Chapter 1 (continued): “Even Bath Salts Have Their Limits” (from BRONX NIGHTS 🌃🍎)

Content Warning: This piece includes discussions of actual childhood sexual abuse, trauma, PTSD and survival. Reader discretion advised. No, seriously.

This isn’t a safe read. It’s not sanitized. It’s the truth—raw, bloody, alive. Bronx Nights is about what it means to survive when the world doesn’t want your story told.

Where to go from here. I think a few logistical details may be in order.

First, I promised myself that no one section of this book would be more than six pages. We can agree, if Chapter 1 is a sign of things to come, we’re all going to need the occasional gasp of air after being held underwater by Navy SEALs on the other kind of bath salts.

Let’s get some product placements out of the way. This memoir is unofficially sponsored by Fresca. Ah, refreshing. It would have been sponsored by Red Stag, an absurdly sweet, cherry-flavored bourbon produced by Jim Beam. But I stopped drinking, more or less, last September. (See Chapter 19 especially about that.)

I down a 12-pack of Fresca every day. I have four cans going right now on my desk. Why? Because Bronx Nights is also brought to you, without permission, by The Last Dab hot sauce, as seen on Hot Ones. Before I began this chapter, I poured a copious amount of that devil’s anus, Pepper X tincture onto a slice of Mario’s Pizza and gobbled it as fast as I could.

Don’t believe me? Hell, there isn’t a character in this book who hates me who wouldn’t at least vouch for my iron stomach.

Why did I just shove 2.7 million Scoville units down my throat? Just turn the page. It’ll make sense.

If this were a novel, I’d probably need The Coca-Cola Company and Sean Evan’s permission to mention their products. That’s the thing about a memoir: this is history. It might not be important history, but there is a chance, however slight, that Bronx Nights might be one of the few texts that survives into the deep future.

Who knows what digital Library of Ashurbanipal (hey, I spelled that right the first time!) exists in our future? Instead of clay tablets, perhaps a well-preserved server will be discovered by a 42nd-century Hank Layard. Good luck transliterating—let alone translating—“Lizard People that look like Sleestaks from Land of the Lost”!

I’m not suggesting I’m Gilgamesh—I’m more of an Enkidu, to my mind—but we are about to descend into the Underworld. Yet, just like the demigod of Uruk, we’ll emerge on the other side.

Here I sit at my desk, playing with my stylus, offering my life to the Great Lexical Lottery. As this is my life (history), legally I can namedrop anything I damn well please: Chanel No. 5. Etsy. Inglebert Humperdinck. Yahoo for personal history! (I prefer Google.)

This may also be a good time to mention that you are under zero obligation to read these chapter addenda. In fact, it may be easier to read the book all the way through, and if you’re curious, return later to see what all this miscellanea is about. Just bear in mind, I’m also writing for readers several millennia from now. They’re going to want an explanation for the TikTok carpet we laid for them.

Did you know the etymology of “cuneiform” derives from the Latin cuneus? It means wedge, which of course was the tool with which those minimum-wage Assyrian amanuenses etched their chicken scratch into soft clay before baking accounting ledgers and epics.

There are several English words that arrive to us from this root. For instance, “cunnilingus.” Lingua means “tongue,” of course. And there’s that other word used freely across the pond, but which makes the pubic hairs on every cancel culture post-Victorian stand on end.

See? That liberal arts education was good for something. And we have Wheaton College, Billy Graham’s alma mater, to thank for our very first dirty joke, albeit it a worn one.

As for me, hell, I don’t drink anymore. So it’s refreshing Fresca for the foreseeable. And sufficient pepper powder keg for me to reach into my asbestos memory banks and present some barely digestible facts about the backgrounds of some folks in this book:

First, I was raped at the golden age of five. To be precise, on November 17, 1978. How could I possibly remember that? Because that was the evening the Star Wars Holiday Special aired. Every male my age remembers that night—although I’m sure Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill would like to forget.

By the way, Mark Hamill makes an appearance in this book. No joke. Alex and I were wending our way through the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art shortly after I moved to New York City. And who should walk by us but Luke Skywalker himself! But let’s save the Force lore for later, shall we?

Back to my rape. (By the way, don’t worry. My ass doesn’t hurt anymore. Just my soul.) While most Star Wars fans rue that moment in television history, I am inclined to be grateful for it, as it assists with my personal history recall, given my age, Brain Fog & all.

I might add that my childhood home was so godawful that the first thing my sister said to me after a 30-year communication gap was, “People like you and me are supposed to become serial killers.”

Not the best grammar, but I think you get her point. That’s quite the “hello, how are you?” after three decades of separation.

Another important point: I did not become a serial killer.

Nor am I a Narcissist, Psychopath, Sociopath or any other Psychology Today armchair quarterback label that any dumbfuck with an associate’s degree’s understanding of mental health has thrown at me these past five years. That includes dumbfuck former best friends, godparents, lovers, family members, mentors, colleagues, Taylor Swift fans, etc., and anyone else without an accredited medical degree who is ignorant to the point of dangerous to think they can diagnose me.

You know who can diagnose me? The 30-plus doctors I have across one of the best healthcare systems in all of Civilization.

In fact, let’s take a gander at my personal health information online portal. Currently, there are 48 active diagnoses. And Hannibal Lecter Binge Eating Disorder isn’t one of them.

But you know what I spy on the list?

Chronic Post-COVID-19 Syndrome. Autism. Social Worker Assigned—thank God. Antiphospholipid Syndrome & Prothrombin Mutation. Mouthful there. Also, flank pain. Yes, I’m a pain in the ass.

Let me take this opportunity to say “fuck you” to all the idiots, and thank you to a very sage university professor for backing up my F.U.

Just another fact or two about my childhood:

One day, I couldn’t find my sister. But there she was, playing hide & seek in her bedroom closet, tied to a chair and gagged. Quite the accomplishment for a young girl, don’t you think? Hmm. I wonder if she had any adult help with that wee game of Musical Chairs.

I should also probably mention the times the man who raised me faked his own suicide in front of the fam. Oh, here’s another one: he used to hide in scary places late at night while I was asleep in my basement bedroom, then quietly call out my name until I wet the bed—which, can you blame me, I did into my mid-20s.

But enough about me. That’s just a snapshot, which I didn’t feel like weaving into the general narration. Thank you for allowing me some cold hard facts here at the beginning.

Earlier, I mentioned there are some fairly nasty characters in this book. Perhaps a better way to frame that would be: there are people in this book who haven’t properly dealt with the nasty things that happened to them, and so remain caught in a vicious, snake-eating-itself, Sisyphean cycle of repeating their own tragic personal histories.

For instance, there is a character in this book who pays to be surprised in her own home and violently sexually accosted. Her diagnosis is none of my business. She is human and needs help.

Here are things that happened to other significant characters in this book:

Several were repeatedly made to play with their fathers’ caulk guns as children, to the point of swallowing that toxic shit. Another endured the same thing, only it was a grandfather. Another’s husband had an affair with her sister. One was forced, as a child, to jump out her window and escape from her male guardian brutally attacking her.

Now do you understand why I’m not naming names, other than my own? And Nina Simone’s. (Dang, that’s three times now.)

The list goes on and on. I admit, my love life reads a bit like The Rape of Nanking.

We are all members of The Shit You Don’t Want to Know That Really Happened to Strangers Next to You on a Diner Stool Club.

We’re all historical people. And just like Neuros, you’re either in the Club, or you’re not. And if you’re not in the Club, lucky you! Jehovah passed over your home and history. Now go have some unleavened bread—with hot sauce, if you dare!

If you’re in the Club, you may need a minute to collect yourself. Any bath salts left? The Epsom ones, not the eat-your-own-face ones.

As to why I’m drawn to people like this romantically, I have my own amateur Bob Hartley thoughts. I think it’s related to Autism. For whatever reason, I’m a pathological disappointment. I have empathy. I don’t like hurting people. But I can say I have a rather unique hermeneutic of Dexter.

Running out of space—just enough lines for a few other matters.

You may have noticed an anachronism in Chapter 1. I didn’t know when I spoke with the bank teller that I had Long-Term COVID. Feel free to look up the epidemiological history on your own. I didn’t even know Long COVID was a thing until I moved to New York City. I just knew I was so ill I had to drink a gallon of bourbon for sleep, which consequently forced my liver into early retirement.

Also, fuck Richland Library. If anything comes of this book, I hope it will be the construction of a goddamn gate around the Southeast Branch children’s play area. Yeah, there was also the time admin had a cow when I dialed up Social Services to rescue an infant from a True Detective incest FUBAR. I mean, DSS removed the child from the home, for God’s sake! But management’s anus became enflamed because the incident colored their fucking corporate image.

And if you think I’m the only employee or former employee of Richland Library with a story like that, you would be (a) wrong, (b) wrong, (c) all of the above.

Trust me. I’m going to be far more kind in this book to Club Members than corrupt institutions and the fuckholes who lead them. (When is Fuckhole Syndrome going to make it in the DSM-5?)

Anyway, here’s my self-diagnosis: Savior Complex.

As we’ll see in an upcoming chapter, I am inexorably wired to act when a child is being abused. Someone please give me a time machine set for Jerry Sandusky’s shower stall. As to child abuse, that applies to anyone aged newborn to 99. Also, anyone over that age—jiminy cricket, please leave the centenarians alone!

You’re not going to believe this, but I just got an email from one of the audition websites I subscribe to. Here’s what it says: