The one time I vividly remember considering suicide was a summer day in 1984, the kind of hot, drawn-out summer day particular to the suburban East Coast where the mall and shopping plaza are the primary social hub for teenagers not old enough to drive. You go buy Nikes, go the arcade, buy records from The Wiz and take your ass right back in the house before you melt.
My family had just moved back, months earlier, to the town I'd grown up in my whole life after a three-year stint in Florida where my extended family had moved.
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| A Florida road I know well |
My three years in Florida covered 7th - 9th grade in a town that, I soon found, rivaled any Deep South hotbed of racial hatred I'd ever read of. God-fearing adults called you 'nigger' as blithely as pointing out a type of plant ("Cactus, ficus...ni-gguh...") - even in church.
Kids you played with one day were no longer able to talk to you the next and any falling-out between us became racially-charged explosions with their tearful parents banging on our door, screaming for the reparations expected. There were few, and I mean few, bright spots. I did have my family, the family pool and some genuine friends who, years later, I found, friended and personally thanked on Facebook for going beyond the pack-mentality of the time. It was intense.
By the time I was back East from Florida in December 1983, I was starting freshman year in the middle of a school year. The kids at my high school were kids I'd grown up with since elementary school but crucial adolescent years had already passed and they thought I'd changed. My polo shirts and pants, de rigeur in the Florida heat, were 'preppy'; I didn't talk the same anymore...'so proper! is that gay?'.. I didn't know the music (no Black radio station for three years) and it was enough social displacement to keep me out of the loop and at polite arms-length, while not mistreated, for the rest of 9th grade. It was hurtful, especially since I felt like a virtual Freedom Rider after enduring some of the most hardcore racial backwardness they couldn't fathom. Being the only Black kid (besides my brother, who everyone thought was Mexican) for miles wasn't even a tangible concept if you hadn't lived it.
Summer '84, 10th grade is less than a month away and I gained weight. My best friend at the time came out to me one afternoon on his family's trip I'd been invited to - dramatically so and in a canoe on some river in Virginia (I didn't care so long as it made him happy). We hadn't made it to the shore before he flipped out at his own candor while ensuring his status of a non-grata tool that same day. Came home and my Mom's tthen-boyfriend had been over. He'd brought his two teenagers and their teenage cousin over to our house for the day. I walked into my bedroom to this trio reciting, line-for-line, entries from my journals that I kept in a drawer and my 9-year old brother had been no match for in keeping out of their hands. Racism and weight issues, how funny! Between flipping out on my brother and then almost ninja-stomping my uninvited nosy guests, I'd fucking had it. Not long after, my uncle moved in with my aunt and three cousins. I was glad they were there but privacy was nil and the alpha-male power play between my uncle and I played out in scenes that exhausted the whole house.
And so, one day, with a new school year right around the corner and a now-forgotten public slight that was the final straw, I went to my room and thought if this was all there was to look forward to then why not just jump out the fucking window, literally, and end it, life, for real-for-real? I was 14 years old and had been called nigger so many times in the States and overseas that I literally had lost count. I was 'too black' for the South, 'too white' for the East, 'too black' for Europe and about to go back to school even heavier, if that was possible, with jeans bought from the same store where men twice my age bought their pants ....and those men were Washington Redskins. I was a loving person who, aside from my family, couldn't get it back. Life seemed a series of betrayals. Add to that the attempts of sexual abuse in Europe and in a local house five miles from the very window I was now standing at that I'd kept completely to myself since I was 9 years old; it was one big funnel cloud of: what is wrong with this picture and what is the point of it?
My next thought was that the window was only three stories off of the ground- not enough height to really die and then there was the pesky barbed wire fence that separated our complex from the high rise apartments next to us. With my luck I'd land on the fence, an impaled and bloody mess instead of a martyred dead teen on the grass. I over-thought the whole thing and tried to weigh less painful options until, out of nowhere, a voice just came in and it wasn't the eloquent, graceful one I'd have assumed would appear in this instance. This voice was concerned and halting but it was also profane and comedic in a way that was right up my alley..
This voice, disguised as a blend of Richard Pryor and perhaps some ancestral spiritual blend, basically said, "You're thinking of jumping out of a got-damned window for who?! It isn't completely clear to you that you're never going to be able to please everybody, right? Right. And you'd kill you for them? What kind of shit is that? So stop trying. Be yourself, or as much as yourself as you know how to be right now, and if that ain't good enough then fuck 'em! This is bullshit." And that was the end of that. I could no longer imagine martyring myself over things that, if I was true to myself, could be vanquished, dismissed or settled as each one presented itself. That became my drive: to conquer and to not ever feel the despairing lack of what I felt was self-worth that made me actually envision ending my own life.
I didn't magically see the future but I did know that worst-case scenario, if I had no one other than my loved ones, I still had myself and I liked myself enough that I could more than hang. It took three more years to be able to buy my pants off the rack in a standard size and four more years to truly reconcile and square away the abuse I'd harbored. Still, I did enjoy the rest of high school and started earning money as an actor at 15 because I loved it and it forced me to handle criticism (or not) and let me transfer my empathy/angst in a way that as I became more disciplined was magic expression even when it hurt. I challenged myself and was the humorous, assertive guy who took no flack whatsoever. Sometimes too assertive but love, as an adult, tempered that and I haven't flipped a bar table in at least 18 years (this month!).
Hurts happens and they accumulate. Suicide, being such a wholly individual act by definition, is a subject that almost is too unwieldly to get a handle on. If you've known someone who's taken their life it's a perplexing, sorrowful process; just thinking what was it that happened, was felt/ thought that was so bleak, so convincingly unceasing that there seemed no other way than to stop it all together? Perhaps your heart goes out to them or you're angry at not being given a chance to help, to tackle them if you had to, but the answer is gone and for survivors it is a lonely, cruel specter.
When I was 35 and held my spouse's funeral-the day of- I went to make some coffee before preparing to go to the funeral home in Glendale and had a full out anxiety attack. My mother was here and I remember saying that how was it possible that I wasn't going to die myself the minute I had to step out and greet guests or prep the cathedral? In later days and months I remember wishing, in pointless and horrified past tense, that instead of dying in my arms we'd, say, been in an instant car crash... because at least we'd have gone together, unified in an instant, with no estates to settle, an identity and sense of joy to reconstruct or distraught couples-friends who fled because death is worse than divorce when you've vacationed and shared holidays together.
Suicide wasn't a thought to me then because I'd witnessed God's merciful collection of spirit and by seeing it knew that there was a bigger picture beyond any present understanding and that I'd need to be strong. It wasn't a comedic voice this time that warned me, it was one of my brothers who said, "Take care of yourself. Because if you don't, then it's another another tragedy."
Loss, whatever its form, is hard enough and if you follow it with your own person, then it is horribly compounded. I don't know the answer to a stranger's despair but I do know that we are more resilient, strong and worthy than we know and in a world of billions of human beings, there is someone-even if a stranger saw you - as well as God, who will care, can care, does care- who will hold you to earth if you let them. When the voice doesn't come, even your own, please do not despair. For those in pain, my words are not meant to be your words but you didn't go through life to take yourself out of the game. I know that as sure as trouble don't last always. It can't.
P.S. Rest in peace, Don Cornelius. Never upstaged and always fly, you can never know how truly revolutionary and incredible "Soul Train" was for decades. An hour a week that changed the world. Godspeed.
