When I was a kid, I set a couple of random fires. It was thrilling. No harm was done.
I’m still an arsonist. It’s just that I now set fires via my blog.
(I try to morally discipline my fire-setting. Fire, like everything else) can be used to do good and to do harm.)
But it’s the same thrill.
I’m not proud of this. I’m just spilling parts of my malicious inner life.
A couple of years ago, I was working on a memoir of my life before Rebel Without A Shul. I wrote this:
Opening image: Boy setting a fire and watching with delight it spread through the bush.
Tentative Title: Delusions of Grandeur: My Life 0-28
Prologue:
I stopped running once I reached the home of my best friend Wayne Cherry. Catching my breath, I turned and looked back across the field. I saw nothing unusual in the dead grass.
It was early 1974 and the days were hot and dry. We hadn’t had rain in months. The fire danger was high.
Pushing the matches deeper into my pocket, I slipped into the Cherry’s station wagon and we began the three mile drive into Cooranbong (population 4,000, about 30% Seventh-Day Adventists).
“Look at that!” Wayne’s brother yelled. We turned and looked down Currans Road. Flames jumped around a couple of eucalyptus trees a few hundred yards from my home. A small section of the field was alight.
I’d read and heard about out-of-control bush fires that burned thousands of acres, destroyed hundreds of homes and killed dozens of people, but this was the first time I thought I saw one that could do just that. For the first time in weeks, I felt excited.
I identified with fire. It was colorful and dramatic. It could change lives in seconds, just like my father the evangelist.
Our car slowed until we could see through the smoke a man with a garden hose.
Within a minute, I watched my work die and felt my fear turn into relief. But the monster inside me who wanted to hurt others until they paid sufficient attention to me was only temporarily cowed.
…The more I tried to be different from dad, the more I resembled him. “Stop rationalizing,” was a favorite saying of my parents when I would give them elaborate explanations for my sins.
Though I liked to think of myself as rational, I’d revert to anger whenever I felt challenged. Under pressure, I’d lash out with the cruelest words and the most self-serving lies. I couldn’t discuss things important to me without flushing and losing control of my Christian exterior.
I got the soft side of my personality, the one that could listen and empathize, from my mother. It only came out when I didn’t feel I had to prove anything.
My memories of Gwen are vague. She was tardy, unorganized, placid, and shy. She cooked me scrambled eggs. She regretted that she couldn’t breastfeed me (a fetish of the Church).
One day I broke into Ellen’s expensive perfume collection. I poured it on the floor and mixed it with shoe polish and toothpaste and smeared it around the bathroom.
When Ellen discovered me, she became furious and started beating me. I screamed.
In her sickbed, Gwen heard my cries. Pushing aside her coverings, she crawled across the floor and pushed herself between my sister and I. Then she cradled me in her arms and said to Ellen, “He’s just a little boy. He doesn’t know any better.”
It’s an excuse that family and friends would used for my bad behavior all my life.
While dad stirred people up, mom calmed us down.
…We reacted in different ways to Gwen’s death. Dad buried himself in his work. My brother and sister rebelled against dad’s values and left home in their teens. I alternately sucked people dry of attention and found a thousand and one different ways to tell those around me, “I hate you, I hate you.”
A few months after Gwen’s death, what was left of my family hired a row boat to take us to Pulbah Island for a picnic. A huge storm roared in at dusk. Even though we had lived on Lake Macquarie for years, we’d never seen waves like this. Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. Rain poured.
As we sheltered in a cave, I cried. I screamed. I said we were going to die.
Eventually we were rescued by the people who had rented us the row boat.
We huddled below decks of the motor boat as we fought our way home, tossing and turning in the swell.
My family held me. My family hushed me. My family carried me home and put me to bed.
Even after I learned to swim at age seven, I never lost my fear of drowning. In my nightmares, it was the way I died.
To fight my fears, I’d swim as far as I could off-shore. Without realizing it, I often traveled through packs of sharks. Floating on my back, a half-mile out to sea, I’d stare up at the sky and wonder if my time had come.
Then, looking back to shore, I’d often see friends, family or lifeguards waving for me to come in. Reluctantly, I’d obey. I hated authority but realized that without it I’d destroy myself.
My father was the main source of authority in my life. He was a rock and I needed his strength more than his love. After most of our disputes, I realized he was right. Yet, that didn’t much assuage my free-floating rage.
When we discussed things, it became vitally important to each of us to be right. My father had the might of his learning on his side and he wasn’t afraid of using every rhetorical trick in his arsenal. I felt crushed by him and yearned to find my own way through life.
I dealt with other sources of authority in my life in the same way I related to my father – with varying combinations of attack, retreat, and surrender (so I could live to fight another day). I was always testing people, trying to find their weak points and just how much they’d put up with. If someone interested me I found it hard to ignore them and it was through verbally challenging them and absorbing their reactions that I got some measure of my place in the world.
Spending most of my time on my own, I retreated into an imaginary world where I played heroic characters who led vital lives filled with significant this-worldly action (the opposite of the lamb-like Christ I was supposed to imitate). I could sit in a chair for hours and tell myself stories. I began writing them down at age eight. Gill typed up the first one. It ran 40 pages. She refused to type up any more of them because they were so long.
My stories had common themes:
· Running away from home
· Adventures with friends
· Long lists of food I wanted to eat
Struggling with reality, I found comfort in such unlikely places as the kitchen sink. I loved washing dishes. By immersing my hands and arms in hot water, I temporarily warmed my whole body. I lingered over my job during those months when the average temperature in Manchester was just above freezing.
…As the youngest child, I was doted on. The main material possession I ever wanted was books, and they flowed into my life from all around me.
I sought attention by being adorable (and if that didn’t work, I became satanic). At night I knelt by my bed and prayed for dad’s supervisor "F.F. Boose." I adopted the scholarly language of my father and his peers.
…Not only did my social graces develop behind those of my classmates, but I also felt behind them physically, emotionally and academically. I was smaller, skinnier, less disciplined and socially astute.
I principally used my brain in school to make fun of people. My fifth grade teacher Mrs. Mazzaferri wrote in my school report that "Luke is always willing to share his ideas with the class, but he needs to be more tolerant of the slower thinker."
One day my mother discovered burn holes in our plastic tablecloth. Against the strictest orders, I’d been playing again with matches. I got a spanking and had to skip lunch.
Good thing for me my parents never learned about the two fires I set outside our home. Both were extinguished by neighbors before much harm was done.
I told Wayne what I had done. My normally mild-mannered friend, a nature lover, turned angry. He said that unless I promised to never do it again, he would tell on me. I promised to never do it again and I lived up to my word.
Jim Jones emails: "Good writing means getting to the point. You could have condensed that whole screed and just wrote, "I am a jerk.""
