My First Ritual At Thirteen or Breaking The Wall

REMINGTON GRAVES

I was a precocious and, at times, prurient child, thirsty and hungry for another world, another time. I wasn’t aware of the disguise I was to claw out through at the aching age of thirteen. Mother didn’t love her baby, and Father was nowhere to be found. On thin ice, I tip-toed through the world, with dread of being the ever-present bother of a child imposed on those unfortunate of being entrusted with my care. Daddy was not across the ocean, but he sure left some memories: a milk crate full of drawings, writings and Pink Floyd vinyl. I found the aforementioned green plastic package under a few boxes in an uninhabited room in my aunt’s two-story house. I reached in slowly with wonder and discovered The Wall; white and arrayed with brick drawings and bizarre caricatures with angry faces, bearing my father’s autograph on the bottom right-hand  corner of the inner-sleeve; I ran my small index finger across the debossing of a hard pressed cheap blue pen. What satisfaction to know that this man, frequently talked about, was real and here was irrefutable proof. Adrian, his first name, like mine, I thought. I smiled and held the album with both hands and lifted it to eye level and realized, I had to listen to the music therein–maybe my father lay within these notes, these songs. But it had to be the right time, a perfect time…where I would be undisturbed. And such time did approach, unbeknownst to myself.

It was a fastidious Friday evening when my aunt and uncle ( of whom had custody of me at the time ) decided to leave for a party in another town. My cousin, the only other person in the house, besides yours truly, was going to spend the night with a friend elsewhere; he loathed me and I didn’t blame him, for his mother made us share a room despite the many other vacant rooms adorned and furnished for no one. They put on their Weekend best and said, ” Do not act stupid while we are gone. You’re old enough to be alone. Don’t let anybody in. We’ll be back later.”

I exploded inside with trembling excitement while trying to hold still so as to not give myself away. I kept staring at the television set of which displayed upon its glaring screen a man with razor-sharp knives for fingers in a dark alley, as their carpeted steps faded out down the hallway and into the staircase.

As soon as I heard the garage door close, signifying they had driven away, I jumped atop the bed and began undressing and jumping and wailing. After I had  exhausted myself, I turned off the VCR and the television and ran for the album I had stashed in the closet on my side of the room. Completely naked with a pounding heart, I turned off the lights and with the moon light penetrating the half-closed blinds, I pulled out the platter and placed it on the record player. I was not allowed to touch anything in the room, for all things belonged to my cousin, who was older than me. The dusty and scratchy sound came like a gentle zephyr with the words that to this day haunt me: “…we came in.” I had been generous with the large, heavy volume knob.

That maddening riff tore at me deeply with tender torment and Water’s thin metallic voice, like a mourning madman, was the voice of my father that moment and henceforth. Organs swelled and ascended into heavens too high for mortals, the sound of a church calling me from the future…the past..the never, with a fallen angel furiously bringing down all the airplanes in the sky. And then, a baby weeping…this was me, and I understood, my birth was the aftermath of a war between two people who may have loved each other fiercely but separated ferociously.

“If you want to find out what’s behind these cold eyes, you’ll just have to claw your way through this disguise. Lights!”

My tears were seething and cutting down the sides of my temples, falling into my ears and unto to the carpet leaving two small puddles–one on each side of my face. I lay in christ pose in defiance of what all adults held sacred and felt a million microscopic spiders crawling from behind my neck and up the back of my skull. I began to sweat profusely as children began the rebellious chant, “…all in all you’re just a…’nother brick in the wall.”

On my feet and light-headed and slightly staggering, I walked cautiously towards the bureau with a battered bounce in my step. I opened a drawer as if something within had called to me…it was a razor blade.

I made a few nicks on my forehead and watch thin red ribbons travel over my eyebrows and eyes and down to my neck, chest and then halting. I kept staring at my face of which it seemed like an eternity. Cackling and then clamoring, weeping then wanting, I rushed out of the room into a dark and silent home: down the hallway and then jumping off the balcony into the pristine sofa in the living room.

“Look mummy, there’s an aeroplane up in the sky.”

Bound for my aunt’s bedroom, I was a naked and bloody banshee caressed by the skipping touch of the moon from one window frame to another.

I reached into her drawers for her underwear and gave it a deep sniff, like maniacal men in the movies did and I slipped into his cowboy boots and did the moonwalk with mad laughter.

Once I had my fill, I would return all things to their rightful place and walk back upstairs and find the scariest room in the house. I would bring myself to my knees in the corner challenging whatever lay in wait to come and take me. It wasn’t a surrender, it was a defiance. In that position, eyes closed, at that moment, I had become a deity–one which would no longer be afraid of any man or any lurking shadow or uncanny sounds undeciphered.

Minutes later, I would be back in our room and would lay in the spot where it all began. Random television conversations came from the speakers before synthesizers accompanied the voice of a sullen ax aficionado.

“Would you like to watch t.v. or get between the sheets…would you like to learn to fly...?

And I spoke words into the sweaty, bloody night, ” I am here… come to me, Darkness. I am here. Come to me. You are the empty bowl for all light to fill.”

Did I mention I was an idiosyncratic urchin?

“Come to me, Darkness,” I uttered while envisioning hazy and sultry scenes from Ridley Scott’s Legend. And as the organs came back on and blaring with hot angry breaths, entered the ‘ooh, babes’, I begged with all that was me, as far as my feeble, young mind could understand, “I am ready. Come to me and empower me. I am tired of being afraid…I am done with being weak. I will escape this hell.”

A hot shower ended this peculiar ritual of things unplanned and emotions unrestrained. Is there anybody out there?, I wondered eyes closed and soap laden. I am no longer comfortably numb. I will not wait for the worms. As soon as I can, I am going to run like hell.

How did I manage to escape? In retrospect, I feel as if I had summoned the strength from an abysmal heaven–it had heard …and it had answered.

I sit here alone in my own home, outside that old wall, at the devil-approving hour of 1:23 a.m. and smile a salty smile with tears no longer cutting, but empowering…releasing and comforting like and old incense once bitter now sweet. The catharsis did cut and I did bleed. I am certain, that if I were to return, a bloody smear would read:

      ” I WAS HERE.”

“Isn’t this where--”

∞