Difficult Birth — Brandon Freels

Fifty years ago today, I was born with a black eye. My first moment of life was an act of violence. My face was bruised and bloody. It took decades for the scar to go away. Apparently, the forceps were used incorrectly. When I was a kid, I think I saw on some talk show, maybe it was Oprah, that the type of birth you have determines your attitude in life. I had a difficult birth. Somehow, through early childhood, I naively trusted the world. But humanity is mostly rotten, and I was often reminded of those forceps scraping across my face.

I must have been a toddler when my sister pushed me into a wooden magazine holder and cracked open my skull. Fragments of that hospital trip still live in my memories. Maybe I have brain damage? Maybe it was the classmate who accidentally smashed her metal lunch pail into my face in the second grade and broke one of my teeth in half? When I recently got a brain scan, they said I have old dried blood in my brain. My first thought was, "How old?"

Then there's the time my grandmother tried to strangle me at Thanksgiving. "Why doesn't he just behave?" she was probably thinking. “You should have hit her,” my grandfather, her husband, said to me after. “Never let a woman put her hands on you!” From that day on, I knew I was done with family. I started thinking of myself as an orphan, a lone wolf. I wasn’t even in middle school yet. Why was everyone trying so hard to fuck with me?

Growing up, it was hardly ever my peers who came at me. It was always my parents, my friends’ parents, teachers, cops, security guards, coaches, grandparents, uncles, anyone vying for authority, anyone who wanted to control me. When I was in grade school in the 80s, I had a rat-tail haircut. A step-uncle of mine, an Air Force asshole who would go on to screw up his own step-kids, simply couldn’t handle it and constantly harassed me. Every smile, every ounce of individuality, was met with some lame attempt to humiliate me.

Sophomore year in high school, to my family’s horror, I quit all sports and grew out my hair. My mother was so disappointed. She wanted her son to be a star sports jock. I’d rather be dead. Another uncle, this time on my father’s side, harassed me endlessly about the long hair, saying I looked like Charles Manson. This didn't bother me, but it did upset my mother. Soon after, I stopped going to family get-togethers. As the only boy on my father’s side of the family, they were put off by my rejection of their version of masculinity.

The next year, I shaved all my hair off, bought some used combat boots, and started wearing a trench coat (given to me by Nova). This transformation brought my mother to tears. She would eventually help me shave my head into a mohawk, but only because she wanted the mohawk to be straight and orderly. “What will the neighbors think?” she said, with the clippers in hand. “Why are you doing this to me?” Then she’d run off to do some damage control gossip with said neighbors. Maybe stick up for me, Mom? Who cares what those bitches think?

Half a century on, I still hate adults. I can forgive the kids. Kid-on-kid hostility is to be expected and forgivable, but those adults can go fuck themselves. I know my gripes aren’t unique for a lot of Gen Xers. We are all damaged in some way, and many kids had it much, much worse.

Yeah, I guess life hasn’t been too bad. I can think of plenty of good times growing up in Portland. I remember constantly taking the 33 bus downtown to flaneur around, or to visit the all-ages City Nightclub, or the X-Ray Cafe (later the O Cafe), or to submerge myself in Powell's small press section, or stop by Reading Frenzy, or see a poetry reading at Umbra Penumbra or Cafe Lena, or maybe hang out with the gutter punks and street kids at the square. Nova, Nate (RIP), and I were lucky enough to see Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins before they were big. Sometimes I’d pile into a vehicle full of misfits, usually Nova’s car, or Dan’s bug, or Ali’s van, and take an outing to the beach, visiting Astoria, Seaside, or Cannon Beach. Other times, we’d walk along the now burnt down Oak Grove train trestle and hang out in that little safe room in the middle.

I remember loving to draw, but many teachers told me to stick with sports or go into the military. I got the military thing a lot from adults. Fuck them for seeing me as expendable war fodder. Fuck war and fuck the military! I remember unleashing my creativity in the off-campus offset printing class, where I wrote many nonsensical newsletters and flyers. These were mostly just me experimenting with free-writing and automatic writing. I remember one teacher questioning me about the meaning of these things I was passing out, as they tried to find some fault with them. This would ultimately become my throughway into taking words seriously, into poetry and surrealism. The following year, my friend Kris and I would put out a poetry zine of student writing, They’ll All Laugh. We found refuge in the journalism department and the poetry club. The writing teachers were much more encouraging than any of the other teachers we had, and writing has stuck with me as my primary weapon.

I wrote many nonsensical newsletters and flyers.

If I tried to mirror anyone as a high schooler, it was Jason Dean from Heathers or Andrew Schofield’s portrayal of Johnny Rotten in Sid and Nancy. That’s how I saw myself, believe it or not. I remember my friend group like they were the teens in River’s Edge, cynical weirdos stuck in a gloomy white trash suburban hell. That’s the way I remember growing up in Oak Grove and Milwaukie in the 90s. I wish I could have done more during this time, but a weight always felt like it was holding me back. It was my parents. Any thought about leaving or trying something new was met with hostility and doubt. College? To them, I was dumb and talentless. Travel? Move out of Milwaukie? Get a fresh start? It was too much money. How would I pay for it? I was stuck in Milwaukie forever. But, against their wishes, I went to college.

At community college, I took some painting classes and was surprised by the instructor's enthusiasm for the semi-abstract work I was making. He was retiring and, despite being a Bob Ross-type landscape artist, encouraged me to use abandoned canvases and materials in the art barn to do whatever I wanted. "Go crazy!" he'd say with a big smile. His replacement the next year, a social realist who made portraits that fetishized Portland's street punks, wasn't so supportive. After I got accepted into PNCA, she told me, "I wouldn't have accepted you into PNCA.”

I began to doubt myself and decided not to attend PNCA, opting instead to attend PSU. There, I studied art history and never took an art class. I loved doing research and writing papers, and took advantage of the university library to study Dada and surrealism. A modern art professor, fresh off the plane from Chicago, was very encouraging to me. "Why are you here?" she'd ask. "You should be going to school in Chicago or New York." But, as usual, my parents told me that it was impossible.

Almost bookending this time in college were two chapbooks of experimental fiction I had published by Future Tense Books, the first in 1996 and the second in 2001. I was very proud of these collections, but again, many of the adults in my life looked at these things I’d written with contempt. I remember one adult I looked up to picking up one of my chapbooks with two fingers, like it was a turd or contaminated.

College gave me much-needed structure, but after I graduated, I felt lost and struggled with my own social shortcomings. I ended friendships and mentally wrestled with my own period of emotional dysregulation, negative self-image, cynicism, and suicidal ideation. I was also becoming a real toxic asshole, like all the men in my family. When some very important people in my life cut me off, I realized I needed to change. If not, I was either going to become a sociopath or maybe even kill myself. It wasn't easy, but over the next few years, I focused on recognizing that I wasn't the center of everyone's universe. People had their own lives. I acknowledged my own destructive behaviors and worked to change them. Mostly, I tried to stay grounded. I guess a psychiatrist would call this mindfulness.

It was during this culturally important post-9/11 period that I started attending anarchist reading groups and, with several like-minded acquaintances, co-founded the Portland Surrealist Group. Then, like a life-saving shock to my heart, I met some kids from Louisiana, displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and became obsessed with their band, Here Comes a Big Black Cloud. I was their number one fan, and they became my closest companions. What followed was years of drunken house shows and an esoteric understanding of the true nature of rock n' roll.

The mid-aughts were the funnest time of my life, as Portland's countercultures seemed to blend. Zoobombers, grindcore kids, noisers, metal heads, bike punks, art punks, garage rockers, punk rockers, puppeteers, clowns, goths, queers, genderfuckers, riot grrrls, poets, anarchists, surrealists. I hung out with them all! Everything crossed over, and I could go to a house show six nights a week. It was cheap to live in Portland then, and it felt like I was in a state of semi-retirement (Portlandia, be damned). I also got my master's degree in publishing at the end of the aughts. It was a useless degree, but it was a fun waste of time (and money).

In 2012, after my mother died, I left Portland with a girlfriend and moved to New York. We broke up soon after, and life suddenly became like a delirious rollercoaster ride. I found myself living in San Francisco, New Orleans, and finally back in New York in 2018. It's too early to summarize this period, and I'm also getting tired of writing about myself, but along the way, I’ve met many creative outcasts and weirdos, for which I am grateful.

Some of you are probably like, "Who cares, Brandon? Why write all this shit?" Well, it's my fucking birthday, and I’m fifty fucking years old! A lot of my friends didn’t, and some won’t, make it this far. If my mother were alive and read this, she would say, "You only remember the bad times.” And, when it comes to my childhood, that’s mostly true. The thing is, I feel these are some of the moments, positive or negative, consciously or unconsciously, that made me who I am. They formed me.

What have I learned in fifty years? I would love to write something here, but everything I jot down comes off as pretentious and self-important. What I have learned recently, though, is that entropy is real. As I get older, gravity fights me at every step. The body breaks down. I realize more now than ever that sooner or later, I’m going to die. I didn’t respect this knowledge when I was younger, but I do now. Both my parents died in their mid-sixties, so I imagine I have about fifteen years left. I want to spend that time creating shit and having fun. I want to make the most of life before I drop dead.