His name was Jack (or so everyone but Barb thought, for he had told her when he moved to the small town what his real name was) and he was (she knew) joking with her. The four friends had not yet left the Female Unmentionables Aisle, and Donna knew Jack was drawing attention to her purely to embarrass her.

It was a typical moment in the life of a few 14-16 year-olds, jogging through a typical supermarket on a typical day, using typical things to rattle each other. Then "Jack" said something that (unintentionally) took the focus off of the pretty girl who was trying her best to keep her personal purchases private. He turned back to the two friends behind him--to both of their friends, for they had all come shopping together--and said, laughing, Look! She won't even acknowledge our presence!

But he had miscalculated, somehow. Dave and Barb didn't respond as he expected, didn't toss back their heads and laugh at Donna's sudden blush and increase in pace. Instead, their expressions conveyed a bit of good humored surprise...and it was focused on Jack.

What the hell did he just say?

Now to you--my dear adult, educated, and well-read audience--the wording is rather unremarkable. But I remind you that these were young teens, and it was the period of life where all your social behaviors are examined under a microscope. To you, She won't acknowledge our presence may not seem an egregious statement to make. But to young, lingo-laden teens, it was. To Jack's friends, She won't even acknowledge our presence was book-talk, was Vocab phrasing, was teacher talk. And here, in the well-lit Great American supermarket (Aisle 7), was one more moment where Jack winced inwardly and made a note to adjust his use of language. Dave and Barb were even a grade and two grades above him. But they didn't talk like that. Who talked like that? Kids just didn't. Jack couldn't seem to remember that. Or act on it. But he eventually decided he could change, use less words, smaller ones. Simpler sentences. He was determined to do it, but he kept forgetting how.

There are a few truths that you can take with you just about anywhere you go. One of those truths is that a kid smaller than everyone else who uses words twice as tall as those around him is a half-dozen ass-kickings waiting to happen. These were sometimes present in Jack's life. Yet...it was not (even for one moment) the ass-kickings themselves that were behind Jack's decision to decimate his own vocabulary. It was expressions like the ones on his friends' faces. Those, believe it or not, proved far more painful.

My legally adopted father and I were hostile enemies from the first moment we met.

Gearheart made it clear to me between the ages of 6 and 16--the span of age I traveled during his abduction of my life and family--that "you didn't like me the first moment you saw me." And I could never argue this charge. Because I remember not liking him the moment I saw him. It was a drastic turning point in my life, and I think I sensed it. Who was this tall man in my kitchen with his huge bicycle that was taking up space? After my real father had been there-and-then-gone from my life, and the next man to get close to me disappeared (died at 29) why was there another one here now? I wanted no more of this Shifting Man Scenery. So perhaps Gearheart is absolutely accurate in his memory.

I was only six, though, when he came around. Maybe I didn't look as hostile as he always told me. Perhaps my 21-year old Legal Father-to-be was just projecting his own fear and insecurity--for he had much of these. And one of the ways they showed was as intellectual insecurity. Many, many, many times, he lambasted my mother for "thinking she was smarter" than him, or "acting" that way. And he did his best to keep us all small. Especially me. I seemed to be his sworn enemy from the start. We all knew it--me, my mother, my younger brother, the family counselor we bothered with for a week or so--it was me he could never tolerate especially. We can pick a few reasons (race not unrelated) but I'm sure my constantly-improving use of language did its part to threaten him. In fact, years later, when I sent him a letter that told him of my then-current college plans (psychiatrist) and asking for some financial help, he was so furious at my (intellectual and condescending?) tone (plans?) that he threatened to beat me up in front of everyone. While we were at a public function. As "grownups." This was a few years ago, maybe ten by now. I don't know. I had been out of the house for many years. And he simply threatened me the same way he had in my past (that is, when he was kind enough to warn me or offer a formal invitation to violence) although this time he didn't offer to fight on his knees. That day was the last time I tried to speak with any sincerity to the man I've always called my "adoptive father." I wanted to make sure he was the same animal who had (not) raised me. So that I could feel okay about stepping away from him. You see, he never saw me as a son. He saw me as the spawn of another man, a rising threat, a spirit to be crushed. Adopting me was nothing more than his trying to own me, trying to sign away my past and my roots and my name--all the things that got under his skin. Our relationship was a ten year crusade during which he tried to conquer me, and I'm still trying to scrub his graffiti from my temple walls. Still, I learned many things from him.

Don't misunderstand. I don't think Gearheart was unintelligent. In fact, this man had some of the sharpest senses about People that I've seen to this day. They call his unvarnished, unadorned, unpretentious and unsettlingly efficient acumen Street Smarts, but in las calles of the Bronx, it's just Life. Gearheart was also an artist, and with a poignant bitterness, he would sometimes tell me how he had been accepted to Art School but hadn't the money to go. He was still green with his own art when he started his new ambitious family project with my mother, so he did not have the confidence he would later own after he had left my mother and become successful. In my life, my Ex-father was a High School dropout and it plagued his mind without rest. He knew he did not measure up in terms of papers, or control of the language. He also had the (mis)fortune of marrying a woman who had been valedictorian in her own college, who was very verbal, and who brought me in tow--the meandering but mellifluous Mexicano you know and love.

My biological father is a writer. He is published and celebrated in and out of the Latino community. Awards, plays based on his work, an "important" and "enduring" and "stately" voice; a poet. He needs no further explanation from me. I would opine that my mother is a writer, too--though she is known and employed as a nurse. She has been paid for writing technical scripts for videos that are shot to be shown instructionally to nurses and doctors on certain matters. But she has never taken the time to develop her creative skills, so I think she has much potential in terms of technique and in mastering that area. I have read her personal poetry, and it is moving. Glimpses come through even her most naive and unformed/unpolished written stories that show me she knows how to communicate her heart: the only firm requirement for a Real Writer. The rest can be hewn, can be shown (...and is mostly a matter of personal taste, anyhow--as Danielle Steele, Dean Koontz, JK Rowling and many, many others show us every day.)

My own language skills have been evident from a young age. Front and center stage. I will paraphrase the quote made about the backdrop of New York City as it appears in a film, and apply it to my own life as "Language, itself, was a character in the story." From the days I was asked by the new principal to read the newspaper aloud; to the many times I have embarrassed myself by using flowery or verbose phrasing in an inopportune moment or setting; to the countless aced spelling tests and spelling bees; to the responses to my unusual and unexpected letters written to various individuals, to scholarships awarded based on writing to the underground newspaper to my being published as a children's book author, to the many moments involving people like Donna--or any one of a dozen other examples--language is and always has been a great love and a natural talent of mine. In fact, the Skin of my Soul series (now Part 3 of 2) was originally conceived solely as a story about my experiences with language. Language is such an important and consistent theme in the Story of My Life that I knew I had to begin writing about it. I didn't know where or why, or what it all means yet. This series has turned into much more than what I had planned, and yet exactly what it was meant to be. I can go with that. I will hunt down the ending, will not predict the landing. Language is a living lesson in the relationship of Symbol and Essence. And learning that lesson right now, for me, is sussing out where the alias is parked. That is to say, the About of language is another About. And in a field of signs, you will find me chasing sightlines. I'm getting out loud in my right mind.

Sometimes I turn things over in my thinking--exploring ideas, but never really reaching a conclusion. Just to start energies moving. It's a good way to begin finding answers, or prime the lids for opening. (Some people do not know, but you can start tasks in your mind that will be continued by your non-conscious self. But that's another entry.) I remember the days--there were various pieces that came together to finally compile my understanding--that I realized what a power language was. Yes, part of it was that day I turned the tables on a bully by using vocabulary he could not access. That is literally true, and it is not being overly dramatic to say that day is marked in my memories as a turning point and has been since it occurred. But there were other important lessons, too.

I don't know who in my family has the a picture of me as a child and at an amusement park, my head in a fake stockade, a sign around my neck: Talks Too Much. But remembering back, it seems I have always been this way. Although, sometimes I wonder how much of my aptitude and ambition with language has to do with the original power I found in it. Here, now, is the Freudian in me--searching for roots of my behaviors in my Family of Origin. But the conclusion seems foregone. As a child, I was always a small boy, a bit lost in the world and my peer groups, and one whose family and school lives were souring more and more by the day. Language was, truly, one of the only places I found power of my own. But then again, perhaps this lingual bent springs more from a simple love of knowing, or speaking, or communication itself. A fascination with Shell/Essence, Symbol/Meaning. I am sure it is all these and more, of course. And? How much of my verbal veracity has been a reaction to my not being able to please my real father and know his language at four years old or so? Any? How much has been birthed from an effort to grow larger than my legal father and his consistent reliance on street talk, street wisdom, street judgments, anti-intellectualism? Any?

It didn't matter, still doesn't. Language was one of my pride and joys, and still is. In grade school this meant I would always get along with my English teacher. Perhaps my abilities with language were responsible for my being skipped from third grade to fifth. I'm sure that was most of the reason. This exceptional ability was noticed at ever turn, and eventually it meant I didn't pay much attention to English class. Only to the creative areas. The rest bothered me. Boring, unimportant nonsense. Little sticks pointing to PARTS of the SENTENCE separating SUBJECT from ADVERB or PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE. I didn't need to study English, because I seemed to have an unusual ability to contextualize. For example, it is a frequent experience of mine to find new words on my tongue, words that I can use correctly, but have no memory of looking up. I have always had a strength in gleaning meaning from context. Which means that to me, grammar lessons were like telling a natural-born jumper how to enjoy the air under her feet. Or so I thought. (I have since learned the great value in the joining of applying learned technique to natural potential...although I still think grammar lessons would put me to sleep.)

--

I am writing this, I hope it's clear, for my own benefit. For my own memorias, for my own historia. I am not shaping it so much for a reader's ego. I know it is often problematic in current social norms to speak so openly about your own positive traits or talents. But I have found through the years that people will make you insane if you try to implement their constant feedback. I think of John Lennon's words they didn't want me so they made me a star. (Forgive me, John). People want to be able to tell you all your life that you are uniquely gifted, but they do not want you to internalize that message and repeat it. They offer honest praise, and with it the expectation that you will now become a liar to accommodate them. Flatterers too often confer a dire dissonance with their conditional compliments. They naturally objectify you (and I mean as you grow, as you are developing mentally and socially) and of course, objects aren't allowed their own process. They want to push you to the top of a heap where you are all alone and where they can put their own projections on you and on what you and Your Talent Mean and then, when they need your blood to complete their own story, they are happy to push you down into a chasm to get it. But your own actual experience becomes secondary the moment you become something to be remarked upon; by then it's too late--you have become their icon. When it comes to acknowledging your gifts, you must adhere to their preferred code of the Humble Smile and Deprecatory Mumble. You are allowed to be specially endowed, but not to be aware of it so much, and not to have a consciousness shaped at all by the constant the commentor cannot see--himself. And this is some of what I mean by Making You Crazy. It is a double-bind. Long ago, I dismissed the judgments of others, or rather (because, yeah, that's a lie) I have reskinned the awaiting receptacles. What you say to me about me will mean just what I want it to mean. (And don't we really all do this, anyway? Go ahead, admit it. Then you can wield more power in your process. Denial means you fight yourself!) Because ultimately, I cannot have you destroying my sense of center or self-confidence. No matter who you are or what you think you are. This priority/ability has allowed me to escape smoking wrecks, honeyed traps, and well-rusted racks; it will never be laid down in blind allegiance to someone else's projection or expectation. I am well aware of both my gifts as well as my curses. I speak of both. I will not feign "modesty." So please, take what you can from my confessions. I do not promise any of it is verifiable or well-tailored or even palatable, mannered, useful....

--

I think now, ironically, of my "real" father. My biological father. The one I knew as a child and remembered as "Papi" for all the years until I met him again at 20. And as gifted as he is with words, he does not always wield them so well. I remember him giving me one of those same Donna Buying Tampons moments, himself. Was it after he learned I had been a Science Major for a year or more? Did he try to say "Oh, maybe that's why you speak....blah blah blah" whatever. "So precisely" or whatnot. He masked his unsubtle critique of my diction in a poetic description of myself as "part angel, part mathematician." Some judgment leaping from his own feelings, some silken nudge. Someone else on me about speaking too "well." Did he feel I sounded too "White"? Was my mastery of the language intimidating to him? Did he feel I was wearing my own internal colonization without realizing it? Was he offended or bored by my choice of vocabulary? Was he projecting from his own feelings of guilt for not making sure I knew Spanish growing up? You can't really be sure, because my father, mi Papá, is not direct as I am. I don't know how reductive it is to frame my will to directness by saying that I was brought up by a bully from the Bronx who made it his calling to keep me quiet and now I don't futz with gauze or gossamer when I have something I need you to know. But it seems not an entirely unreasonable argument to make. And while I'm sure my (Real) father's less-confrontational approach is very indigen-ey, or non-patriarchal, or non-colonizing...I also (sometimes) see this type of vague, poetic communication as plain passive-aggressive. I won't enter a final ruling, because I cannot tell what is him and what is me thinking on him, and I don't pretend to always be able to differentiate. But I know I will speak how I like, and as Sid Vicious said--if you got a problem, the problem is You. I will not have either an adopted father nor a biological father nor admirers nor detractors shaming me for my natural gifts. In fact, unless I die first, I will study multiple languages and become better at speaking them--technically, poetically, rhythmically, and all other ways--than all my critics. So mind your own box because it's where you sleep!

Of course I cannot cast my papi's words--nor even a straight-up enemy's words--in a wholly negative light. Aside from the fact that my father (like all of us) needs understanding and forgiveness, I see no point in discarding valuable fuel. I will take what I can from whatever is said to me. It's another one of those Jack London Dying in the Woods tricks. I can glean lessons and grok the best use for the fibrous unseen heartstalk of any arrow or weed that splits my path. I can use that to strengthen. Of course you also have that ability, but don't take my word for it. Take it out for a spin. Let someone say something, and use it in whatever way you need to, for your own self-actualization. All symbols transform, are malleable, meet in the back. We are the writers of the hidden track.

I have, before, listened to the "wrong" voice. And yet...were they the wrong ones? Given my eventual lessons and use of the experiences?

As I imply, it has not been one or two incidents in my life that have demonstrated the power of language to me. It has been a constant stream of experience, of taking notes. Another of the ways in which I've noted the power of language was using it to counter my appearance. And this has taught me a lot about the judgments of others.

--

I look young for my age. I mean exceptionally. I am one of those people who is known for this. When I was 16 or so and most boys my age were looking like men, I still looked tiny. It meant that when I was a slender 17, big husky, cornfed 12 or 13 year-olds would pick fights with me, and when I pinned them to the ground and embarrassed them ("Man, you're WIRY" was always the phrase), they would run home crying and get their drunken ex-Marine father who would rage around the projects hunting for me with his gun in his hand. Okay, that only happened one time. But you get the point. When I was 25 nobody still wanted to sell me cigarettes (no, I don't smoke anymore), and just last week someone guessed me at a decade younger than I am. So I'm still holding up okay. That's how I think of it now. "Holding up well." But when I was young this quality was felt more as a disease. I was behind on all the (Caucasian) growth charts, and the doctors urged my mother to put me on Human Growth Hormone. Yup, I was that small-looking, I guess. Always shortest in my class, I grew up in between and around a million insults and bullyings due to my size and young-looking cara.Oye, this is a ten-entry series in and of itself! So let me just say that I was quite interested when I discovered that the person at the counter (or the desk, or the other end of the pen) who was half-asleep would straighten up and listen when I opened up my mouth and began to speak.

Why? They came awake. They had been running on autopilot, and barely lifted their lids to sum me up...or so they thought. But I shattered those prejudices by using our common language far better than they had expected or would expect from someone who looked like me. I learned to love that look in their face--that "reframing" look that washed over someone's eyes; that "I am paying attention now" look. Because I felt that nobody was taking me seriously. Not as seriously as I felt I should be taken. I know. I was probably a very serious and ridiculous child! But I had many thoughts, some seemingly important ones, some I would even read later in "Great Books." Yet, I knew how people were seeing me. I knew it because they had let me know over time. Because I was "shrimp" and "runt" and "short people got no reason to live" and "can you carry that by yourself?" and always last in football team picking, and always in the front row of pictures, always left carrying someone heavier than me when we did tandem-carry/sprints up the Hill, always wrestling someone a bit out of my weight class in Wrestling, always dancing with girls breast's rather than their cheeks or faces--when I did manage to be brave enough to dance (okay, it wasn't all a curse). I was so small and young looking, people had their minds all made up. It did not escape my notice that big, stubbly male teenagers were being treated like adults while I was still treated like a child. Boys who were grades above me would hit on my girlfriends, asking them if they were tired of a "half-man" and other such insults. (So I would steal their girlfriend.) I could go on for pages, not that I have any urge. Trust me, I grew up with this perception. It's been a big part of my life. When I read of Kurt Cobain's trauma of Growing Up a Small Boy, I grokked what that meant immediately. If you know, you know.

And if you do know, then you can understand what it meant to me when I saw that once I began speaking, I could make even grownups pay attention. Their eyes did that little shift, as if shedding a cataract and looking right at me for the first time. The conversation changed. Do not think this was a small part of my young awareness. It was huge. It was really a continuation of that day in first grade when I told the bully that "Fucking Myself" was, in all actuality, a Physical Impossibility. And a precursor to a professor one day telling my class that humans mostly judge intelligence by how well one wields language. It was a lesson I internalized experientially long before that course in Child Psych, and I perhaps knew the truth of it even better than my teacher. In those days when I first realized I could make this happen, I truly felt I had harnessed actual Magic.

This is exactly why I have loved writing letters in the past. That is, when it came to authorities and such. I have been awarded money based on my writing, jobs based on my cover letters, contracts based on my verbal abilities, tickets dropped based on my argument. I'll get quite a different response in person, and I'll have to work to counter it. But If I send you a letter, you cannot see my inked forearms, my ropily muscled hands, scarred fingers, the well of tangled echo in my eyes, my skin tone, my shape, my size. You get what I want you to get. ...At least when I'm aware what it is I'm actually saying. That, perhaps, is not as natural a gift. Divining my own (true) intent has taken much more effort than using English well. And it is, perhaps, unfortunately for my own ego that I have, historically, been better at speaking than at knowing when not to speak.

But I'm getting there. And it has to do with listening.

--

LIKE METALLICA, BRISTLING WITH COMPLEXITY on And Justice For All, there comes a time when cold competence in format has been proven, and he who thinks himself Master must find the next level of growth. In this example, it is to be found in further developing or knowing or expressing the content, rather than further refining the form. Leaving aside the many (valid) criticisms of The Black Album (for now that I've begun the Metalliphor, I must keep going) it is a much slower, simpler album than its predecessors. No machine-gun broken drum beats that are the child of a frantic virtuouso desperate to prove his brilliance; no unorthodox or unexpected shifting to the augmented 9th to entertain Hammett's Satrianically-tinted and centipedian riffs; no rippling thick reverb or beastly vocals spat out in doubletime from Hetfield. And why? Because you can only take the orthodoxy of technique so far before you meet your own boredom--even if it is a technique with which you've made your name, your chops, your bones. Just as there came a time in my life when I realized that I had impressed myself as well as one could hope, and that I lived in a world filled with Talkers--self-impressed talkers, everyone saying something and sure it was essential. In this lull, I realized that I had dropped intellectualism by the wayside at 14, after I realized that even the most thought-out and educated arguments still left you with a person opening their mouth and making words. That was reason, speech, and argument. And as many ways as you might word something, you were still left with but words.

I found myself at parties, eschewing the familiar openings in dialogue. A pretty girl (or boy) would blather on, hurrayo-yayo tempo y entusiasmo and I didn't want the bait. An easy catch left prattling by the open, abandoned gate. What an odd sort I had become, divested of the need to conquer every conversation! Not a dummy, clearly with some history (and thus things to say), but who left you with a word or two, an enigmatic smile and a sigh. A playful but unyielding refusal to take Shit So Seriously. What a turnaround, eh? Once he was Heavy. Once Deep and Philosophical. Once always ready to take up those well-worn conversations and put a full grip on the seesaw handle. But he just didn't seem to be playing anymore. Somehow, the unthinkable had happened. He no longer fought the urge to impress, nor was a plaything of its seductive duress.

I am talking about talking. Not so much about writing. And I am still not immune to saying those stupid things that give away your social ineptitude (I am, despite apparent evidence and sworn assertions to the contrary, socially inept) but at one point I just found that I no longer had the energy to convince or sway or repave the same old rest stops. Not even to play. Somehow, I had not even the interest in being heard amidst the clanging, banging, shouting, cheering fray. Why?

I'm older? Less time? Or maybe I've proved to myself whatever I had been trying to prove. I can't surely say. I'm still (completely) eager to share what I've seen and learned and think with any people who really have an ear. I just won't talk to hear myself do it, nor to take up time while the other person waits their turn to shine. I'm (always) willing to listen and learn (though you may not always know when I'm doing it) but I've lost all patience for dragging people to school, or dressing myself up as some sort of Thing or Person (unless for costume parties!) or even rebutting that which I know to be false. I've come around to new views. I don't care to fight like that. I know what I know. Holding that within me feels big, warm, sure. Safe and complete. There is no other action needed to fulfill that process. And what I don't know, I'm working on, listening for. Noisy conversations mostly meant to signify or satisfy things other than what is apparently being discussed do not interest me except as the occasional reminder of the ubiquitous quicksand that awaits the earnest student in every day "dialogue." Real knowledge, Information, Wisdom, Words--they are power. I am on a journey. I will not waste valuable fuel peeling out at the lights or doing donuts to impress bystanders.

So I did, it seems, finally curtail my vocabulary. But not in the way I had originally planned. Not to please my peer groups or to blend in or hide myself. I just found I was using too many words, too often, and for no good reason. Wrong direction. So I began to travel inward. But first I asked myself, in the midst of all my conversacion,

what (really) do I have to say?

---

Part 3 of 2.? Part 1 here. Part 2 here. This installment not very punctuated by images yet, but later will be. Also some accent marks and such missing due to alien keyboard.

Part 4 to follow.