Chicapee brought to my attention that in the past she has been asked to write down all the traumatic events in her life chronologically. She thought it might be a good head-start for me to start working on a similar project, and while my memory is shit right now, I thought I would rewind the life-tape and see what I come up with.

1. Age 3, I fell off a rickety chair reaching for something in my closet and cut off the end of my finger.
2. Age 4 I was listening to music on my kids record player in the driveway. My dad drove up and over my records, my player and began verbally abusing me for leaving my shit in the driveway. When I began to cry over my broken toys the mental abuse escalated. I was told never to cry again. And I didn’t.
3. Age 5 – at bedtime I kissed my mom good night and per the ritual walked over to my dad’s chair to do the same. He looked at me and said that was no longer allowed. I was too old for it.
4. Age 6 – I was regularly locked in my room when my behavior was questioned. I was left there until I had gone through a total berserk episode and was never released until the next day.
5. Age 8 – I was placed in little league. My father attended and when I missed a simple pop-fly he left the game and never saw me in another event either sports or music. He did attend a production of Godspell I starred in in Hollywood 20 years later. Once single event in my lifetime.
6. Age 9 – I was repeatedly sexually assaulted by an older male cousin. Even when I said something it was ignored completely and I was made to feel there was something wrong with me.
7. Age 8-9 I would find a patch of poison oak and roll around in it, insuring that I would be kept home. This was the only time I experienced the loving care of my mother.
8. Age 12 – Entering the 6th grade I was signed up for band and needed an instrument. I chose the trumpet since that was what my dad played as a kid. I walked into my dad’s bathroom while he was shaving and asked if I was going to be getting a trumpet so I could be in the band. He became outraged and slapped me so hard my head left an impression in the drywall.
9. My dad getting drunk and making me watch him urinate on his stepfather’s grave.
10. Age 13 – I discovered masturbation. When my parents found out they wanted to have me committed for such abhorrent behavior. I was called “sick” and “disgusting” and made to feel there was something truly wrong with me.
11. Age 14 – 17 My father and mother got into a physical fight. He ended up knocking her unconscious in front of my sister and I. He exited to the garage and was getting in his car to leave. I came out the back door and he faced me. He said: “If you think you are man enough, let’s finish this right now”. I of course cowered. He left and drove across the country not to be seen for over a year.
12. My parents eventually resolved. I was the president of the marching band at school and the evening before the biggest parade of the year, I got drunk with buddies and missed the parade. I was a pariah on campus until the end of my senior year.
13. As I also sang in the choir, I was selected to sing the national anthem at graduation. My father didn’t attend my HS graduation.
14. I drove a car off a cliff sustaining a broken back, significant concussion and facial lacerations. I was hospitalized for several days. My father did the plastic closures on my facial wounds. I was also an amphetamine freak at the time, and the accident was caused by my drug addiction.
15. Several years later after starting a family of my own, we got a call that there had been another physical altercation between my parents who were now living 100 miles away. We drove quickly to the scene where my mother and father had just engaged in a drunkin brawl. He had left the scene and I spent the rest of the night driving around Riverside looking for him. The next day his nurse found him strapped to a chair in an exam room hooked up to his own anesthesia machine, he had committed suicide.
16. One night sitting on the couch with my first wife of 25 years she asked me if I was happy. I responded that I was content and she said that wasn’t good enough. She had fallen in love with one of her students and needed me to move on. I left everything that I knew and took a job in West Virginia managing a new theater project. This is where I met my second wife and we soon relocated to Maryland where I took a job running a 500 seat theatre on a community college campus. This blew up in my face since by then I had become a raging alcoholic. It was at this time that I also fell head first on black ice landing on my head from 4 feet onto the sidewalk. I was unconscious for an unknown period of time. Shortly after I was fired from the position at the community college for drinking.
17. We returned with tails between our legs and moved in with her family back in West Virgnia. Without being able to find work, and battling untreated alcoholism I packed what I could in my old Ford pickup and left my wife standing in the driveway as I headed to a friend’s in California. I had done exactly what my father had several times years before. What a fucking coward.
18. I eventually landed a job in an IT department at a University when went well for 5 years. We wanted to move to Arizona and I took a position with a small private school teaching STEM. This turned out to be more of a detention center for kids with serious behavioral problems and I was literally scared for my own well being. That ended when I finally lost it one day in class when a group of students decided to dump all their materials on the floor in a big “Fuck You” whatcha gonna do about it. I was fired immediately for telling the class to get their “asses” back in their seats and was escorted from the campus.
19. Since then, I have suffered with significant cognitive issues including total collapse of both long term and short term memory. I am suffering from dementia, and don’t know on any given day if I will remember how to get from point a to point b.