Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (15 page)

And so we fought, day in, day out, about what I should wear, what I needed to do, how I combed my hair or didn’t comb my hair. They were never, to be clear, substantive disputes over whether a movie was appropriate for children my age, or if I needed a second helping of whatever was for dinner. Instead, there were violent efforts, at least on my part, to have my feelings recognized and validated—to be heard, and seen.

Once, when we fought in public, she decided she would teach me a lesson. I was in fourth grade. I don’t remember what we were fighting about, but when we got to the car, she unlocked her door and got in but didn’t unlock mine, and then she drove off without me. She came back for me, but I’d felt completely abandoned and alone. She did this on multiple occasions, until eventually I’d had enough. The next time she tried it, I ripped the radio antenna off as she pulled away, which embarrassed her because a man in a nearby car had witnessed the scene.

I knew only to be afraid of her anger and her irrational behaviors. That fear translated quickly into hatred, because she was supposed to be someone I could count on, and she was not. At first, I hated how lonely I felt, how unseen and unheard and isolated I was, but that sort of loneliness can turn into a kind of armor you wear and embrace. You realize that if you’re on your own, so be it. You decide you can’t depend on anyone, so you depend on yourself.

Because Sandra worked nine to five, I had a series of babysitters up until I was in about sixth grade. At that point, I was old enough to let myself in and take care of myself in the empty house. Calling it an empty house makes it sound like something I dreaded, but the opposite was true. I liked it. I could do anything I wanted to. Too often, to my regret, what I wanted to do was plunk myself down in front of the television in the rocking chair with a Coke and a bag of potato chips and watch reruns of ’80s sitcoms like
Family Ties
or
Gimme a Break
or
Duck Tales,
which was about Donald Duck’s nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie, though Scrooge McDuck was in it more than Donald was. If I had a time machine and could go back and redo those after-school hours, there are surely ways I could put them to better use.

Feeling lonely wasn’t all bad, because lonely meant safe. It’s hard to remember exactly when or how it started. I wasn’t antisocial, at least not at first. I was in the Cub Scouts, and the Boy Scouts. I played on sports teams. I played with my cousins at family gatherings. But it was a label I wore, at school, and it was the same label, year after year. I felt like I carried the label with me, the stigma, wherever I went. How is someone’s social standing established in kindergarten? I dressed like everyone else. I acted like everyone else. . . .

It started out as verbal chastising, and it seemed to get worse, or more entrenched, with every passing grade. I was able to tell myself that life is just like that, some kids are more popular than others, and if somebody had to be the most popular, then somebody had to be the least popular, and that was me, but I couldn’t make sense of it. No kid should ever have to experience that.

Each time it happened, the wound reopened, and it was like hitting your shin over and over again in the exact same spot. The wound never healed, and the pain got worse. To endure it, I’d lock myself into a kind of mental or emotional survival mode, but the simple act of bracing myself was traumatizing. Trauma is what happens to you, to your mind and perhaps to your soul, when you can neither fight nor flee. Those are the two options Nature gives animals in the wild. A kid on a school bus can’t flee, and he can’t fight. When someone called me a name, I’d laugh and pretend I thought it was funny, too. I’d retreat into myself, but not too far because if you retreat too far, you get attacked again. It’s like the advice you get about what to do when you encounter a bear on a hiking trail or a mean dog on the street—don’t run, because if you do, you just invite them to chase you—just curl up in a ball and play dead. On the school bus, I couldn’t hide, and I had to keep an eye on the people teasing me, but the fifteen-minute trip was torture. Nice way to start the day.

Early grade school was tolerable, if not particularly fun, the abuse mainly verbal. Kids called me names, and after school, I was never welcomed to hang out with them or invited on play dates. I lost sleep, trying to figure out why it was happening. The stress actually made me sick. I had insomnia. I developed a hyper-vigilance because I felt like I was on display all the time, conspicuous and singled out.

In grade school, there’d been a kid named Scott and another kid named Joey. In seventh grade, there was Ben and a different guy also named Scott, and then Leona and Jerry. I always wondered what they said about me when I wasn’t present, because the bullying seemed so coordinated or organized, as though there was a group consensus. Any day, any one of them could drop a comment. It felt like a wolf pack, where one harasses the prey while the others rest and prepare for when it’s their turn.

It’s an insidious sense of constant betrayal, where you don’t know who your real friends are, or when your enemies are going to do something. I once ran into Scott in the boys’ room at school in fifth grade, and to my surprise, we chatted pleasantly, as though nothing had ever happened between us. I had the sense he thought, “You’re not cool, but I’ll talk to you as long as we’re alone—in front of people, I’m going to have to pick on you again, to show everybody we’re not friends.” He was athletic and he had a reputation for being tough, so a lot of people followed him with the sense that it was probably smarter to be his friend than his enemy. Joey was an Italian kid who was sort of charismatic and made everybody laugh, all piss and vinegar, and he was Scott’s friend. Running into either of them, separately, wasn’t nearly as dangerous as meeting them together, when they aided and abetted each other, as though competing to see who could be meaner to me. Meeting them alone, I almost had the feeling they were embarrassed by the way they behaved toward me, as close as I would get to an admission that they knew what they were doing was wrong.

In ninth grade, when I was a Boy Scout, I was nominated for the Order of the Arrow. It’s a nice thing to earn, because the boys who get it have been chosen by their scout leaders and recognized as representing the ideals scouting supposedly stands for: honesty and hard work and fellowship and service. When I learned of the possibility of receiving the award, I said I didn’t want it, because to receive it, you have to participate in a ceremony where you have to stand up in front of the entire summer camp of around 250 boys, and that idea terrified me. What if someone said something, called me a name, or made a fart noise while I stood alone in front of everybody?

Lying in the back of my pickup truck outside of Page, Arizona, I thought about the dog in the hospital. The word “dogged” means never giving up. There had to be something more than a cardiovascular system capable of sustaining three hundred beats per minute to explain doggedness, some sort of innate stubbornness, or maybe indefatigable optimism, that kept them running. Nature had to select for the gene that let them believe, against all odds, that the chase was going to pay off, a persistence of hope.

I’m in tenth grade, and everything shifts in a single instance when I see a thirty-second commercial for the Navy SEALs. It’s much like a light turns on or a door opens in my mind. It’s another way out of my misery that won’t be easy, but won’t require killing myself. It’s a way to reinvent myself and channel my energies and abilities, and more than anything else, a way to get the hell out of Cudahy as soon as I’m old enough to enlist. It’s hope. I want to be a Navy SEAL, and I know that if I’m going to be a Navy SEAL, I’m going to have to change my body by lifting weights.

I am actually pretty decent at sports and I am on the volleyball and tennis teams, so I am already reasonably fit, but I know there’s a very high drop-out rate for guys training to be SEALs. Having a clear goal—this goal—to work toward appeals to my logical engineering brain. I’m an okay swimmer, but if I’m to become a SEAL, I need to join the swim team to really take things to the next level. I join my sophomore year. It’s the hardest thing, physically, and in some ways emotionally, that I’ve ever done. I’m the worst swimmer on the team, at first, enduring agonizingly long practices and on several occasions nearly drowning as I learn how to swim freestyle competitively. I am nearly “one of the guys” on the team, but after practice ends for the night, or between seasons, they largely ignore me because of the stigma attached to who I am.

There’s a gap between the swim season and the tennis season, so I have the time after school to use the school’s weight room. The problem is that the weight room is where all the “cool” jocks hang out, and thus it’s a minefield for someone in my position at the bottom of the social totem pole, an endeavor fraught with peril. Fortunately, I know a guy named Pete who, while not as unpopular as me, is by no means part of the “in” crowd. I’ve known him since kindergarten, and nobody messes with him because he holds a black belt in tae kwon do. I’m in the weight room one day, avoiding the free weights section where all the hardcore lifters congregate, working with one of the pull-down machines. I set the weight low and begin operating the machine, all my emotional shields raised, expecting to catch some sort of trouble. While trying to look straight ahead and not make eye contact with anybody, I hear a voice say, “You’re doing that all wrong.”

I brace myself, but fortunately, it’s Pete. He asks me if I need a workout partner, and it’s fairly obvious that I do. He asks me if I want him to make me a workout schedule with a plan—day one, day two. This is exactly what I need. The progress I make is almost immediate, maybe because I’m starting from zero. By the second week, I’m lifting more than I did the first. After a month, I’m lifting more than many of the guys in the weight room and, specifically, more than some of the jerks who’ve teased me. When I tell my tennis coach I’m going to quit the tennis team to spend more time lifting weights, he can’t believe it. He says I have the potential to be one of the best players on the team by my senior year. I don’t care, because my goal is to be a Navy SEAL, not a tennis player. I can see and feel my body responding to the regimen. Eventually I’m benching more than two hundred pounds, which is considerably more than the “cool” kids are lifting.

I start feeling competitive, knowing I’m stronger than them. The bench press is more or less the “showcase” in any locker room. I’ll see one of the “cool” guys lifting, and when he’s done, I’ll move to the bench he was on and add weight to whatever he was lifting, before rolling the bar off the rack and lifting it. There is no argument they can make—the “loser” is lifting more than they were, so apparently the loser isn’t a loser any more. There is, I’m learning firsthand, some sort of deeply embedded code of masculinity where the perception of strength commands respect, like some species of bird where the male with the longest beak or the largest bib markings holds dominance over other males with shorter beaks or smaller bibs. I realize I don’t have to fight anybody—I just have to look like I
could
fight anybody.

My attitude changes along with my body. I’m learning things about myself. It’s more than just what others are seeing in me. I am surprising myself, seeing what my body can do, and what my spirit is capable of. I’m concentrating like I’ve never concentrated before, developing a kind of personal intensity. I am actually feeling confident for the first time in my life. As a consequence, the bullying stops almost immediately. Somehow, I’ve been able to convert inner strength and pain into outer strength and gain. It’s not that the bullies have developed a new respect for me—it’s that I’ve developed a new respect for myself. bird where the male with the longest beak or the largest bib markings hol

It happens bit by bit, slowly, day by day.

After I started training for the Navy SEALs, I started bicycling long distances, as much as thirty miles a day, both to get in shape and to get out of the house and away from the dysfunction there. On my bicycle, I wasn’t just improving my aerobic conditioning—I was also alone and safe, and I could relax in the way your brain shifts into neutral when your body is working hard. It meant a lot to me, not just because it told me I’d done well, but because it told everybody else I had.

Later, after receiving the news that my less-than-perfect eyesight would keep me from attaining my goal of being a Navy SEAL, I became a Marine. In boot camp, I was briefly promoted to “Guide,” not an actual rank but a position of leadership among equals. However, a few days later I was demoted when, on a forced march, a soldier from the platoon ahead of us lagged behind, and my drill instructor ordered me to push the poor kid out of the way and I refused. We’d been taught, after all, that our mission was to save and protect our fellow Marines. When I was offered the position of Guide again a few days later, I turned him down, much to his amazement, but I’d lost all respect for him, which made the recognition and promotion meaningless.

In a way, working out in the gym with weights merged perfectly with joining the Marines, which presented me with a life that was absolutely regimented and predictable and perfect for maintaining a training routine. I was soon in such good physical condition that I acquired the nickname “Android” (from my last name) from my peers, a name I embraced and identified with. The week I left the Marines, I tested myself. I completed a three-mile run in a time of 17:29. I could bench press 350 pounds. I could press a pair of 100-pound dumbbells over my head five times, and I could bench press a pair of 120-pound dumbbells ten times, all at a bodyweight of 211 pounds. The satisfaction I got was not a matter of vanity or the desire to acquire bragging rights, though when you’re living with a bunch of gung-ho Marines, it’s rather natural to compete with each other in all kinds of ways, including weightlifting. What mattered more to me, much more, was measuring how far I’d come from the first time I’d set foot in the weight room at school when Pete had offered to help me. Or rather, how far I’d come from well before I ever set foot in a gym, when I saw myself as the proverbial ninety-five-pound weakling getting sand kicked in his face at the beach.