5 Suicides and counting:
The first one is mine. A lot of people, most in my experience which yes has to be colored by my own lead-ins and bearings and comportment still most of the people I've had recourse to mention this to, to say well yeah you know I once tried to do that, most people assume you were an attention-getter and not seriously trying to leave or you would have left. And the fact of your being there means it failed anyway so it was weak in addition to being the weakness of suicide in most people's minds.
There was a movie on tv back in the early 80's called "Shogun" this white guy goes to Japan in the early days of white people going to Japan and at one pretty gripping moment there's this hari-kiri re-enactment, a Japanese samurai ritual suicide which when honorably accomplished is called seppuku. And after the movie I tried to tell this guy I was watching it with drinking beers and getting stoned that I had done that, and I inspirationally started to tell him by saying see this and lifting up my shirt where the scar is so there would be that to start from rather than the pills and wrists aspect and he thought I was showing him or about to be showing him my dick so he got real superior and distant but the scene had been so intense for me I had to tell somebody and he was there but because of that misapprehension and the subsequent closing down of formerly open channels it just dissipated before any resolution happened.
Right after it happened and just after I was out of the hospital at home mending up I sat down to watch some television on the Stromberg-Carlson and it was a choice between Vincent Bugliosi's oddly proprietary tv-docudrama treatment on the Manson Family or a Japanese flick called "Hari-kiri" by Masaki Kobayashi. I was an Akira Kurosawa fan even then so it was the deciding factor even though I was temptedly drawn to the authoritarian serving of evil Bugliosi's flic represented.
Just the other day which is many years later I was watching "John From Cincinnati" on HBO with a roommate and the lead character picked up a knife and stabbed himself with it. I didn't say anything.
Another time a long time ago an elder beat of my acquaintance took an immediate attitude before anything about how or what and why came up when the subject arose and so assumed I'd tried to slit my wrists or taken too many pills or something. The old cry for help thing. Well no I said I put a four inch hunting blade into my upper abdomen just grazed the interior side of a vertebra as it hilted having missed every vital organ on the way in and then with it in all the way with both hands pulled the knife straight down hard the idea being you make a crossed pair of incisions opening the bowel entirely guaranteeing death but I only went down a half inch or so even less and hit my belly button which is very hard as are most people's and the knife would not go through so I sat there after trying actually I was kneeling in front of the heater and sat there crying a little and then took it out and then after a little while put it back in the same opening and shoved it around sideways. That caught a few things and did some damage.
Later the doctor who sewed things back together who saved my life in every way including the attachment of a kind of guilt to the question of whether or not to continue to carry the impossible burdens of a singular life told me that the first wound was virtually harm-free except for the opening itself, that going in the first time I'd missed every organ that was in the way and all major blood vessels. Eventually not having died yet I got up and went outside.
I kept bleeding and got in the truck all covered with blood and drove downtown which took about twenty minutes. I obeyed all traffic laws and drove slowly and carefully shifting gears where appropriate. I pulled into a space and sat downtown by a park and a theater in the cab of my truck for a while feeling very strange then some street chick panhandled me at the driver's side window but I didn't have my wallet or any money so she started yelling at me for being tight and ungenerous because she could only see my upper shoulders and head which was a blue work shirt unstained by my eventful preceding moments and my face somewhat pale but calm. After that I drove out to the airport thinking now someone who knew of my plight would be there when I got there to put me on a plane and out of this predicament but by the time I drove through North Portland traffic and out to the airport parking lot I was too weak to do much. I may have driven somewhere else beforehand and not remembered for instance back toward home then changed my mind. That's possible, I have a dim recollection of having done so. Still strength returned in small waves.
I went in from the parking space I'd found toward departures and arrivals and the airline counters where surely someone would be but there was construction then and a long temporary passage made of plywood leading obscurely into the terminal. As I walked up to it I saw a rank of cabs on the other side of the access road their drivers sitting on the fenders of the cabs smoking and talking one of them saw me and then they all turned or most all of them turned and stared at me I walked into the terminal kind of holding my stomach area the passengers and relatives would notice me or not when they did they'd start what my older relatives called that when something shocks you suddenly you start people would start and move quickly away I got a length or two up the plywood corridor leading into the terminal and realized it was no go and turned around and headed back toward at least my truck which was at that time a 1948 GMC waiting out there in the October sunlight I got out to the arrival curb and the cabbies continued to stare at me as I got progressively then rapidly light-headed and sat down peaceful and feeling very insubstantial and nearly free of the bonds of gravity after a while of indeterminate length this sort of chubby sort of gay guy and a sort of skinny sort of gay guy came up and one said are you alright with a lot of genuine concern in his voice and I responded as honestly as I could that no I wasn't doing all that well right then and eventually the larger of the two said he would wait there with me that his friend would go to call an ambulance and then the ambulance got there quickly I was in it and the siren and the engine and then the kid riding in back with me yelling at the driver that he was losing me and the driver was reassuring him the idea being among people in those conditions that no matter how bad it is staying calm is bound to be preferable. Before that they had asked me where I wanted to be taken "Providence or Emmanuel" two hospitals we were almost equally near and me being indigent or close meant insurance didn't dictate one or the other and under Oregon law either would have to take me and I had chosen Emmanuel out of not knowing which to choose and out of reasons of religious delusion. A decision which changed my life.
The second suicide would be that of a girl named Polly, daughter of my mother's next door neighbor, a year or two after the preceding event. She used a derringer and while inside the building in her mother's bedroom was physically about 8 feet from where I was sitting in the sun playing my guitar outside in the courtyard of the apartment complex our mothers lived in and we were both staying in. I heard the sound it made.
This event will be enlarged upon as the next part of a series.
