Читать книгу The Punk and the Professor - Billy Lawrence - Страница 19

12

FOR A WHILE I felt hazy. At eleven years old I had strange bouts of odd dopey feelings. I would doze off on the living room couch after a bowl of cereal and wake to a kaleidoscope of colors swirling around on the big screen television. Except the television was turned off.

One night I awoke and I was in the TV being beaten up by professional wrestlers. I knew I wasn’t dreaming or having night terrors like I had had when I was six. Sometimes in those vivid dreams, I was chased down in my neighborhood or just terribly embarrassed in front of a crowd. A psychologist later told me this was a result of some insecurity I had— perhaps my mother’s busy work schedule or a missing father.

This time at eleven years old, I knew I was awake, but something different was going on. This feeling kept me from going to school on a couple of occasions. For a while, I thought it was a virus or an allergy to something, but I blew it off and hid it from my mother. I told her I was just a little dizzy.

The most memorable of these hallucinogenic states was one night around midnight. I was eleven and my little brother JP was only a toddler. He didn’t wake all night, despite my screams. I had been sleeping, again on the couch after lounging around watching television. The TV was off when I awoke in terror. Something felt like it was inside my head. It was closing in chasing me from room to room. My heart pounded. I ran from room to room looking for help only to realize that no one was home. My mother was out waitressing and Don had stepped out. My yelps turned to screams. I pulled the window up in my mother’s bedroom and stuck my head out into the winter night. Poking my head out from the second story window I yelled,

“Help, help.”

When no one answered I just cried to the cold.

After a few minutes, I heard the front door open. The state of panic seemed to vaporize. I thought it might be my mother or Don returning, so I went to have a look. I opened up our door and peered down the hallway to the entryway. A couple out for a walk stood at the bottom of the stairs. They had heard me from the sidewalk.

“Are you ok?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied, trembling.

“Maybe you just had a bad dream.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Are your parents home?”

“No, my mother ran out for milk.”

“All right, well just sit tight and wait for her. Do you want us to wait?”

“No, I’m ok. Thank you. I’m going to go back to bed.”

The kind couple left and I sat there for a while at the top of the stairs with my back to the closed door. Had this been an illness? Was I crazy? Was this a panic attack? I had no idea.

$$$

It never occurred to me that some of this might have been an intentional effect I was suffering from. One night some weeks after my episode, I sat on the couch in the dark after waking up in the middle of the night. I was going to get up to go to my room when I saw the refrigerator light on. Don was leaning into the fridge with something in one hand. The other hand lowered the milk back on to the shelf. The door closed and the light disappeared. He turned around, but it was too late. He saw me. I pretended I was groggy from my nap. He too pretended he didn’t know I knew that he knew I saw him.

I didn’t drink milk for a while. In fact, I spilled out that container of milk and made it look like I had used it all up. I’m sure he knew. No one else used milk. My mother hated it and Don had no use for it. I used it in cereal and chocolate milk. As far as I know, I was also the only one going through these weird visuals and feelings. A couple of months passed and I started to use the milk again and never had one of those mental episodes ever again. I’ll never know whether I was just some crazy person’s lab experiment.