The Bambi Principle
(or "THE BOY WHO CRIED KNIFE")
"I came here today to ask, to beg you, to vote to release those elephants from that zoo!"
—Bob Barker
I am sitting alone again in a girl's toilet stall off a junior high gymnasium somewhere near the end of the world. With a black sharpie and the beam of a pocket flashlight shaped in the mouth of a dragon, I am channeling Terry Robbins past The Days of Rage, equipped for subterranean vengeance. If they catch me this time -- as I was caught the last time -- I'll forgo the demerit slip by taking the Vice Principal into the band practice room to play her a lounge rendition of "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road." (Last week was "Goodbye, Marlon Brando"—because really, who can think of a better time to hone your aptitude for nostalgia than in the 8th grade?) As is the case with most lone militants in junior high that skip gym, I have yet to identify the principles driving this chestnut radicalism, nor have I identified, for that matter, an adversary to burn.
Except for maybe Sammy Kipps.
Sammy Kipps and his protégé in the purple jumpsuit, Chuck "Appletree" Machado, hauled me down the aisle to the back of a schoolbus last week to proceed with a ritual aptly called "The Faggot Wash." Greg Misner and Appletree's cousin, Lance, were last month's burnt offerings. It's not unlike a baptism, truth be told. Shoved against the emergency exit door, they broke my sunglasses, purloined a black Jansport from my shoulders, waited three skips of a heartbeat for an audience to raise to their knees and watch them lash out their terrier-sized cocks and simulate heavy rain. The driver took a pause before lunging into another gospel shrieking selection from KUBE 93 (Seattle's #1 Hit Radio Station), stopped the bus to ask which of the three of us started it. After the fingers twirl and I am outsung by accusations, she feigned an attempt at peacekeeping. Each of us resolved to keep the incident to ourselves, from the administration, our parents, our invisible friends and the ears of their secret stash of Care Bears. Back on the bus, I made plans to call up Sergio when I got home. Sergio and his fraternal twin brother Avni were a part of a notorious squad that met behind the Skate King on Friday nights. Both siblings wore coordinating walrus mustaches that \ let them pass for twenty-four. They claimed their father preserved ties with the Albanian mafia and that I danced like MC Hammer. When I called, their grandmother said though a long, indecipherable yawn that they had gone to live with a stepmother in Fresno.
The Faggot Wash will play three repeated showings from here till the end of the winter semester. The driver will be singing along to Aretha Franklin's "Respect' with the rest of the world her second-hand man. But I will be defenseless. This toilet stall will write my redemption song.
The PhysEd instructor, Ms. Uselbech, knows where I am this seventh period. She is adamant to see that I fail, even having explained to her, quite delicately, that telling someone like me to play volleyball is like asking a nun to give a poledance. I don't think she found that terribly funny, which leads me to believe that she's keeping one. We negotiated, I thought, on a passing grade if I showed up at attendance in a clean shirt. I have, thus far, been more than accommodating. I just hope one day she gets to visit this stall and see all the sketches I've drawn of her giving birth to Baby Hitlers.
The mistake might have been switching to public school. As often as I complained about the cushy, overcoddled Montessori school, they left me to my World Book Encyclopedias, encouraged me to play Rachmaninoff at their quarterly talent shows. They even let me skip the second grade...
I await the seventh period dismissal bell, pulling up my gym shorts in rehearsal for a future transgression:
"There's no going back there, Ma..." I begin in a stoic whisper in the front seat of her '86 Toyota minivan. "I already disposed it in a dumpster behind the cafeteria. Let's just leave it alone. It's not like I woke up expecting to find a knife in my locker this morning."
Fifteen minutes later, during the xylophone jingle in a radio spot for upholstery cleaner, she will make a gymnastic U-Turn back into the mob of the parking circle, park the van and ask me to find it on my own. My front teeth will chatter. I will clutch my seatbelt, recalling the origins of my defenselessness, there, at the back of that bus, mouth drenched in Appletree's baptism. Later, I will finalize my plea that she salvage me from this endless seven-hour dart massacre they've designated junior high. But before all this—yes—before my amazing attempt at self-retrieval, claiming the knife has left the dumpster after word of it had been circulated, she will know everything. She will momentarily, not recognize me. She will know, in my flushed, spent-out, calculated tears, that I am lying...
*
The failed 19th century American lawyer turned epigramist Christian Nestell Bovee defines panic as "a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination."
If the crude miracle of being born can be described as a going over to such an enemy, then I arrived to the world sufficiently unarmed. The morning before, the weather reports in The Seattle Times would read that "whitecaps broke on the usually placid Lake Washington beach, rain beat on the tops of empty park shelters with temperatures in the early 50s." It is not important that any of us remember the day we born, but they say the development of memory of infants is closely connected with the same facilities behind recognition. The recollection of a face, the stench of a wet dog, or a knock on the door. On September the 8th, 1984, at approximately 8:30 AM on the Southside campus of Virginia Mason Hospital, a door knocked, the florescent lights twitched, and I entered—which is to say that I panicked.
I have been telling people stories ever since.
The process of a closed adoption legally forbids couples from knowing very much as far as details on the part of the child's biological family, even as it might be relevant to unforeseen physical defects or extended medical history. I was brought home that day by my adoptive parents with the following information, no more, no less: it was clear my birthmother's origins were rooted in the Philippines and that she was 30 years old at the time of my delivery. Less clear was the migratory nature of her career in finance, although I suppose it meant lacking the resources or stability to raise a child. Even more nebulous were the details about my father; merely that he accounted for a fraction of my French bloodlines. However, even through the restraints of the inscrutable, a child learns to invent his own caricatural history. On yards of butcher paper, I'd diagram a complicated nexus of bloodlines resembling the infrastructure of the Empire State Building. Through this nexus, I'd trace myself back to the likes of Elvis Presley, Marie Antoinette, Kermit the Frog. The truth would reveal itself as something less of a floating high-rise, and to its own credit, a manifold far greater than what a child could have borrowed from his encyclopedias, his mother's Dolly Parton records, or The Prophetic Warriors of Make Believe on Mister Rogers Neighborhood.
But I would know none of that yet.
The name "Trystan", for those who might not know, is a variation (though not an unequivocal reference) to the medieval Celtic folk hero made popular in a certain Wagnerian song cycle. Fourteen years later would I learn in a music theory course that the infamous Tristan chord in Wagner's overture consisted of an augmented fourth, sixth and second, making it the most recognizable unresolved harmony in the canon of Western music. I have long contemplated getting a tattoo with the chord on my forearm, and under it, a caption reading: "Resolve me."
It has been said that my adoptive mother, Christie, even through her years as high school valedictorian to vice-president of a state insurance company, wanted nothing more than to bear children. Born Christie Anne Kreinop, my mother arrived from third-generation Germanic agricultural workers settled in the Midwest. Most of her relatives were born fair-haired, with concentrated seraphic features which evoke, in their parents, a feeling of redemption. Their photos as children would have them staring at us with innocuous aerial blue eyes, as if caught in the astonishment of being photographed. It was easy to see why they had four-to-six children; they'd have stopped if any came out looking like a hippopotamus. Most of them have remained, to this day, within a twenty-mile semidiameter of Seymour, Indiana (the hometown of the singer John Mellencamp, lest it fail to be reiterated). Most are practicing Lutherans, collecting from these teachings a kind of quiet strength in spirit, generous to the point of yielding. Most are, for one reason or another, bored to death, which meant I was arranged a baptism. The ceremony was small, procedural, and not particularly painful. Unlike circumcision.
This quiet strength of spirit is associated often with Greater Midwest hospitality. I think it's misunderstood as a shortcoming of charisma and social intelligence. It is neither of these things. In fact, what I think it could be is something of an estranged fragility conditioned out of their unresolved relationships with their own mortality. The preconditions of agricultural labor require that they take a role as catalysts between nature and predator savages of machinery. Stories have scattered thin over the years of men falling off of soybean tractors for reasons unknown (stung by hornets, their wives would later speculate), leaving their vehicles in a steady spiral that eventually crushes their spines to death. My grandfather, Robert Kreinop, died at the age of thirty-six for carrying his coworkers out of a cataclysmic fire started by a discarded cigarette. When such accidents seem to defy the logic or syllogisms of a compassionate Lord and Savior, the most powerful response is also the most faithful: to give these accidents over to the unfathomable phenomenon of tragedy and stay put. Viewing the accident as a series of amplified slips isn't helpful, nor is the thought: "One sliver of a moment, and the whole thing might have been resolved." Because it had resolved; just in the worst way they could have anticipated.
Christie was thirteen years old upon receiving news that her father was never coming home. Six years later, she would make the decision either to leave her first husband and a towering position at an insurance company, or resign herself to kitchen table in Southern Indiana for the rest of her life. "But why stay put? And for what?" she must have asked herself in the rear-view mirror of a thousand traffic jams. So she marched out of Southern Indiana with her older sister, Karen, and they dropped their haversacks in the corner of a studio apartment in San Diego.
Just a short radio signal away lived my father, Steve, studying for his San Diego State bar exam after a graveyard shift at a French bistro. Their paths wouldn't cross here, but some ten years later in San Francisco.
Born in Columbus, Ohio and raised in a Tudor house in Cincinnati, Steven Gary Toole is probably one of the only living Jews that hate Woody Allen. A descendent of mostly Russian lineage, he is faraway removed from the premise of a universe that is cold and empty, a premise as exclusive to his origins as a warm shot of vodka. His father, Conrad (or "Connie") was a traveling salesman for Levi's Jeans. In the days of red hunting and heightened anti-semitism, Connie devised an anecdote for his clients explaining the genesis of our surname. The anecdote, if I recall correctly, has something to do with his grandfather arriving on Ellis Island at inspection without his name on record. Under pressure to think on his feet, he reached into the pocket of his trousers for a claw hammer given to him on ship by a one-armed plummer who said he'd need it when they reached the states. This is apparently how he decided on the name Toole. The other less ambiguous, far more probable explanation is that Toole is one of many American conjugations branching from the names Tolstov or Tulinsky.
Steve was a middle child in a house dominated by chatty women. His mother, Belle, died of tongue cancer shortly into his first year of law school. I know close to nothing else about her, really, but have reason to suspect she was born at Kings County Hospital early three blocks from my former apartment in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. Perhaps there is such a thing as an eternal return.
I imagine this as a slogan slam-posted to the doors outside the hotel ballroom in San Francisco where my parents first met. With my father two years out of law school, he held off on plans of starting his own private practice to join the training staff of a "human potential course" then known as Lifespring. My mother, Karen, and Karen's future husband, Pete, were also on the staff. I make a fair amount of mocking jokes about the program, since it almost transparently fits the category of New Age, or more accurately, "psychoanalysis without the analysis". I prefer public streaking in park fountains. But it turns out that the research commissions from Berkley, Stanford and USF found an overwhelming 90% of Lifespring's participants came from the training program using words like "transformative" or "transactivating."
A normal course might consist of up to 300 participants in a succession of weeklong evening lectures lasting from 6:30 till midnight. The goal was to show participants all the ways in which human beings hold themselves back from the living experience, largely through the manipulation of a fair number of "chuck the crowd a microphone" exercises. They would also spend entire week redefining words like responsibility, space and surrender. Commitment, for instance, would eventually get redefined as "doing whatever it takes." The word conclusion would be re-characterized subtly as "the mother of all false beliefs."
Neither my mother nor my father have gone especially out of their way to hide from me that they were smoking obscene amounts of hash back in those days. But personal reservations aside, I like to idealize them informally as consciousness missionaries, which is not exactly the same as calling them evolved hippies. Rather than pushing a series of principles seized from heavy-handed theology or gyrating philosophical thought, they promoted instead an unpretentious, solution-based method for people without the structural (or practical) orientation for solution in their daily lives. The program would be less effective on disparaging assholes like me who have been known to spend up to half-an-hour at the deli counter questioning what a whole wheat pastrami says about their order on the food chain. In fact, if I caused my parents any great distress (which, in itself, is an acknowledged fact), it had something to do with challenging their systematic recognition of the things that could be solved, and the long strain of unsolvables that seemed at times to spread itself like a sudden cancer.
My first four years were spent as an only child. A group of around seven-to-eight kids from around the neighborhood would climb over our backyard fence to recount their lives at home. It seemed all of their fathers had, at one time, flung a stained-glass coffee table out the window, and that their mothers were each running recruiting marathons for a divorce lawyer. To keep with the spirit of urgency, I forged my parents into the same scenarios, and announced to my friends that for reasons beyond my understanding, my parents, too, would soon be filing a divorce. At each of these backyard assemblies, through the Brady Bunch role-play sessions and the bludgeon of a deflated tetherball, the topic of worry and question was invariably: "Whose parents will get divorced first?" Little by little, the backyard assemblies would shrink, as would the impromptu gathering of their parents at the caudle sac a shot across the fence. At one of the last of these assemblies, Hannah, the slightly older Indonesian from next door confronted me privately: "Your parents aren't getting a divorce, and I can prove it." I asked for her proof and she pointed to the window of their bedroom. It was April. Midday. The dog was out. The blinds were down. This would gracefully cue my introduction to the more innocuous mechanisms of heterosexual intercourse.
People frequently ask about when, where or how I first learned that I was adopted. Thanks to the ham-fisted climaxes of outhouse Harlequins or evening soap operas, the answer they usually expect is a full description of a devastating rite-of-passage ending in fake carnage and firetrucks. The truth is, the disparities in physical resemblance to my parents alone would never have me not knowing. But if recognition is the overture to memory, then it must have occurred to me right there, as Hannah sat with her knees pressing the grass, using a daisy and one-half-of-a-donut hole to demonstrate grown-up penetration:
I was one half of The Donut Man; never to know from where I began.
The rumors of my parents' divorce grapevined back to them past the point of relevance, whereupon they sat me down and told me to channel my fabrications elsewhere, or rather, keep my goddamned mouth shut. With the neighborhood freshly evacuated, I crept to the leg of my Fisher Price easel, equipped with a roll of butcher paper spread miles wide to contain a raving and reckless four-year old imagination. Maps were drafted of undiscovered continents, their states, their capitals, their villages in decline; blueprints for Victorian fortresses with Malaysian rock gardens with asymmetrical floor planning; Donald Ducks genitals, and other acts of indiscretion in the rest of the Disney kingdom. Suddenly, I was no longer an only child, beckoning for an audience, propagating stories to keep the attention of a room. I wanted, mostly, to be left alone. That is, until I drew a small but technical sketch of what my older sister might look like, which was a sort of menopausal Pocahantas. Three months later, my parents brought home a younger sister, already eight-months old, from Taegu, South Korea. They would name her Melia; a name referencing the nymphs of the ash tree in Greek mythology that sprang from the blood of Uranus when Cronus castrated him.
Both my Mother and Father, I am sure, would claim these references to Western folklore and mythology were completely unplanned. (I am on the fence until the weight of me sends it breaking.) Still it suggested, from an early age, a kind of bulldozing of immemorial past-lives, preparing us as pawns to a more preponderant mythology. I speak, of course, about the mythology of the nouveau American middle class: a place where cultural heirlooms built unmarked graves; where the story of who we were and what we'd become seemed navigated by chance and strategem like the chattering of dice across a Monopoly board; where the insatiable appetite for upgrades supersede absence and start a line around the megaelectronics store.
We must have been told at least a thousand times that "Nothing is truly impossible." Maybe this is where the trouble started.
For a second grade family portrait, I inserted myself as a hippopotamus. With the rest of my family in full character, I defended the drawing to the class by describing myself (convincingly, I thought) as a semi-aquatic, vegetarian boar who enjoyed summer afternoons on large meads of grass. The fact was that in a mere five years, my younger sister had adapted to the family like the missing picture cardboard piece the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club somehow forgot; I was still in search of a larger chorus.
And so I started playing music.
-- FOR PARTS 2-4 OF OF "THE BAMBI PRINCIPLE", e-mail TrystanTrazon@gmail.com --
