A word about monsters.
I met a guy when I was about 3, and he got into my head. It was like he found a sanctuary there. There was no one, or nothing, to free him. He wouldn’t leave anyway. It was too snug in there for him. Easy pickings.
This guy took on different forms, all frightening and depressing — Jesus Christ in so much statuary suffering at church or the guy at the filling station with the eyepatch and rotted teeth and attendant ghoulish grin, his cracks filled with darkness — where I’d ride along with my dad, a little kid in the passenger seat, terrified of the window drama and its backdrop of grease and fumes and so much metallic summer light. Countless nights laying motionless in our bunkbed, my big brother on the top, my little brother on the pullout underneath. The fright made breathing difficult, I was convinced the eyepatch man, in all his dark and silence, was aiming for me, only me. I had Batman to fight him, at first, and my brothers.
As I got older, this guy, this thing, got better at disguises, and he turned inward, a swirling blob of grim internal energy, like a shitty parent.
The “two” of us formed a connection based on fictions; his words seductive, wily but hardly intelligent, based on fictions. To be abducted by bleakness, these staggering exaggerations of anything even remotely uneasy, or untrue, suck all space in the head and heart for anything else. “You’re just a failure, unproductive, talentless, artless, you have no value. Might as well embrace that. If you’re not like this person or that thing, you’ll be nothing.” For me, this part of my brain became a joy-eating beast, a courage killer, a curiosity killer, a beauty killer, here to feed off my weaknesses and destroy my life. He even became the town drunk, would drape over me and pass out, leaving me unable to move. For days.
How easy it is to lose so much of your life and energy to this inner horror. Over time, the interminable agony and panic becomes a defining version of yourself. Sharing or communicating said misery is often impossible, which exacerbates the pain. (My friends who have killed themselves saw their suffering hit and maintain degrees so unendurable, so unrelatable, for years on end, they only wanted the torment to end.)
These are not auditory hallucinations, not bipolar speak, this beast is a way to identify a part of the brain that refuses to believe any good of yourself.
I learned recently from a Jewish rabbi, there is a Hebrew term he uses for this negative monster in your brain. He calls it the “yetzer hara,” which roughly translates to “one’s evil inclination.” He uses “yetzer hara” to describe, basically, your self-created internal suffering, and I often refer to it. The “yetzer hara” can sometimes disguise itself in reverence because he is clever, an alcoholic staring at your miserable reflection in a mirrored sign behind a bar at closing time. That was my revelry for years.
It seems pretty damn simple, the hours spent with clinical psychologists to dissect unyielding pain, and ways to keep that beast inside from walking across my grave. The useless medications. I ain’t alone, certainly, so many are learning to reject the dated and devastating aspects of oneself, to become a singular human being, and how it requires some kind of internal reconstruction, spiritual or whatever you want to call it. It’s painful. For me, the sadness will always be there, and if it is kept to a melancholy, a bittersweet sensation to things, I can learn to navigate life without being so profoundly compromised.
The other day I am surrounded by mesquite trees and a grassy field with two of my young children. Clarity falls over as the sun falls into its late-October evening magic, like some kind of god gently blowing into our faces. It is in that simple beauty a spark of optimism and inner hum rises. It is a moment of peace to quickly affirm the value systems of being a father, a husband and a human being.
A word about a monster slayer.
Jason “Shades” Schusterbauer, a best friend, died a few weeks back.
I met him on the day after I arrived in Michigan, my first day on the job as the new music editor at Detroit Metro Times in early 2002. His hyper-intelligence and buckshot wit soothed as he orated to me a pithy history lesson on Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood, which ended on a hilarious takedown of white people who work in Detroit proper and only spend their money in the white suburbs.
His love of jazz and New Orleans carried us to bars and shows, in beat Detroit, into wee hours. Armed with beer, we climbed the abandoned skyscrapers downtown, defying security and ascending the rickety perrons dozens of stories up. The entire city and its troubled sadnesses spiraled out in frozen winds before us.
We called him “Shades,” because of his ability to recognize horseshit, and mock it in sidesplitting derisiveness. And his ability to snatch external (and internal) turmoils and calm them. Those were his superpowers. His photos reveal a keen eye toward sensitivity, music, art. Yet he was known to show up alone at Trump rallies wearing a F*ck Trump T-shirt, and get so much shit, or rallies to protest Islamophobia. He had a strength sprung from self-respect and a very selfless mother.
He was a very intuitive and smart promotions director at the newspaper and could’ve parlayed that into a highly lucrative PR gig, but it was that horseshit thing. He chose instead to work at a public radio station (WDET-Detroit), in bookstores, and road manage our mutual buddy’s band, The Sights.
People like Jason get stepped on, get their soul eaten out, a person forever compelled to discover, embrace and elevate whatever beauty is around him, hideous or not. I understood this about him: He valued empathy and kindness over anger and hatred, and he fostered fierce loyalty to his friends. I never really had the chance to make it clear to him how much he helped me.
He was managing John King Books in Ferndale, just outside Detroit, and I’d go in there and hang with him for hours, talking life, books, philosophies. His humor enveloped. He wasn’t a sculptor or a poet or a painter, but was artful in his spirit, where it counts, a true lift of form to life.
I left Detroit in 2015, and he moved to Austin to be with his love, Dacia Rivers. He became a father figure to her two children and worked at the distinguished BookPeople bookstore, where he was adored. I missed him every day.
He could be hard on himself, and it was obvious he carried with him the death of his younger sister, who died in a bicycle accident when he was a boy. In the last several years, we texted often about the internal monsters. He had them, “but not too bad,” he’d say.
