Oh wait, there is, they’re called judges, and thanks to all sorts of mandatory sentencing laws passed largely to keep control of the “negro sagging-pants gangster threat”, we’ve managed to neuter one of the best safeguards of our entire legal system. Ironically I supported the passage of laws which would have made my situation much worse had I ever been prosecuted for this crime.
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Drunk driving. Yeah, it’s probably not on the same level as the other stuff on this list, but it’s the only really bad thing I’ve done besides the others, so I’m including it. Also, this chapter is really short. Yes, I know drunk driving is bad. Yes, I’ve had friends killed by it. No, I would never do it sober, and it only happened a couple of times in college, but it turns out, drinking booze impairs your judgment and helps you make bad decisions. Who knew? This actually ended up costing me my first job out of college when I applied to the KCPD. I admitted to drinking and driving a few times during the polygraph and that ended my application. I ended up working at a warehouse loading dock the rest of the summer until I got paralyzed. But again, I’m getting ahead of myself.
An alcohol related offense was probably the best way to end this chapter given what we’re about to transition to. They say your real personality comes out when you drink, because you can’t keep a mask up. Well, if you’re convinced I’m the devil walking after reading this bit, you might change your mind during the next chapter. Or go even more into the “He’s Satan” crowd. I can see it going either way.
Chapter 3: The part where I get drunk
Page per page, this is probably going to be the highest return on investment for amusement and enjoyment in the whole book. I don’t drink anymore, and based on the information included here, you can decide either way if that’s a good or bad thing. If some of these seem overly familiar, I know several of them have been transcribed by others and circulated around the internet in various forms of email, but I promise, these are the primary sources.
The format for written stories is different than for oral storytelling. When telling a story in the oral tradition, you generally want to end on the climax. Or, to use a more modern reference, Costanza it and go out on a high note. In the written form, there is often a denouement after the climax, to let people know how things resolved once the critical point passed. These stories are therefore in two paragraph form, with the first paragraph being the actual story, and the second paragraph being the denouement. The written stories are also longer and more detailed than they would be if I were telling them orally. Again, this is because they are in a different format and I don’t have to worry about my audience getting distracted and going for another beer if they story takes more than a minute or two.
I’ll start with a pair of stories, both the first and last time I got drunk, the first time is a pretty bad story, but was pretty awesome to live, the last time is great story, but wasn’t the best experience.
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The last time I got drunk was New Year’s Day, 2011. Yes, the day after New Year’s Eve. No I did not go out the night before. Actually, I was down to about five or six times going out and drinking a year at this point, and it showed when I got to my buddies house and we started drinking and playing poker and watching football. I got about as garrulous as a first time drunk at the prom, and revealed all sorts of nifty embarrassing info about myself (Fact: I attributed my drunken poker dominance to prior experience playing Magic: the Gathering. Yes, I am that big of a nerd that other nerds make fun of me). So anyway, we’re drinking, and it’s like seven or eight o’clockish, maybe later, and I am no longer capable of driving, so I hitch a ride with the one guy that’s planning on going out that night, and we figure I’ll just crash at his place. We stop at his condo complex to drop off his car and he gives me a key, we then head over to a nearby bar. This is the last thing I remember. I wake up early and see a chick walking around. I think: my buddy scored! Good for him, and go back to passed out land. A while later I wake up again and look around. It’s odd. This does not look like my friends condo. In fact, the décor is all wrong. I begin to get a bad feeling. The I hear some broads talking, one of them is saying something about going to church. I start to get a really bad feeling, but, not much else to do, I walk over and introduce myself. They look very confused. Not a good sign. So I ask if I’m in apartment X. They say yes, then look at each other and tell me I’m in the wrong building. I have no idea what this means. I apologize, grab my shoes, and run away as fast as I can when I’m too hung over to walk at more than a slow shuffle. When I get outside I realize what happened. My friends’ condo complex is “Garden Style”. This means it’s a bunch of apartments facing inwards towards a central pool. I had turned off the pool one entrance too early. I head over to the correct apartment, walk in, and pass out on the couch opposite my friend. An hour later, the doorbell buzzes. It’s a policeman. He says “I’m looking for Sean?” I reply, yeah, this one’s for me. My friend is an odd mixture of confused and relieved. The cop has figured out what happened, and much to my relief, informs me that he went to CMSU and “has seen this kind of thing before.” Exact quote. He takes my information and leaves. I explain to my friend what happened, and he busts out laughing before driving me back to my car. On the way he begins calling people to tell them what happened.
If you’re confused, I walked into the wrong apartment/condo thingy and slept on the couch of (and apparently puked in the sink of) two total strangers. Nice. Now, it’s kind of fun to analyze this and see just how many things had to go wrong for this to happen like it did. First of all, there are two locked doors plus a front gate you have to get through to get into any of the apartments. I have not the slightest clue how I accomplished any of this. Also, I had to get from the bar districts back to my friends apartment complex. I often have trouble finding his complex sober and in daylight. Like I said, I don’t remember anything. I kind of wish I did, but it’s just not there. Second, in addition to the two locked doors and the gate, I came really, really close to getting the right apartment. Like if I’d turned right ten feet later, no problem at all. Third, and this part is just weird, the girls called the cops AFTER I LEFT. Now, don’t get me wrong, this whole thing was entirely my fault, and if I’d gotten tased/maced/shot/arrested out of the deal, I wouldn’t hold a grudge. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you wander into the home of someone you don’t know at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning. But these two broads saw me sleeping on their couch, were evidently totally cool with it, and than, after I woke up, said hi, apologized and left, called the police. I have nothing even resembling an explanation for that. Neither does anyone else who’s heard the story, and by this point, it’s a fair number of people. We can’t ask the girls themselves, because they moved out a week later. Again, my fault. If you’re reading this, sorry, it was totally an accident. My bad.
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The first time I got drunk was far less eventful. I was at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma for 13B (Artillery – towed) OSUT. OSUT stands for One Station Unit Training and is your basic training and advanced individual training smooshed together into one big 13-14 week mess. AIT is like basic training but focused specifically on your job in the Army. OSUT is generally only available for combat arms, and while it’s longer, unlike normal basic and AIT, you only have the one course, so there's no graduation then going back to being a nonsoldier trainee again. Which seems cool. Anyway, the last weekend, we got a pass to go off post. This led to about 20 guys in a hotel room for two, with a bathtub full of beer and a couple of bottles of booze floating around. I was 20, about to become a sophomore in college, and had never had a sip of alcohol beyond communion wine in my life. It took the whopping sum of one shot of Goldschlager and half a can of Miller Lite to put me down. Hard. I was laughing and babbling and generally acting like I was having my first beer, completely unused to the sensations and lack of inhibitions caused by alcohol. Eventually we got some Taco Bell, talked to a highly amused cop, experienced a $150 cab ride back to town from a club that DID NOT welcome a mix of black and white basic trainees, and got back to the hotel room to go sleepy time.