Shortly before leaving for college, I don’t remember exactly when, I went in to my baby sister Sharon’s room. She was only four years old and too young yet to have learned that she’s not the favored daughter - the princess- as my oldest younger sister is. Sadly, that’s important to my parents, despite the uniquely positive energies all of my siblings bring to the family. Not to mention me.
It’s a Mexican thing, I’ve noticed, for the first-born girl to be the princess, all other kids-and even the mother, who’s suddenly competing for her husband attention be damned.
That said, even without this odd family dynamic I knew Sharon would always be at a disadvantage, growing up in the shadow of her older sister. I knew she wouldn’t get the same attention and wondered just how disfavored she’d be made to feel, if at all. Thinking of my own experiences in the family I knew it was a very real likelihood.
A Mexican father’s lack of inhibition in celebrating his princess daughter is part of the definition of “family,” a fact I learned from seeing my grandfather act toward my teflon Aunt Rita, my father’s sister, as I grew up.
Unlike me, my father was the last-born male in his family and therefore disfavored by his father, a fact he insecurely lorded over me. Weird, those people’s family dynamics.
Anyhow, knowing all this I remember crying as I held Sharon in my arms for fear that the home I was leaving her in would be the same to her as it was to me – a horrible place, riddled with stories of emotional distance and abuse.
It was a particularly poignant moment for me: Though I wouldn’t have known it then, it would be the first, closest moment to being a parent that I’d ever have. And also those few moments with Sharon signaled the first of many unfortunate times I’d ever have to leave a loved one behind without looking back.
Over the course of my life, three of these loved ones would be kids; my own daughter and adult girlfriend’s two boys. That is as close as I’d ever be able to let anyone get.
Everyone else in my immediate family except Sharon covertly knew all the secrets about me and the horrible things that went on with my parents and I. Sharon’s memories likely remain in the recesses of her mind but they are there nonetheless. That said, leaving Sharon behind was the beginning, just the first of many many sudden turn-my-back-and-walk-away moments with people in general.
In a sense, I have always been a functional person living with complex PTSD (cPTSD). As a post-college adult I’ve lived a workaday life with no apparent outward limitations. Inside, however I’ve always felt torn up and horribly injured. Unbeknownst to anyone, just below the surface I’ve always been ready to cut and run away.
Naturally, there have been some times I felt that way more than others, when that fragile surface was scratched deep, but not quite deep enough to trigger my flight or fight response.
There have also been a handful of times however, all of which can be easily documented, when that cut was deep enough to trigger fight or flight – and I never fought, I always fled.
Throughout this time, addiction had a deleterious effect on all my relationships, and has been the only thing remaining after they ended. It’s simple: Because my personal history then indicated every relationship I’ve ever had or would have will eventually go down in flames I was hesitant to drop my coping mechanism because I knew I’d eventually need it to recover. My addiction? Endorphins.
Up to the very moment of my bicycle accident with a car, I had been addicted to endorphins. That fine feeling was something I could not get enough of and, in fact, I was so stoned on endorphins when my accident occurred I was hesitant to say so lest my words be misconstrued and it’d appear at fault for the accident.
Still, I cannot help but think that I played some role in that accident. I’ve had- and still sometimes have -lots of self-doubts about this. Could I have stopped in time? Part of me thinks I could have. Could I have avoided it completely? Maybe I could have.
But I was so high then that I might never have imagined life getting any better than at that very moment. It was a take-me-now-God feeling that I’d worked up in just the space of only about an hour on the bike, as if OD’ing on the body’s own, naturally produced painkiller. And why not? I’d had the feeling a million times before.
So, while both of my marriages had been largely asexual, I could never get enough of my bike. My insatiable drive for endorphins trumped everything.
In fact, I once shared a joke among some teammates and other less familiar cycling buddies. I knew it to hit very close to home regarding my own relationships but it drew a smile from me anyway: What’s the difference between women and bicycles? Bicycles don’t mind if you ride other bikes.
Not that I rode other women, but I did ride other bikes when I should probably have been astride my woman at home. I can’t think of any less vulgar way of putting that, but the gist is there.
This sort of humor was always tongue-in-cheek funny among some of my teammates, all of whom seemed like such successful people: Lawyers, doctors, surgeons, entrepreneurial marketing and PR professionals, and God knows what else.
When we were all together, I remember looking around at them and wondering what skeletons, like me, those guys might have been hiding. What was lurking beneath their surface just like there was lurking beneath mine?
Everyone has something, I knew. Perhaps they were just better at hiding it.
Most of the time, though, I felt like a junkie in a room full of straight people. I had a secret I didn’t want anybody to know about and lived in fear that it would come out. Namely I’d never had the same sort of success they seemed to have. While I survived my past others thrived, or at least seemed to thrive.
All my life, despite my powerful aptitudes, I could only ever pretend to fit in anywhere for so long. My Fear of Exposure eventually came to the surface and I needed to run away to some new place, one where nobody knew me.
I’ve always had great potential but it has chronically been trumped by my poor self image and, of course, Shame.
This last feeling I attribute to having grown up in an abusive home. It was my first, most devastating and longest-lasting introduction to the later realization that I’d been raised in a shame-based religion: Catholicism.
But so had some of my teammates, one of whom was a great guy who seemed to have a good relationship with his wife and son. As we waited to begin every race he always looked down to the crucifix he’d cemented to his bicycle’s top tube and said a prayer.
He was not like my father, who daily shamed me as a kid for the things I could not help as I grew up: acne, a developing sexuality, my seizure history. I was an easy, captive target for him, without a mother to step in and push back in my defense. I accepted shame as not unusual, but normal. I didn’t even know then I was being shamed.
My own mother was complicit in this and decades later I realized she was never my friend. As a twenty year old, she was just an unfit mother unwilling to learn how to become better.
What I knew and came to accept as fact as a kid were not conducive to creating healthy, long-term relationships, whether friendships at school or at work.
Anytime anyone got too close, I would cut and run for the very reason that they became too close. I simply didn’t know what to do and was scared of the unfamiliarity of the situation, of not knowing how to be close to anyone.
As a result, I went through decades of relationships whereby I would get close to people then turn and run away. Looking into their eyes as it happened, which I’d usually announce by loudly voicing my displeasure with them as I abruptly left, I could see their confusion. I knew it was happening again, whatever it was. Today I can’t help but wonder if they’d seen my confusion, too. I’m sure it was there.
Unlike my siblings, I am not now nor ever have been in touch with old friends from high school or college. I am not in touch with my own daughter. I am not in touch with either of my ex-wives, either .
Quite frankly, I don’t understand why my ex-in-laws remain in touch with me. Not that I mind - I am grateful to have them. Despite being in my fifties I consider them my adopted parents. Better late than never.
I think it’s because I know that they love me unconditionally and that they never judge me. I don’t know why I had to wait so long in my life to find such good role models. I’ve long felt at a point where I no longer feel I can extend what I’ve learned from them to anybody else. They are true friends.
Sophie, of course, loves me unconditionally as well so it’s no surprise that I have anthropomorphized her. I treat her like I should have treated every woman in my life: like a lady, an Angel, a gift from God, which they all are.
From Sophie I have learned the immeasurable benefits of being part of a mutually unconditional and loving partnership. The things she has endured for me I could never adequately describe to anyone. The things I have endured for her have also been extreme except that, as the human, the sentient one, I understood what was happening, at least to some degree. She didn’t.
Because of my past victimization in physically and emotionally abusive situations, I can better understand them. Still, Sophie will always be the stronger of the two of us when it comes to grace under pressure.
Getting back to the endorphin highs I used to achieve while cycling: There was something I didn’t see in it then that’s become clear to me now: I’ve been a chemically dependent person all my life.
One of my favorite introductory phrases about the nature of things in general was to say “In cycling, as in life, blah blah blah...”
And from what I’ve come to learn about junkies, I realize that whatever addicts are plagued by - booze, heroin, cocaine or any other opioid, adrenaline, endorphins or testosterone – they might say the same thing. Their drug, their chosen chemical has become their life.
So if you consider my near death experience – which unfortunately did not take my life as I believe it should have, I was left without the chemical substance upon which I’d been dependent for decades.
Endorphin highs are how I dealt with the real pain inside me, and I needed a regular fix to keep me going through until the next one.
Talk about being a functional addict: I used to openly say that “Work is an eight hour break between bike rides.” And I was proud of it, too. Too bad I wasn’t a paid pro cyclist.
But few things topped the feeling of anticipation I had when I changed out of my work clothes in the men’s room and into my cycling shorts and headed toward my bike for the long, sweet ride home.
Except on Fridays, when I knew I also had the next two days to look forward to on the bike. No matter the weather, it was always the high point of my day.
After my bicycle accident with the car, the chronic pain I had was not just physical, but emotional. Yes, I was beat up like Evel Knievel after a major crash.
But I began losing my sense of hygiene after suddenly finding myself with no functional hands: One arm was dead because of the crash, and my other hand was shattered. It had been surgically reconstructed and would take God only knew how long to work again.
Just getting to the bathroom was an exercise in agony and, once there an exercise in humility and deep shame. It hurt like hell to get up, and the ten painful steps to get there might as well have been a mile. The pain and the dizziness sometimes conspired to make incontinence seem more desirable.
But even worse, my inability to wipe myself or shower or blow my nose or perform any similarly intimate task meant I had to rely upon my wife’s help. Overnight I went from the strongest physical condition I’d ever known to being as helpless as a newborn baby.
It was a prison in which I was trapped. I did not know when the return of the use of my hand would come and, for someone who was deathly afraid of intimacy, I found few things more intimate than that.
In many ways I’m still trapped. In the RV, anytime I relieve myself, I apologize to Sophie for her having to watch me squat over the can. I apologize to her for how dirty the floor is, I apologize to Sophie for being unable to stay with my ex-wife because I know Sophie loved her, too.
It still breaks my heart to recall how Sophie used to approach the driver’s side door of the car when my ex-wife got home. She was so happy to see Sophie’s smiling face, “a ray of sunshine” sharing her reunion with a member of her pack. They were happy to see each other.
Sophie’s habit lingered long after the divorce, when she continued to approach similarly-colored Subaru wagons the same way, fully expecting to see her person get out. It was always a nice surprise for that driver “Well, Hi, I’m happy to see you, too pretty girl” but a disappointment for Sophie. She missed one of her original pack members.
Sophie is an exceedingly smart alpha dog who is extremely devoted to her pack. Today, save for occasional visits with my ex-in-laws I am the only remaining member of her human pack. Granted, I rely greatly on her sole attention but I also know she’s the capacity for so many more people in her life.
I feel as if I have denied myself all of the things that make a person healthy, with the conspicuous exception of Sophie. Yet, in denying myself I have denied Sophie as well. My life now exists largely to make it up to her, never mind myself, for everything has always been about me.
In the absence of endorphins, and in the face of unbelievably excruciating intimate physical pain I first learned that medical marijuana had been an effective painkiller for many dealing with more serious afflictions like cancer, Cerebral Palsy and more. It offered a chance to return to the world, albeit only to a certain extent.
I was raised Catholic by self-righteous parents who, though not alcoholics, would “enjoy a drink” on certain occasions. Though they weren’t drunks, they thought nothing of getting tipsy. And why not? The priest chugs a chalice of wine before the congregation at every service. Hell, it’d be a sin to not drink, for it’s one of the most Christ-like things anyone can do.
But police officers, even Catholic ones might disagree. To them, a roadside sobriety test of a “tipsy“ or “buzzed“ driver likely equals a DUI conviction.
Anyone who’s been “buzzed” knows that you are either drunk or stoned or well on your way to being drunk or stoned. Yet the stigma of pot smoking- smoking dope - in my family culture persisted.
As an adult with chronic pain issues though, at my wit’s end from all the pain medication with side effects like constipation that marginalized the pain killing effects left me open to something, anything else.
My ex-wife’s brother had long since been pro-marijuana, even years before it was legal in the state. After Colorado legalized pot in 2012 he was in a perfect position to make a good living for himself with it if he chose to do so. It’s made his story an inspiring success.
The pot worked as promised, with the added benefit of being stoned for the first time. It’s a great feeling, one that I think everyone should feel in their life just once even though, for whatever reason I know it’s not for everyone. I believe, though, that I’m one such person, because it can’t kill my real pain.
The pain I have runs much deeper than any drug has managed to reach, though pot has been the closest thing to endorphins I’ve since found. No drug could ever compare with the painkilling and sedative properties bicycling brought me.
It’s why, despite my physical pain today I still sometimes take my clunky old mountain bike off-road. As I’ve said a million times, the worst day on a bicycle is better than the best day doing just about anything else.
My long history of drug use is as benign as the insidious nature of their side effects. I didn’t touch any drug save my seizure meds as a teenager living at home. Even during my first week or so in the dorms at college I was ambivalent about the idea of even drinking just one beer.
All my peers, it seemed had gone through their experimentation with alcohol in high school and I suppose some didn’t at all. But I had maybe two or three friends in high school and certainly never went to any parties. Mine was a sheltered upbringing by design. All that was to change in college.
I had always been warned as a Catholic kid that for me to drink any alcohol would result in some unimaginably horrifying physical consequences. The same Fear that guided my Catholic parents was liberally directed toward me as well.
So, once I overcame that ambivalence, that fear of drinking my first beer, the floodgates flew open. Fresh out of high school, into my first, second and third years of college, I assimilated with others my age who were also the offspring of steelworking families. They smoked and drank and I began to also.
I attributed my beer drinking – my need to swap out my inner, sober feelings with the more pleasant feeling of partying with others while getting drunk. It seemed a fitting release from the pain of having lived in such an awful environment for so many years.
Just being with my cohorts then, the others who also knew the closed-mindedness of Catholic steelworking families was a comfort.
Suddenly I was invited to parties left and right, on a fast track into what I thought to be the world of adulthood. It seemed I knew everybody on campus and they knew me. And there were lots of good, solid guys in my group.
Having never felt before that I could even have a single friend, let alone have one visit my childhood home, group acceptance was suddenly as confusing as it was welcome.
During my freshman year, my buddies and I even grew so weary of the cliquishness of the only fraternity on campus that we organized our own separate, equally cohesive yet accepting group that eventually established a chapter of a second fraternity on campus.
It was perhaps the greatest accomplishment of my freshman year, though I transferred out of that campus the following year. Of course I shared the development of all this with the folks back home. Unsurprisingly I was forbidden to return to that campus again. As such, I wasn’t even there to enjoy any of the wilder frat parties I helped facilitate.
Despite my absence there in my sophomore year my name, however, is inscribed on some plaque somewhere on campus for posterity. It was the work of my old fraternity pals.
As I said, some of my frat buddies were good, solid guys who remembered me, A true friend will watch out for their friends, even in such demure ways. Still, I haven’t seen or spoken with any of them since freshman year.
Why? My idea of brotherhood probably wouldn’t have worked out there anyway, so it’s probably better things ended abruptly before my intimacy issues surfaced. It would likely have ended badly, like most of my relationships would be from then on.
I thought my sudden social skills, finely honed under a keg tap, was a natural outlet for all the physical and emotional abuse I faced every day as a kid. And, indeed it may have been. I didn’t realize it was actually the sign of having an addictive personality.
Coming from parents whose heads were buried in the fine gold sand of Catholicism and rank-and-file unionist Republicanism they couldn’t see outside of themselves enough to realize anything else. My father drank beer, his father and older brother drank beer, etc. To them I was just following in their footsteps.
Even though I managed to graduate from college, I barely did so with a D average. Though it was a real “achievement“ to have earned a college degree, my lousy college transcript was never anything I would dare share with anyone. It merely became yet another source of shame.
One day, late in my junior year, drinking beer and partying with friends didn’t serve me any longer. So I quit, dropping it overnight as if it’d never been a part of my life, just as I’d done with cigarettes two years earlier.
Having been to three different campuses during my first three years of college and living alone my fourth year I could virtually reinvent myself every year.
My first year, I lived in the dorms. My second year I lived at home and commuted to college. I partied more than ever and drank a staggering amount of beer that even I sometimes had trouble believing. I don’t think I was trying to hurt myself, I was just pushing my limits.
What’s more, I drove my van – the old family clunker- to campus and back five days a week, about an hour each way. Though Monday through Thursday I was sober, on Friday night it was guaranteed I would arrive home late, if at all, still drunk.
Most often, however, I would pass out in a friend‘s basement where we listened to Led Zeppelin all night long, talking about women as if we knew what we were talking about and how badly we would love to have gotten laid. Never mind that our usual inebriated state would have rendered us unable to get it up anyway.
But, in its own weird way, I still regard it as among some of the happiest times of my life. I was still a virgin then – a fact attributable to being Catholic and it’s frowning upon extramarital relations, though chronic drunkenness was apparently okay.
I saw my whole life ahead of me, unencumbered by any real commitments or responsibilities or uptight parents breathing down my neck. It was unlike any time I’ve since known and for good reason:
Regarding shame and Catholicism, while only a few years old I was present for something my siblings were not – my father‘s infidelity to my mother and the ensuing fallout between them.
Their constant screaming, my mother’s throwing things, the constant turmoil are still fresh. It was traumatic for a kid, though my parents couldn’t see beyond their own trauma to realize it was having a terrible effect on me.
Perhaps the worst thing a parent could do in such a situation is what my parents did to me; they dragged me into it.
I remember my mother putting me in the car to drive over and surprise/confront my father with the woman he thought he was covertly seeing. He was sneaking around, though he was not very clever about it. I plainly remember my mother pointing out lipstick on my father’s shirt collar one day, and the ensuing screaming between them her discovery prompted.
My mother used me as a pawn to show the other woman that the man she was fooling around with was a father, as if that made a difference.
Perhaps my mother believed that my father was somehow innocent. But what about my father‘s complicity in his affair? How could my mother be so blind as to blame my father’s infidelity on “the other woman?”
My father was equally complicit, if not in fact the one who encouraged the affair. I don’t think that way, but they do, and they always will. The power of denial was lost on them, and still is.
Their blindness, their blame-the-other-party mentality was something both my parents also had when it came to me.
My parents never stuck up for me, no matter whether what I’d done was right or wrong. To them, I was always to blame for anything negative I encountered; the circumstances never mattered.
This even includes the last time I spoke with my mother, just after Sophie and I were brutalized and violently separated in the Arizona desert in February, 2017.
It was not until I was released from the county jail and, for lack of anyone else, I called my mother. I can’t imagine why I did it - codependency, I think - and regretted it immediately.
Her response – “You just called to upset me!“ and my father’s refusal to speak to me were predictable.
But it told me in so many words, flat out, that my parents were never my friends, for friends are always there for each other. And I believe every parent must, if nothing else, be thought of by their kids as, at the very least a dependable friend.
Though my parents’ reaction hurt initially, the realization that my parents were never my friends validated the bulk of my adult life spent ignoring them. Deep down, I always knew those people were toxic for me and, as long as they draw a breath, they will remain so.
Because my brother and sisters did not experience the turmoil between my parents that I did, my parents don’t seem to appreciate the fact that I ignore them.
For as long as I’m not in their lives, their secret is safe, though they’ll always live in fear of being exposed. They’re Catholic and therefore must always have something shameful to fear.
That said, my parents have understandably scapegoated me so that any of their past malfeasance that occurred today falls upon my shoulders. Not knowing our parents as I do, it isn’t a stretch for my siblings to adopt my their parents’ narrative on the family history.
it’s also not a stretch to know my siblings would prefer to believe their parents, better experienced by the time they were raised and who’d never laid a finger on them. I might feel the same way, though my mind would always remain open to other possibilities. A true friend would.
In that same sense, my parents are exercising their blame-the-other-person mentality and, of course, I am that other person.
Though I receive no recognition for it – only a succession of many years of heartache and relationship dysfunction – as someone who’s been vilified in absentia I have served a very viable purpose for holding my nuclear family together:
My personal absence from their lives is tantamount to keeping the peace in general. If I were still there, the Fear I’d instill in my parents due to my inside knowledge of their less-than-pristine past would only create discord among all of them.
That said, no matter what I was always destined to sever the ties with my parents and, given my birth order, my siblings, too.
Regarding marijuana, while it has temporarily eased my pain and even made me feel quite high, it has done little more than to completely occupy my mind while my ex-wife was studying for her real estate exam.
It was around 2015, a few years after my accident and shortly after I suddenly found myself out of my own home. It was as if some plan had been hatched then that everyone knew about but me.
My nieces and nephews and their mother showed up on my doorstep one spring break and they never left. I understood it to be temporary and was glad to be able to help. I’d known domestic violence and physical abuse, too.
But gradually it became more permanent, as their belongings arrived and their mother, who’d been bringing the kids’ things moved in, too. Sophie sure loved it.
According to their story, their father had been abusing them and they sought refuge in my home.
Evidently my ex-wife consented to this, though I knew nothing about it. I’d put a lot of sweat equity into that home and had no plans to leave. I knew all my neighbors and was on such good and familiar terms with them. It was my home. Our neighbors had become friends.
Suddenly, I found myself knee-deep in five kids and a mother with a bad attitude toward men in general. I sensed it toward me, just because I happened to be there. Never mind the fact that it was my home, or at least I thought it was.
An old familiar scenario played out when I found myself avoiding her, a parental figure, in my home. This time, though I was the homeowner, not the kid, and I had no idea what this woman was capable of. I thought I’d put such situations behind me forever, I thought I’d be safe there.
But, looking back on how everyone acted I was merely the last to know. My ex-wife didn’t have the same attachment to the home that I’d made, the down payment for which came from the settlement of the lawsuit from my accident.
I had the tongue-in-cheek thought that the going rate for a cookie cutter home in Brighton was a person’s left arm and a near death experience. Joke was on me, though.
That home symbolized a great deal more than just a property value to me. I was no longer a cyclist, so I reached out to define myself anew: as a homeowner in a neighborhood full of people who became friends and who embraced Sophie and I, and who quickly welcomed us as fixtures there.
I don’t even remember what my ex-wife did during the day while we lived there, just that we went for many wonderful evening walks around the Adams County Courthouse and Municipal Building campus. I stayed home and worked around the house and the yard, doing the things that made it our own.
It was a beautiful location, despite its nearness to the interstate. The highway was barely audible and the concrete path surrounding the county complex was newly poured, with lots of bunnies for Sophie to chase, too. One evening she was sweet enough to bring me one, its guts spilling out everywhere. She was so proud and, though I love bunnies I was, too.
It was truly a time when Sophie’s and my bond was strengthening, and this all happened before I’d even tried pot. In fact, despite the terrible pain of being on my bike trainer, I still thought I might end up on a road bike again in search of endorphin highs I’d not yet achieved.
Unlike today, there was still a chance I might compete again and almost a certainty that I’d ride. But the physical pain won out and I had to face the fact that I’d never know cycling the way I once did.
Flush with cash from the accident settlement I even bought a beautiful time trial frame and gear thinking that’d be the best way for me to contribute to the team. I’d have the course to myself and would only need to put my head down and ride like hell. But I was grasping at straws, for it wasn’t to be. My bicycle racing days were over.
And if I couldn’t have that, I didn’t want it at all. I was left with no identity and no idea how to create one anew, or if I even wanted to.
It was under these lost circumstances that I was, for all practical purposes evicted from the Brighton home I’d established for us in favor of a wonderful Denver neighborhood.
Upon leaving Brighton I literally had to go through the garage and take only those things I could carry, leaving most of the tools and the lawn mower and all the sundry stuff that made our home unique to us behind.
Leaving my bike tools was the worst, given the meaning they had. I was so crushed I threw out all my cycling clothing and pretty much everything else related to my cycling identity. It truly was adding insult to injury and I’d rarely felt more despondent. As I said, if I couldn’t have it all I didn’t want any of it.
Years later, in a fit of despair I even gave away my bicycles, my trainer, my busted bike frame from the accident, and all my other associated effects of a lifetime spent rolling on two wheels and muscle power.
It’s the one thing that, though I tore myself away from it, I have looked back countless times to process my loss, always ending up wondering “What if?”
Tears still sometimes come to my eyes when I see other cyclists, though not out of anger or envy but of profound grief. I still can’t believe I lost the one thing that meant so much to me, the only real passion and pleasure I’ve ever allowed myself to indulge.
Cycling is still my identity but given my inability to ever ride like I did leaves me feeling just plain lost. I’m nothing without it, and though my body’s long past its usefulness on a bike my heart will always remember the feeling of riding one.
The muscle memory I felt in my pedaling cadence and that special hum I’d hear of that tiny piece of rubber where my tires met the road I’ll never forget.
Upon leaving my home in Brighton, I haven’t spoken to any of my former neighbors since. It’d surely trigger an even greater sense of loss for me. They became yet more casualties of my inability to maintain a positive relationship with close neighbors as a true friend would. That in itself brought me considerable shame.
But my ex-wife, who still visited her sister and the kids would send along to me our former neighbors’ inquiries about Sophie and me, and that they missed us and please call or come by to visit, but I never did.
It deeply saddens me because I know Sophie loved seeing them, too. Again, the things I’ve denied myself I’ve also denied Sophie, too.
As a capable one-armed guy who did everything his neighbors could do and then some, that beautiful and friendly dog always by his side, never on a leash but always in control, I know we stood out. It was one of the few places where I was unafraid of our being so conspicuous. I still have yet to consider anyplace as safe as I did there. I don’t expect we ever will.
Given the turmoil and sheer problems my angry ex-sister-in-law and her kids brought to that neighborhood I’m sure they missed us, too.
I recall one afternoon, not long before we moved out of the house, three teenage boys showed up at my front door looking for my fourteen year old niece. Though I was very friendly, they suddenly became extremely and inexplicably belligerent, almost unwilling to leave my front door.
I didn’t respond well to their sudden change of attitude that it began to piss me off. There was even a moment when I was ready to grab a baseball bat to chase them away. I kept one in a closet as a joke, knowing Sophie’s all the deterrent our home would ever need.
But when Sophie came and made herself visible, sitting right next to me, the little shits wisely took their problems elsewhere. It was the only sign they had any brains at all.
I remember thinking how I was once a horny teenager and, though I’d never behave toward anyone the way these kids acted toward me, I thought perhaps they were just more demonstrative about things.
“My poor niece, the crap she has to put up with,” I remember thinking. Then it dawned on me: Maybe my niece had willingly attracted such troublesome boys. And what was it about her that she and those boys found so attractive in each other?
Not long after, I saw it clearly: these kids were the wrong-side-of-the-tracks types my niece found attractive. Given the girl’s issues with her combative parents I suddenly saw my niece for the statistic I believed she’d become: an unplanned teen pregnancy with a number of potential fathers.
The boys who showed up at my door, knowing I was the only one home but not knowing Sophie was there had been told I was sexually abusing my niece, a story espoused by my ex-sister-in-law and my niece.
They were going to show me who was boss, I guess. How naïve I was to all of that. But I don’t think that way so of course I couldn’t see it coming.
It was my ex-sister-in-law’s MO, to play the “victim” role in getting her way. I didn’t know her well, but my ex-wife filled me in on this later. It was her sister’s backup plan should I catch on to her outright hijacking of my home out from under me.
She had been talking up a storm about how awfully I treated her and the kids and was prepared to accuse me of something awful. If necessary, she was ready to call the police. Evidently, it was how they did things in La Junta where they’d lived.
Whatever it took to separate me from my house they were going to do.
And I thought I understood family dysfunction. This was a new low, though it made perfect sense after some consideration. Low is low, and that’s that. It wasn’t the low I knew
While I initially bought into their tales of woe about my “abusive” ex-brother-in-law, the epiphany that came to me after being on the receiving end of my ex-sister-in-lawl’s BS cast doubt on everything she did and said. Her plan was to make sure I never returned to my old home again and, given how things transpired with all of that I never could anyway.
What for? To witness the shambles they’d likely turned the home I loved into, and with my own tools, no less? No thank you. The sister-in-law needn’t have bothered with her scheme for I wouldn’t have returned anyway. It was just something she loved to do.
The subsequent sense of unwelcoming I felt from them all in Brighton after moving to Denver created a rift between my-ex-wife and I that led me to believe our marriage was over.
Though we were still living together I was under the impression things were over and long before our divorce I made the break from her. It was about that time I began making trips in the Subaru into the mountains with Sophie, car camping on public land.
In short, I couldn’t have been and felt more displaced than I did then.
The Denver neighborhood was absolutely beautiful, with amazingly tall oaks that lined both sides of the street like enormous sentries standing guard. Home prices began in the mid-$700s. It was the first time since my bike racing days that I was again surrounded by successful guys my own age who, without knowing my true background, might well see me as a peer.
While it hadn’t the redneck element that Brighton did, I again played the role of social chameleon.
It was the first time I had pot in my life, which I got from a medical dispensary in Boulder, usually when I visited my previous psychotherapist there.
He was an old, salty guy, with a deep voice and proclivity toward using the f-word and referring to Obama as an n-word. He loved Sophie of course.
I remember how ballsy Sophie was to go there with me; his office had a typical Boulder eccentricity to it, and I think his office was a converted attic. The steps leading up to it were extremely steep, enough to give Sophie pause before descending. But she always made it down and I remember thinking that I’d be scared shitless if I had to do that and that I probably couldn’t.
One day I showed up to my appointment early and took Sophie for a quick walk around the block. Out behind the office, in his Jeep in the parking lot sat Tom Fiester. He had kind of a blank expression and didn’t even seem to notice we were even there.
I stepped up next to him and saw him smoking a cigar. He seemed surprised to see me, then told me how he sometimes liked to “enjoy a cigar” before his appointments.
I learned shortly thereafter that it was possible to catch a “pretty good buzz” from a cigar-according to another, older acquaintance who knew what it meant to “enjoy a cigar” I never went to see Tom again.
To think that the person from whom I’d sought to work with to improve my own condition might have been high himself may have been an ethical and certainly a professional breach.
But more important, to me it represented time that I could have better spent being high myself. Out walking the neighborhood in Denver with Sophie.
has always been the best therapy of all.
I even remember driving to a business park near the Centennial Airport on some weekends to get high and walk around the nicely manicured but deserted office buildings.
I’d reminisce about my days at the Denver Tech Center, a bit further south from twenty years earlier, wondering how things might have worked out had I not been hospitalized with a blood clot.
Then one day a Homeland Security officer, replete in his official-looking uniform and an air of self-importance wanted to know why I’d been there over the previous few weeks.
Turns out during all the time I thought I’d spent lost in my own private contemplation I’d actually been watched by somebody, probably through binoculars. Though I was gracious about it-what else could I do?- it pissed me off nonetheless and I never went back.
Like my old Brighton neighborhood, it could never have been the same, so why bother?
But having pot was one of the only times since my bicycle accident that I could count on not being in pain and therefore free to let my thoughts roam. It was better than any therapy I’d yet known. Then again, I hadn’t yet wintered on a Mexican beach with half a dozen other Canadian and Coloradan snowbirds.
My time in that pretty part of Denver was spent largely with only Sophie; Kami was always out, working on her real estate license. It was little more than a fog of being stoned, self-flagellation, and walking with Sophie through the neighborhood. In other words, all the things I could do to ease my pain and to distract myself that I my cycling once did.
Those were the only things I knew to do to assuage the pain I then felt to make myself, even if only temporarily, feel better.
I rejected my wife’s advances, which was nothing new. For me to look back upon my second ex-wife as anything but an angel only serves to add to my inner hurt.
How to describe loving someone so much and so badly wanting to show it but, how and why be unable to do so? It was like a daily reminder of my inability to be a feeling, loving person.
It goes against everything I believe being human stands for. That means, by implication, that I see myself as less than human. Unfortunate, but true.
Equally unfortunate, is my knowledge that no amount of time spent loving Sophie, or vaping pot or anything else could ever equal the total and utter endorphin high I got while cycling.
All I know from any of that is I’m still virile and what the hell good is that now anyway? I remember seeing one guy at the races who was apparently some young girl’s sugar daddy. He clearly wasn’t her father, though he was old enough to be dating a daughter’s friend. Her, perhaps?
Somehow it disgusted me to think this girl was being bought by this guy and that he felt more secure in his masculinity by having her there.
He technically took second place that day in the Men’s 60+ division, second only to one of my 60+ teammates who also raced with us in the 45+ Men’s division. The funny part is that my older teammate placed in our 45+ race but didn’t accept his 60+ trophy, too. He just loved the competition.
But the sugar daddy was so proud of himself for taking second, despite the race roster showing he was only one of two in that division.
Though I could never be that person I was happy for him nonetheless; it’s not as if pro contracts were on the line. We were just there to have fun, a sort of midlife whip-em-out-and-measure-em thing amongst guys our own age. We also knew that the “sugar daddy story” would one day become a point of humor among us. The sugar daddy was just this guy’s way of whipping-‘it-out, presumably literally so.
It was in the same vein as the “Why are bikes better than women?” quip. But I no longer have teammates to share such jokes with. In fact, many of my old teammates no longer race, though some still do. I know that if I could, I’d still be among those hardcore teammates who still train and race out of our mutual passion for the sport.
Instead, I’m riding only in spirit. The few times I made it out on my mountain bike last year were special. They were the only time in years I have looked to the sky and felt unashamed to scream with joy and out of sheer pleasure.
But it wasn’t just the momentary joy I felt. It was also because I never again believed I’d feel anything even closely resembling the high I got on a bicycle.
This I achieved with only one arm on a mountain bike trail with several sections that were too technical for me to ride. But I was alone in the silent foothills above Ft Collins, and the fact that I was on a bicycle at all was, in itself, an accomplishment.
There was always hell to pay pain wise, so my little victories were short-lived. But it was better than nothing, and it helped me to cope when I saw other road cyclists on the roads near our home. In other words, a quick fix.
I remember a trivial statement from long ago regarding cocaine use and its effect on some users. It had been documented in some lab somewhere that it only took the anticipation of the first snort of cocaine for some participants to spontaneously ejaculate upon so doing. A weird thing to remember, to be sure.
As a twenty-something young man I was used to the notion of ejaculation as being accomplished, if you’ll excuse the pun, in mostly one of a handful of ways.
The idea of spontaneous anything then was as compelling as it was stimulating, and I remember wondering if one day I would ever find something in my life that might have a similar effect.
And though I haven’t been looking, I can’t say that I would ever have found it. As an older man, I do respect the possible existence of something like that. However, I now know anything to have such an effect on a person to be dangerous, not desirable. I can’t imagine a substance having such power over me.
Ironically, the drugs I take daily for seizures and neuropathy leave me dizzy – but not pleasurably so – and my vision has been irreparably harmed by them.
Even squinting, I have trouble reading road signs. And laying in bed as I read from or write on my smartphone I must hold the phone at arm’s length so that the words are intelligible. If I don’t, the blurred words will blend together and completely alter the subject of the story.
It makes for some interesting reading because my mind is quite capable of combining word fragments to create unintended words, but it’s more frustrating than novelty. And it’s exhausting.
I know that words have always been my strongest point, more so than for most people if my aptitude testing is any indication. I know from experience with others’ writing, which I’m unable to read without editing as I go that it’s true.
Mistakes abound everywhere, even in the best of newspapers, just as they probably do here in the eyes of readers who possess a similar aptitude.
Just recently I wrote a resume and cover letter package for one of the cab drivers I’ve gotten to know over the past few months. I’ve done the same for many others over the years.
For some reason, lack of self-worth, I guess, I’ve never taken money for the work I do, even though I may have helped many of them obtain interviews or get their foot in the door for some pretty lucrative positions.
I know this, of course, because I am the one who has taken their qualifications and made sense of them. Because of me, they looked very good on paper, or at least good enough to get a foot in the door.
That, in itself is of immeasurable value to anyone whose language is rooted in engineering or some technical language as opposed to plain English.
But this ability of mine, which I have largely denied myself the pleasure of exercising is a point of shame, too. With every article from the New York Times or the Washington Post or any of my online news sources I feel both immense respect for the writers who can pound out such great content and who make a living at it to boot, but also deep shame for not having fully exploited my own potential.
It wasn’t until the advent of blogging that I actually “put my work out there“ for others to read. Prior to that, I wrote ceaselessly on my laptop but, instead of sharing my work with anyone I kept everything saved on memory sticks which I still have somewhere.
I’ve written all my life but have never made a penny from it because I was too ashamed to risk being criticized for it. It’s been safest for me to withhold my writing, the only thing that has only brought relief and never pain, from anyone.
To do otherwise would be to risk being disillusioned forever as an adult. My greatest fear that yes, the world can be equally disdainful of me as my parents were as I was growing up would prove to be true.
In fact, the primary reason I graduated college at all was because of my literary writing classes. The degree requirements in math and science held no interest for me, save perhaps for the beer money I might get upon selling the textbook back at semester’s end. Therefore, I largely ignored the work involved and my transcript reflects this.
As someone who knows what a person looks like on paper I also know that anyone who sees my transcript wouldn’t see me as a very well-rounded person. Well, tough tittie.
Since I learned from grade school that the swift and violent retribution due to poor school report cards meant only pain, “Poor report cards” were subjectively defined; it was merely shorthand for being unlikely to ever please my parents.
Since I knew nothing I did would be good enough, my perceived inability and lack of desire for even the most basic technical things were reinforced. I do respect such abilities in others, however.
Ironically, many of those resumes I’ve written were done for people pursuing highly technical positions. After all, what kind of writer needs another writer to create their resume? A shitty one, that’s what.
I guess writing gets me high, too, which is why I have trouble stopping once I get started. So, The End.
