Rage Against the Meshugenah by Danny Evans

Author:Danny Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

Just as she wouldn’t let me hide from my issues, neither would Susan spoon-feed me. She forced me to make my own discoveries, although she certainly did adjust my sails in such a way that I’d float in their general direction. And by juxtaposing conversations about my career frustration and the fear I felt in response to my dad’s ire, she led me to an extraordinary personal discovery: I was afraid to live my life on my own terms. I had never allowed myself to make my own choices because I was afraid of the anger, afraid that deviation from the safe path my parents wanted me to follow would end badly for me.

In my mind I pictured a dog wearing a shock collar. Every time it attempts to leave the yard, it gets jolted. The jolts hurt, and no matter how badly the dog wants to cruise around the neighborhood and sniff the asses of the other dogs, he eventually learns to scuttle those desires so as to avoid the painful shocks. I stayed in the yard, too, as did my emotional maturity. It hurt. So to make the sting hurt less I started to pretend it wasn’t there. Always laughing, always joking, always coming up with something funny to say so as not to have to feel that sting. I stayed in my yard, cracked my jokes, stuffed my pain down my throat, and tried to forget it was there. But it was there. It was always there, festering inside the places in my mind where I dared not go. And when things got tougher than they’d ever been for me, out it came. All of it. The tears, the shame, the anger, the sadness, the what-ifs, the real izations. And for the first time in my life, I couldn’t find anything funny to say.

“What is it?” Susan asked. Whether it was because of my transparency or her perceptiveness, she could always tell when a memory came into my consciousness.

“Once when I was a teenager, a relative of one of my buddies invited three of us to work on election night,” I said. “I can’t recall what our specific duties were—something to do with transporting ballots—but I remember we were standing in a big parking lot behind a post office in Van Nuys when this big, loud helicopter flew in and landed right there in the parking lot. The pilot gets out of the chopper, loads some big boxes into the back, and then he comes over to us and starts talking. It was actually yelling, so he could be heard over the loud hum of the copter blades, just like Duvall did in Apocalypse Now. So the pilot yells, ‘Hey, I’ve got two empty seats on the copter if any of you guys want to go.’ And I remember that my first thought—even before I considered how incredible it would be to fly in a helicopter—was that I absolutely couldn’t do it. There was just no way.”

“I think I could have predicted that,” Susan said.

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