From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself

I had just left my parents’ house in Portmore, a suburb outside Kingston, for my own apartment in the city: a one-bedroom studio, barely 600 square feet, with yellow shag carpeting, a tiny terrace enclosed in jail bars, a bedroom looking out on somebody else’s bedroom and a ceiling I could reach. I locked myself away from the neighbors with two deadbolts.

At 28 years old, seven years out of college, I was so convinced that my voice outed me as a fag that I had stopped speaking to people I didn’t know. The silence left a mark, threw my whole body into a slouch, with a concave chest, as if trying to absorb impact. I’d spent seven years in an all-boys school: 2,000 adolescents in the same khaki uniforms striking hunting poses, stalking lunchrooms, classrooms, changing rooms, looking for boys who didn’t fit in. I bought myself protection by cursing, locking my lisp behind gritted teeth, folding away my limp wrist and drawing 36-double-D girls for art class. I took a copy of Penthouse to school to score cool points, but the other boys called me “batty boy” anyway — every day, five days a week. To save my older, cooler brother, I pretended we weren’t related. At home, I lost myself in Dickens’s London, Huck Finn’s Mississippi River or Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. One day after school, instead of going home, I walked for miles, all the way down to Kingston Harbor. I stopped right at the edge of the dock, thinking next time I would just keep walking.

The University of the West Indies was a door: wide open. I found friends who seemed to have been waiting all summer for me to show up. I walked into the library with a back issue of Spin, and somebody asked if that was the one with Tom Waits. I’d known people who were geeky, sarcastic, well versed in the Smiths and “The Wrath of Khan,” but they had never been my friends before. Now I was dragged into word wars because one friend said “Time Bandits” was the greatest movie ever, when everybody knew it was “Life of Brian.” There were cheap liquor, potato chips, ironic quips, mix tapes. But when college ended, I returned home, got a job in advertising and shut myself down again. The people I had left behind were waiting for me when I got back.

The entrance to my cubicle was blocked by a boss with curious eyebrows who asked why all my magazines showed men on the covers, what GQ meant, where was Playboy? Every man in the office had a woman on the side, whether he was married or not, and even monogamous men were considered gay. Memories of childhood returned as nightmares: I was a kid again, frightened by school, praying to God every night, please let me wake up in another body. One that walked and talked right. That did not play house with a boy in the neighborhood that time when he was 8 and I was 9 and ruin him and myself.

One day I bought “Steppenwolf,” by Hermann Hesse, in a bookstore. Early in the book, an irrefutable argument for suicide jumped out and grabbed me by the neck: the scene in which the protagonist, having given himself his own expiration date, realizes that he can put up with anything, tolerate everything, suffer through all things because he knows when he’s going to check out. I hadn’t thought about killing myself since I was 16. But now there were nights when I woke up crying, or found myself out on the jail-terrace sunk so low into sadness that I had no memory of how I got there. I listened over and over again to lyrics from the song “I Found a Reason,” by the Velvet Underground: “I do believe/If you don’t like things you leave.” I cried for a sorrow that I did not know I had.

I was 28 years old, and I’d reached the end of myself. Electric words, “end of yourself” — I first heard them during a sermon in a Kingston church. The preacher was talking about when you reached the limits of your own wisdom and the only person left with any answers was God. A new friend in the office, who went to school in Canada and came in as my assistant, read my sarcasm as a defense tactic, though he didn’t know the reason, and said, “You should come to church this Sunday.” By then I was having panic attacks. I went to a doctor and asked, “Am I normal?” He said normal was a scale, with the left being normal and the right being abnormal, and I was somewhere on the left side of the middle. Then he gave me Xanax and asked if I wanted Prozac. Instead I got saved.