ESCAPING
MY HIDING
PLACE
By
David Tieck
CHAPTER ONE
“Sometimes when the mouse is in his hole he is simply hiding from the cat;
Sometimes however, he is in his hole scheming to get the cheese!”
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Drunk with happiness! Like a rookie sailor landing in Amsterdam, about to have his first night on land after six long months at sea, with a bottle of rum in his hand, a thousand dollars in saved wages in his back pocket and more than a thousand red lighted windows to choose between.
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Serene! Like dancing in a field of sunflowers with birds singing all around and a majestic snow capped mountain casting a shadow over the field to provide protection from the cloudless sun streaked sky.
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Divine! Like angels floating over the Tuscan country side, and over the sky bound peaks of the church towers in ....Florence...., Sienna and San Giminango.
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Filled with light! Like a Broadway star standing in the spotlight, receiving a standing ovation after his most accomplished performance ever. Hands outstretched soaking in the glory of being so loved.
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Energy bursting at the seams! Like a millionaire standing at the starting line at the running of the bulls in ....Pamplona.... about to fulfill yet another of his life long dreams. Heart pumping, adrenalin flowing, but with that feeling deep down below that he will be a success at this, because he has been at everything else he has tried.
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Smiling! Constantly and consistently like the sunrise, filling the world with amazing colors, every morning, always different from the time before, but always beautiful and often breathtaking.
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These were all ways in which someone absolutely without doubt could NOT describe my life.
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Drunk! I was drunk with cheap red wine, the only alcohol I could afford to drink with enough excess so that I started to see red lights everywhere I looked as I stumbled to find something resembling my bed which I could lay down on, so as not to pass out on the bathroom floor again.
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Serene! I was serene like the constant sounds of bums yelling out gibberish in front of my ground floor apartment window about the world ending, and a how evil spirits were constantly telling them to kill everyone and destroy everything, while there hands were held out hoping to scrape together enough five cent pieces to afford one more hit of what ever drug they were killing themselves with this week.
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Divine! I was divine like the hell hole of the of the neighborhood I lived in, filled with drug addicts, ugly diseased ridden prostitutes, where the devil himself could walk down the street and the only people that would notice would be the drug dealers thinking they had found another customer to destroy the lives of.
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Filled with light! I was filled with light like the Broadway understudy hiding in the dark, dark corner of the back stage being forced to move every five minutes as stage hands moved scenery back and forth past him, watching the less talented but more famous star hog all the attention and accolades once again.
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Energy! I had energy like the teenager on his end of high school adventure, lying in a hospital bed in ....Pamplona.... after being gorged by a bull, trying to figure out if the doctor standing over him speaking Spanish really was telling him that his spine had been destroyed and he would never walk again.
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Smiling! I was smiling like the middle aged house wife coming home to find out that her only child, the light of her life, was murdered, and the killer was her only friend, her husband, and every single thing in the world that mattered to her was gone forever. I smiled so infrequently that it literally hurt my face to bring those muscles into action.
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These weren’t words to describe me. I used words such as alone, lonely, depressed, low, down and miserable. I felt like a living man in a coffin lying at the bottom of a grave, as a lone graveyard worker starts to shovel dirt on top. Not caring enough to scream or fight my way free. I didn’t want to die, I wasn’t suicidal, but I didn’t care if I lived either.
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However I had had enough of living that way. I needed to change. I needed to find love. I needed to set goals and achieve them. I needed to find something to be passionate about. I needed to find a reason to wake up in the morning, rather than lying awake all the time wishing I could sleep. I needed to find a reason to leave my apartment and my neighborhood and go to where good things happened and good people frequented.
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My name is Jason or JayJay to my friends. Well I wouldn’t describe my acquaintances as friends. Really I was only JayJay to my family. My dad’s name is also Jason, and so my family refused to call me Jason. They called me Junior. I hated it. I couldn’t help to think that everyone was laughing at me about it all the time. I don’t know why, I guess I was just paranoid; or just really pessimistic back then.
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Eventually I one day yelled “ENOUGH!” And told my parents and two older brothers that under no circumstances would I ever respond to the name Junior ever again! After years of teasing my brothers finally felt some pity for me.
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This didn’t last long. They all began to come up with other funny things they could call me. Things like ‘little dad’, ‘the young one’, ‘piglet’ and ‘the brother formerly known as junior’. All the while my pleas to simply be called Jason were ignored. Then my oldest brother Michael, yelled out “how about JayJay?” It was meant to be a tease name. But then they all seemed to like it, and it stuck.
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I hated having another tease name. But secretly I thought it was a pretty cool sounding name. These days you can tell what kind of frame of mind I was in when I met someone by what name they call me. If they call me Jason it means when I met them I was down and depressed and had low self esteem. If they call me JayJay it means I was on a better day and wanting to be cool. Therefore pretty much everyone I knew called me Jason, except my family; to them it was JayJay, often followed by giggles. Although in hindsight I think that their ability to find a crap joke still funny the three thousandth time they heard it is probably more a commentary on their intelligence than their cruelty.
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In school I was outgoing and popular, one of those boys who everyone from every year seemed to know, I was intelligent and athletic, and a natural leader, so people liked me.
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However about year eight or nine puberty started to really take hold of the classrooms, and around that time my true inner shyness started to come out, and my popularity plummeted.
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This was largely brought on by my complete inability to talk to girls in any way shape or form; I in fact knew how many times in total I had exchanged more than two sentences each way with a girl by the time I graduated high school. Four! That’s it. I even still remember them.
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The first - a girl in my class asked if she could borrow a pen, I replied “blue or black?” she replied “I don’t know, what have you got”. I held up two pens and said “this one and this one”. She then said “that one” pointing to the pen in my left hand. My favorite pen! I never saw it again, and was too shy to ask for it back.
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Second time was at lunch. A girl who I had a huge, huge crush on actually came up to talk to me. As soon as she came my way I began to panic about what was about to happen. Then she said “you’re sort of friends with Josh aren’t you?”, “yeah I guess” I replied. “Well you don’t happen to know if he likes me do you?” She asked. “No, I don’t” I replied. “You dirty slut” I thought.
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The next one would have been quite a nothing experience for most people but for me was quite special. One day when I was front in line at the school cafeteria a girl came up to me, and sort of flirted with me to try and get me to get her food for her. This I did graciously. Even though I think my two sentences in that exchange were “Oh” and “Ok, I will”.
The last one was a girl in my English class; some would argue the hottest girl in our school. She actually went on to become a part time model, and I have heard a rumor that this progressed to porn movies, I’d love for that to be true, I really hated her guts, and it would be one I would have up on her, plus I’d love to watch of course, she was hot.
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Well anyway once in class she was due to go next in a speech we each had to present for the class. I was scheduled to go after her, and the class was coming to an end which meant I was suddenly a huge chance of not having to do mine that day. It turned out she had the same thoughts. She didn’t just not want to go next she couldn’t, she hadn’t done the work!
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So when the teacher announced to the class she would be next, and I would go first the next day, she also used the standard attractive female method of trying to talk a guy into doing something for them and went the flirt route to get me to switch places with her. She was nice to me, and gave me sexy eyes, and promised she would be really nice to me forever if I switched.
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What she didn’t realize is unlike most guys in the world, my shyness actually well beat out my horniness. Not that I wasn’t horny, I was horny as all hell. It was just that my horniness just couldn’t compete with the awesome strength of my shyness. My shyness was like the best of the best of all sportsmen ever. It was the Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordon of emotions. It could beat horny, flog happy, and shit all over desire.
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She obviously wasn’t used to someone who could overcome their horniness for her so categorically, so she continued to ask, she pleaded, she begged. She begged like a dog begs for a doggy biscuit to get the taste of its own balls off its tongue. In the end not only did I pull away from number three to a personal best number four, but she failed her speech, I didn’t have to do my speech till the next day (when I failed), but I also had a great memory for those lonely nights in my room alone. This was of course every night. What a great day!
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The second reason my popularity went off the balcony was the fact that all the boys changed from sports mad lads who you could have an innocent game of WWF wrestling with, with only the occasional broken arm, into sex mad sex feigns who thought and talked only about sex. I just couldn’t relate to them anymore. I mean I was a sex mad sex feign as well, but I was uncomfortable expressing it the way my friends were. Like when a mate would turn to me and say, “Did you see Jenny Browns ass in those jeans today, god I’d love to get my cock up that ass”. I didn’t want my cock up any ass, let alone want to tell people about it. So I drifted apart from all my friends, and one lunch time I actually succumbed to the fact that I simply didn’t have a single person who I could spend the break with, I didn’t even have someone who I could say hello to.
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My other problem was that I had frequent unpredictable spontaneous erections. Actually you could predict them; it was basically all the time. I pretty much had one long erection from the age of fourteen till I was twenty. Well long in time anyway.
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Unfortunately for me I came up with a theory early in my erection days that maybe having my penis causing deja-vu to all the campers in the school would lead to the false conclusion that I actually had more manhood than god had naturally blessed me with. This didn’t work. A fourteen year olds erection in his pants looks like a small erect penis, not a large flaccid one. As I’m sure you can imagine this obviously lead to much laughing and teasing. Teasing my favorite! So the rest of my high school life I spent avoiding people, holding books in front of myself, or jumpers, or food, or foliage. And I couldn’t wait to get out. I had no friends, and stayed in touch with no one after school ended.
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So what do you do when you end school? It’s either work or more school. My social skills were still way too underdeveloped to consider the rat race. So instead I reluctantly found my self enlisting to crawl through the social minefield of the university campus. Fortunately my academic skills meant getting into university was quite easy.
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Unfortunately I decided to take the expert advice of Jason Senior and I resisted the temptation to try and pursue a career that I could possible enjoy or even love, and decided on a Bachelor of Economics. This, I was told, would provide me with the greatest opportunity to apply for a large variety of equally boring jobs upon graduation.
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Fortunately and unfortunately however, it didn’t come to that. Instead I struggled enormously at university. I struggled like a heterosexual homophobic young man struggles when two not quite heterosexual young men grab hold of him, kiss his cheek, and tell him that they are about to show him something new. It was just something that wasn’t ever going to work for me.
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For one thing it was way too people intense for me. It started off with us having to turn to the person on either side of us and introduce ourselves and talk about ourselves a little bit. The shy man’s worst nightmare; and this happened in every class and every lecture. By the forth or fifth time, I had managed to get my routine extended out as long as I could, and had mastered it, and I was able to get out “hi my names Jason”. But I was far from comfortable saying even that.
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Then with that ordeal semi-successfully completed they gave us the terrible awful news. Every subject had at least one speech, to be given in front of many, many people, and/or a group assignment with two or three of the other somehow amazingly confident people in the class. On top of that, in tutorials we were expected to contribute to class discussion and this discussion would count towards our final grade. That was not going to work for me. I would rather if they had said, “each class will require students to stick needles into their private parts”, at least that would be something I thought I was capable of.
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Basically I ended up going to very little class. Damn shyness, it really can be a curse. So I lost marks on not being at class, let alone contributing to the discussion. I mumbled out a very, very, very ordinary speech (about the economic multiplier effect on macroeconomic forces, and how that affects microeconomic forces and small business’s and therefore consumers; sound entertaining!), in front of about a hundred sniggering colleagues, before leaving the stage as red and as sweaty as a fat man who has spent five hours in a tomato fight. I skipped my second speech altogether and got only a slightly worse mark than my first speech. I joined three group assignments, contributing very little, unsuccessfully attempting to ride the more outgoing and academically gifted group member’s waves to good marks.
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Then at the end of the first semester I opened up my results envelope and said eight F words. Subject 1 Microeconomic theory, “fail, FUCK!” Subject 2 Macroeconomic theory “fail, FUCK!” Subject 3 Economic Statistics, “fail, FUCK!” Subject 4 Economic History, “fail, FUCK!”
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After about 20 minutes lying on the floor hyperventilating I suddenly felt calm. Then a slight hint of joy. Then a smile appeared on my face. “I’ve failed out of school; I don’t have to go back next semester, I DON’T HAVE TO GO BACK TO FUCKING SCHOOL NEXT SEMESTER, I’M FREE, I’M FREE”.
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This surreal feeling enabled me to tell my parents much easier than I thought would be possible. And as usual they knew just how to bring me back plummeting to earth and splatter all over the footpath. “Ok son well I guess you will be getting a job then” my dad responded. “A job who said anything about a fucking job” I thought “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, and fuck!”
I am also uploading this novel at myspace.com/afleetingforever if you want to leave and read comments check it out there too, and please tell your friends, your enemies too for that matter.
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