My life in a Nut

I am a man run by my demons. Not in the sense that I am possessed, but what I mean to say is that the skeletons in my closet have too much of an opinion in what I say and do to ever be over looked. I have done some very bad things, some evil things that I can never ignore. While it may not be wise to dive into these things, I believe that it is important for you, my reader, to understand what these things are, and as most stories go, my monstrosity will begin at the beginning, just as I told you it would, on March 20th, 1989: my birthday.

I was born into a family of five (which later turned into a family of six 18 months later when my younger sister Hannah graced the world with her presence.) My father was a struggling radiologist who had just nearly graduated from medical school upon my arrival. He had celebrated his 30th birthday just ten days before I was born, so when I first came onto the scene, I'm afraid that my father thought I was his most special birthday present. As it turned out though, he would quickly find out that I was the gift that kept on giving. As if it wasn’t enough that I nearly killed my mother in the delivery room, or that the countless shots she had to have simply to keep me alive while I was still in her womb cost a fortune, my parents soon found that they had never had a child quite like me, that is, quite as horrible as I was.
I truly was a little hellion in my pre-pubescent days. On top of having an abnormally large sex drive, my perverted ass was also extremely sensitive. My younger sister Hannah and I used to get into the pettiest arguments on a daily basis, and for some reason, I found myself never truly being able to let go of my resentment towards her. I remember multiple times when my family would all be gathered around the dinner table and my sister would mutter, “Bitter, bitter, bitter,” to which my family always managed to get a kick out of. This had a rather magnifying effect on my resentment. I often would fantasize running away and joining the military (a ploy I eventually turned into a reality) and making a hero out of myself, making my family and myself proud to know me. That was all I ever really wanted. Just to be worth something was a goal I secretly felt I should only hope to attain. After all, what worth could possibly be found in an annoying, unskilled, hormone ridden little pervert like me?
When I was five years old, my parents sent me to school hoping that other children might rub off on me, but what I found was that instead of others rubbing off on me; I tended to change the way others acted. I don’t know what exactly it is about me, but I have always managed to get exactly what I wanted out of people. Maybe it is that I am manipulative, or “good with words” as my friend Nick once put it, but whatever it is, my “ability” has helped me get out of jams numerous times. But back to school.
I met Katie on my first day of class. I distinctly remember watching her in class all day until recess came. The boys and girls in my class played a game, which I found rather petty. The boys all tried to gang up on the girls and capture them or throw them in the mud or do some form of terror to them, you know, the way little boys treat girls. I guess that should have been when I realized I was different. I didn’t want to hurt the pretty little girls. I just wanted to protect them, to make them feel safe. So that became my game: I was the bodyguard. I found myself standing up for girls against even my best of friends. Punching boys in the face, throwing them off of slides. I also found myself in the principal’s office on more than one occasion answering for my violent actions of defense. It didn’t bother me though. Not as long as Katie was all right.
She was a cute little girl. A girl that anyone would have been able to say would be undoubtedly breath taking when she became older. She always wore her hair either in a pigtail or ponytail and she always came to sit by me during naptime. She was my first girl friend, and possibly my best. From Kindergarten all the way until the second grade when she moved schools, she was with me. We never got into a single fight, but then again, what is there to fight about when the biggest thing on your mind is what mom packed you for lunch, snack pack or a banana? I don’t remember much about my child hood, but I remember the phone call that I got from Katie the night before she moved away. Her dad hadn’t told her that she was going to leave and therefore had no idea that she was going to make such a large issue about seeing me again.

“Mark,” my mother called up the stairs, “you have a phone call from Katie Ryan.”
When I picked up the receiver and heard the sobs, I knew that this wasn’t going to be good. “We are leaving,” Katie had managed to spit out. “My Dad got a job somewhere else and I am not going to be at school on Monday.” I remember the feeling of despair rushing over me as the tears formed in the pit of my eyes.
As I sat there on the back stairway staring at the wall, I found myself coming up short of anything to say to her. I wanted to make her feel better, to take the sadness out of her beautiful singsong voice, but what could I say that would matter. What could I possibly voice that could take away the mutual suffering that was hitting us both through our phone line? There was nothing. So at age 8, I learned what it felt like to break up with someone.
“So we aren’t going to be together anymore,” I’d asked. “Are we?”
“No,” she’d said. “But that doesn’t mean that we can’t still love each other.”
“No, it doesn’t I suppose,” I felt a knot tighten in my vocal chords, “but it will be much harder.”
“Don’t worry Mark. I will call you everyday.”
It’s funny how shallow rooted that promise was. That was the last time I ever talked to Katie Ryan, however, even more than a decade later I have often found myself wondering if she is ok now. I imagine if I ran into her, I wouldn’t even know it. It has been so long, but love remains.
It always seems to do that. Love, no matter how hard you try to shake it, love clings to you like a tick, sucking the life right out of you, poisoning your system more and more the longer you allow it to fester. I have never had a relationship that didn’t leave permanent scars. That didn’t leave my bitter nature feeling just a bit more jaded by my encounters with members of the opposite sex. Yes I am jaded.
What Katie and I had may have started off as a harmless little crush between a little boy and a little girl, but it grew into a hazardous sexual relationship that probably left some real scars somewhere inside of me. After Katie it took a long time for me to move on. My parents changed schools, I met knew friends, but I never forgot about my Katie. I actually took it so far as falling for the next girl named Katie that I met, simply because I loved saying the name. I imagine I will name my daughter Katie taking for the granite that I will someday have one of my own.

I’m not going to bore you with a biological ordered account of my life, don’t worry. I only wanted to give you a little piece of me in order for you to understand me a little better in a probably wasted attempt to relate to you. If I can connect with you after all, it doesn’t really matter what I right down. I could tell you about my pet iguana, Walter, that I had when I was 12, and if you had connected with me somehow, it would interest you. So here is my desperate attempt to connect to you, through a list of my life experience. The story will come soon enough, but until I decide what I want to write, I will not start it. I will simply get used to putting my thoughts onto paper in a way that oozes with voice.

Now, I am twenty years old and I consider myself a young adult, a young man, but just because I am young, doesn’t mean that my life has not been full of experiences, both good and bad. As far as work has gone, I have ranged from being a knife salesman, to a lifeguard, to a US Marine (if only for a short time.) I have developed a respect for the fragile state that life must be lived in if we want to make it to see our grandchildren through witnessing many friends die. I have lost family too. Grand parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, all poof, gone, just like that. Out of my high school graduating class, eight students died. It was a shocking reminder that we are not invincible, no matter how badly we wanted to believe that we all were. It struck extremely close to home when my friend Travis died in tragic car accident. His younger sister, Olivia, and his mother and father survived him, not to mention the countless friends we had both shared. Besides my close acquaintance with death, I took it one step closer only once when I tried to meet him face to face at the darkest point in my life. But that is another story. My purpose is to connect, so lets get back to the point.

Shortly after I was discharged from the Marines, I meant a girl named Annie. One thing leads to another, which lead me right in between Annie’s legs. After I’d tried desperately to be an asshole and give her brush off for nearly a month, I finally talked to her only to find out that she was, that’s right, Prego! (Not like the pasta) I was driving through my home town of Coppell, when I decided to tell her off, once and for all, to make her stop trying to call me, but when I answered the phone and she told me we needed to talk in person, I new exactly what was coming.

“You’re pregnant,” I said in a flat voice, only adding, “Aren’t you?”

There was a pause on the other line and I heard her voice falter. I could tell she was relieved she didn’t have to say it first.

“Yes,” she’d managed to squeak out. She was a tiny girl who would have made for a very cute pregnant woman, but that wasn’t what was going through my head following her response.

“Ok,” I said. “Can I call you back?”

“Are you really going to call me back?” she asked.

“Yes.” How could I be mad at that after how I’d avoided her for the last month or so? I hung the phone up and sat it down in the cup holder on my console.

First mistake, I didn’t wear a condom. Second mistake, I was driving my mustang at the time I received this phone call and the overwhelming feeling that I was being crushed from every angle was to much for me to deal with. I felt heat pulsing through my body. I felt my life rushing away from me, my free will, slipping from my grasp. In my moving vehicle, I felt myself starting to hyperventilate, the world slowly blurring as I tried to focus on the solution. Abortion was the obvious answer. I didn’t love her, she didn’t love me, but could I really do that? Could I kill a human being? Could I end a life before it even started? I didn’t think so. I didn’t think that I had it in me to kill an innocent child. But was it really my choice? If she wanted to end this life it was ultimately her decision, not mine. Maybe this loophole could get me out of feeling guilty and out of the responsibility I’d hoped. It was a thought that has haunted me since I thought it.

As the phone rang, I listened too my music playing on the radio. I tried to block out reality for just a moment in an attempt to regain my composure before I did what I was about to do. Before I surrendered my life over to this woman and the child that she carried.

“Hello?”

“Ok so I’m sorry,” I started off.

“For what?”

I pondered how I was going to answer this in a way that wouldn’t offend her, but failing to see a smooth way to put it, I blurted out, “For getting you pregnant. I didn’t mean to.”

Over the line I heard her start to cry, something I have always hated to hear. As I sat at my red light wallowing in my self-pity, I asked her, “So what do you want to do about this?”

She didn’t respond right away. I heard her swallow, and I imagined that she was trying to make her voice sound strong, but when she spoke it was barely more than a whisper and I had to turn off the volume on my radio just to hear what she was saying.

“I want to keep it,” she sighed, as if feeling the war between what she wanted to do and what was the right thing to do. My stomach dropped, because I was feeling the same polar conflicts she was, and because I had been hoping to get out of this responsibility because of her actions.

As another crushing wave of helplessness swept over me, I could almost here a voice laughing at me inside my head. “Perfect,” I’d thought.

But what I thought and what I said were completely different. In the same moment that I wanted to run for the border, I also wanted to do the right thing, so in a very calm, collected voice, I replied, “Ok, then I will do everything I can to make this baby come into a happy life.”

She laughed at what I said, but it wasn’t the kind of happy laugh that you normally hear. It was the sound of relief, like I had lifted something heavy off of her and she was grateful.

“Thank you,” she choked out, and I knew she was crying.

“Don’t thank me,” I said. “Not yet. I haven’t done anything yet.”

“No, you haven’t,” she responded. “But you will.”

“Yea,” I paused, “I will.” And as I pushed the end button, I knew that I would. I would change who I was in order to make this work. I would do what I had to do. I owed this to her and to my child. Somehow, I knew that I had this inside of me. All I needed was the courage to find it.



The next few days were a blur. My head felt like a broken record, replaying the conversation over and over again. Maybe if I thought about it enough, it would change somehow. Maybe if I thought about it enough, I would come up with a way that I could salvage my life, just pull it back together. I had never been involved with an issue that I had no way to control.

How could I have let this happen? What was I going to tell my parents? Her parents? What was I going to tell my friends? As these questions ran through my head, I couldn’t help but see the humor in this situation. Of course this would happen to me. Of course God would push this on me, the least capable person I knew. As I fumed, I slowly began to realize that there was no way I could do this. That no matter what I did, there was no way I was going to ready for a kid in nine months.

“I am so fucked,” I told my friend Brendan. Brendan and I had been through a lot. He was my longest lasting friend, not that I deserved him, but we had been through a lot together and he had always been there for me.

I took another pull from my beer, hoping that he might say something that would make me feel better.

“Yup.”

Gee thanks buddy, I thought. “What the hell am I going to do? I’m not ready for a kid.” My head started spinning again. For the past few days, it had seemed like I’d spent more time in that state of mind than with a clear head.

“Nope,” he said. He eyed his empty Miller and hopped out of his chair. “You want another beer?” he asked as he strolled toward the door.

I didn’t say anything. I could feel him looking at me as he stood there waiting for my response.

“Helloo-oo, Mark? Earth to Mark, this is Houston, come back to us.”

I smiled. He was funny. He always could make me laugh.

“Beer?” he repeated.

“Yea sure. Thanks bro.” How the hell was this going to work out. When he walked through the doors, I let my face slide into my hands and my mind wander. I shouldn’t be here. There has been some huge mix up in the fate department. I’m supposed to be a happy-go-lucky kid right now, with a job, and a future. Not strapped to a woman I barely knew, with a baby on the way. How the hell did I let this happen, I thought again. I picked myself up from the chair and dragged myself into his bathroom. All the spinning had gotten me feeling nauseous, and after I was done yelling at the toilet, I dragged my sac of bones back to the chair I had been sitting in, feeling the weight of the atmosphere pressing down on me like it was trying to kill me. Just do it already I thought. Kill me.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about this,” Brendan started, pausing only slightly to see if I was listening, and when he saw that I was, he continued. “If you really don’t want to do this, why don’t you just run away to Canada?” He sounded serious, but the huge grin that ran across his face told me otherwise.

I chuckled. He was such a good friend. No, I wouldn’t run away to Canada. All my life I had been running from everything. From my parents, from my responsibilities, from problems. I was tired of running. It was time for me to grow up. Time for me to be a man. It was time to try living for reasons other than myself. And while the weight of my decision bore down on me with the pressure of a building collapsing around me, I knew that this wasn’t something I had a choice in. It was time to accept my life and bear my cross. And I would, I knew I would, I just didn’t want to.

“This isn’t going to be easy,” I said, completely ignoring his question.

“You got that right. What were you thinking Mark?”

“What am I normally thinking Brendan?”

“Not much.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

He grinned. It didn’t matter to him that I had been a bad friend to him at times. It always seemed like he expected it from me, to let him down that is. It was the reoccurring theme in my life. I never seemed to not let people down, especially people with dreams for me. But this time I’d let myself down. I’d done the unthinkable. I’d gotten a girl pregnant. And now I was bearing the weight of my consequence with out any help from the outside world. Ok, my life is over. Time to deal with it.

Easier said than done though. I’d have to start a savings account. I’d have to clean up, no more drugs for me. I’d have to read baby books, and get a car seat, maybe even have to trade in my Mustang for a more family oriented car. Yes, I was definitely going to need a new car. I would have to pull a complete 180 of the person I was at that exact moment in time. I would have to start being responsible.

“Oh shit,” I said. “I’m about to puke again.”

As the vomit spewed from my mouth, I couldn’t help but hope that this would kill me. If I died right now of natural causes, that would be ok. Come one puke! Kill me!

I was pathetic. I was weak. I had no hope that my life would ever be normal again. There was nothing I could do to control this. There was no thing that I could say that would fix this. Nothing. As I looked in the toilet, I thought, wow Weisbruch, you are a loser. Congratulations, quitting everything you ever nearly failed really caught up to you in a big time way. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I heard myself laughing at me. Laughing at what an idiot I was. Stupid.