A Mad Box of Rain: A Mad Box of Rain

A Mad Box of Rain

(One man’s journey towards self-enlightenment)

by Brian J. Quattlebaum

Cover illustration by Murphy Shaw

Opinion

(so as to spark conversation)

There are, in my opinion, three types of people:  

First, there are those that see a worm frying on the hot sidewalk and rescue it by gently picking it up and placing it onto the lawn in a shady area close by.

Second, there are those that see the worm, think about rescuing it, and decide maybe it’s better not to rescue it, so they leave it to chance. Of course, the worm fry’s 99.9% of the time, unless the first type of person happens upon them.

Lastly, there are those people that get a delightful and insidious joy out of leaving the worm on the hot, scorching sidewalk. They might even pause to watch. I’ve witnessed them doing so; me unable to intervene without looking completely foolish and being bullied.

I, the author of this novel, will always rescue that worm. As passively and gently as I can. Unfortunately, because of the madness of my nature, I will also use that same worm as bait for fishing. It’s human nature. It’s my nature.

Preface

This is an honest recounting of my childhood and teenage years. It covers sensitive subjects such as childhood sexual, physical, emotional, mental, institutional, and substance abuse. It is told in my Southern American internal dark humor voice that has helped me get through these things. Hopefully my story will help you as well.

Also, instead of saying I shit you not in my most Southern accent before a lot of the following stories, I’m just going to say it now so that you’ll l never have to see that cliche phrase again in this book. Just know, it’s a given. In my most Southern and sincere voice, I say to the reader: I shit you not.

Back ‘round

I always heard that the pen is mightier than the sword. I’ve also heard that truth is stranger than fiction.  I personally believe both are right, and that these sayings are an encouragement to justify life and our reason for being here. It’s a creative exercise.

If there is a God out there, I think maybe this life we experience is a creative playground, to experiment with creative choices outside of the cosmological constant. A giant aquarium to see what we can create, for the benefit of life. That petri dish that God has labeled life.

Please, let’s try not to muck this up any more than we already have. I don’t want the mad scientist to get upset and throw the petri dish away into the trash bin.

Unfortunately, most of this story is reality and not creation of mind, it is the truth and not a figment of imagination. However, if there is a God, is not all we do but part of a creational experiment? Is not all of this but a figment of our imagination?

Maybe we are all God’s ant farm? Maybe we are all God’s art form?

Please, listen to my story and learn what you can from it. I tried to create art from the tools given to me at the time. I’m not a judge, so hopefully God thinks that I did so as well.

Part 1

My Lost Childhood

Chapter 1

Al-Anon

November 1983

I had just turned seven when I went to my first Al-Anon meeting in Memphis, Tennessee. Most kids spent their nights and weekends playing games and then headed off to early bedtime. Instead, my parents drug me to group therapy sessions for loved ones of alcoholics. It wasn’t really their fault in my opinion; it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. It was madness. It just happened.

At the time, my thirteen-year-old brother (my only sibling), who was six years older than me, was extremely creative and got in trouble a lot.

For instance, one afternoon a month prior, while my parents and I were gone, he had decided it was a grand idea to steal a whole bottle of vodka from a neighborhood girlfriend’s parents’ house. He and the girlfriend then decided to drink the entire bottle on the roof of the girl’s house, in the middle of the day; getting so drunk that he eventually fell off the roof.

Luckily, it was a one-story house, and he landed on the soft grass and was ok; but the girl’s parents were not pleased to find a passed out drunk thirteen-year-old boy on their front lawn. Especially when they found out he stole and drank an entire bottle of their vodka with their daughter.

My poor parents and I, God bless us, came home shortly after to find some very pissed off neighbors wanting nothing more than to give this drunk dumbass boy back to us. They were confused and astounded; we were confused and astounded.

I mostly remember my parents shoveling coffee into him in the downstairs half-bath while he profusely puked into his newly found porcelain god; that cold and brutal god, he, and many others, including myself, have come to know oh so well.

Fast forward one month, and my brother, still thirteen, was in his first short-term drug treatment center called Lakewood in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was having to attend Al-anon meetings. My parents weren’t rich, they were middle class at best, but they had good health insurance.

My mom was a Certified Pediatric Nurse who worked at a large children’s medical center in downtown Memphis, mainly post-ICU and graveyard shifts. She’s made a difference in countless children’s lives. No matter their background or monetary status.

My father worked for a computer processing giant (one of the first). He liked math, had a master’s degree in computer science, and he was good at programming Basic. He is a good man but was as stubborn as a bull at the time.

We (my father, mother, brother, and I) had moved all the way across the States from Los Angeles to Memphis in 1977 due to my father taking a work transfer. We had close family in Arkansas, and my parents were originally from Little Rock, which is only a few hours west of Memphis.  I guess they were homesick. I was eighteen months old at the time of the move and didn’t have much of a say on the matter.

Both of my parents worked hard and had a profound impact on my ability and willingness to achieve an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. They were good Southern Christian parents just trying to raise their two boys the best they could.

My parents couldn’t really understand why this madness with my brother was happening to them. They tried their best to be good parents. I must believe that the community tried its best.

So, here I sat at seven years old in 1983 at an Al-anon meeting held inside some random church in Memphis with a bunch of strangers. My parents and I were gathered with about twenty other folks in a large circle of metal folding chairs, hearing the Serenity Prayer for the first time, and very confused about what the hell was going on.

Now, for those that don’t know, the Serenity Prayer is a mantra popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous and other support groups. The short and simple version says: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I didn’t know it at the time, but that mantra would become a recurring theme in my life; whether I liked it or not. I still get nauseous every time I see that prayer hanging on a wall.

If I was lucky on those nights at various support group meetings, the groups would be split up between siblings and parents. I was rarely that lucky. I usually had to sit with the adults and hear their stories.

This would be the first time I thought about telling my terrible secret to anyone but was too scared to do so. I wish I had; my life may have ended up being a little easier for me. I hid my secret from everyone for another nine years.

My secret was that by the age of six, I had already been, and continued to be for two more years, sexually and physically abused by a male friend of the family. It was a regular occurrence. I know that seems physically young; but yes, not to overshare, I was already getting erections and dry orgasms by the age of five.

I remember feeling such shame at the time of the abuse. Not only because of the powerlessness I felt over what was happening, but also the pure physical enjoyment I felt while it was happening at such a young and naïve age.

It started off by us perusing male gay magazines that he had with him when nobody else was around. Quickly it advanced to giving and receiving fellatio and anal intercourse.

My abuser was a teenager whom I was terribly frightened of. He had already given me a black eye and a sprained wrist. He was easily three times my size.

In my six-year-old head, I was honestly stuck and felt I had no support, even though I really did. Again, not to be redundant, but I was six.

I would not share my secret with anyone and continued to suffer in silence instead while going to various support group sessions for dependents, most of the time run by private institutions, until it was my turn to be labeled the bad kid.

I lived at the time in a small town thirty minutes east of Memphis, called Collierville, Tennessee. Collierville is a small town in Western Tennessee that was originally an 1800’s train depot station consumed by the Civil War. The railroad that runs through the center of town was contested by both sides.

My brother and I were very bored in a small town and tended to get into trouble a lot. Our childhood path was laid out before us: try to creatively stay busy, but constantly end up bored. Maybe God wanted us to be bored, so we could be more creative?

Collierville in the early 1980’s had an old-fashioned town square, annual fair on said square in May in a small park smack dab in the middle of it (where one could buy goldfish in a bag, switchblade combs, and also ride in a hot air balloon tied to a rope), and a lot of small boutique-style shops surrounding the square.

I remember that next to the soda fountain shop on the square was an army surplus store, where you could buy actual hand grenades and mortars. I never had the gumption, nor willingness, to try and buy anything from that store. However, it was fun to go in and browse.

Collierville also had a separate elementary, middle, and high school. There were around 7,000 people living in Collierville at that time and nothing at all for the kids to do but afterschool sports and church activities. We didn’t even have a bowling alley.

There was briefly a movie theater in our small town, but it didn’t survive. The theater’s main patrons were all local teens, mainly on Friday and Saturday night, bored out of their minds. I do remember seeing the film The Lost Boys when it first came out in 1987 at the age of eleven. I accidentally spilt a soda on a classmate sitting next to me. I didn’t mean to, but in hindsight he deserved it. Most of the time we Colliervillian’s wanted to go to a better movie theater in the nearby city of Memphis.

I’ll try to keep this brief, but when I said earlier that we were Southern Christian, I mean we were part of a very small church’s congregation in Collierville called Greenhill’s Baptist in the early 1980’s. Greenhill’s had a total congregation of around 100 people. Most of the Collierville residents went to the larger First Baptist across town instead.

My dad was in the church choir, as so was I, until I started to hit puberty. My family and I  were regular church goers and, when we weren’t in family therapy or Al-anon meetings, we went to church twice on Sundays and then to mid-week Bible school every Wednesday night.

I do remember being eight and walking down the aisle of Greenhill’s Baptist while the preacher asked if anyone wanted to come forward to get saved. I stood up, tears streaming down my face, and said yes, preacher I want to be saved! while walking down the center aisle. My mom, sitting beside me at the pew, was frozen in shock and could do nothing more than watch as I rambled down the middle of the congregational pews.

Once I reached the preacher’s pulpit, I whispered to him, tears streaming down my face, that I was tired of feeling horrible and being bullied by neighborhood kids. I didn’t mention my secret. He nodded sullenly and asked me to go back, sit down, and to see him after the service. He never baptized me.

Instead, he gave me a 100-page activity workbook after the service, which would take six months to a year to complete with my parents’ help. Only then would he save me. I didn’t have time for all that.  I got halfway through the booklet and quit. I later got sprinkled with water in the face (Methodist don’t like to dunk people in water for some reason) at the neighboring Collierville United Methodist Church when I was twelve.

My fondest memory of Greenhill’s Baptist was when my two Bible study teachers, who were both in the Vietnam War, decided one Wednesday night to describe to me, and other kids in our Bible class, how someone can stay alive for several days with an open gut wound while holding their stomach entrails in their hands. Why this was their go-to story to tell a group of kids in church about the Vietnam War, I’m not sure I’ll ever understand.

When I was ten in Collierville, I was so bored out of my mind that I started taking gymnastic lessons at a local store that was in the same small shopping center as the movie theater. I could bicycle, or skateboard (depending on my mood), to that shopping center from my house. It was less than a mile away. I was already tall and gangly at that age, so gymnastics was not very easy for me. The only thing I could do semi-well was a round-off cartwheel.

Within a couple of months of trying gymnastics, a very small Taekwondo store opened right next door to it. I quickly dropped gymnastics and started taking Taekwondo all the time. Wu-Tang vs. Shaolin was on Saturday morning television, so I was desperate to learn a martial art. I found it a lot more believable as a fighting style than the Saturday morning Memphis wrestling that was also on television at that time.

Taekwondo was also challenging and taught self-discipline, which I desperately needed. I even liked Taekwondo so much that my parents were willing to drive me to a Memphis dojo for several years after the Collierville one was shut down. I have fond memories of having to stand at the side of the class as a white belt holding canned food in both of my hands while balancing on one foot as punishment for being silly in class. I also had to do a lot of pushups, but I couldn’t help but be silly. It was fun.

I tried my best to stay busy in Collierville and have an innocent childhood. However, thanks to a combination of what passed for good parenting advice at the time, spawned by the Tough Love movement, the war on drugs, church, and therapists (plus health insurance to pay for it all), I was the only other young kid I knew who got to learn instead about the difference between pills on my nights and weekends.

Pop Quiz: who here has ever been a student in their second grade Say No to Drugs program when they knew more about the drugs than the local cop assigned to teach us? Answer: me.

To top it all off, I also had my huge secret that was eating me from the inside out. I wasn’t feeling all too jolly.

Chapter 2

Run away attempt #1

Fall 1987

I was nine the first time I ran away. My parents hadn’t really done anything to deserve it. I just couldn’t stand reality due to so much repressed and built-up pain and embarrassment over my secret.

I remember I used to daydream during school, as early as kindergarten, and even through the fourth grade, about just getting up and bolting out the classroom door, skipping merrily across the neighboring field while all the students and teachers watched from the classroom windows. Where to, I don’t know. Just away.

On my first attempt, I wasn’t that brazen. I just decided to not catch the school bus in the morning and skip school instead. I was in the fourthgrade, and I didn’t like the heaping pile of lemons that life had dumped upon my life. I was convinced in my head that I was going away where everything would magically be better. Providence would favor me; I was sure of it.

I finally decided that morning that I was going to walk to my brother’s friend’s house that was twenty miles away. I had no clue if they were home. My brother was no longer living at home by then.  A few years prior though, he had stolen my parents’ car one night and driven us to his friend’s house. I had the impression that night that his friend had a cool family. Funny how memories stick with us at that age.

I did it right, too. I had a pillowcase with a change of clothes in it tied around a stick and carried that over my shoulder. Hobo-style.

So, my nine-year-old self ended up walking in the rural Tennessee woods alongside a two-lane country road most of the way. To this day I am impressed how far I got; fifteen of those twenty miles. It took me walking all morning and most of the early afternoon.

I got caught when I ventured into a small convenience store along the way. The lady working at the counter had sense enough to realize I wasn’t old enough to be