The Hornet's Nest - Part II
...cont'd from The Hornet's Nest - Part I
My mother's first husband was an abusive bastard and she suffered from the stigma of divorcing him, with three small children, in a small South Texas town. Technically, those children were my step-brothers although we never thought of each other as such, or at least, I didn't.
Ironically, the guy standing up in the photo of me and my brothers was David, nine years my senior. At fourteen, folded beneath a junkyard car, a jack slipped and almost killed him. He bucked the odds and escaped The Reaper's scythe, his spinal cord mangled and kidneys damaged. Within a few years, he was able to walk on crutches. His is a story all its own. Perhaps someday I'll find the strength to write it, as it is ensconsed not in a gilded frame of mythical heroism, but in the salty tears sadness and joy and laughter and awe.
Each of my brothers was wild in their own way. Each bore a scarred soul. That's what happens in life, even though most people don't really acknowledge it. The wounds vary in depth, severity and frequency from person to person.
I was closest to David. He became a technical draftsman, married someone about as naive as he was and divorced a few years later. We bonded in a way that is hard to describe, but I was mature for my age and he was in many ways an eternal adolescent, if a reasonably responsible one. My home life was often tense and I spent as much time as possible in the warm comfort of my bedroom.
When I turned sixteen, he was living in a small apartment and we enjoyed each other's company tremendously. The days were spent under the hood of his Chevy Malibu Classic and cruising the streets of East Dallas, White Rock Lake and Lake Ray Hubbard. Between casual street racing and flirting with girls, we smoked copious amounts of Panama Red and Columbian Gold. Sometimes with a friend of two, but usually alone, I would make the crosstown trek to his apartment and we would listen to music, watch Saturday Night Live and Monty Python, and laugh hysterically. Nearly twenty years later, he would be gone, his ragged body worn to dust from constant struggle. I miss him enormously.
The same rebelliousness which led me to quit school has accompanied me throughout life. Having come of age in the '70s, it fit like a well-worn cotton t-shirt. Fashion, however, has changed. As early as the late 80s, having made the transition from airman to claims adjuster, society had become increasingly fear-based and blatantly materialistic. Those were the greed is good years; kind of like now, except it was still a novel philosophy. Americans wrung their hands over the rise of gangs, hip-hop and crack cocaine, though not enough to eschew an occasional line at the party of the neighborhood hipster celebrating his or her latest promotion.
Able to write and speak a good game, I found myself working in a professional environment and often competed against college grads for various positions. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I failed. I could be a well paid claims adjuster one year and clerical temp worker the next. What I really lacked was ambition and a knack for tolerating the vagaries of Cubicle Nation, and this was quite a handicap during the George Herbert Walker Bush years, when little mattered except whether or not one's job held enough prestige to warrant a blue suit and red tie. Usually, mine did.
Whatever my own professional ups and down, a notable constant in my life has been Mrs. Hill, who over the years has forged her way from file clerk to marketing guru. Weilding nothing more than talent, drive and dogged perserverance, she created an enviable career for herself. I've never known anyone who even comes close to matching her professionalism, ethics and capacity for caring about others - all qualities which are notoriously difficult to maintain in the bloody currents and shark-infested waters of corporate life.
By the mid-nineties, people my age were turning away from the euphoria of illicit drugs to the passive numbness of legal ones. Prozac, Paxil and other SSRI anti-depressants became common as rain, and considerably more common than pot. With the national religion of consumerism ratcheting up, it stood to reason. How else were people to tolerate it without cutting their wrists, that moo-cow pasture of compliancy called "office life." Maturity was something of a disappointment, if only because people my age were having children and becoming, for lack of a better word, retarded. The casual and sometimes tumultuous era in which I'd grown up had long been erased, replaced by an age enveloped in the ridiculously thin aura of status and reputation and material consumption.
Nearly everyone who had a kid was either medicating them or feeling guilty for not medicating them. Having been cruelly plagued by cluster headaches my entire life, I joined the herd and found it provided some relief, though not without tradeoffs. Between the rock of restrictive insurance plans and the hard place of finding physicians willing to treat me for pain, it wasn't like I had much choice in the matter. It continues to be a problem. Cannabis offered the best relief and was far superior to pharmaceuticals, but thanks to the government assault on the American brain and human will, it became difficult to obtain, prohibitively expensive and of surprisingly poor quality - where I lived, anyway. Penalties for cultivation were (and continue to be) harsh, and I was unwilling to risk sacrificing the wonderful life Mrs. Hill and I had built together. So, I suffered. And do to this day.
Every place I worked for stayed in the perpetually uneasy state of pending sale. Everything was on the auction block, and if it wasn't worth buying, it wasn't worth anything. Institutional loyalty was required, but never reciprocated. I hated it despite earning a decent income, but my home life was good, warm.
And then came December 12, 2000.
(Final Segment - Part III - tomorrow)
My mother's first husband was an abusive bastard and she suffered from the stigma of divorcing him, with three small children, in a small South Texas town. Technically, those children were my step-brothers although we never thought of each other as such, or at least, I didn't.
Ironically, the guy standing up in the photo of me and my brothers was David, nine years my senior. At fourteen, folded beneath a junkyard car, a jack slipped and almost killed him. He bucked the odds and escaped The Reaper's scythe, his spinal cord mangled and kidneys damaged. Within a few years, he was able to walk on crutches. His is a story all its own. Perhaps someday I'll find the strength to write it, as it is ensconsed not in a gilded frame of mythical heroism, but in the salty tears sadness and joy and laughter and awe.
Each of my brothers was wild in their own way. Each bore a scarred soul. That's what happens in life, even though most people don't really acknowledge it. The wounds vary in depth, severity and frequency from person to person.
I was closest to David. He became a technical draftsman, married someone about as naive as he was and divorced a few years later. We bonded in a way that is hard to describe, but I was mature for my age and he was in many ways an eternal adolescent, if a reasonably responsible one. My home life was often tense and I spent as much time as possible in the warm comfort of my bedroom.
When I turned sixteen, he was living in a small apartment and we enjoyed each other's company tremendously. The days were spent under the hood of his Chevy Malibu Classic and cruising the streets of East Dallas, White Rock Lake and Lake Ray Hubbard. Between casual street racing and flirting with girls, we smoked copious amounts of Panama Red and Columbian Gold. Sometimes with a friend of two, but usually alone, I would make the crosstown trek to his apartment and we would listen to music, watch Saturday Night Live and Monty Python, and laugh hysterically. Nearly twenty years later, he would be gone, his ragged body worn to dust from constant struggle. I miss him enormously.
The same rebelliousness which led me to quit school has accompanied me throughout life. Having come of age in the '70s, it fit like a well-worn cotton t-shirt. Fashion, however, has changed. As early as the late 80s, having made the transition from airman to claims adjuster, society had become increasingly fear-based and blatantly materialistic. Those were the greed is good years; kind of like now, except it was still a novel philosophy. Americans wrung their hands over the rise of gangs, hip-hop and crack cocaine, though not enough to eschew an occasional line at the party of the neighborhood hipster celebrating his or her latest promotion.
Able to write and speak a good game, I found myself working in a professional environment and often competed against college grads for various positions. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I failed. I could be a well paid claims adjuster one year and clerical temp worker the next. What I really lacked was ambition and a knack for tolerating the vagaries of Cubicle Nation, and this was quite a handicap during the George Herbert Walker Bush years, when little mattered except whether or not one's job held enough prestige to warrant a blue suit and red tie. Usually, mine did.
Whatever my own professional ups and down, a notable constant in my life has been Mrs. Hill, who over the years has forged her way from file clerk to marketing guru. Weilding nothing more than talent, drive and dogged perserverance, she created an enviable career for herself. I've never known anyone who even comes close to matching her professionalism, ethics and capacity for caring about others - all qualities which are notoriously difficult to maintain in the bloody currents and shark-infested waters of corporate life.
By the mid-nineties, people my age were turning away from the euphoria of illicit drugs to the passive numbness of legal ones. Prozac, Paxil and other SSRI anti-depressants became common as rain, and considerably more common than pot. With the national religion of consumerism ratcheting up, it stood to reason. How else were people to tolerate it without cutting their wrists, that moo-cow pasture of compliancy called "office life." Maturity was something of a disappointment, if only because people my age were having children and becoming, for lack of a better word, retarded. The casual and sometimes tumultuous era in which I'd grown up had long been erased, replaced by an age enveloped in the ridiculously thin aura of status and reputation and material consumption.
Nearly everyone who had a kid was either medicating them or feeling guilty for not medicating them. Having been cruelly plagued by cluster headaches my entire life, I joined the herd and found it provided some relief, though not without tradeoffs. Between the rock of restrictive insurance plans and the hard place of finding physicians willing to treat me for pain, it wasn't like I had much choice in the matter. It continues to be a problem. Cannabis offered the best relief and was far superior to pharmaceuticals, but thanks to the government assault on the American brain and human will, it became difficult to obtain, prohibitively expensive and of surprisingly poor quality - where I lived, anyway. Penalties for cultivation were (and continue to be) harsh, and I was unwilling to risk sacrificing the wonderful life Mrs. Hill and I had built together. So, I suffered. And do to this day.
Every place I worked for stayed in the perpetually uneasy state of pending sale. Everything was on the auction block, and if it wasn't worth buying, it wasn't worth anything. Institutional loyalty was required, but never reciprocated. I hated it despite earning a decent income, but my home life was good, warm.
And then came December 12, 2000.
posted by Arvin Hill at 3/06/2005 11:21:00 PM
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