Chapter 2: Making Haste Slowly

One of the benefits of an early morning paper route is the empty streets belong to me. I can be alone with my thoughts as I deliver papers to sleeping customers. Not ready to think about anything, I do my best to keep my mind blank. Head bowed, I study the sidewalk and try not to step on any cracks in the cement as I walk toward the city center.

Down to my last three cigarettes, I make a slight detour on my way to pick up my newspapers from the Worcester Telegram and Gazette office in downtown Fitchburg. I stop by the taxi stand and pretend to buy a candy bar from one of the two vending machines in the waiting area.

The lobby is a beautiful set-up. The candy machine sits adjacent to a cigarette vending machine. When the dispatcher’s attention is elsewhere, I drop a quarter and a dime into the coin slot of an ancient cigarette machine and pull the handle.

Clunk-de-clunk and a red and white pack of Marlboros drop into the tray. I snatch them and hide the cigarettes in my newspaper carry bag. At the age of fifteen, buying smokes is a real hassle. Machines don’t care who buys the tobacco they sell.

My side trip only took a couple of minutes and I arrive on schedule at the loading dock. I’m in time to wait in line with a dozen other news carriers as bundles of newspapers are distributed. Thank God, it’s Friday! Today’s edition of the Telegram is the thinnest paper of the week and only weighs in at about fifteen to twenty pounds. The Sunday edition can weigh in at forty-five to sixty pounds, and it’s a fucking killer.

This morning my paper route is running on autopilot. Eventually, I know must deal with what my mother did to me but in the meantime, I’ll put it off.

I reach the mid-way mark and note I’m running about twenty minutes ahead of schedule. It is time for a break. I hop up on my favorite stone wall and take a seat, light a smoke, and try to make sense of my life.

My mother and I have been at war since before my birth. Joyce says I was a hard baby to carry and a difficult delivery. For payback, she’s been making me as miserable as possible for as far back as I can remember. She’s told me hundreds of times it would be better if I hadn’t been born, and not once do I remember her ever saying she loved me.

There is no universe I can imagine where it is appropriate for a mother to play with her son’s private parts and while fondling him, invite him to visit her bedroom and explore her naked body.

Like a trapeze artist walking the high wire, I struggle to keep my balance. There is no safety net and far below lies madness. If I fall, I don’t think I will ever rise again. It is taking all my willpower to stay centered and resist the growing fear; my life is turning into a complete shit-show.

My father used to tell me, “Dennis, it isn’t your fault if you are dealt a lousy hand of cards. But the blame will be yours alone if you play your hand like a fool.”

Other than the crap my mother dealt out on a regular basis, I consider my childhood to be happy; at least happy enough until my parents decided to divorce. After they split, my deck reshuffled and my cards turned to shit.

Dad taught drama as a professor at Ithaca College. When the divorce became final, he married a student of his. A few days later, my mother got married to a preacher. Who would have guessed it? Both mom and dad had secret lovers. Go figure.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forwards.” He may be telling the truth, but my life didn’t make any sense going in either direction.

If something bad happened, my dad would tell me, “Build a bridge and get over it.” The strategy worked well for small stuff like skinned knees or lost lunch money. I didn’t think there could be any way to construct a crossing long enough to reach over the canyon my mother blasted in my life.

I knew how to fight with Joyce. We had been going after each other like cats and dogs for fifteen years, and I gave as good as I got. She would try to beat me down and break my spirit. She diminished or ridiculed almost everything I did. In turn I rebelled, defied her authority, and refused to break. Virtually every interaction with my mother left me demoralized. I loved, feared, and hated my mother.

Last night Joyce caught me by surprise when she burst into my room. I had been too stunned to speak and did not resist as she fondled me. Horrified as I was, I remained passive and became aroused. I hated what she did even as a part of me welcomed her touch.

I would’ve ejaculated if she’d continued but she stopped before I reached the point of no return. Instead, she invited me to come to her room so I could explore her naked body. In a weird way, she wanted my permission to continue our conflict on a new incestuous battlefield.

I glance at my wristwatch and realize my twenty minute break has lasted nearly an hour. Fuck, my customers will flood the newspaper’s office with complaints if I don’t hustle. I race through the rest of my paper route. I’m only fifteen minutes late in getting to my last customers.

The morning clouds have cleared and every sign points to be a warm, pleasant, summer-like day. I make my final stop at a neighborhood variety store where the owner allows me to run up a tab. Almost everything I earn delivering papers goes into the store’s cash register at the end of the week.

The time is 8:30, a half-hour before school will start. I am in no mood to attend classes today and I don’t like the idea of going home. I decide to skip school.

The corner store has an excellent selection of junk food. Playing hooky on an empty stomach is no fun so I gather supplies for a pity-picnic. I fill my carrier bag with several bottles of Pepsi, two bags of potato chips, half-dozen candy bars, and a bag or two of peanuts and head for the hills where I can be alone with my thoughts.

The rolling hills around Fitchburg are the granite remains of a once mighty mountain range. Time, glaciers, and the passing eons reduced them to a shadow of their former glory. Forty minutes later, I arrive at a sun-drenched clearing of bedrock on the crest of a high hill overlooking one of the city reservoirs.

The clearing is surrounded on three sides by scrub pine trees clinging to life in a thin layer of topsoil. As the soil increased in depth, the trees grew in height until they gave way to a full-blown forest. At the far end of the glade was a hundred foot drop-off, which afforded a grand view of the countryside. On the horizon, the skyscrapers of Boston are tiny dots in the distance.

The morning has become quite warm and the spring jacket with which I started the day has long since been stuffed into my carrier bag. I walk to the edge of the cliff, sit down against a boulder left over from the last ice age, and use my bag as a pillow. Overhead, the cloudless sky is a brilliant blue and the sun rests halfway to noon.

The air close to the sloping granite shimmers and dances in the radiant warmth of the daytime star. Occasionally, the circle of silence around me is broken by a lazy whisper of wind rustling the leaves and needles of the nearby trees. The flavors change and shift depending upon the direction. The breeze from the woods is thick with the musky scent of decay accented by new life and growing things. The still air above rocky surface tastes like dust and time.

When I was out exploring a few years ago, I stumbled upon this clearing and fell in love with the place. The rocky glade is one of my favorite spots. I find the grooves on the rock face intriguing. Rocks, carried along under a mile thick sheet of ice, gouged out the lines as the glaciers advanced to the sea. They spoke of times long past.

After reading The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, I became fascinated by the concept of time. I close my eyes and try to capture an instant of time. I blink my eyes open and close them as fast as I can. Now I slice this image as thin as I can. I cut as close as I dare and I slide my mind into the sliver of time shaved off the face of eternity. This thin slice of time is the eternal now, and it is my only real contact with the universe around me.

I imagine time as an old-fashioned phonograph record. Where the stylus touches the vinyl is now. All that lies behind the point of contact is the past, and everything in front of the needle is the future. We cannot remember tomorrow because it hasn’t yet happened. I’m mindful of time. Yesterday we are memories. Tomorrow we are dreams. Today we are real. Now is the only moment I can become the person I want to be.