B0092XNA2Q EBOK (27 page)

Dear Katie,

I used to think that a story was something special. That it was the one key that could unlock the broken places in us. What you hold in your hand is the story of a broken writer who attempted to kill himself and failed who meets a broken actress who attempted to kill herself and failed and somewhere in that intersection of cracked hearts and shattered souls, they find that maybe broken is not the end of things, but the beginning. Maybe broken is what happens before you
become unbroken. What’s more, maybe our broken pieces don’t fit us. Maybe all of us are standing around with a bag of the stuff that used to be us and we’re wondering what to do with it and until we meet somebody else whose bag is full and heart empty we can’t figure out what to do with our pieces. And standing there, face to face, my bag of me over my shoulder, and your bag of you over your shoulder, we figure out that maybe my pieces are the very pieces needed to mend you and your pieces are the very pieces needed to mend me but until we’ve been broken we don’t have the pieces to mend each other. Maybe in the offering we discover the meaning, and value, of being broken. Maybe checking out and retreating to an island is the most selfish thing the broken can do because somewhere on the planet is another somebody standing around holding a bag of all the jagged, painful pieces of themselves and they can’t get whole without you.

There was a time in my life when I unselfishly offered my gift. Risked everything. Emptied myself. And, when I did, I found that more bubbled up. The well never ran empty. But then, life tore my heart in two and I swore I’d never offer it again. That I’d never risk that.

Maybe love, the real kind, the kind only wished for in whispers and the kind our hearts are hardwired to want, is opening up your bag of you and risking the most painful statement ever uttered between the stretched edges of the universe: “This was once me.”

Maybe that in and of itself is the story.

T
HE
L
IFE AND
D
EATH OF
P
ETER
W
YETT BY
P
ETER
W
YETT

I have no memory of my mother. Or father. My records state that my mother was raped by an old boyfriend. The rape produced me. My mother kept me around for about forty-eight
hours and dumped me in a trailer where I was found by a homeless guy looking for a roof. After that, I did the foster home dance where I ingested mostly cigarette smoke and fast food. At the age of two, I was found malnourished in a soiled crib so they placed me in a different home—either my fifth or sixth—and circumcised me. For reasons I can’t explain, I developed a stutter about the age of four, but I have no memory of ever not having it. While I was “fostered” and moved around a good bit, and occasionally held by well-meaning and well-intentioned people, I have no memory of being wanted. Or, needed. Because in the end, I wasn’t.

Nobody picked me.

I was a daydreamer. Quiet. Unseen. Stages scared me. Shadows did not. I sat in the back and watched the world out of the corners of my eyes. What I saw and heard entered through my senses then bounced around inside, looking for a place to attach. To settle. To mean. But that was the problem. I didn’t know how—or couldn’t—assign meaning. What something “meant” wasn’t always clear. I’m not sure but I think parents are a big part of this equation. I think they’re supposed to lead us in figuring out how to understand what something means. It’s as if meaning is a baton passed down. It’s like fishing—you can read the maps until you’re blue in the face, but the fine print is what really matters. On the bottom of every fishing chart I’ve ever read, it states: “Local knowledge is necessary to avoid holes and find exact fish locations.” This is why people pay fishing guides to take them fishing. Local knowledge.

As a kid, I didn’t have a guide and little local knowledge of how to make sense of the world. What I did have, I stumbled upon. This made conversations tough. Sarcasm and humor a complete mystery. Multiple choice tests a disaster. I lived in a world without terra firma. Nothing to stand on. To push against. If I asked myself, “What does that mean?” once, then I asked myself a thousand times. Sometimes at night, I’d close
my eyes and cover my ears to slow the world. Make the bad man stop.

A growing cloud with no way to rain.

In school, I sat in the back, seldom raising my hand and never raising my voice. But the absence of verbal expression did not mean I was dull to the needs of others. Didn’t mean I couldn’t think and feel. Didn’t absorb. I thought and felt just fine. Absorbed like a sponge. My peripheral vision was twenty-ten. I cried when strangers hurt. Laughed when others smiled.

It’s what entered the heart that muted it.

When nobody wants you, all you have is hope. Hope that somebody might. This thought alone got me out of bed for the first eighteen years of my life. It was the stuff I fed on. We all did. We could skip food and water but not hope.

The inability to make sense of my life made childhood a bit rough. ’Course, the stutter didn’t help, either. For the most part I kept my mouth shut and seldom spoke, even when spoken to. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to talk. I did.

I developed two habits. Since I had no real home and had no one waiting on me, I went where I knew I’d never be alone. The library. And since I was a kid, I started in the kids’ section. I read everything I could get my hands on. Anything that would take me some place other than where I was.
Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan,
The Chronicles of Narnia,
The Wizard of Oz, The Velveteen Rabbit, Peter Rabbit, Where the Wild Things Are, The Polar Express, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Little House on the Prairie, The Secret Garden, The Boxcar Children, The Indian in the Cupboard, The Giver, The Wind in the Willows, James and the Giant Peach, Anne of Green Gables, Stuart Little
. I even read
Heidi
and
Little Women
when nobody was looking. As I got older, I moved up to thicker, longer books with smaller text and fewer to no pictures.
Where the Red Fern Grows, The Hobbit, The Call of the Wild, To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn,
and
Tom Sawyer
, then
Great Expectations, Les Misérables, The Sacketts, Moby-Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Le Morte d’Arthur, Robinson Crusoe.

The library was magical because every time I walked through the door, there were literally thousands of voices ready and willing to have a conversation with me. I walked through the door, stared at all those stacks and bindings, and whispered, “Tell me a story.”

And they did.

I found that I belonged at the library. My dream became to add my voice to the hundreds of thousands I heard around me. Which meant I read even more. Every day I made a new friend.

And none of them rejected me.

I stayed until dinner, walked to the orphanage, ate amid conversation that never included me, then retired to my bunk—or the hammock on the porch if it was available, and continued right where I left off. I joined the conversation and never had to open my mouth. I imagined my own fantastical stories cut from the same cloth as those I read daily.

Because of this, I never felt alone.

The orphanage sat blocks from the water. At night, when the breeze moved in off the ocean we could smell the salt and hear the bells of the shrimp boats going and coming. When I got old enough, I walked down to the docks and tried to make myself useful. I did anything. The fishing guides always needed help washing down their boats, spooling reels, catching baitfish. I was too young to get hired on officially so I worked for tips. I didn’t care because tips meant books. Soon, the guides grew to trust me. That meant they talked to and with me. Sharing their secrets—which could come in handy later.

Every quarter the library would have a sidewalk sale, so for pennies on the dollar, I began collecting the stories that
had fed me as a kid. Many first editions. Finding these stories was like discovering Incan gold. My stack of books grew, taking up one shelf, then another, and another. With every new book, the house mother would look at me and laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding?”

No, I wasn’t.

Naturally, reading led to writing. The opposite side of the same coin. I created worlds with my pen where people didn’t giggle and point when I spoke. Where my parents tucked me in. Where I didn’t stutter. Where I had chores assigned by a chart on the wall with my name on it. Where the seat at the table was mine and I was missed if the bell rang and I didn’t fill it. Where I was always the prince who rescued the princess, the Hobbit who destroyed the ring, the boy who saved Narnia. Where I was Pip.

Sometimes I wrote all night. Filling pad after pad. True or make believe mattered little. Life was in the telling. In the exhale. Writing became the outlet for the one-sided conversation inside my head. The only place I knew complete expression. A thought encapsulated. A breath deep enough to fill me. Punctuation with certainty. Writing was how I worked out the goings on inside. The act of making story made sense of what I couldn’t make sense of. Like being an orphan and never being adopted.

People with parents who claim them have a tough time with this, but it’s simple: Being an orphan is illogical. The brain never makes sense of it. Ever. It shelves it in the “miscellaneous” file. It’s like a book with no place on the shelf, forever relegated to the cart that circles the library, never stopping to slide between two worn covers.

Writing became my therapy and allowed me a revolutionary thought: Maybe I’m not crazy. It also allowed me to ask myself a universe-rocking question: What if I’m of value? Or better yet, What if I matter? It was rather simple: The people in the
stories I read mattered. If they didn’t, then why were they on the shelf? And if they mattered, and they included me in their worlds, then why didn’t I?

At eighteen, I became my own. I checked myself out with a suitcase and sixteen boxes of books. I graduated high school in Jacksonville, took an un-air-conditioned room above a garage next to the docks for twenty-five dollars a week, and since college was out of the question, I began putting in some serious time at the docks. Where guys who worked hard could make good money. The guides would come in, their clients and lines in tow, and I’d offer to wash down their boats or clean their fish. Most of them knew me, ’cause I’d been hanging around for years. Cleaning led to building rods, repairing reels, working on boats, whatever the guides got tired of doing and would let me do. I worked daylight to long after dark, keeping my head down and building more shelves in my apartment. Before too long, I lived in a library I’d built myself. My greatest fear was not death or sickness, but fire.

Eventually, I bought a used skiff off a guy, rebuilt an old two-stroke, and began learning the backwaters. Because I’d hung out around so many fishermen for so long, I knew some of what and how to fish long before I could actually get out there and do it. Once I hit the water, I put my head knowledge to work and acquired local knowledge. A year or two passed, word spread about “the quiet guide,” and before too long, my schedule was full and booked six months in advance. Fortunately for me, clients don’t care if their guide can talk, only if he can put them on the fish. And I could. Rain, heat, storm, or calm, I learned where and how to catch snook, tarpon, reds, and more trout than folks could eat. I figured my career was set.

I hadn’t even scratched the surface.

It was a Saturday. Late afternoon. Conditions perfect. My client was an attorney. Jason Patrick. Good guy. He’d hooked into a large red drum. Nearly forty inches. Got it to the boat.
I’d dropped the power pole in the ground to hold our position and knelt to lift the fish. When I did, the red decided he wasn’t finished fighting. With a snap of his head, he spat out the Top Dog and my client, still applying pressure to the rod, sunk that treble hook deep in the meat of my palm.

Ordinarily, I’d push the hook through the skin, snip it beyond the barb, and keep going. Clients pay for a full day and they expect to get it. But this one was a little different. Down in the nerve. Sooner or later, this would need a doctor. And, given that we were nearly sixty miles in the backwater, it was going to be later. Two hours later, I got Jason back to the dock, paid a kid to clean his fish, and made my way to the River City Hospital—Jacksonville’s riverbank hospital. It was nearly nine o’clock and my hand was good and stiff and swollen and getting toward purple by the time the doctor saw me.

The doctor cut out the hook, stitched me up, gave me a shot for the infection, and asked for my card. Said he wanted to catch a tarpon. I said I knew a few spots.

Walking out of the hospital, I took a wrong turn, got lost, and ended up in what I soon learned was the children’s wing. It was nearly midnight, I was tired, and needed to be back at the docks at five to meet Sunday’s client but there’s something about a place just for kids.

I turned a corner and saw a slippered kid standing in the middle of the corridor wrapped in a blue blanket. He looked like he belonged there. His pajamas were covered in tigers and airplanes and hung loosely. A stainless-steel pole on wheels stood next to him. A bag of clear liquids hung from it. A plastic tube ran out the bottom of his shirt sleeve and tethered him to the bag. I said, “Hey, p-pal, which way out of h-here?”

He turned and began pushing that pole so I followed him. We walked the length of the corridor. When we reached the end, he turned and pointed at an exit sign at the far end. I said, “Th-thank you.”

He nodded and stepped into a brightly lit room just off the hall.

I can’t quite remember why I walked into that room. Curiosity, I guess. The walls were covered in scenes and posters from kids’ movies we’ve all seen.
Star Wars. Indiana Jones. Robin Hood
. The furniture was plush, comfy, and made for lounging. Shelves of books with tattered bindings lined one wall. The opposite wall was filled with Lego, puzzles, wooden train sets, and every imaginable toy that might occupy a child’s time and take their mind off the pain ravaging their bodies. Two large widescreen TVs lined the far wall. Each was hooked up to a different gaming system.