Triction: Mentally Disordered

19—Waterfall

CHAPTER 01—Your Brother Is A Fox

I cannot sleep, I think. Three o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, and my head throbs, inside and out. Too many things are happening or not enough. Most of what I suffer may be paranoia. When I arrived at the beaches of Manhattan in the Golden State, I brought ambition. Bizarre how things can change. Twenty years have passed me by. Roger Waters already warned you, albeit with an amount half the duration.

The summer has taken forever to get here. I am disappointed when the sky is not blue and the air warm. It’s disgraceful how I allow other things or people to impinge on me. I take pleasure in being at the beach. I feel better when I am tan. I don’t know whether it’s the dopamine or the serotonin. In these settings, I feel free of the mundane, of phones ringing, answering the door, responding to the media. An anomalous strangeness has bathed across my being and foreign to the person I thought myself to be. The strangeness bears no resemblance to that future self I had in mind years ago. I have no clue where I am or what I am doing. I don’t know when or how to do whatever it is I’m doing.

The past has drifted far away from me, and the future is even farther. I tried to hang on to it, but at one point, fate brought me into a life seeking sin. This condition lasted for years at high intensity when I pursued it with vigor. At the time, the thrill came from the label itself. Sin is fun. Enough people hate truth enough that you can entertain them, and yourself, by telling them your truth. They pretend shock for fear that someone will gaze into their eyes and see their imperfections, which might be worse than those of the gazer. Someday, I will utter the words, that is who I used to be, but I am different now. Let me be clear: by sin I mean trivial religious violations, the type that brainwash a young person. I don’t mean sins involving maliciously hurting people. Those are the prick sins. I abhor violence.

Hey! Hey Dylan! You’re Zac’s brother, aren’t you? a girl’s voice says.

Flabbergasted, I answer smugly but awkwardly with the beloved (according to my grandmother) dimples blazing, Yeah, I’m Zac’s brother. My last name is Pritchard. I mumbled, P-R-I-T-C-H-A-R-D.

I never could say my last name eloquently for some reason. My tongue would get stuck in my throat. It’s related to that public speaking fear that everyone in the audience knows your thoughts and is silently mocking you. The result is that you freeze with fright. It’s near certain that they are mocking you, but not with malice—at least not most decent people. Most people are mocking a public speaker in the form of nervous amusement from their own fear of being on stage. Moreover, many people get intense pleasure from others being embarrassed or failing. Failure, great or small, of another tends to give certain sick, depraved people a mental boost.

A shoulder-to-shoulder crowd is in the stands for a football game when my cousin and I arrived. The girl stood up, cupping her mouth with both hands and yelled, Your brother’s a fox! What happened to you? A short-lived burst of giggles erupted. I never turned around to see if the surrounding crowd initially crucified her, mocked me along with her, or whispered amongst themselves in cowardly or sympathetic agreement. Whether my brother was a fox or not was completely immeasurable to me, but I knew with certainty that I wasn’t one. I’d always thought all the cutesy compliments I had received from anyone were genuine and honest. This girl in the bleachers shattered all that and made me question the sincerity of anyone, including loved ones, who normally showered me with either kindness or prankster love.

Of course, there was Uncle Droopy who would tell us we were fat as he gobbled up another piece of pie—adding to his gigantic but fascinatingly rigid-as-steel stomach. He was just so lovable that we only laughed. He made the most amazing lemon pie for me every holiday season. Just for me. He was full of love not money. He died suddenly on the side of the highway after feeling pain following a meal that may have been too much for his big heart. We won’t ever know. He had an infectious laugh, like the Winnie-the-Pooh character, Tigger.

A flush of silence came over that section of the bleachers, but I would have never known the difference. My ears stopped listening. Those words rang in my head for years. I could hear nothing else. I heard but did not listen. I listened but did not care. I cared but not for the talker, only for self-preservation: fight or flight. My dimples turned to valleys of molten lava; not flushed from anger, but from embarrassment. Silence became a yoke to me from that day forward. The spellbinding reality of a stranger taking hold of my mind never occurred to me before then.

I keep my distance now. People take me away from my domino goals. They fall on their own sometimes, but I push them down too, for an array of reasons and excuses. The excuses range from laziness to fear that my goals infringe on someone else’s comfort: construction for the sole purpose of self-destruction. But then again, when you build something, do you want to hold it or let it go? Do the building contractors stick around the houses they build after the family moves in? Does the automaker stay with the vehicle after it’s sold? What does he care if a buyer destroys it—unless of course, he’s Howard Roark? Then he cares but only if the buyer has dared to tweak his design.

What was the girl’s purpose in degrading me? If my brother was a fox, is it safe to presume she wanted him as a boyfriend? If so, would this be the best way to impress him? Was she making the effort to be popular amongst her peers by making fun of someone in public? Or, was this far more sinister: maybe she gained immense pleasure from degrading others. Where is that behavior born? Did her parents or loved ones repeatedly put her down or, equally damaging if done with no consequences, build her up? Should her actions be written off as an immaturity thing? Did she gain, lose, or keep the balance of friends after she injected this life-changing moment into my soul? Hard to imagine that this girl planned these crushing moments, but maybe she did. Did someone do this same thing to her? Does she figure this is a game, and she’s going to win it? If so, she may have been disappointed when I didn’t respond. If I had, what would I have said? The one-line insult of the day back then was yo momma, which then and now seems so ridiculous.

I gripped the side of the embankment and watched the mid-town river rush below me with filthy, muddy water. The water was brown from sediment; perhaps, gold and copper were being washed along, or maybe just good old-fashioned dirt. I knew it was not tailings—crushed rock which is usually a light gray color. That was a completely different river. I managed to climb up and over to the unpaved road and scuttle over to the north side of town. I wanted to take my chances at the North River. I noticed the stream bucketing from the second waterfall, at least two miles away. The water’s clarity deceptively signaled that it must be clean and potable. It was smooth and appeared to be green from the jungle surrounding it, a reflection, an unfiltered, lucid daydream.

After hiking for over an hour, I reached a clearing in the river. Notwithstanding the people around me, my focus was sharp, and I continued walking on foot. The ecstasy of being outdoors: the slippery rocks in the riverbed made no difference to me. I was liberated. I noticed a crowd of people ahead of me. I walked through them, smiling along the way with the occasional flush or blush. They were blissful, contented people. Not a word spoken or implied, they seemed wholly fine with staying where they were. The weather was beautiful, blue and warm. The mist of the river water lightly sprayed the air, which chilled the air down sufficiently. I had escaped.

I have always wondered how beautiful people could not recognize their own beauty. How could they toddle around not knowing this? While I stand all amazed, they carry on, typically swallowed up in insecurities, but I’ll never understand theirs, unless I dig deep or decide to be content with making my own speculations. I began the long trek of hopping slippery rocks to get to the first waterfall, invisible until you were right on it. The second waterfall was spectacular from the town. It was a considerable hike, but it was worth it. I knew it would be. I slipped and fell right on my ass, then splashed into a shallow pool. Giggles in the distance, but I didn’t care. What difference would it make if I cared? Should I take a bow? Should I flip them off? No, I just continued onward and upward. The waterfall was my focus, and these people won’t matter when I get there. Because they’re downstream, though, it may matter to them.

Rebecca and Holly were jungle town friends. Rebecca was my first girlfriend. She was my original French kiss. In fact, we broke the record, held by my fox brother and his girlfriend Katie, for French kissing. Eighteen minutes and thirty-six seconds. We had to build up to the record. Our very first kiss was on the top of the school where I nearly missed her entire face. Lips crashed together, so it counted. We were on the school roof after dusk for the fake marriage ceremony officiated by Zac. Because of Rebecca and my pretend marriage, we hung out at Holly’s house a lot, including the night Rebecca whispered something unintelligible to Holly, giggling, and then she dragged me into the bedroom to make out in the dark. Pure shock and awe.

After minutes of making out, Rebecca and I got up. I stood bent over, breathing heavier than expected, pretending to gaze at something on the night stand for a full three minutes. I could not permit her to see. Later, after we moved, I saw Rebecca again and she was beautiful. I remained so dense. Those formative years you’re dimwitted: dumb decision after dumb decision. In some ways, I had supremacy over many of my peers, but I failed to recognize it. I think I had the world by the balls, and I didn’t know it. What happened? I let go of the world’s balls.

Holly was the nerdiest girl I had ever met. She wore glasses and had teeth like a shark, layers of teeth. Maybe some people considered her ugly. I thought so, but that was before I discovered that looks are a small fraction of a person. So-called unattractive people are a hidden gift rarely opened. When the face seems like a bow, the rest of the wrapping gets discarded; that’s the romantic world in which I do not live. For some reason and despite their polarized looks, Rebecca really liked Holly. They were best friends. Admittedly, Holly was like a sidekick rather than an equal partner; she gave Rebecca the laughs required to stay friends. Holly wanted Rebecca’s looks, personality, and popularity while Rebecca needed a whipping girl and applause. Most importantly, Rebecca wasn’t as shallow as some of our peers.

I was curious why so many people were hiking up the rocky banks of the river, but not one appeared to be going up to the waterfalls. Our parents were working, socializing, or out at the club. Frequently, they would leave us to run amok in this small jungle town, including that night where the three of us stayed in the confines of Holly’s Class A track home. Nearby that same home, I captured a lizard and brought it back to the United States in a pink tampon container. It died shortly after arrival on the banks of the Mississippi river. I kept it in a Bayer aspirin bottle for at least fifteen years where its mummified remains reminded me of the jungle that shaped me. Most of those years I kept the dead lizard in my closet, the inside of the door of which displayed the poster of Farrah Fawcett. She cost my parents a pretty penny in lotion. Eventually I flushed the lizard down the toilet. It was a hard shell of its former self, yet remarkably intact. It made me think of King Tut. The summer I was eleven, I saw King Tut in Cairo. He looked like a giant black lizard.

I find it odd that I could be so content with that summer and nothing else. I dwell so much on it that I get headaches. Maybe if I stopped dwelling on my obsessions, they might draw closer my way. Baking in the sun is good enough for me. A drink, a smoke, and a pool or the sea is ample to give me the satisfaction I need and want. I count down to summer then it’s gone and I’m a year older. On my solo hike to the waterfall, I cared nothing about these things. My focus was on getting to that second waterfall. I thought of how difficult it would be alone. The first hike to this area I had done with my parents, and I know my dad helped me on the trail immediately following the first waterfall. It was nearly a straight climb up slippery jungle moss and had required that we hold on to jungle vine to take every step. Quads burned. Arms burned. I certainly didn’t want to slip and fall; I could have died falling directly into the small, deep pool or hitting every rock on the way down and crushing my skull or breaking my back.

She cheated on me. Not Rebecca, but someone else did. Initially, I was so stubborn that I wanted her even more just to demonstrate that I had not lost her. I am not so sure I cared that she cheated. There’s really no such thing as cheating anyway. Cheating implies that someone owns another person which can never be possible in a free society. Who am I to have power over such an imposition? If the one I love wants fulfillment from someone else, I need