My eyes open for the first time since being strapped onto the operating room table. I’m sore and nauseous, but these senses have been temporarily overshadowed by severe cotton mouth and blurred vision. The recovery nurse realizes my conscious state and promptly offers the most refreshing cup of water ever to cross my lips. She then precedes to wipe the jelly from my eyes and the room slowly comes into focus though it’s spinning at a sickening rate due to the fading effects of anesthesia. Nausea is now my nemesis… until the first dry heave. The 6 inch incision through my abdominal wall quickly steals the spotlight. I close my eyes to escape the cyclonic world around me. I had a great nurse who was attentive to my needs even without verbal communication past the wrenching sound of me heaving immediately followed by winces of pain. She quickly delivered a pharmaceutical cocktail that settled the overwhelming sickness and deadened the charged nerves just above my groin. Although I was physically bound to bed, my mind was racing to figure out the why’s and what now’s.

It was 70 days to my 23^rd birthday. That meant I had a solid 15 years of riding and racing motorcycles. So why did I release the rear brake after it seized the rear wheel fishtailing my 300lb bike to a stop? Anyone with my seat time, or formal riding education knows to ride a rear wheel skid to a stop. But this one time I released it allowing the gyroscopic action from the wheels to violently correct the direction of travel pitching me like a dog shaking water from its coat. I’d had far worse accidents in the past, but something about this one was different. The pain was something I’ve never felt. Not a break or a bruise, but a burn from the inside out. Nothing else seemed out of place other than the pieces of motorcycle now scattered all over the track. I sucked up the pain and gathered my proverbial yard sale into the trailer I used to haul bikes to and from the track. Days turned to weeks, the soreness subsided, and everything seemed back to normal. That’s when I found the bulge of an inguinal hernia.

There was a familiar voice, “Richard, How are you feeling?” It was my mom, but in the moment her significance didn’t register. I make an attempt to speak for the first time, but I’m still uncertain of what really came out. She said “The nurse says we can go as soon as you feel up to it.” I simply shook my head no since removing myself from this bed was the absolute last thing I wanted to do. What scared me even more was my absence of health insurance. I was a server and bartender in those days. It was common to end shifts with up to $1000, but seldom less than $200 cash in my pocket. Florida’s Space Coast was a great place to live virtually tax free on tip money alone. A little charisma and knowledge of who would patronize what establishments during what seasons was all a young person needed to be successful. During the spring and summer I would work the bars on the beach, or near the docks where the gambling ships would offload in Port Canaveral. During the fall and winter I would move inland to more established chains like Outback or Carraba’s and rely on retirees that call that area home, or the northerners who snowbird to escape the harsh winters of whatever state they might call home. This was a great hustle, and 25’ish hours a week made a substantial living compared to my peers. Rent, utilities, and car insurance were all covered within 3-4 shifts, leaving thousands of dollars a month burning a hole in my pocket. Because let’s be honest,  when you’re 22 living in Cocoa Beach, FL, things like healthcare plans and savings are hardly atop the list of priorities. At this particular moment I wasn’t sure if my drugged and injured body, or the ever increasing medical debt I would soon face was the cause of increased specific gravity felt in that bed. From my initial visit to the family practice doctor through the follow ups and prescriptions still to come, I knew significant change was upon me. I felt this had been a conscious thought that flashed before me in a matter of seconds, but it had really been a moment of somnambulism as a sharp pain brought me back to reality. A medical aide and my mother were helping me transfer from the wheelchair to the front seat of her Chevy Blazer. I had no recollection of getting fully dressed, but there I was fully clothed aside from socks and shoes that were instead replaced with flip flops in true Florida fashion.

I wasn’t allowed to lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk, climb stairs, or even drive a car for the next 6 weeks. None of these things stopped the world around me, and I was soon buried in the expected debt with no income to appease the beast of burden. As I convalesced and friends would visit, I couldn’t help but look at their lives from a perspective not before imagined. Most made their living hustling the hospitality industry in the same fashion I did, because you know the old birds of a feather adage. One friend in particular was different. Ryan seemed to have it right. He drove a late model sports car, had a nice apartment where he lived alone, and his gear whether surfing, fishing or whatever was always a step above the rest of the groups. Ryan was a Staff Sargent (E-5) in the Air Force. The more time I spent with Ryan the more I was impressed by the way he frankly had his shit together. By the end of Aug I was driving, and back to work. I was still good friends with Ryan, but just couldn’t bring myself to ask him directly about his existence. Instead I found my local recruiter and less than a year later was on my way to basic training. This was July 2001.

I’ll never drink Bud Light Lime again. Just the smell of it brings me back, heaving and choking after getting the worst news of my life. I struggled to keep it down. Tasting it twice was the only thing that would have made that moment any more awful.

I met him at my friend Brenna’s Halloween party nearly 3 years before. She was moving out the next day so drunk, costumed young people and a dog dressed as the Yellow Submarine arrived to a nearly empty house. Not feeling much in a party mood, I knocked on the door dressed in a last minute Sexy Abraham Lincoln costume, clutching a paper bag full of records. I planned to play DJ, the stereo being one of the only things still in the house.

At some point in the evening, a man in a yellow Star Trek Uniform swept behind me. “What are you playing next, Abraham?” he asked me very quietly. When I later looked through the kitchen doorway and saw him, head thrown back and singing along at the top of his lungs to “Wild Horses” I knew I wanted to know him.

It’s funny, on Star Trek it’s usually the ones in the red uniforms that die.

Early in our relationship, he had told me that he also almost didn’t go to the Halloween party. Like me, his friends had pressured him until he gave in. Over the years, when our relationship hit rocky low points my best friend would say “I wonder how different your life would be if just one of you hadn’t shown up to that party?” I’d often wondered that myself.

He was a genius but he was troubled. He had struggled with depression since he was a small child. He was hilarious, so quick with the most ridiculous jokes. He quit drinking. He started taking antidepressants. He played in a band and when I watched him on stage a calm fell over his face that I never saw in him otherwise, as though playing guitar was the only way he could truly escape all that haunted him.

We tried for nearly 3 years, but we couldn’t make it work. Not long after I gave up for good it was a hot summer evening and I was laying around, drinking Bud Light Lime and licking my wounds. I got a text from my best friend- “Where are you?” and then she immediately called. She never calls.

“He’s dead” she said as soon as I picked up. She started crying, which was surprised me because they’d never really liked each other that much. “I couldn’t go on knowing, knowing while you didn’t”. I sobbed and tried not to throw up and then I called my mom.

He’d hung himself in his closet, a closet that maybe because of the type of wood and the Super Hit incense, the leather and old books and something that was impossible to define made it smell like heaven to me. Divine and impossible to duplicate. Every time he opened the door I’d remark on the smell to him, tell him about a perfumer I’d read about in some magazine, a man who claimed to be able to synthesize any nostalgic scent. That if I was ever wealthy I’d hire that guy to identify what it was that made that closet smell so intoxicating. I don’t want that anymore.

The strangest thing is that beyond that horrible moment, when my friend phoned and my life felt forever ruined, I felt like I’d died too. Months passed that I barely remember. I felt like a plastic bag, scraping along the road in the wind and being batted in the right direction by well meaning passersby. I wasn’t able to sleep or shower or eat like a normal human. I was only interested in poisoning myself with cheap champagne and trying to avoid being seen.

The most vivid memory I have from that time is suddenly, one night, getting the idea that maybe he’d faked his death to get back at me. Maybe he was hiding somewhere with a new name and new life. I considered this delusion reasonable for several long moments before I remembered I had seen his body at a viewing.

The rest of the summer and fall went by but I didn’t notice. Then one day, a day no different than any other, I felt I had suddenly awoken. I looked around at my new house; saw his cat that I had taken in staring at me from across the room with her big green eyes. I felt like a blinking amnesiac dropped into an entirely new world. Like someone that had just awoken from a long coma. Someone back from the dead. I felt empty and defined by this experience. I didn’t want that anymore, either.

The cat jumped into my lap. I put on “Wild Horses” and began my uncomfortable new journey: getting to know myself again.

In the middle of a sad town, in the middle of a sad street, sat an unnecessarily large house with a dusty, overgrown backyard—the kind of backyard that was home to discarded flat tires and tumbleweeds—that contained one algae ridden, Grecian style swimming pool (the reason my father had purchased this house), and a mammoth avocado tree that seemed somehow able to throw its unwanted fruit into the deep end.  Here, in Santa Ana, California I was thrust into my third, and not my last, school for my sixth grade year. Willard Junior High School is located near downtown Santa Ana, and offered grades sixth through ninth, and the students were giants in comparison to my gangly twelve year old self.

At Willard, I became an avid runner.  As the last bell sounded, I would burst forth through the doors at top speed, my white Keds gripping the hot asphalt to the best of their ability, attempting to out run whom ever had decided that I would be their target for the day.  I would run the mile back to my house usually with one or two kids in tow. Kids that if they caught me, would knock me around a bit, and then steal whatever meager amount of cash I had on me.  Kids that hated simply because I was awkward and new. I use the term “kids” loosely as I am not sure how old any of the people who tormented me after-school actually were.  The girls all looked like they were in their early 20’s, their bangs cemented straight-up in some gravity defying miracle that required equal parts Aqua-Net and sheer determination, eyebrows plucked until there was only one or two hairs left and then miraculously drawn back on with a pencil at odd angles and points, and a wardrobe that always contained the whitest of the white shirts ever made.  The boys tried to look like they were in their early 20’s but instead had that awkward haven’t-quite-figured-out-puberty thing happening, greasy, matted hair, oddly shaped peach fuzz mustaches that seemed geometrically impossible and looked more like dirt than an actual mustache, and the most vile of all vocabularies—vocabularies so crass that truck drivers, construction workers, and even strip-club aficionados would have blushed if within ear shot.

The after school marathons grew exhausting and after a few months of non-stop torment, I took it upon myself to extend my weekends by skipping multiple days of class each week, which was actually quite easy to do. Willard Junior High had so many students that their truancy department (yep, they had an entire department) did not seem too concerned with the authenticity of a note from a parent—if you gave it a moderate effort, they would excuse your absence.  I had my father’s signature down pat, even his trademark swoop of the S in his first name (Steven).

During the first few weeks in our sad new home, my father had hired a maintenance staff to care for the malaria ridden pool in the backyard, as well as landscapers to mold our desert wasteland into a tropical oasis; but what he had really done was provide me with the most luxurious of spaces to lounge while not attending class.  I spent hours in my watery refuge floating on air-mattresses, practicing cannonballs, mastering freestyle and butterfly strokes, and my favorite pass time, diving for the avocados that had sunk to the bottom of the deep end; I could hold my breath for what seemed like hours.

It was during one of these underwater retrieval missions that my father caught me playing hooky.  I had not heard his car pull into the driveway; I was searching for that one elusive avocado that seemed to be intentionally evading me.  I am not sure how long he had been home before he noticed the sliding glass door open.  I do not know if it was my hot pink cassette stereo playing Depeche Mode that gave me away, or if he had happened to walk into the house just as I had jumped into the pool.  But I saw him as I looked up from the bottom of the deep end.  His body swayed and shimmered through the several feet of chlorinated water.  If I stayed under the water he could not yell.  If I stayed under the water I would not have to explain why I was not in school.  If I could just hold my breath for just a little longer.

Stig Severinson, holds the current world record for holding his breath underwater for twenty-two minutes^[1], I lasted for maybe two before my lungs felt like they were going to punch their way out of my chest and swim to the surface of their own volition.   But something amazing happened once I emerged from the depths of the pool with that last tricky avocado in my hand; my father did not yell or scream, he simply asked me why.  And I told him.  I told him about my daily race home.  I told him about how scared I was all the time.  I told him everything he had failed to notice since we had moved into that sad house, on that sad street, in that saddest of California towns.  That night I made us guacamole to accompany our dinner on the back patio, it would be one of our last dinners at that house.  We moved a few weeks later.

[1] http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/1000/longest-time-breath-held-voluntarily-%28male%29

I have a memory, incomplete and loosely formed, from my childhood, where I sat on the floor of my parents room, neck craned up at the old television.  I was watching a musical which I wouldn’t remember I had seen till several years later when I finally saw it on stage.  Vague images of the dancers and the set was all I carried for a time.  At ten I went to my first musical, a small production of Footloose put on by a sixth-grade class at my school.  After that night I knew I had to have that teacher so I too could be part of a musical.  Two years later I was granted my wish as an extra in Grease.  As preparation for our performance my teacher took our class to professional productions of the Lion King and other shows.  Over the years I went to more and more shows, read plays in my spare time, memorized monologues and lyrics.  While I waited with excitement to start high school where I could finally take theater classes I worked backstage for my sixth-grade teacher.  I learned the in’s and out’s of stage management and lighting, of how to handle performers and their props, how to transform the stage from a garden to a castle.  By the time  I finally took a real theater class it was very much a part of my identity.  In high school it only began to consume me more.  Lunches and free periods were spent in the theater room with my teacher and the senior students who had taken my friend and I under their wing.  By the time these students graduated my friend and I had taken up their place mentoring new students during class and at after school rehearsals.

There was no part of theater I didn’t enjoy.  Memorization came easy to me, accents presented a fun challenge.  I could never dance without specific instruction, and things always seemed to be scattered right until the curtains opened, but the satisfaction when the curtains closed made everything worthwhile.  Stepping onto the stage I could leave behind the identity I had constructed for my high school peers.  I could step into the character and present some aspect of myself with more honesty than in my day to day life, and no one would know how much closer this character was to the real me; they just saw a performance.

It was my intention to keep performing after high school.  We used to say in my family that my brother was the artist.  He could create beautiful imagery with a canvas or a camera.  I have never been artistic in the same way, but if you gave me a stage I could perform my art.  With my junior year things started to change.  At the prompting of a friend, I went to my first martial arts class.  I went to two nights of taekwondo and felt what I describe now as falling in love.  It was so outside my normal realm of activity that I felt painfully awkward and self-conscious, but passionately driven to mimic what I saw the others practicing.  My instructor was endlessly excited and encouraging, teaching exactly what I had no idea I had been seeking for self-defense and self-development, that I just had to keep going.  As time went on my body found that forms and details of techniques felt natural.  I no longer felt like an outsider.  I became part of a community to which I still refer to as my taekwondo family.

A year after I found a new love in the disciplined training of martial arts I had the opportunity to do my first real theater work outside of the high school environment.  I was in a small show in the city.  For a period of three months I devoted much of my time to this show and to the the theater company.  I helped to remodel the building, build the set, acquire props, enlist volunteers, and on and on.  Every night I drove into the city to nurture this growing theater company as they put on their first show.  Now, until this point there had been no conflict between what I called my two loves; theater and taekwondo.  For high school performances rehearsals fit in between school and taekwondo practice.  For this professional show the rehearsals ran during taekwondo.  So for three months I had to take a break from my training.

Never in my life had I been so miserable.  I was doing what I thought I loved so much, yet I found myself suddenly without an outlet, without a source to re-energize myself.  All of a sudden monologues and performances were dull instead of satisfying.  The director could no longer command my attention as well as my teacher could.  Stepping onto the stage no longer fulfilled my need to express myself, for now it felt like a new art in expression to perform my forms for my instructor.  My body ached for the chance to work out with my little family.  My mind suffered as I had no contact with this new love of mine who just a year before I had no awareness of.

When the show ended I couldn’t have been happier to walk away from the stage and onto the mats.  I had learned something.  I loved theater, I still love theater, but there is something I love more.  My path was altered when I was forced to see where my priorities lay.  There are many things I enjoy, that I view as important, but I have yet to find something more important to my mental, physical, and spiritual development as my practice in martial arts.  As my current sensei says, we practice to keep our sanity, so we practice all our lives.

I haven’t been in another performance, or taken another theater class.  Now I spend most my nights in one dojo or another, training and teaching.  My free time is no longer spent memorizing monologues, but memorizing the history of our lineage as I sit and listen for hours to my teachers.  I express myself now through the movements of my art as my teacher has passed it to me, blending his teachings with my interpretations.  My identity has shifted from a performance artist to that of a martial artist.  Theater was a hobby, my practice is a way to be.

I can’t tell you exactly when or how I began playing soccer, furthermore, I don’t believe that a single one of the young boys in the entire AYSO could have explained in any satisfying way how they managed to become a part of this charming and artless athletic slapstick. I must assume that we were all impelled by the same inscrutable pair of forces that would have dominated, directed, and guarded jealously all other aspects of our lives. One says to the other: ‘The boy needs to get out, he can’t just sit at home all day.’ ‘Yes, but what if he were to get injured?’ ‘Nonsense, he’ll have pads and a helmet.’ ‘Oh, but he’s so delicate and it’s just so violent.’ The former begins to roar, ‘Now you’ve already spoiled him soft, why in my day we would use surplus flak jackets as shoulder pads and our ball was an unexploded claymore and we were glad for it I’ll tell you what. He is going to do this!’ ‘I will not have you turn our son into a vegetable so that you might relive your glory days!’ So my father, a touch grayer and a bit more palsied, would usher me to the soccer cleats and shin guards, but not before leading me slowly through the football aisle and giving me a strange, wet look, to which I’d respond with a guileless grin of animal stupidity as my head lolled back and forth, trying to appease my father with my best impression of idiot beatitude, not having the words but wanting to say, ‘Father forgive me, one day I will bring great honor to your name, but today, I am just a babe. Can’t you see that I have not yet been endowed with the agency you expect of me? That today I am as hapless as a man o’ war being buoyed upon the tides? I will go wherever you lead, but no further.’

Soccer, like eating, sleeping, attending school, brushing my teeth and every other custom and courtesy of my youth soon became something that happened to me automatically. The gestures of my day were never decided, being entirely governed by muscle memory. Like an ant, I would follow the scent trail of my relentless routine and if ever I strayed off course, a large hand attached to the dopey, concerned face of some adult would grasp my shoulder and set me back on track. Every other Saturday, however, the monotony of my life was punctuated by the orgiastic pursuit of triumph over a rivaling soccer team. Actually triumphing was of middling importance so long as I was released from the tedious drilling and physical conditioning of soccer practice and given the 90 minutes in which my teammates and I joined in ecstatic cahoots against our challengers. They were all despicable: the vile Hornets from Diamond Head, the loathsome Hurricanes from Aiea, the Hunnish Warriors from Kailua, the Wolves from Hickam Airforce base were particularly abominable as all the players were either defrauding the AYSO as to their age or else they were the products of some nefarious military super-soldier experimentation. But, it didn’t matter at all who we faced, if we won, if we lost, so long as we could run and dive and exult in the strength of our limbs. Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

On this particular day, everything seemed to be as it always has been and always will be in Honolulu. The sun came up and it was glorious. The warm, effervescent trade winds rolled the few white clouds over the gold-green morning and I watched from the backseat window of my father’s car as we passed by tanned locals milling about outdoor bazaars filled with peculiar fruits and exotic baubles from the mysterious orient, by golf courses manicured into unwholesome perfection, by fine-sandy beaches where families had gathered to barbeque and daub the sky with kites, and to the field, patched by sleeping grass and painted with chalk, where we would play our game. I met up with the other children wearing homely, canary yellow uniforms and we began our warm ups. While doing our warm ups, I noticed that we were playing a team we had not encountered before. I do not remember their name, but if I was forced to come up with one based on their most obvious attributes I would dub them something like: the Potato Bugs from Palolo or perhaps the Convalescents from Koko Marina. Looking back on it now, I believe that the AYSO may have made some bureaucratic blunder and erroneously scheduled us to play against a team from their pee-wee league, but here we were, and we would not be denied our just desserts.

The game started and we massacred the poor invalids. It must have been 6 and 0 before the first quarter ended. I remember running by their coach and hearing her shout out, ‘Just take a shot! I’ll give a dollar to anybody who just takes a shot!’ At the quarter break our coach told us ‘No more scoring, just pass in front of the goal.’ The only effect this had was to further humiliate our opponents as now we were simply doing passing drills to each other in front of their goal as their entire team tried to get the ball from two or three of our players. At half time our coach tried to fix this, ‘Shoot for the corner posts.’ This made for a marginally better game as whenever one of our players would kick the ball clearly out of bounds the ball would be given to the invertebrate team, who could usually get it at least out of their goal zone before one of us would steal it back and kick it at the corner posts again. This was all progressing about as sportingly as any other collapse of the social contract would, when I got the ball, aimed at the corner post, and kicked. Hoorah, I hit the corner flag right on the tippy-top and this had become the only measure of success in this game, I felt victorious. I felt a burble of joy caught in my throat like a grape and I just had to let out a shrill ‘whoop!’ and throw my hands up to the sky. Not three seconds after that, as I was still beaming, the referee swept down upon me and handed me a card, ‘That’s bad sportsmanship.’ Immediately, I was crushed. My guts turned cold and I felt the gray weight of shame hit my stomach like a fist. I walked off the field and wished that the earth would yawn open underneath me and that some daemon would drag me to whatever level of hell I was inevitably destined for. In one instant, all the shining had left from the day; the great, golden motes of morning had been replaced by some poisonous choking gas. I wished for nothing more than to turn back time and undo what had been done and I could think of no other solution to this calamity, but I had only an intermediate understanding of quantum physics at that tender age. And so I sat and stewed in my own shame, contemplating how quickly gold turns to lead, triumph into bitterness, all life into ash. I have never experienced happiness since that day.

or other.