My Earliest Memories, Part 4:

We were watching the Simpsons

My parents and me

All wedged into the couch in the house on Pert

I didn’t get the jokes but I loved their laughter

I felt good

I felt safe

Everything was right

I thought this rightness would stretch into forever

This was the way of the world, the baseline, the norm

For I had not yet learned that things could go wrong

And Homer’s voice, was the background music

For

Eternal

Comfort and peace

D’oh

D’oh

D’oh

The heart beat of my first core memory

I was in my mothers lap

My belly was full

I remember looking up at the Face of Safety

She was laughing and she was eating…

Batman tortilla chips

They debuted in ‘92

Google told me so

And I debuted in ‘90

The Face of Safety told me so

So I must have been about two years old

She bit into a bat signal,

The wing went in her mouth, and the body shattered

A jagged, salty tortilla torpedoed my eye

D’oh!

All things changed

I remember screaming and crying

To learn that the world could be so cruel

My old world was gone

I believed this new one to be permanent

Pain and flaring blindness

I’d never gaze up at the Face of Safety again

And the rueful part of me accused her

The Face of Safety was only a mask for the Face of Vengeance!

She was still after all the highest authority in my little world

Infallible

Accidents could not be

So this pain had to have been ordained

By her

I did not know why I deserved the assault

But I knew, deep down, it was my fault

Still, I wept

For pain

For blindness

For the loss of peace

Somebody— I think my dad— rushed me to the kitchen sink and flushed my eye

Agony and terror!

I shrieked like a rabbit

Clamped in a predator’s jaws

But when the cold waters ceased I had relief

The fire that had seared the window of my soul

Had been washed away

But

I’d been betrayed

Betrayed by peace itself

I could not be consoled

And somewhere in my wretchedness and my prolonged wails,

I was force fed a nipple

I did not cling to her breast, the way nursing babies do.

My little hand clutched my cheek and I shuddered

Even with a full belly

I drank deep of the traitorous teat

I could see now, with my eyes and with my soul

That pain was inevitable

And that all good things would betray me

Still I drank with my eyes closed tight

Against all truths

I suckled the proffered comfort

And it was the flavor of reassurance

***

Now as a 250 lb man, that memory lingers

And so does the lesson:

Whenever I feel bruised and dragged by circumstance,

Whenever bad luck feels preordained

I can just comfort feed

—Chips or pizza or gin—

All to feel better again

Well,

D’oh