"Jack"

I tell myself I’m not actually hearing my name across a parking lot. No, this is in my head. (It happens now and again, my hearing music or voices no one else does.) She isn’t manifesting in the here-and-now. I’m tired. I don’t want a visit from Her. But I know that voice, though I haven’t heard it in years. Thirty? Thirty-two? Mother, what game are you playing now? I turn to see.

“Do you know who I am?”

I think I smile. It wouldn’t be polite to burst out laughing as if I’d lost my mind, which I’m close to doing. I focus on the face that used to occupy all my waking moments and most of my semi-unconscious ones. (I didn’t sleep much when this particular aspect of the Universe opened the gates in my mind and let the suppressed come out to play with a Muse.) I tell myself that she (the human she) is no longer a young woman. I am no longer a smitten drunk hell-bent to accomplish a suicidal binge. (Buck up boy. You can survive this.) The cages in my head rattle. The Suppressed would still worship this one, just to punish me for caging them.

I allow I know her, though I doubt “the her” looking at me through dark sunglasses has any idea how many “hers” I actually see. There is the young woman flickering in and out of the mature woman’s hesitant smile. She is obviously present, and the Muse. I want to run away, but I’m too slow witted to escape. The suppressed in my head are howling now. Their laughter should be heard across the parking lot, but she (the flesh and blood she) just smiles and says she has some poems I wrote. Do I remember them? Would I like to have them back?

And Her trap closes. I feel the hook pierce. I’m aware now of the game and not so easily played. Trapped? Yes. But I don’t have to play. I know what’s up and I can escape. Only I don’t. Gods what an idiot I am! I want to read those sheets she/She offers me. I want to see if memory comes even close to the pain that drove me then! The Suppressed are gibbering manically now. Their laughter and cage clanging helping to seal my fate. (I hate the things in my head. That’s why I have them caged.)

I’m not sure when I began suppressing aspects of myself. Likely, I’ve been at it since becoming aware. Dad was big, loud (if angry) and scary. I never saw him hurl a lightening bolt, but his voice shook houses with its commanding rumble. It was best not to draw his attention. Mom was easier to be a kid around, though she was more likely to spank me if I was too much a boy. By the time I started school I was thought to be shy. Hardly. I had long since learned to suppress the more out-going, boisterous aspects of myself, especially in public. By the time I hit high school, and had learned to bank the anger building in me, I was very much in control of my caged self. And then I found alcohol.

The altered states following alcohol consumption were a revelation. I became aware of, under its influence, just what I had caged. Trapped within me were people who occasionally slipped their constraints while I was intoxicated. A dancer, furious that I denied him the training to dance like Fred Astaire.

A gentleman, who politely suggested I cut my hair, buy a suit, or at least casual clothes and allow him to make a presentable man of me. Someone that might have been suave and debonair with the ladies, had I not choked him into submission.

And a poet; some shriveled aspect of the want-to-be writer I kicked and stomped until it whimpered and fell silent.

Those and others welled up in me, fought for a place in the frontal lobe and with enough alcohol, fell into babbling contention and the dominate “me” won out as the collective “we” crashed, yet again, in drunken stupor. Yee haw for the bully!

She (I was unaware of Her in those days, having yet to meet and sit among the Pagans) had long played me with a Muse aspect of Herself. I’ve lost count of the sleepless hours I’ve sat scribbling, or pecking words on paper, or computer monitor as my mind raced beyond my fingers with story upon story, frustration upon frustration, as I screamed at myself for not knowing grammar, hell, even correct spelling! I was aware of the Muse, but not the Other, or Her games.

We were at Edgewood Lanes along the Old Emmitsburg Road in PA for some reason (for the life of me I can’t remember why) when a young woman I thought might someday become a friend reached out and playfully tugged on my beard. To this day I remember a “click” sounding in my head as if a light had come on, or cage doors had been opened. Everything changed.

Her face burnt into my mind, her voice embedded deeply so I knew it 30 some years later. Everything I had spent years suppressing and caging came stampeding full-blown into my mind. Thankfully, most of the aspects of myself had atrophied so badly they were mere shells as I stood there slack jawed. I’d beaten them, or denied them for so long they had power only to niggle me, but not take over. Except the poet. He had lain so quietly dormant I’d forgotten him. The Muse, freakin’ harpy that she can be, grabbed hold of the poet and slammed all my defenses down, stomped them deep into the mud that was my mind and took advantage of the alcohol haze to punish me, seemingly without end.

The poet, the shambling wreck I’d made of him, rose up and took his revenge. Lacking an education, lacking anything but a desire to speak and punish, he tormented me without mercy. Doggerel. Pages upon pages of rhyming doggerel spewed out of me onto paper. The Muse whispered in my ear, the poet shrieked at me. It got so bad I began to think in rhyme! It took a conscious effort not to speak in rhyme!

I regret dragging the innocent beard tugger into my nightmare. That she kept some of the doggerel rhymes all these years surprised me. That She is manipulating me with them does not. Reading those long ago lines produces a mild sense of the misery I wallowed in then, but stirs nothing I have lived in fear of. Mostly I laugh at my feeble efforts at rhyme. (The want-to-be poet had his fling; he’ll not get out again this turn of the Wheel.)

My mind eased of that particular burden; I raise a glass in thanks to Her, the young woman and the Muse. Now I need to figure out what I’m supposed to do next. I know damned well She didn’t set this in motion so I could sleep better!