How’s It Hangin’?

An Essay on the Art of Hanging In There

Hugged between the North Pennines and the Yorkshire Dales, just south of Scotland, lies the birth of a memory that has echoed throughout my life. It is one of those memories that recurs and stings more often closer to the moment than later in life where you bump into it occasionally in its shallower waves. If I was 14 or 15, I couldn’t recall. Hell, maybe I was even 13. It was one of those typically teetering military family predicaments where I was a year older than the rest of my grade in one country and a year younger in the next.

A small camp in the middle of nowhere was catering to a herd of American boy scouts. It was a struggle to be a scout, or in most things that involved masculine competitiveness. Never being last but always 4^th place filled my world with the classic jargon: “They just wanted it more than you,” “You weren’t bad, they were just better,” “You don’t need a metal to be a winner,” and “You should be proud you did your best.”

Of course, in these formative years, most teenagers develop the habit of either trying too hard to the point of becoming ass hats or cowards. Me? It got me stuck in the psyche to where there was never a dare I wouldn’t accept.

It was a simple dare: to climb an old rickety climbing wall and spelunk down. Not such a dare to most, I know. However, everyone was highly aware of my upper body weakness and my fear of using my muscleless arms. I was teased to no end – names like ‘baby arms ‘or ‘fat bish’ were on the regular. Playing football, I would yell, “go long” fully cocked, sweaty and eyes squeezed shut only to shoot it out looking like a flailing T-Rex as it drop a mere foot in front.

Needless to say, scared out of my mind to climb that monstrosity, I didn’t hesitate to say, “I’ll try.” After only two steps up, my skinny-ass piano playing phalanges were buckling with no muscular support under the 200 hundred pounds of man flesh no 14 year old hand should ever have to bare.

So, I fell. After 8 or 9 times of falling only to make it to the 3 step up alone, I began to tear up out of frustration, and with everyone watching. But I kept trying. Eventually, I felt myself get lighter – able to make it half way before falling again. And then a little higher each time.

It hadn’t become aware to me until I actually reached the top (which felt like hours later), that more and more people had taken ahold of my rope to help pull me up. It was a stunning kaleidoscope of emotions from dashes of encouragement flooded with various shades of embarrassment. And then the leader at the top told me it was time to go down.

Terribly afraid of heights, I looked over the edge. Slowly bending my knees, I closed my eyes, crossed myself in the way any good non-catholic would, and began to spring myself up and over. A man grabbed me from behind as everyone was yelling “NO!” I gave everyone the “how the hell was I supposed to know” look and waited patiently for instructions.

The idea of leaning backwards over the side of this old rickety faux cliff with my life line literally in my hands was not the most pleasing idea to me. So what did I do? I froze in panic. Everyone started yelling – trying to encourage me. My freeze thawed into tears as I began to hear taunting over those cheers. Suddenly the man in front of me yelled “JUMP!”

And jump I did.

Straight down. Of course no one told me not to jump straight down. Because I didn’t jump out and keep my legs in front of me against the wall, I just smacked right into it – my face bruised squishily against the paint shedding splintery wall. Everyone roared in laughter. “Put your feet in front of you and push,” I heard an older man instruct loudly from below. With my weight and shaking arms and legs hindering my coordination, I tiptoed them up under me in the very uncomfortable squatting-to-shit-upside-down position.

It took a few yells and jeers from above and below before I lunged myself away from that terrifying old tower. Before I knew it, I was air born – exhilarated by the control and power I thought I had. As I was swinging back toward the wall, I put my legs up to brace for impact and went too far. The inertia caused me to flip backwards upside down and this time smack my ass against the tower of terror. Half of the crowd was yelling from nerves (the men) while everyone else was losing it laughing (the boys… and the men).

The water works began to the point of making Sally Field look like an under-actor. In the blur of my tears, I saw my bully among the crowd yelling what sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher but looking an awful lot like “faggot.” It was easy to interpret since he over used that word around me. Hanging there, I wanted the tower to fall on him – but my over-thoughtful passive self decided to give him a thesaurus. (Before I moved out of England, I gave him a thesaurus with the word “faggot” circled in red. He probably never read it – but I felt it. And it felt grand.)

Maybe it was all that blood running to my head, but I had a moment of Euphoria. A hallucination of hope. Hanging there between the top and bottom, jeers and cheers on both ends, it didn’t matter which way I went. All I knew was I just couldn’t keep hanging there.

That moment right there. THAT is the point in this memory I keep dwelling on as of late. All famous orators during moments of trial or great change have thrown around the word ‘precipice.’ Dictionary.com defines this as: 1. A cliff with a vertical, nearly vertical, or overhanging face; 2. A situation of great peril. Quite literally, this moment of mine was both at the same time – and the only way out of it was to either go up or down – and both required many hands to help me – and for me to calm the hell down long enough to see where I was doing.

As the men below followed my barking orders, “Let me down!” I started reciting the Boy Scout Oath to myself (I was well indoctrinated like that – The Lord’s Prayer was saved for church camp). Even now as I recall landing on the sawdust laden ground, head first, I realize just how much the meaning behind that oath has changed: Now, the boy scout oath has morphed into something more like:

On my honor I will do my best to the higher power and my conscience and to obey the scientific law: To help other people at all times: To keep myself physically awake, mentally strong and morally …well, gay.

I’ve become a better version of myself, a more honest version, using the strength I already had rather than the one I was told to have. Winning and losing is now a lot different, too. Those who win the prizes in life are some of the biggest losers we know, and some of the losers in life are some of the richest people I know. But we always pay attention to what people have, not what they don’t. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it would often change overnight. It fell because it didn’t learn from those changes. (Google it.)

Everything that replaces something great is also replaced. It’s not a cliché of hyper positive bull. It is a historical human-behavioral fact.

Whether we go up or down, at least we’re getting off that wall. The choice is ours, we tell the men holding the rope which way we want to go. And whichever way we go, when it’s all said and done, we will give that thesaurus to our bully with his over-used word circled in red: ”loser.”