The Loner

When my Dad told me they called him Solitaire in the military, I didn't really get it.  I'd never played the card game, and some kids I knew, who had more knowledge of the prison system, but as much about card games as me, thought I meant Solitary, as in Confinement, and not the adjective itself.  They laughed cause they thought it was some kind of insult, and maybe it was, just not the kind they thought.

I can't say I take after my father, but I can't say I don't.  Our lives are different, and our temperaments.  Maybe I'm a mutation? But if my father was Solitaire, then I am Castaway. The youngest of three, only boy, raised by default, meaning, my parents only got involved in my rearing when they had to. I spent a lot of time figuring things out by myself.  By the time I was 4 years old I had already been exposed to so many inappropriate things, picked up so many inappropriate behaviors, that I can't help but concede that as a child, supervision was not present. It just didn't happen the way I feel it should for well adjusted children content with being children. I ended up becoming hyper conscious of all the wrong I was guilty of as a small child and alienated.  To say I felt guilty as sin was an understatement.  By the time I was old enough to be confronted with raging hormones, I was already severely emotionally damaged by my experiences as a small child.

One of the things that happened as a result of me isolating myself, and being around such a diverse group of friends, in a time of larger than life pop that was more integrated then than it is now, because Pop music included black artists in their genre instead of their being black genres crossing over into pop was cultural isolation. Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club, the Police, Genesis/ Phil Collins, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Hall & Oats, that was all pop to me.  Who would've known keeping that same colorblind taste in music would be a major factor in isolating myself from others?

When Breaking came out, I loved it. Beat Street was one of the most depressing experiences of my childhood, seeing Ramo die like that. Those were my introductions to hip hop.  I remember loving Chaka Khan's Feel For You, and Din Daa Daa, which I would have never guessed was by a German?  I don't ever remember seeing that video on Video Soul or Video Vibrations, but I do remember Herbie Hancock's Rockit and Art of Noise being on there. What I was hearing had a richer, more open ended cultural history than it was presented to be.  To me it was just music you could breakdance to. But it paved the way for other things later, things that would be considered Alternative, even some Electronica.  The point is, by embracing what I heard, I ultimately alienated myself when race and genre of music you should listen to got isolated to exclusive categories.

This happened for me in the mid to late 80s, right when my parents divorced, and we moved from a middle/working class cul de sac (to me it was just my circle off of our street at the time) to a townhouse complex that was a mix of renters who paid near $800 per month and section 8 housing.  Of the 80 or so townhouses, only 2 were occupied by whites.  Diversity was not a thing.  Though we were a five minute walk from the suburbs, the stigma kids from the town homes carried was strong. I was assumed to be a poor student by the staff at my new school who assumed my grades from my previous district, which they had low opinions of, couldn't have been accurate. It took 3 years of test scores in 90th percentiles in science and reading for them to accept me into their gifted student program, after being in the equivalent in my previous school going back to 1st or 2nd grade I think. All they did was spare me, because I wasn't a fashion conscious kid, I got labeled a nerd upon arrival at my new school.  So here I was, an abnormally tall, fashion faux pas prone, socially misaligned kid who'd been over exposed to graphic sexual content and violence as a small child, torn between two parents in the process of acrimonious split. I was a complete mess, and I'm sure getting punched and threatened with blunt and sharp objects was helpful in my becoming well adjusted. Yeah. Right.

I found things I liked that were socially acceptable, gave up things I held dear as symbols of my youthful hopefulness and idealism that my peers rejected. When I couldn't win them over to like something I knew might be aberrant, I just kept it to myself. I ended up keeping most of the things I liked to myself as a result, because they might have been rejected or ridiculed, or in some cases, mishandled and broken.  Some of this was a reaction to or trying to compensate for being called stingy by my sisters as a small child.  It resulted in having my toys stolen and broken by these new kids when I tried to share generously.  You can't win for losing I guess?  So I retreated into my imagination with my comics, cartoons, story ideas, an imaginary life far removed from my reality. I made a couple of friends who I felt I could relate to and not feel judged or beholden to some arbitrary cultural litmus tests, though I did impose the ones I was subjected to on them on more than one occasion.  I wasn't the good friend I thought I was. I was pretty pathetic when I think about it.  I didn't know how to live up to the high morals I wanted to experience from a friend, because I didn't have any friends like that. I was like most of the company I kept, an immature, over exposed, under supervised kid. I didn't want to be one, and I didn't want to be around any.

It took being pulled out of school for post-op recovery from foot surgery the fall of my sophomore year, the year I was getting comfortable in my own skin, learning how to look "cool" a little bit, becoming an aggressive basketball player, to really hammer in the Loner identity for me.  Being 6'5", wearing a size 15 shoe, the hospital folk opted to cut the toe box off of my favorite Nikes as a stopgap solution for not having medical shoes to fit me.  I remember those shoes being the most expensive pair I'd ever gotten, and coolest and boom, they were instantly the tackiest, and the source of ridicule that would find its way to the guidance office where I would be stationed everyday when I returned to school after a few months isolated to a bed in the living room of  our town house, watching daytime tv and videos, thinking about who knows what.  I know I mulled over all the things I was ashamed of that happened when I was little, and all the more, the things I did as a preteen to belittle others in response to being belittled myself. I thought about the ways I'd dumbed down my persona to make other people more comfortable with me, and how important it was that some adults saw through that, saw how I was harming my chances at a better future.  I thought about God and death, because I was put under, and for all I could sense, I was just gone, and then I was back. What did that mean?

It was at this point that I got somewhat serious about becoming religious.  I was also remarkably ignorant about all faiths other than Greek, Roman, and Nordic Mythology, because I checked out Time Life books from the grade school library as a kid, but the Bible was a mystery to me, outside of Jack Van Impe's predictions. But me the 15 year old Virgin, stuck in a wheel chair, my alienation was all but guaranteed.  I was on the far side of  the high school in a room with two guidance counselors, and an occasional student worker who'd be kind enough to get my lunch for me, and one particular young lady who Witnessed to me and shared the study books from her church, which was Pentecostal I believe. I never really assimilated, I was just the me I had become, stuck into new classes when I was able to walk.  Different people, same me, so the little bits of personality I was capable of sharing, were just bits and pieces that weren't built to tear other people down with insults. You see, that's what we did for fun back then.  We took pride in being able to tear a person down with funny insults better than any other high school. Our mascot was a Bulldog, but a Hyena would have been more accurate.  It was an atmosphere where if you weren't part of a pack, you were always on edge, wary of conflict, for fear of getting jumped.  In that context, the tendency to estrange myself from everyone was an asset.  To be absent while present was essentially a Keyser Sose like achievement.

It allowed me to define myself, not by my experiences in high school, but by the experiences I had apart from high school.  My non-participation became the defining aspect of that period of my life.  If I'd been able to take up the guitar then instead of just rapping all the time, who knows what would have come of it?  I did have music in side of me, and it was during those years that I was able to spend time unto myself rediscovering the cultural diversity of my youth in music, one artist, on genre at a time.  It set the stage for my college experience, which was not that different than high school, but the exponential increase in student body (from 400 to 6000) made it easier to find the closest thing to like-minded friends with common interests or ambitions. Even so, in coming out of my shell a little bit, I ultimately separated myself from the groups I was a part of, by virtue of the volume of unrelated things I anchored my sense of self on, some of which I embraced, others I denied, like the influence of  my parents personalities on my own. In the end, what I discovered in college and beyond was this:

Every cafeteria is exactly the same, no matter how big or how small, at least to me, because I never had the luxury of breaking bread with a group of people I knew and trusted for very long in life, ever.  We never made a habit of eating together at the table after my parents split.  We eventually ended up with our own separate TVs in our rooms, games etc. That coupled with the age difference, and the desire to lives outside of our home, I never had much family time to build positive relationships with my sisters or mother. We tolerated each other. This, a people person, does not make.  But it does prompt one to learn how to pretend to be one, for the sake of finding somewhere else to go instead of home.

There's more to be said, but I'll save that for another post, using the Stephen Stills cover of this song as the link I guess?