***My name is Devin Morning. I’m writing this in an attempt to describe what happened to me, and how I found my way back, because if it happened once, can’t it happen again? And what protection or fortification do we have as people and animals and humans, besides these abilities to process pain, even joy? To save it; make something out of it worth keeping – that which, with any luck, might stave off future relapses of the stuff we’ve worked so hard to throw out.
Among the first obsessive behaviors I remember was a fixation on other people’s shoes. Eighth grade, and my eyes were coming off the ground at a forty-five degree angle, and I knew to look up and see it was my friend Tak Ishi when I saw that vicious pair of brown Reeboks.
“What up,” Tak said.
“Aye,” I replied, coming back to the world of peoples’ eyes. Tak and I were good friends. The thing was we had six out of seven classes together that year. So we ended up traversing the halls and breezeways, eventually becoming tight in an unspoken sort of way. Just then Nathanial Weber came whizzing by with his massive head and clocked me right on the shoulder. Oooouuuww. He must’ve had his middle knuckle stuck out a little. Then he faded off, weaving through the human traffic and laughing, his big fucking head seemingly going up in smoke. I clutched my right shoulder and winced a bit. It was purely my lack of retaliation that egged him on, and I knew it. He punked me ‘cause he could. But should I have to stoop to his level?
Tak barked at Nate as he disappeared down the hall, half defending my honor and half laughing with him at me, chiming in with the gesture of the punch. He was playing the neutralizer – but I knew he was with me. He was the peaceful sort, so he and I proceeded on and out of the building into the explosive California sunlight. Sunlight in California is a way of life, and everything caters to that. The asphalt schoolyard had thirty-five basketball hoops – sixteen full courts and three half courts – which, to a thirteen-year-old who had grown up in the golden state, was both archetypal and radical. It was awesome. There was nothing better than being out there, sweating and competing, talking and taking shit.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” one dude yelled as he laid one in the hoop, keeping his shooting hand up long after the fact, and even going so far as to shove his limp wrist in his opponent’s face, so he could smell it. After three minutes of this unbridled bragging, he took off down court to play some defense. It would come back – even if he was wearing those prized new Nike Air Jordans.
Tak and I made our way to the court we regularly played on with the rest of our friends – guys I grew up with – and counted ourselves in. We got picked up right away. Lunch was only half an hour so the games were intense. Tak was short and stout but bulldozed his way around while playing. You couldn’t catch him, and if you did, don’t stand in his way. It wasn’t a long distance between him and the ground, I guess, so he seemed to dribble a mile a minute, and the rest of his movements somehow reflected this phenomenon. I – on the other hand – was tall but liked to play point guard, opting, rather, to head up the flow and pass it off. But this time, I decided to try and take it inside, managing to juke the guy out guarding me! but blowing the lay-up. It was really a foul, but I was content to hustle back. Sometimes my lack of competitiveness got on people’s nerves, because they didn’t get how I was just enjoying myself either way. My teammates looked at me, frustrated. Still, I let it go.
The bell rang and game dispersed just as quickly as it had formed. Tak and I intersected pathways, almost literally bumping into each other, and headed to history class together, talking about was a dumbshit Nathanial Weber was.
And then there was always that sky, there, hanging over us like a tarp to keep out rain – and it didn’t, much. It was Los Angeles. The sun was like three feet of brand new fresh snow. No, like a blizzard! It was everywhere, on everything. Caught in the spirals of our attention; clear sheets twisting on a sumptuous breeze.
Back in fourth grade, now, and it was a minimum day. We got out at 12:30pm, but the school buses didn’t know this. My friends and I and my twin brother were usually bused to another school about ten blocks up where they had an after-school program. Well, on this day the buses didn’t come so three of my friends and I (my twin brother, Jared, was already learning to use his left brain and, turning back, I remember him jumping up and down like a baboon, flagging desperately for me to call the whole thing off) decided to walk it. We knew the way, so what the fuck?
The sun was too bright as we ambled those twelve blocks up Airdrome Ave., four ten-year-olds along the grid-gripped streets of L.A., the wide sky and those manicured lawns, with – most likely – high tops on (three years later I’d know exactly what kind). When we were not far from the destination, my three friends decided, unanimously, to venture into the 7Eleven on the corner to play the few arcade games they had wedged inside the store. This seemed like a bad idea to me. We’d come this far already, and by now I’d picked up the notion that this probably wasn’t such a good idea to begin with, a realization which, a few blocks back, had begun bursting into worry. “No! Fellas,” I said, “Let’s stay on track!”
“Just for a minute, Dev,” they moaned in unison, not really giving a shit whether I was coming in or not, and dipped inside the convenience store.
I kept going, at odds.
When I got to our after-school school, a lone, canoodling kid, the principle pulled me into her office and called my dad and put him on speakerphone. He replied benignly out of sheer shock and disbelief – the emotional incursion of it all – “That’s not good.”
And though they were mad and disappointed and worried, my parents were relieved I hadn’t gone into that 7Eleven. That part showed good judgment. Either way, they were well aware, by this time, of the disparity evident in my nature. Once they saw me kicking my feet to my own ass, as if I was playing leap-frog with the air! out in the middle of the soccer field during a game. And over and over I was doing it; it was some tension in my knees combined with an implicit urge in my buttocks, which led me to want to keep bringing my heels up to them, so I did. Over and over. This one didn’t last long, though. More prominent was when I was sitting at the kitchen table bucking my shoulders to my neck – shrugging, basically, except to the opposite effect.
What the hell is wrong with this kid?
Later, one Nathanial Weber, the bully of my eighth grade year, imitated me as I flickered my eyelids constantly. To his credit, I might not have known otherwise the extent it was depicted – how crazy I looked, like a butterfly losing its wings – but to mine, I was already aware enough to know I couldn’t stop. Fuck him, he had some cheesy flatfooted Converses on anyway.
Ninth grade my friend Tak Ishi moved away to go to some other high school I’d never heard of. Ah well. At the beginning of that year I forgot all about it and fell in love with the first girl who ever liked me, and this is where the story really begins.
More importantly, the only way we can experience love is if we feel we deserve it, so this is another stab at that.***
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