A Man Named Dave (4 page)

In an effort to relieve the pain I stare up at the ceiling. I wring my hands and concentrate on inhaling tiny puffs of air through my nose. From the corner of my eye I can see the nurse still standing by the door. I slowly turn my head toward her. Tears run down my cheeks. “I, ah … I can’t.”

“Why? In heaven’s name, why do you protect her? What are you waiting for?” she barks in a rattling voice. “Something has to be done!”

The nurse’s words pound through my skull. I bite down on my lip until it bleeds. My arms begin to shake. “Dammit!” I blurt out in a squeaky voice.
“Don’t you understand?
There’s nothing,
nothing,
that anyone can do! It’s my fault!
It’s always my fault.
‘Boy’ this, ‘It’ that, blah, blah, blah. Every day is a repeat of the day before. Even you,” I state with my finger thrust at the nurse, “every day I come in, take off my clothes, you look me over, you ask me about this, about that … for what? Nothing changes, and nothing ever will!” The band around my throat begins to tighten, but I don’t care. I can no longer control my flood of emotions. “Miss Moss tried –”

“Miss Moss?” the nurse asks.

“My, ah, my second-grade teacher. She tried … she tried to help and she’s gone .…”

“David?” the nurse says in a disbelieving tone.

I bury my face in my hands. “Father tried … and he’s gone, too. You have to understand: everything I am, everything I do, is bad. Everything’s wrong. If you get too close, she’ll… she’ll deal with you, too! No one wins!” I cry. “No one wins against The Mother!” I bend over in a coughing fit. Whatever energy I had drains away. I lean against the nurse’s examination bed. I fight to slow down my breathing. “I, ah … when I sat at the bottom of the garage stairs and they’d watch TV or eat dinner, I tried to figure things out, to understand why.” I shake my head clear of the countless hours spent in the garage. “You know the one thing I wanted the most?”

Her mouth hangs open. She’s never seen me like this before. “No,” she answers.

“I just wanted to be
real.
To be a real kid – with clothes and stuff. I don’t mean just toys, but to be outside. I always wanted to play on the jungle gym after school. I’d really like to do that.” For a moment I smile at my fantasy. “But I know I won’t be able to.
Never.
I have to run to The House fast or I get into trouble. Sometimes, on really sunny days, as I’m running from school, I cheat and stop to watch the kids play.”

My vision becomes blurred as I rattle off my deepest secrets to the nurse. Because I am not allowed to speak at Mother’s house and have no friends at school, I have no one to express my feelings to. “Other times in the garage, at night, when I lay on my cot, I’d think hard to figure out what I could do. I mean, to fix things between Mother and me, to make things better. I wanted to know why, how, things became so bad. I really thought if I tried hard enough – if I prayed with all my spirit – I’d find my answers. They never came.

“I … I, ah, tri – tried,” I stutter. I’m holding back my tears. “I spent so much time … I, ah, I just … I just wanted to know why. That’s all. Why me, why us? I just wanted to know. Why?” I stare into the nurse’s eyes. “I don’t care anymore! I just want to go to sleep! I’m tired of everything! The games, the secrets, the lies, hoping one day Mother will wake up and everything will be better again! I can’t take it anymore!

“If you could just let me sleep, for just a while, please?” I beg.

She shakes her head. “This has to end, David. Look at you. You’re –”

“It’s okay,” I interrupt in a calm voice. “I’m not… when I’m at school, I’m not afraid. Just promise me you won’t tell.
Not today, please?
”

“David, you know I can’t do that,” the nurse replies in a flat tone.

“If you … if you tell,” I pant, “then you know what will happen. Please, let it go!”

She nods her head in agreement. “Just for today.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” She takes my hand and leads me to the small bed in the corner of the room.

“Cross your heart and hope to die?” I ask, making an X mark on my chest with my finger.

“Cross my heart,” she repeats in a choked-up voice. She covers me with a thick wool blanket.

“… And hope to die?” I repeat. The nurse’s lips part with a smile as she gently strokes my matted hair. I take her hands and cup them around mine. “… And hope to die?”

The nurse gives my hands a gentle squeeze. “And hope to die.”

In the deepest part of my soul, I feel at peace. I am no longer afraid.
I am ready to die.

August 24, 1979

Thick, sticky sweat coated every pore of my skin. My stomach seized with fear. My fingers seemed fused together as they clawed the armrest. I wanted to shut my eyes, but the combination of exhilaration, fascination, and terror inside me kept them glued to the small Plexiglas window. I studied every feature of the Bay Area – my home for the last eighteen years.

“I’m flying?” I asked, to my own amazement.

My body slid from my seat, and I thought for sure I’d fall out of the plane as the Boeing 727 made a sudden sharp roll to the right. To help contain my fear, I forced my eyes shut.
I’m okay. I’m all right. I’m fine. My God, I can’t believe it! I’m flying! I’m actually flying!
I could feel myself drifting off. Because of the excitement of finally enlisting in the U.S. Air Force, saying good-bye to my foster parents, and struggling with my past, I had not slept in days. As the roar of the jet’s engines began to fade, I started to unwind. The more my tension disappeared, the more I began to think of how far I had come.

As a child surviving in the garage of Mother’s house, I had never dreamed of making it out alive. Somehow, I had known Mother was close to killing me, and yet I did not care. I had given up all hope. Yet on March 5, 1973, the day after Mother had thrown me down the garage stairs, my teachers called the police, who immediately placed me into protective custody. I was free. As elated as I was, I sensed that my freedom was a hollow victory. At the county’s court proceedings, I felt that Mother had given me away. I felt as if
I
was not good enough for
her.
When my angel of mercy – my social worker, Ms Gold – informed me that I was never to have any contact with Mother or her children ever again, I was crushed.

It was then that I became obsessed with finding answers to my past. Even though I was still terrified of Mother, who wanted nothing to do with me, I still struggled to prove that I was worthy of her love and worthy enough to be a member of her family.

As a foster child, I soon learned that I knew absolutely nothing about
living in the real world.
My former life as Mother’s prisoner had been dominated by elemental needs of survival. But after my rescue I felt like a toddler – learning and growing by leaps and bounds. The simplest things taught to preschool children became major obstacles for me. Because I had spent years in the garage with my head bent backward in a POW position, I developed very bad posture. As a foster child, I had to learn to focus and walk upright. Whenever I became nervous, I stuttered or slurred every word. It would take me forever to complete one simple sentence. My foster mother, Mrs Turnbough, spent hours with me every day after school, teaching me phonics and helping me to imagine my words flowing from my mouth, like water cascading over a fall. Mrs Turnbough’s valiant efforts were perhaps her undoing. Within a few months, I was driving my foster parents up the wall with all I had to say. They had all they could do to shut me up. I wanted to show off my new form of communication to everyone, every minute. But my mouth soon became my Achilles’ heel. Because I was so skinny and awkward, I became easy prey for others, and my only form of defense was my mouth. Whenever I felt backed in a corner, words of intense anger and hatred seemed to erupt before I could analyze what I was saying or why.

The only way I felt I could make friends was stealing for acceptance or doing whatever else I could to gain recognition. I knew that what I was doing was completely wrong, but after years of being an outcast and totally isolated, the need to fit in was too powerful to resist. My foster parents struggled to keep me on the straight and narrow, and teach me the seriousness of my decisions.

On the lighter side, they were dismayed at my naivete and ignorance. The first few times I took a bath, I filled the tub to the rim
before
stepping into it, causing water to spill over the sides. I would then squeeze every drop I could from what I thought was “fancy-smelling bubble bath” into the tub, then stir the water like a whirlpool trying to form as much lather as possible. As much as my foster parents laughed at my water frolics, my foster sisters were not amused and hid their bottles of Vidal Sassoon in their bedrooms. Up until then I had never heard of the word shampoo.

I thought that in order to survive, I had to work. Early on as a foster child, it was drummed into me that foster kids –labeled as “F-kids” – never amounted to anything, never graduated high school, let alone go on to college. I also discovered that by the time I turned eighteen years old, I would no longer be a ward of the court – a minor that was provided for by the county – and since I didn’t have parents to rely on, I would be all alone. The closer I came to reaching adulthood, the more I became terrified of being broke and homeless. Deep down I feared I would not be strong enough to make it on my own. As a frightened child living in my mother’s garage, one of the promises I had made was that if I ever escaped, I would always have enough money to eat. So, as a young teenager, I abandoned my Lego and Erector sets and my Hot Wheels toy cars and focused on earning a living. By the age of fifteen I was shining shoes. I lied about my age to get work as a busboy. I did whatever I could to put in at least forty hours a week. As a freshman in high school, I slaved six days a week to put in over sixty hours. I did anything I could to squeeze in an extra hour a week to earn an additional $2.65. Only after I’d show up to school and collapse on top of my desk and get sick from total exhaustion did I begin to slack off. On one level, thinking that I was ahead of the game, I was proud, almost to the point of being cocky. But on the inside I felt hollow and lonely. As other boys my age were dating beautiful girls with short dresses and fancy makeup, driving their parents’ cars and whining about their ten-hour work weeks, I became increasingly jealous of their good fortune.

Whenever I felt a little depressed, I would bury myself even more in my work. The harder I applied myself, the more the cravings of wanting to be a normal teenager disappeared. And more important, the inner voice bubbling inside me, fighting for the answers to my past, remained quiet.

For me, work meant peace.

In the summer of 1978, at age eighteen, in order to further my career as top-rated car salesman, I decided to drop out of high school. But months later, after a statewide recession, I found myself as a legal adult, with no diploma, no job, and my life savings quickly draining away. My worst nightmare had come true. All of my well-thought-out plans of getting ahead and sacrificing while others played vanished into thin air. Because of my lack of education, the only jobs available were at fast-food restaurants. I knew I could not make it by working those jobs for the rest of my life.

Ever since I had been Mother’s prisoner, I had dreamed of making something of myself. The more she would scream, curse at me, and leave me sprawled out on the floor in my own blood, the more I would fight back and smile inside, telling myself over and over again,
One day, you’ll see. One of these days I’ll make you proud.
But Mother’s prediction was right: I had failed. And for that I hated myself to the core. My idle time awakened my inner voice. I began to think that maybe Mother had been right all along. Maybe I was a loser, and I had been treated as such because I deserved it. I became so paranoid about my future that I could no longer sleep. I spent my free evenings trying to form any strategy I could to survive. It was during one of those endless nights that I remembered the only piece of advice my father ever gave me.

In six years as a foster child, I had seen my father less than a dozen times. At the end of my last visit, he proudly showed me one of the only possessions he had left: his badge, representing his retirement from the San Francisco Fire Department. Before loading me onto a Greyhound bus, Father mumbled in a dejected voice, “Get out of here, David. Get as far away from here as you can. You’re almost at that age. Get out.” As he looked at me with darkened circles under his eyes, Father’s final words were: “Do what you have to. Don’t end up … don’t end up like me.”

In my heart I sensed that Father was a homeless alcoholic. After spending a lifetime saving others from burning buildings, Father had been helpless to save himself. That day as the bus pulled away, I cried from the depths of my soul. Every time the bus passed someone sleeping beside a building, I’d imagine Father shivering in the night. As much as I felt sorry for him, though, I knew I did not want to – I could not – end up like him. I felt selfish thinking of myself rather than my stricken father, but his advice,
Don’t end up like me,
became my personal commandment.

I decided that joining the service was my only chance. I even fantasized about serving in the air force as a fireman, then one day returning to the Bay Area and showing Father my badge. Trying to enlist proved to be an ordeal. After struggling to obtain my GED, I had to fill out mounds of paperwork for every time I had been bounced from one foster home to another, then explain on separate forms why I was placed in another home. Whenever the air force recruiter pressed me about my past, I became so terrified that I stuttered like an idiot. After weeks of evading these questions, I caved in and gave the sergeant a brief explanation about why Mother and I did not get along. I waited for his reaction. I held my breath knowing that if the recruiter thought I was a troublemaker, he could refuse my application.

Every morning, for weeks, I stood outside the door, waiting for the office to open, before I hurried in to fill out more paperwork, and studied films and whatever booklets the recruiter had available. I became possessed to enlist. The air force was my ticket to a new life.