Michigan
1991 to 1996
After the robbery, Uncle Lito went out and bought himself a gun. It was a handgun, but it was a lot different from the gun the robber had used. The robber’s revolver, with the shiny bright metal… It looked like a classic six-shooter, the kind you’d see in a Western movie. Uncle Lito’s gun was a semiautomatic. No spinning cylinder. No bright metal. It was dull and black, and somehow it looked twice as deadly.
He hid it behind the register, thinking I’d never see it. That lasted about five minutes. He didn’t talk about the gun. He didn’t talk about anything having to do with the robbery at all. But I could tell he was thinking about it. For the next few weeks, whenever he was quiet, I could tell he was replaying the whole thing in his head. Not just the robbery itself, but the strange way I had reacted to it.
I have to feel a little bad for him now, looking back on it. It’s not like he had anybody else to talk to about me. There was a woman from the state who’d come by and see how I was doing, but she only did that once a month or so, and after the first year, she stopped coming altogether. Even if she had kept up her visits, what the hell was she going to do with me? By all appearances, I was doing okay. Not great, but okay. I was eating, even if half the time it was at the Flame. I was sleeping. And yes, I was finally back at school.
It was this place called the Higgins Institute. It was mostly deaf kids who went to this place. Deaf kids with money, I mean. Besides them, there were a few kids with what they called “communicative disorders,” some kind of defect that prevented them from hearing or talking or both. I was put in that category. I had a “disorder.”
I was nine years old, remember. I hadn’t been to school in a year and a half. Let me tell you, being the new kid in school is bad enough. Try doing it in a school where hardly anybody can talk to you, even if they want to. And you can’t talk back.
That turned out to be the first problem they tried to fix. I needed to learn some way to communicate, some way that would be better than carrying around a pad of paper and a pen for the rest of my life. Which is why I started learning American Sign Language.
It didn’t come easy for me. I didn’t have to use it, for one thing. I never went home and kept on using it. I never practiced it at all unless I was at school. Meanwhile, all of the deaf kids were totally immersed in it. It was their whole culture. It was their own special, private code. So I wasn’t just the “different” kid. I was the foreign invader who barely knew the language.
On top of everything else, there were still plenty of psychologists and counselors poking at me. That never let up. Every day for at least forty-five minutes or so, I’d be sitting in somebody’s office. Some adult with jeans and a sweater. Let’s just kick back, Michael. Let’s just hang out here and get to know each other, eh? If you feel like talking to me… and by talking I mean you can write something for me, or draw me a picture. Whatever you want, Mike.
What I wanted was for them to leave me the hell alone. Because they were all making one big mistake. This business about me being too young to “process” the trauma, that I’d have to bury it in my little mind’s backyard until somebody came along to help me dig it up-I mean, I still get upset to this day just thinking about it. The condescension there. The stunning, absolute ignorance.
I was eight years old when it happened. Not two years old. Not three years old. I was eight, and like any other kid my age, I knew exactly what was happening to me. Every single second, every single moment. I knew what was happening, and when it was all over, I could go back and replay it in my mind. Every single second, every single moment. The next day, I could still do that. A week later, I could do that. A year later. Five years later. Ten years later. I could still go back to that day in June for the simple reason that I had never left it.
It wasn’t repressed. I didn’t have to go digging to find it. It was always there. My constant companion. My right-hand man. Every waking hour, and more than a few of the sleeping hours… I was and am and always will be right back there in that day in June.
Nobody ever got that. Not one person.
Looking back, I’m probably being too hard on everybody. They were trying to help me, I know, and it’s not like I was giving them anything to go on. Problem was, I don’t think they could have helped me. At all. And hell, I think I just made everybody uncomfortable, you know? Like they couldn’t forgive me for what had happened to me, and how that made them feel when they thought about it. So they tried to help me so that they could feel better.
Yes, that’s it right there. All those years. That’s what I was thinking. They were all so freaked out about what had happened to me, they were just trying to make themselves feel better about it. I think that’s why they gave up on me in the end. After five years at the Higgins Institute, because I wasn’t “responding” well enough. Maybe it was a mistake to have you come here in the first place, they said. Maybe you should have been around speaking kids all along. So that maybe… someday…
That’s what they said. Just before they kicked me out and made me go to Milford High School.
Imagine that summer for me. Just counting down the days to September. I mean, I had already been the odd man out at the institute. How much more of a freak would I be walking down the halls of a public high school?
There was only one thing that could distract me that summer. You see, there was this metal door in the back room. It opened out to the parking lot. When the delivery trucks came, that’s the door they’d use to wheel in the boxes. The door was usually locked, but when the trucks came, Uncle Lito would have to start fiddling with the dead bolt to get it to open. There was a real trick to it. You’d have to give the bolt a quarter turn in the wrong direction, then pull hard on the knob while you eased the bolt back the way it was supposed to go. Only then would the damned thing decide to cooperate. And forget about opening it with a key from the outside. One day, he got sick of it and bought a whole new lock. I watched him take out the old lock and throw the two separate pieces in the garbage can. When he put the new lock in, it turned beautifully on the first try.
“Just feel that,” he said. “It’s like butter.”
But it was the old lock I was interested in. I took it out of the garbage can and joined the two pieces together again. I could see immediately how it was designed to work. Such a simple idea. When the cylinder turns, the cam goes with it and the bolt is retracted. Turn the cylinder the other way and the bolt is extended again. Eventually, I’d take the cylinder apart and see the five little pins inside. All you had to do was line up those pins just right so the thing could turn freely. At least that’s the way I got it to move after cleaning out the dirt and gunk and spraying a little oil in there. Uncle Lito could have put that lock right back in the door and it would have worked just fine again. But he’d already bought the new lock, so there was nothing else to do with the old one except to keep playing around with it, to watch how the key went inside and how it pushed up each pin exactly the right amount and no farther. Then, finally, the really interesting part. The absolutely most fascinating and satisfying part of all, how I could put a little bit of tension on that cylinder with something as simple as a paper clip, and then with a thin piece of metal I had taken from the edge of a ruler, say, how I could push up each pin, one by one, letting the tension keep them in place as I moved on to the next, until finally all five pins were lined up perfectly. How the lock, without the use of a key, would then slide smoothly and magically open.
I sometimes wonder how my life would have gone if not for that one old lock on that one back door. If it hadn’t gotten stuck so much, or if Uncle Lito had been too lazy to replace it… Would I have ever found that moment? Those metal pieces, which are so hard and unforgiving, so carefully designed not to move… Yet somehow with just the right touch it all lines up and God, that one second when it opens. That smooth, sudden, metallic release. The sound of it turning, and the way it feels in your hands. The way it feels when something is locked up so tight in a metal box, with no way to get out.
When you finally open it…
When you finally learn how to unlock that lock…
Can you even imagine how that feels?