For many years, I had a lingering, unshakeable sense that from childhood on, I existed within an ever-changing, “in-between” status.  Surely, there is no mystery as to why I never felt comfortable within a single, distinctive cultural group.  I was born in an American naval hospital in Sasebo, Japan to a cocktail server from Hong Kong and an Italian-American U.S. Marine from Miami.  Between the ages of one and ten, I lived in Japan, Oceanside (CA), Okinawa and Virginia.  When my dad resigned his commission, we settled in an ultra-conservative town called Ridgecrest,California, where my father took up a supervisory position in the nearby China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station (birthplace of the “Sidewinder Missile”).  Meanwhile, I bounced through eight public schools in nine years.  My parents divorced shortly after we moved toRidgecrest.  As my mother, extremely depressed and suffering from untreated alcoholism, left the country in disgrace, my father remarried to an apocalyptic Christian evangelist with a tenuous grasp on reality.  My grades and morale predictably tanked. 

I remember this one incident in middle school, when my art teacher ordered me to report to the principal’s office at the beginning of his fifth period art class.  I was puzzled…I typically kept a low profile, mostly for the sake of self-preservation.  I didn’t want those two lumbering, ham-fisted bullies, Clay and Jesus, to charley horse both of my legs, as they often did when they spotted my scrawny, bespectacled frame lugging my thirty-pound backpack full of textbooks that I didn’t read.  It’s hard enough as it is to carry a disintegrating, leaden-weighted nylon sack without your legs feeling as if they were paralyzed and unable to propel you toward your next beating. 

I was surprised to find my father waiting for me on the bench outside of the principal’s office.  Dressed immaculately in his freshly pressed short-sleeved dress shirt, mismatched paisley tie and his golden Marine Corps-themed tie clasp, polished to a gleaming luster, my Pater Familias glared at me and demanded the meaning of this interruption of his test-firing of American-made WMD’s.  I denied any knowledge of wrongdoing or purposeful insubordination.  Yeah, my grades blew, but I was a good kid, or at least I appeared that way.  I guess you could call my crimes passive-aggressive.  Was it the water balloons that I smashed on the ceiling of the boy’s bathroom last week, near the cafeteria?  Did someone find out that I was the one who broke the room-clearing stink bomb capsule during the library’s film projector screening of “Vegetables are Good for You?”

We went into Mr. Grimfaced-Whoever’s office, and as we sat down, I saw my creation on his desk: a yellow foam hand puppet I named “Gorgo.”  He was an art project. My teacher had betrayed me.  Gorgo had two maniacal bug eyes glued to his face—two thick, wooden beads painted a garish orange. The bead’s holes pointed outward from his inanimate face, creating a kind of cold, hollow-eyed lunatic effect.  My puppet was decorated with spatters of bright red paint on his face and chest, and in his right fist, he gripped a “blood”-soaked hatchet.  The accompanying drawing and one page biography of Gorgo’s life story was sealed in a Ziploc plastic bag; Exhibit A in a case being built against me by the art teacher, the school psychologist, the principal and my aghast and embarrassed father.  Of course, the unspoken accusation against me was the questioning of my mental stability. 

So, what was so offensive in those supplemental documents that it compelled the school officials to seal them hermetically within a heavy-duty freezer sack, as if they were contaminated, gore-besmirched machetes from a violent crime scene?  According to my written story (and the accompanying graphic image), Gorgo had killed his parents with a meat thermometer and a plastic shoehorn, its improvised killing edge being the tip of the innocuous household device sharpened to a jagged, curving point. My dad didn’t buy my line that “it was just a joke.” My elated stepmother finally had a reason to tear down my “Satanic” horror movie posters and throw away my Clive Barker books.  Also, I think that was the day when my father started keeping a loaded gun inside his nightstand.  I was puzzled by his mumbled explanation that he was preparing against “home invasion gangsters.”  This was Ridgecrest, for crying out loud.  Back in the ‘80’s, a chicken rapist on the loose was the worst that happened in that town. Our chickens were dead, decapitated, and in the freezer.  Anyway, the next day at school, I sat before my guidance counselor, my grades and the incident report before her, and she just looked up at me sadly, shaking her dyed-blonde head at me, as if silently asking: “What happened?” 

 

Years later, still unable to find a place to fit in, I joined the Marine Corps.  Yeah, makes perfect sense, right?  A graduate of a four-year university, enlisting as a rifle-toting, grenade-tossing grunt?  From sitting around, drinking lattes and bullshitting with Marxist playwrights and liberal arts majors, to playing GI Joe on a global scale.  Of course, logic did not play a factor in my decisions.  Any psychotherapists out there care to do some pro bono work to stop me before I join the circus next?  Or the French Foreign Legion? 

Anyway, the Marines.  So, as an infantryman, I traveled to the Persian Gulf, Africa and several Asian countries and saw and experienced things that I will surely never forget.  Abject poverty, for instance.  And there were kids back home who were pissing and moaning that their moms didn’t pack the right flavor of Capri Sun in their lunch, while the kids I saw in Kenya were lucky if they didn’t die of the shits from drinking stank-assed water.  Although a lingering sense of distrust for authority figures and organizations followed me throughout my life, it was not until early on in my enlistment that I seriously started questioning the dogmatism inherent in political ideologies, as well as the rigid, immutable tenets of organized religion.  Throughout the years, both in and out of the Corps, as I read through a diverse collection of world literature and investigated author biographies, I realized that my outlook on life reflected the tone and themes of fictional narratives written by my favorite writers.  While entertaining me with their wonderful tales, these artists transcended nationalism and openly questioned racial prejudice and gender bias, while exhibiting a heightened sensitivity towards injustices stemming from colonialist exploitation.  These stories enriched my life while also shaping my burgeoning sense of moral outrage.  I decided that I wanted to craft stories that might bring attention to certain individuals in our society who are overlooked because they are judged as Other or immoral in their lifestyle choices.  I planned do this by tapping into my own disparate experiences, if any of them were worth sharing and shaping into narratives. With pen to paper, I kept coming back to themes of the “in-between.”