Johnny Cash and the purple period

DAVID SILVA

The first of two parts.

Shortly after I entered the eighth grade, my body decided it had

enough with being only 5 feet 2. Over the next three months, I grew

more than six inches to become taller than all of my friends and most

of the kids in my class. I was delighted when this process first

began, thinking that if things continued I would soon enter the

Guinness Book of World Records as the tallest man on Earth.

But what I soon realized was that a side effect of this remarkable

growth spurt was pain. It wasn’t just the pain of my mother yelling

at me over having to constantly buy me new clothes, though that was

painful in itself. Nor was it the pain of my brother Michael’s fist,

since his reaction to me suddenly being taller than him was to double

the frequency with which he beat me up. No, the pain that really got

my attention was that brought on as my bones grew faster than my

muscles’ ability to keep up.

It began as a dull ache in my knees, and quickly spread to the

point that just getting out of bed in the morning was sheer agony.

I’d sit up, bend over to pick up my socks, and the pain would be so

intense, I’d burst into tears. It didn’t help that I was constantly

falling down or bumping into things, as my brain had a hard time

coordinating all that extra bone and tissue.

My mother took me to a doctor, who after asking me all of five

questions, rolled his eyes and said I was experiencing growing pains.

“Relax, kid,” he said. “Drink lots of milk and get plenty of

exercise, and they’ll go away in no time.”

“Just how long is ‘no time’?” I asked him, angry over his complete

lack of sympathy for my suffering.

“Oh, about six months to two years,” he said, and I burst into

tears.

I found myself crying a lot during that awful period. Along with

the growing pains, puberty brought with it an onslaught of emotions

for which nothing in my life experience had prepared me. Suddenly, I

found myself intensely attracted to girls, and more than anything

else in the world wanted them to be attracted to me. This was

unfortunate, given that my sudden gift for falling down and

spontaneously bursting into tears made me about as attractive as a

gurgling squid.

Exacerbating the situation was the fact that I hit puberty just as

Michael was emerging from it as a handsome, well-coordinated young

man. Almost all the pretty girls at school thought he was hot stuff,

and they couldn’t help but compare his smooth-talking, acne-free form

to my gangly, gurgling squidness. This didn’t help my case at all.

The few times I got up the courage to approach a girl and ask her

out, she’d look at me, then across the courtyard at my stately

brother, and ask me in all seriousness if Michael and I came from

different fathers.

The inevitable result of all this physical pain and emotional

chaos was depression. One morning, I opened my eyes, thought about

the aching, girl-less day that awaited me, and closed them. An hour

later, my mother walked into the room.

“What are you still doing in bed?” she yelled. “Get up, lazy

bones. The early bird catches the worm!”

“What’s the point?” I said tonelessly. “Early bird, late bird.

Eventually, it’s the worm that has the last laugh.”

My mother stared at me. She opened her mouth, then closed it, and

finally turned and left the room. About 30 minutes later, she

returned.

“I thought I told you to get up!”

I rolled over and pulled the blanket over my head. “Go away,” I

said.

It was the start of what I would later refer to as my blue period,

or, more accurately, my purple period, given all the bad poetry I

wrote during that time.

The next year or so found me spending hours alone in my room or on

the gym bleachers at school, scribbling verse in a black three-ring

binder. My poems were almost always about the same thing: boy meets

girl, girl rejects boy, boy dies from some rare and disfiguring

illness.

“She laughed and I would have cried / had leprosy not taken my

sad, brown eyes ... “

I took to color-coordinating my clothing with my black binder.

Using the money I earned from my job at a local department store, I

replaced my already questionable wardrobe with black shirts, black

jeans and black Vans deck shoes. Even my Velcro O.P. wallet was

black. While my previous bad fashion choices had often been met with

ridicule from my classmates, their reaction to my new funereal look

was to keep as far away from me as possible.

My friends, however, didn’t know what to make any of it. While

they couldn’t care less how I dressed, they were saddened that I had

almost completely stopped hanging out with them. No one was more

bothered by his than my best friend, Mike, who came by the house one

Saturday to try to talk to me.

“What’s going on with you, Dave?” he asked. “You don’t come around

anymore. You go around in that Johnny Cash get-up, looking miserable.

Everybody’s worried about you, man.”

“Sounds like everybody needs to get a life,” I mumbled. “Who let

you in here, anyway?”

“Your mom did,” he said. “She just told me she’s worried about

you, too. She says it’s pretty obvious you’re in pain, but you won’t

talk about it.”

“Great, now you and my mom are best buds,” I said angrily. “Dude,

don’t come around here like you’re Mr. Together trying to fix

everything. I’m in pain? What do you know about pain?”

This, to a guy whose mother walked out on him and his brothers not

four years earlier. Mike shook his head, told me what I could do with

my attitude, and left.

As hard as I worked at alienating my friends, I worked even harder

at alienating my mother. I had recently concluded, for reasons only a

child psychologist could explain, that all my troubles were Mom’s

fault. Not satisfied with merely being a cause for worry, I

positively delighted in doing things I knew drove her crazy. One of

my favorite tortures was bringing home strange people for dinner.

“Mom, this is Russell. Russell just got out of the can and hasn’t

had a home-cooked meal in eight years. Russell, show Mom that prison

tattoo.”

“Mom, this is Nikki. Nikki’s a runaway looking to break into

Hollywood. Can you believe that’s her real hair?”

Those were rough days for my mom -- so rough that to this day she

doesn’t like to talk about them. She tried punishing me for my

misbehavior. She tried cheering me with gifts of comic books and

trips to Disneyland. Nothing worked. My mood steadily darkened, and

my misbehaviors increased, and she began to despair that she was

losing her youngest child.

But my purple period was soon to come to an end, and when it did,

it was for reasons entirely out of my mother’s control. And it’s a

strange truth that the thing that finally lifted me out of my pain

was more pain than I had ever imagined.

Next week: Earl Scheib and the falling action.

* DAVID SILVA is a Times Community News Editor. Reach him at (909)

484-7019, or by e-mail at [email protected].