In the aftermath of the first instance of abuse, I truly hadn’t perceived any change in myself or my behavior. From my eyes, there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, since I was already used to being abused by Michael N. and the others in non-sexual ways. If that was their ultimate goal - to commit acts of sexual abuse - then they certainly knew how to tear someone down to a point where they’d allow it and not even think about it as “wrong.”
One of the events that spurred me on to start writing all of this out was a text message I’d gotten from my mother, who in turn got it from my father, who’d been sent a video from my younger brother; it was a clip of the news back in El Paso, just a brief mention by the newscaster on a quiet Sunday night broadcast, detailing an armed robbery at a Circle K in Northeast El Paso. Not having any connection to that part of town, I was confused as to why this was noteworthy, until the feed changed from the camera to a map and chyron with the suspect’s mugshot. It was Michael N., weathered by a hard-knock life, ears stretched to his shoulders, and tattoos scrawled on his face like he’d passed out at the wrong frat party.
Something that my mother always noticed when Michael N. and I were spending time together was that we were similar, but on such different trajectories. She always chided Michael N. for not taking school seriously or doing things to compromise his academic success, remarking that he was too smart to be so stupid. In private, she’d confide in me that she was worried about him, and that she loved him like a son and wanted to see him succeed alongside me. Looking back, there was definitely some truth to that observation of hers; we were in the same grade, but two years apart in age. Michael N. had been held back at one point, but he was always able to answer questions in class and got high marks when he did his work.
There was a definite similarity in that regard, as I was starting to lose my academic edge. Unsurprisingly, as the abuse I received started to magnify, my schoolwork began to slip. And my outbursts in response were increasingly more volatile, because I knew I was better than that, but I just couldn’t succeed like I had known I could. At the time, it just seemed like an invisible force that I kept running up against, and I didn’t know what it was.
My parents saw it as laziness. Suddenly, I wasn’t working hard enough, I wasn’t focused enough, I was half-asking everything in front of me, and I wasn’t going to be able to do anything in life with my attitude.
That was a whole different kind of abuse, but this isn’t that story.
But the threads overlap, and it’s a part of this story’s tapestry. Woven in between the fibers of manipulation, cruelty, naïveté, adolescence, fear, and pain, there’s this thread of frustration. Nowadays, it’s easy to see why I started to struggle; I was undiagnosed with ADHD and depression, I was doing less and less at school, and I was being abused pretty constantly by my only friends. Since I was so used to living up to these sky-high expectations, though, I pushed as far against, up, and through those obstacles as possible.
My grades sometimes dropped, assignments were done either on the due date or late, and the quality wasn’t perfect, but I stayed at or near the top of my classes. None of my teachers had any reason to suspect anything was wrong. My success was turning into my downfall, because the performance I put on every day was convincing enough.
So that was my experience: gifted kid pushed beyond the breaking point and then some, and staying together long enough to meet it. From what I saw and can remember, Michael N. had hit the breaking point a long time ago. He was, funnily enough, also the third of four kids, but he had older brothers instead of sisters, and they were closer in age to him. Unlike him and my brother, I’d barely met his siblings. I barely ever entered his world, really, and I think he preferred it that way.
Their family lived a few streets down, easily within walking distance, but their lives were totally different than my family’s. From the few times I visited, I remember the garage had been turned into a second living room, one with more ventilation for his grandmother’s cigarettes. The rest of the house was dim, a far cry from my upper-middle class renovation project my parents had been tinkering with since I was born. His grandparents owned the house, and they were about the same age as my own parents, but looked so much older; they really looked like grandparents.
Michael N. never knew his mother, only that she’d left his father shortly after giving birth to Michael N. and was living in New Mexico. His father was loving but had some bad habits, the kind for which America loves to incarcerate. For all the years I knew Michael N., I actually never once met his father. And since his grandfather was chronically ill, his older brother ended up acting more like a parent. From what I recall, he did his best to raise his two younger siblings and care for his grandparents, all while getting through high school. I hope he did okay for himself.
The one time Michael N. and I tried flipping the script and planned a sleepover at his house, ini ended in disaster. I’d never been past the garage at that point, and so I was startled in a deeply sheltered way once we got to his bedroom, which he shared with his younger brother. His younger brother was a Tasmanian Devil of a child; definitely hyperactive and in an environment that had been already worn down by the forces of a post-Reaganomics society, meaning he was pretty much left to his own devices.
Those devices included screaming, running in and out of the room while I was getting my ass handed to me playing Super Smash Bros. Melee, and ultimately biting my arm hard enough to draw a little blood. Before sending me out from my house, my mom told me to call her if I wanted to leave, and I told her I would, but that I’d probably end up staying the night. After the bite, I called her and she picked me up around 9:30. It had been three hours.
When I told my mom about what happened at Michael N.’s house, she tsk tsk’d and remarked it was so sad what happened to them, and that I should always be grateful for how hard she and my father worked.
In time, I’d come to learn how insidious that belief is. That looking down on others for their homes, their situations, and their everyday choices is an insanely prejudicial thing to do, and it erases the realities of the forces that shaped their lives. My father was a lawyer, whose college was paid for by the G.I. Bill, an impressive coup as a first-generation American. My mother was a self-made woman, having put herself through undergrad and dental school in the 80s in Houston, partially during her first marriage. Neither of them had silver spoons in their mouths, but they both had full homes, parents with continued employment (military, for both), and relatively stable family lives. Now, that isn’t to say that there weren’t problems behind those facts, since there undoubtedly were. In some of the first conversations with my mother after gathering some knowledge about mental health, she shared with me that she struggled with self-harm when she was my age, and that she sought counseling that helped her through that. That her parents were neglectful, and that she was endlessly tormented by her younger brother.
Maybe I’m explaining all of this for their benefit, because I want them to know that those struggles were struggles. But Michael N.’s family certainly had a worse hand dealt to them. Michael N.’s father was in and out of jail, his brother was stressed far beyond what any teenager should be asked to do. His grandparents were exhausted and in no position to raise more children. Employment was unstable, money was tight, and they were scraping by as best they could. In a lot of situations, that’s a situation rife with potential for abuse. It’s no guarantee, but it’s certainly possible; studies have shown that socioeconomically-disadvantaged families experience more abuse than others. But I suppose one of the big “truths” of my story is that abuse can be and is everywhere. The difference between us is that I was only being abused by people, Michael N. had been failed by and abused by society.
—
I can’t say for sure if Michael N. was ever abused in his home by his family or any of his friends. It’s possible, for sure, and assuming that the pain I suffered came from the transitive hand of another makes swallowing it down easier. But we both experienced pain, that I know for certain.
Looking back at my mother’s observation from all those years ago, I can’t help but think that there were a lot of similarities between the two of us. Both of us weren’t quite cut out to succeed, either from internal or external pressures. Our families were volatile in different ways, but volatile nonetheless. And, in time, we had both been broken down to shed parts of ourselves.
I was the atom stuck in the pressure chamber, whose nucleus was exposed to one, two, 10, 100, 1000 extra atmospheres, and stuck in the center of the Sun. My experiment was that of fission, getting me to break apart and explode into various subatomic particulate, left to reform new compounds under constant observation.
Michael N. had been the atom left to decay, forged in ore that was deposited billions of years ago by meteors, left to nourish and be nourished by the Earth, and dug up near the end of geologic time and worn down under conditions it wasn’t meant to endure. Its fracture wasn’t nearly as dramatic or as noteworthy, but it was the end of something, regardless. The compounds he touched today are as they are because of that process.
Both our atoms had reach their half-life, and as such, shot radiation off in every which way. Michael N. irradiated me and turned me into a toxic piece of waste, something to be shipped off and buried in the far desert. And I’d blown apart and cast off painful pieces of material in every direction, causing indiscriminate harm to most everyone around me, which would fester until I was no longer radioactive, and clean up could begin.