Normal Sucks by Jonathan Mooney

Author:Jonathan Mooney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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Jake was my best friend in high school. He was a year older than me and drove a Chevy Malibu that had a different color hood from the rest of the car. People made fun of it and him. Jake lived in what my girlfriend and her cheerleading friends called the poor part of town, in a 1960s ranch house with an aboveground pool, which I thought was rad but that others, who had actual pools in the ground, did not. His father was a drunk: nice in the morning, vicious in the afternoon, unconscious at night. We used to skim off the bottles he thought he’d finished. Jake’s left foot was bent from birth and twisted, yet he managed to play soccer in what I’m sure was considerable pain that he hid. Jake had shitty teeth like mine because his parents couldn’t afford braces or the dentist.

As a kid, Jake had been told he was stupid. Jake worked harder than anyone I knew, including me. We joked that neither of us would live past thirty. We were both wrong. On June 14, 2013, Jake died of cirrhosis of the liver when he was thirty-eight.

So many of the not-normal I have known in my life were filled with, and consumed by, anger. Anger at what? Themselves, of course. The logic of difference as deficiency and pathology turns righteous outrage inward. The logical consequence of being told that you are a problem is to see yourself as the problem to be solved, if necessary, through self-destruction. I know my life could have ended like Jake’s.

But it did not. While there are many reasons for this, one of them is that I was lucky enough to have multiple people in my life who didn’t tell me not to be angry, but told me who and what I should be angry at and what I should do about it. One of these people was named Father Young. I met him at the beginning of my second semester at LMU, when I attended an information session at the English department to help figure out my major. I was at a fork in the road in my education at that time. The previous semester I had mostly hidden my learning differences and tried to just work harder, which wasn’t successful. There was one English class, however, where I had managed to have one of the highest grades in the class, only to discover that the final was a handwritten timed essay that would make up over 60 percent of our final grade. I was supposed to be accommodated with the use of a computer but wasn’t, so, big surprise, I failed. I was so angry at myself, but also at the fact that a whole year of work was negated by a bullshit test. I did not know what to do with this anger. I figured, what was the point—I was still the dumb kid who was at LMU to major in soccer anyway.

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