Author’s Pick: Meaning Beneath the Words

When I was 26 years old, I decided to enroll in college. It had been just about a decade since I had been in an academic setting, and the Scientology school I went to, my college advisor would inform me, was indeed fake. So, when I went to college to study English, I was going into it with a 7th-grade education, as far as the college was concerned. Even though I had gotten a high school “degree” from some shady Scientology entity on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, it was not valid. I had to get my GED ASAP, which I did a few days later.

Unlike my attitude back in my school days, as an adult, I loved school. And a particular poetry class I took was one of those classes that made me fall in love with academia. In this class, I had to write three poems, focusing on prose, rhythm, and form. One poem, “Jealousy’s Sonnet,” was a free-form sonnet, while the other two were just free-form poems: “Twilight” and “Hero.” The latter of the two has a story behind it that almost sounds unbelievable, one my parents told me much later in my life. In fact, my mother cried reading “Hero” because it brought that terrifying night back to life for her.

I've always been a deep sleeper, and this story will go beyond attesting to that. At the time, I was four years old, living in Fort Lauderdale, FL, with my folks. My grandmother, my ma's ma, lived in Sacramento. So, for the first time ever, our small family flew across the country to visit my Nana.

One night, in the spare bedroom of my grandmother’s first-floor two-bedroom apartment, I had fallen asleep under the window right up against the wall. Just outside of that window was a large tree. Seeing that I was fast asleep, my Pops curled up next to me, “a protective embrace from a warrior father,” as I wrote in "Hero." Ma was on the bed, fast asleep. No one knew that shit was about to smash fan. Or tree, to put it literally.

Down the road, a 16-year-old girl was driving home in her father’s car after spending time with friends. She wasn't drunk or high or anything like that. But just down the street from my grandmother's apartment building, the girl dozed off, ultimately falling asleep behind the wheel. When the car went off the road, it smashed right into the spare bedroom in which we all slept, except it didn’t because the tree outside the window cushioned the crash.

Had that tree not been there, I would not be writing this to you now. My father and, quite possibly, my mother would also likely be deceased. The loud smash woke up the entire neighborhood. Ambulances, police, and fire trucks all came pummeling onto the scene. The girl was not injured, but her father was super pissed that she had totaled his car.  The entire block was crowded with curious neighbors and onlookers. The loud accident had woken the entire neighborhood up. EVERYONE. Well, everyone but me. Even though a car had crashed into a tree just feet from my head, I snoozed through the crash AND the commotion that followed. And that’s what the poem “Hero” is about.

I’m not sure what year we started this project, but judging that “Quagmire” was written in 2018, my guess is that it was a long time ago. The premise of the project was a coffee table book titled “Endangered Species,” a book that would showcase Brandon Hurley’s Endangered Species Series. The way we were going to do it was like this: I’d write poems to Brandon’s existing paintings, and then he’d paint pieces that correlated to my poems. The project lingered too long, and we ended up scrapping it.

Nevertheless, I would end up reusing at least three of these poems for “character.” The first was a poem that I wrote, where Brandon would paint the subject of what I was writing. The poem “Light Chaser” was about my now ex-wife and talented photographer, Camila Pereira. So, Brandon painted Milla in correlation to what I wrote, a painting titled “Renaissance Woman.” The poem “Quagmire” was a poem inspired by Brandon’s “Freight” painting. The final poem, “Ghosts,” was a poem I wrote while stuck in the Austin airport, way back in 2015, during The Court Tour. Brandon would paint “The Wordsmith” to accompany this poem.

Although I have been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since I was 16, all of those trips—I’ve honestly lost count as to how many there are—were always 51/50s. A 51/50 is a 72-hour hold, but I never stayed that long, for I was always able to talk my way out of there. These holds aren’t too helpful for the patient, as these hospitals are usually understaffed and overcrowded. So, they drug you up, give you a daybed for a night, and send you on your way, usually looped the fuck out and quite possibly worse than you arrived. However, a few years ago, I was put on a 52/50 ( a two-week hold), which actually ended up saving my life. It’s also where these last five featured pieces were written.

My two-week stay at UCSF Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital was a game-changer. After nearly two decades of diagnosis after diagnosis, medication after medication, the folks at Langley Porter finally and correctly diagnosed me, which got me on the right medication, a medication that finally, after all those years, worked for me.

During my time in Langley Porter, I met many eccentric, genius, beautiful, and mentally anguished characters. Two of them, my good friends Mae and Cory, are the subjects of both “Mae Day” and “Cory’s Art Club.” One of my least favorite things about being in psychiatric inpatient settings is the coffee, which inspired the piece “Decaf Coffee.” During downtime (one actually stays quite busy in psychiatric hospitals, if they want to get better and, more importantly, get the fuck out of there), I scribbled down the poem “Boredom.” Finally, and as a full narrative of the experience, on my last day in Langley Porter, I wrote “On the Outside.”