Authors: Joe Putignano
Acrobaddict (7 page)
C
OMMONLY KNOWN AS THE
A
DAM’S APPLE, IT IS THE PROTRUSION FORMED BY THE ANGLE OF THE THYROID CARTILAGE SURROUNDING THE LARYNX.
D
URING MEDIEVAL TIMES A MYTH AROSE ABOUT THE
A
DAM’S APPLE, ACCORDING TO WHICH THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT BECAME LODGED IN
A
DAM’S THROAT AFTER HE TOOK A BITE OF IT
. T
HE
A
DAM’S APPLE IS USUALLY MORE VISIBLE IN MEN THAN IN WOMEN.
My asthma came seeping back into my lungs with the changing of the seasons, autumn to winter being the most challenging. Every day I lost my breath. I was always trying to catch it, and that feeling of mortality and death crept in alongside the perfect, vibrant fall colors. Those are the colors prior to death’s arrival, before the hands of winter reap all that is living. The deepest colors always come with death.
In the months of September, October, and November I would end up in the emergency room for a treatment with a nebulizer. The nebulizer allowed me to breathe better, but I was ashamed of using it because of its pipe-like structure that resembled a hookah. In my mind I was an athlete, and drugs were the substances created for the weak and desperate. In addition to the nebulizer treatment, I was given injections of prednisone, a steroid that decreased the inflammation in my lungs. That medication is not the same as the much-abused testosterone and muscle-building anabolic steroids, but I was scared my teammates wouldn’t know the difference.
I became fascinated by the hospital and quickly began to pick up the medical terminology for my ailments. I had visited the emergency room so many times for my asthma that I began to feel like an intern. There was something romantic about a person who could prescribe medication. Those doctors were powerful to me, and I was attracted to the patient-doctor pattern—illness, diagnosis, medication. In a peculiar way, I felt I belonged there.
The doctors had changed my medications many times, and it was difficult to know which prescription made me feel better; all of them left me feeling hyper and edgy. During the numerous X-rays taken of my lungs, the doctors discovered an abnormality in my rib cage. This was more evidence that I was born different. I was born with an extra rib, a deformity that could not be seen by the human eye and was basically purposeless. My mom, who always tried to turn my awkward discomfort into ease, was a witness to the doctor’s discovery. Excitedly, she recalled the story she had been told as a child in church, about how God had taken one of Adam’s ribs with which to create Eve. She had read that Adam had been given an extra rib, like me.
As a boy, I didn’t attend church because it conflicted with gymnastics competitions that were held on Sundays. I found the sport to be a much grander religion, with a more promising outcome than any story supposedly written by God and told by men. My mom’s story made me feel better, and even though this extra rib didn’t hurt me in any way, I would have given it back to be “normal.”
A new asthma medication started giving me horrible anxiety, and I constantly believed something bad was going to happen. Panic and despair replaced my inability to breathe, and I would lie in bed wide awake. It wasn’t just a few hours of thinking of the many horrors and wonders the world held; no, this insomnia kept me awake until morning. The daylight announced a horribly arduous day ahead without any peace at all. A sleepless night left me feeling like my entire body was filled with rusty nails, heavy and dull, and my daily tasks at school followed by gymnastics practice seemed impossible to complete.
In the quiet of night I would sit in my room, staring at the walls, terrified for no obvious reason. I could never pinpoint what was behind those feelings, but it brought up an overwhelming desire to create something beautiful. At first, the feeling urged me to produce something original, to make some form of art or create something from nothing. I knew if I did not begin to create, I would live forever in frustration.
The form of creativity that eventually drew me in was writing. During my fits of sleeplessness I would write to keep the panic at bay, and the more I wrote, the more I had the desire to do so. I called my stories and my desire to write “ghosts,” and they moaned and lingered, stabbing me until their tales were written exactly as they tormented me to. Ghost-writing was the only way to freedom. Strangely, when I finished with one story, another one appeared, and sometimes two or three entered at the same time. I would sit on my bed, pen in hand, scribbling and writing, thinking beyond my imagined limits and discovering pieces of myself.
After endless attempts to fall asleep, I willingly surrendered to my imagination and began to summon the ghosts to my side. They were always in control of the stories, and I became a conduit to their voices and invisible forms, transforming nothingness into matter. I had been stabbed in the heart by a merciless muse that demanded my attention. I loved them because of the creativity they gave me, allowing me to be the vessel for their words and lives, but I also hated them because they kept me awake at night.
My mother was my biggest fan, and she was the only one besides my English teacher with whom I shared my stories. To me, they weren’t just stories; they were words born out of my own flesh, blood, sadness, and euphoria.
During that time, I was free to do whatever I wanted without being questioned by the people around me. However, when I turned thirteen, my freedom started to get curtailed by the unspoken rules for a boy my age. I had a desire to act, dance, and perform. I couldn’t help myself, but I realized the other boys around me, who used to do those things, had stopped, unwilling to cross a line in the sand
that was invisible to me. I didn’t have that age-related restraint with which they seemed to have been born.
Tara was still my best friend, and I was under constant scrutiny by my peers as to why I had a girl for such a close friend. The glue that held us together was our ability to laugh, but the larger reason why I hung around her was simply that I loved her. When I wasn’t around Tara I felt a terrible loneliness. We were the same height, four feet eleven inches—the shortest students in our class.
Tara was turning into a beautiful young woman, and I secretly knew I was the ball and chain she was dutifully dragging behind her. She was a cheerleader and had many friends; I shied away from the other kids. All of my free time was spent practicing gymnastics, while most kids were doing their homework, hanging out, or watching sitcoms. I had nothing in common with them. I couldn’t make new friends the way Tara did.
So there I was, short for my age and best friends with a girl. To make matters worse, my classmates called gymnastics a “girlie” sport. I felt betrayed by the kids my age. I even felt rebellious against the wonderful spirit that gave me my gift, asking it, “Why couldn’t you have made me a football player or basketball player instead of a gymnast?” I could not understand why people thought gymnastics was a girl’s sport, because pound for pound, I was stronger than anyone at my school, including everyone who teased me.
I was an easy target for ridicule. In addition to being short, I had a squeaky voice that didn’t deepen when the other boys’ voices did. I would often go home to my mother crying, “I’m always gonna be short and I will never get taller!” She was short too, and would empathize by telling me, “Good things come in small packages.” I adopted that phrase as my comeback for everything.
I became so self-conscious about my voice that I would sometimes mumble or talk in a low whisper, which made it difficult for people to understand what I was saying. I stopped making eye contact with other kids, letting the words tumble out of my mouth. Concerned about the tone of my voice, I even asked my doctor if there was
something wrong with my throat. But he assured me that there was nothing wrong with my voice, that it was unique. The word “unique” stung like a thousand bees. This single, Latin-based word would keep me up at night, wondering why I had to be “the one” gifted with a voice so different from the other boys’.
I didn’t know what to do because I wanted to talk, but knew as the sound wave left my throat that it would become a rusty wheel against the air—a disgrace that threatened the perfect silence of nature. Did the birds mock me when they heard me speak? It was during those long nights of over-obsessing about my voice that the idea of suicide began to form in my mind. I would think about taking my own life because living with my voice, my falsetto of death, seemed unbearable.
I felt cornered by the sounds coming from the larynx of my own body, and I had no idea how I would get through an entire life sounding like that. Should I become mute? Should I hide my voice in my throat, tucked away beneath the skin and muscle? Could I somehow change my voice? I didn’t know the answer, nor did I want to think about it, but the daily teasing began to strangle me, and the person I should have been in the process of becoming began to hide deep within my skin.
Although my spoken voice fell flat, I believed that my written voice would withstand the ages and leave a deeper impact than any physical voice I had been given by the creator of humans. It was then that I realized Pandora’s box was not evil; rather, it contained her voice box, and by opening it she was able to speak her own thoughts as a strong woman. She angered the world around her and was condemned for it, and so was I.
T
HE HUMAN SKULL IS A COMPLEX STRUCTURE THAT HOUSES THE BRAIN.
W
ITHIN THE BRAIN IS A SPECIFIC REGION RESPONSIBLE FOR RECOGNIZING FACES.
I
T IS SO ATTUNED TO FINDING THEM THAT IT CAN IDENTIFY FACES IN RANDOM PATTERNS, IN SYMBOLS, IN FOOD, AND IN NATURE.
T
HE HUMAN BRAIN CANNOT SEPARATE THE IMAGE OF THE HUMAN SKULL FROM THE FAMILIAR HUMAN FACE.
B
ECAUSE OF THIS, BOTH THE DEATH AND PAST LIFE OF THE SKULL ARE SYMBOLIZED, AND HUMAN SKULLS HAVE A GREATER VISUAL APPEAL THAN ANY OTHER HUMAN BONES IN THE SKELETON.
T
HE SKULL FASCINATES EVEN AS IT REPELS.
A menacing shadow had been following me for two weeks, and I couldn’t shake it. It quietly lurked until I was desperately vulnerable. That shadow was Death, and I had been marked. I could feel the chill of its breath in the autumn breeze with its intoxicating, clove-like scent.
I had become a regular at the hospital due to my asthma. Even though I couldn’t breathe properly, I continued to show up for Saturday afternoon gymnastics practice. Endorphins released by exercising usually helped me breathe easier, but that natural chemical relief was no longer occurring. At the end of practice we raced each other up a giant hill. Running made my lungs vulnerable and frail, but I couldn’t tell my coach because I didn’t want to appear weak. He would have allowed me to rest, but I wouldn’t—I’d be giving up on myself. I wasn’t going to sit back and watch my teammates’ strength increase.
Chris was usually the fastest, but on one glorious Saturday I won the race three times in a row. At home after practice my breathing quickly disintegrated into a tight, wheezing gasp, making me sound like I had swallowed a whistle. I took my blue inhaler, showered, and watched my mom get ready for work.
Once my mom left, I searched the channels on TV for a good horror movie. As the daylight faded, my breathing began to decline quicker than ever. Usually attacks took time to increase in strength, but this was a sudden tidal wave roiling over my body. The dark shadow I feared sat next to me, holding my hand. It was not dark in color, but more an absence of light, and it chilled my skin. Its frigid hands touched my chest, feeling my heart beat, trying to memorize the sound so it could crack the code and stop it.