America's Favorite Pastime

 

One of the greatest ways of supporting isolationism is by idolizing it.

 

How does an individual cope with the stress of being taken out of one environment and put into a new, completely different one? For me, it wasn’t too difficult: I developed an overactive imagination that became my reality.

The move from living with my mother to moving in with my grandparents could have been entitled “A Tale of Two Cities” in which there were very few comparisons between the two. From an unstructured environment where I could play out late and the parties never seemed to stop, to an environment bereft of any emotional expression; unless they were in the forms of outbursts by my grandmother or various racist rans by my grandfather (we lived in a small town where any non-white family was scared away by waking up to burning crosses in their yards in the middle of the night). Of the two, I attached myself to the emotional outbursts and left the racism to my grandfather.

It was there that I also discovered two things: Baseball and prescription medications.

My grandfather, overbearing as he was, wanted one thing out of me: To be a Major League baseball player. And I have to admit, I was good at an early age. After tournaments, my grandfather used to tell me that different Major League scouts were in the bleachers taking notes of me (I really doubt this as the bleachers held twelve people at most and I always recognized everyone there). When I was going through a rough patch with hitting or fielding, he would always be there to coach me through it.

My grandmother, on the other hand, was very caring and always had stories to share about almost anything one can imagine. And of course she did, she had been a high school English teacher! But something else lurked within her at all times: The dozens of prescribed medications she took every day. She came from a family where her father left when she was very young and she had to go a Catholic school as a young girl. She told me at various times how the nuns were really mean to her and picked on her a lot. She also mentioned how those interactions alienated her from her sexual desires and so when she and my grandfather would have sex (way before I was born), she would cry the entire time.

The funny thing about all of this is that, apart from the many medications she took, I am not sure how much of it is accurate. As the years went on, I realized that my family was one lie after another. So trying to decipher fiction from fact became I monumental task that I eventually gave up on.

Some of the things I do remember, apart from spending time with my grandfather playing baseball is fairly far-ranging. I was always smaller than everyone else while in school. And, even though I didn’t know it at the time, the insecurities I was developing made me a target for those that loved bullying. I had only a couple of friends at any given time until around the age of 16 (but that’s a different story!), so I was mostly isolated. And what do most people do when they are isolated? We go into a pretend world where I fed that already overactive imagination of mine.

In school, it was difficult paying attention because I wanted to be anywhere but there (except for gym class). So when a teacher would call on me to read, I had no idea where we were in the story, nor could I answer a question they had of me because I didn’t know what the question was.

It was also at this time that I developed a love of all things “War”. I loved war movies and soldiering and toys from cartoons that were always in war against each other. I don’t really feel like I was too different from other boys in this fashion. But my desires didn’t just fixate on war. I wanted to see pain and blood and suffering. It was until years later that I discovered that my “love” for war had more to do with me reconciling the war that was taking place in my inner life at that time.

Transitions being what they are, what happened next would be something that altered the course of my life.