Deathwish 013: Sean
“His skull broke open on the asphalt”
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At 6 years old, my great-granddad rasped, coughed, and spit into a coffee can at my grandmother’s house.
The smell of his diseased saliva introduced it to me.
At twelve, a flatbed lurched. A man standing on the back fell. His skull broke open on the asphalt of the parking lot.
I learned its randomness.
In Haiti, bodies floated in the bay. I took part in killing a man. He made squeaking sounds, agonal breathing.
I participated.
Later, I was an Emergency Room security guard in a poor Bakersfield suburb. Summer meant gang shootings. On more than a few smoke breaks, a car would drive by and throw a half-dead gangbanger at me and drive off. Not stopping, afraid of being caught.
I remember its apathy.
As an Incident Responder on Oregon highways, I saw a man in a convertible beheaded by a truck trailer. I sprayed bleach on all three lanes of southbound I-5 to dilute the blood of a woman hit by a semi.
Sympathy.
In Iraq we were intimate. It followed us on every mission. It took friends and strangers.
In New Orleans it swam just beneath the stagnant waters, waited in holes, squatted in flood-damaged houses. I found a man who nailed plywood over all his windows and doors to keep it out.
You can’t prepare for it.
My father died, freezing in a bathtub in the middle of an L.A. summer.
It’s fond of irony.
I’ve feared it. I’ve helped it. I’ve run away and towards it. Now I respect it. I think of it like Neruda did in his poem: “I’m not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see, but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets.”
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Sean was born in San Francisco, CA, and lives in Portland, OR.