Calming the Rollercoaster(Charles E.J. Moulton) Calming the Rollercoaster

A Story by Charles E.J. Moulton

Too much bullshit. Kenny could not handle it anymore. The rollercoaster of his life between heaven and hell simply would not work for him. And really, it was like his blood sugar: up above 400 and way below 40. Exhausting.
Did he feel alone in his situation, abandoned even? Yes, certainly. On the other hand, who would actually be able to grasp the entire gamut of what was going on? Not even he had known, mostly because he hadn’t been honest enough to dwelve deep enough. How then could a shrink or a priest find out. No this was his job.
Arthur, who was a Buddhist, would try. With Arthur, Kenny always had the feeling he really tried to be understanding. Really tried, putting on his sad face when Kenny told a sad story, putting on his happy face when Kenny told a happy story. Sort of like Rob Lowe in “Wayne’s World”. His wife would also try, when she wasn’t too strained or frustrated.
No misunderstandings. Arthur was the sweetest guy on Earth, his wife was a dear woman most of the time, but when Kenny needed someone to chat with, really deep chat, there was no one there to really get it. So Kenny really ended up talking to himself.
For twenty years now, Kenny spoke to his higher self. Either that or the soul of his deceased mother.
He called himself “Clairvoyant Kenny”. Yeah, basically, that’s what he was. Talking to angels, channeling spirits, researching the extra dimensions, getting signs from the other world.
Most people didn’t notice that Kenny spoke to himself. His wife would catch him occasionally in the cellar corner trying to talk himself out of a misery. Mostly, though, Kenny ended up sitting on his couch at night, a Bourbon in one hand, his smartphone in the other, writing a deep jazz poem and, Glory Halleluja, giving himself some really, really great advice. Okay, okay advice. Sometimes, there would be an angelic sign, a syncronicity, and, whopp-dee-flying-doo, Kenny would find himself in heaven. Someone pissed Kenny off, back he went down to hell. Did he live in his own world? Yes-sir-ee.
Kenny was cool. No doubts there. Loads of his professional friends thought so. Kenny knew all the arts. His darned versatility scared the shits out of some people, who just didn’t get him, but what of it? The older Kenny got, the less he really cared about those kind of nitwits.
The problem was that he did care.
Okay, what had sent him into hell that day?
His wife. Carla could be the sweetest chick on Earth, cuddling him like nuts in bed. Yes, the sex was stupendous. Carla also, most of the time made him a better man. The problem was that he, a man, lived with two women. A teenage daughter, hormonal and stubborn, and a post-menstrual woman, hormonal and stubborn. What the hell does a guy do when two women spend two hours screaming at each other, neither of them giving up. His daughter screaming: “I’m gonna kill myself!” His wife screaming: “Just let us know before you do!”
Holy crap, he had bought earplugs to actually block out the screams. It didn’t help. He heard them shout anyway. He even tried to soften their tempers by asking if he could suggest something. His daughter snapped: “You stay out of this!”
That same afternoon, Kenny had driven home from a doctor’s appointment, Carla, the ultimate back seat driver, telling him what to do at every instance. Of course, Kenny had taken the driver’s license at 50. He was no good driver. He admitted that. On the last street on the way home, the car died in the middle of traffic and, oh, sweeet Jesus, Kenny panicked. All hell broke loose and Carla spent the whole ten minute ride home screaming at him at the top of her female lungs.
“What the hell are you doing, ya lousy moron? Move yo’ ass!”
Kenny asked her if she thought it helped the situation if she screamed. Would that improve the situation? She didn’t care. It helped her. Goddarnit, who gave a shit, if screaming helped her, then it had to be good, right? Right? Right?!!
After returning home, Kenny took a few decisive steps to the nearby post office to chat with himself. “Oh, yeah,” he smarmed to himself, cynically, “I’ll buy you a hammer so you can hit me with it. I will lie dead in the corner, but, hey, who cares? You will be rid of your frustration. You’ll just have to see how you form my dead lips to say thank you for getting rid of ... your frustration.”
The real question Kenny asked himself was not why did he live with what had to be a borderline patient. The actual thing that bothered him was: why was this happening ... again? Or why did he experience this first hand when the exact thing had happened to his parents? His temperamentful, low-blood-pressure, panicky mother, pulling at her hair, banging her fists on her head. His hot-headed, high-blood-pressure father biting his mother’s cheek and then turning to Kenny, saying: “See? She makes me do this!” before disappearing on a two-day-absence, coming home stone drunk, finding Kenny sick in the family double-bed, which was Kenny’s bed for a time because the parents would not sleep in the same room together.
Kenny’s books had been piled up on the other bedside. Kenny’s father had just thrown all the books on the child’s bed, spitting:
“You’re not sick!”
It had shocked Kenny. Holy crap, he had felt bad. But what does an only child do with no one to defend him? Keep quiet until he gets OCD. Diabetes. Or both.
Okay, Kenny thought to himself, a moment’s cease-fire going on between his wife and daughter. Let’s figure this one out. His wife was actually on the smartphone, forbidding their daughter to be on the smartphone herself because she had been doing so much of that lately. That was unfair. But Kenny thought to himself: “Hot damn, I ain’t gonna be waking up the Yeti and the Dinosaur, otherwise we might actually be reinacting the D.H.K., the Darned Hurricane Katrina. Either that or the French Revolution.”
Be that as it may, Kenny now had a moment’s pause between his wife shouting at him that he was the worst frigging driver EVER and his daughter growling that he better keep his mouth SHUT. Yes, the house was like an Egyptian tomb. But Kenny trusted the angels, though, to keep them safe. That talk about his daughter killing herself, man, that was talk influenced by her depressed girlfriend. What can a man do except say “I love you!”, bring his daughter scones and agree to almost anything. He wasn’t even allowed to say “Darling!” to her.
Kenny wondered, sipping tea in the proverbial monastary of sorts, why he now, as adult, repeated the stormy marriage of his parents. He had waited for Carla. Fate? Oh, yes. His words: “I want to spend my life with you!” had actually come out of his mouth without him thinking about it for a moment. He had not had one doubt about this being the woman he wanted to have kids with. Other women he had dated, women that had been quite luscious and quite willing, he had not pursued their interests. He had even left one girl’s flat in the middle of the night, because she slept in what had to be bedroom as cold as an ice-box. In retrospect, he had been waiting for Carla. What did that say about his own drama with her? Was Carla here to teach his soul a lesson. Obviously, he had not passed the test with his parents, so he had to repeat it with Carla. But this was older. Kenny was sure of it. If there were consistancies in this regard in his own life, and his whole life was filled with consistancies, then this was a karmatic issue he was here to fix, something he had carried with him from an earlier life.
He had unfinished business to take care of.
What the heck was his problem?
He wore his heart on his sleeve, followed the people that abused him until they supposedly stopped doing so, which they never did. Kenny rarely spoke up for himself, because when he did he was bashed down or ridiculed. He was taken for granted. He also had the feeling of being caught between a rock and a hard place, Scylla and Charybdis, to quote Greek lore. That was his parents, though, was it not? On the other hand, he was a strong experienced personality.
He remembered his own childhood.
Dad on the couch, wanting to show him “just this one scene from that great movie”, Kenny not daring to get up because “it’s so funny and you will laugh just as much as I do, Kenny”. His mother knew it, felt it, heart broken that her son was being forced to watch something, forced to agree, whatever.
She stood in the doorway, exclaiming:
“Kenny, I want to show you something!”
What was the result? Kenny turning into his future confused self? “Damn it,” his father spat at his mother, “I’m showing Kenny something. Why do you always keep interrupting? Watch, Kenny, here it comes. Isn’t it funny? You like it as much as I do, right? Right?! Right?!!”
Kenny had chosen a teenage friend that was the opposite of his parents, well, that was understandable, but a totally subconscious decision. That really turned into sheer hell, as well. His friend had manipulated him psychologically to the degree that he had cracked, the guy even introducing him to OCD. After breaking the contact with the guy, Kenny fell into a crisis that had him sinking so deep, he could not even see right or left. But, again, in spite of shrinks and not because if them, he swam upstream to his own semi-victory.
Accepting everything? Not defending himself? Not saying no? Was that the problem?
Had he really been so abandoned? So abused? His loving parents had wanted to influence him, praising him to the skies, calling him “a young genius”, but still complained that their own careers had not really gone anywhere since he had arrived, but that it was okay. They loved him, anyway. Hmm.
After an important move to his mother’s new university town, his school application had been the last thing on his mother’s mind, apparantly. So he had arrived late for that 9th grade. For 10th grade, the resident school had been too expensive. Again, they had arrived too late for the subsequent school and any decision to be made. His folks had suggested for Kenny to join his mother’s university as an external student. That was all fine and well, but not really fair.
Thinking back, still sipping his tea so many years later, Kenny realized his parents mixture of incredible professional expertise and negligent behavior had actually damaged him. External and internal at the academy, manipulated by a friend and keeping that a secret from his parents, eventually advised to take a a break from the university undergraduate programme from some jackoff-professor. All of that kicked him into confusion, literally becoming a pornography-addict.
Kenny sighed a mixed sigh of pain and relief, for the first time actually realizing that making heads or tails of his own confusion had been so damn hard. He had loved and admired his parents. As an only child, though, he had never dared oppose any of them. Because he had never been taught to speak up for himself, he had not even spoken up against his abusive friend’s manipulation.
Anyone could do anything with him. That wasn’t really true, but it almost was. So it was his problem with the word “No!” that was his problem. But that subconscious anger had been there all the while, his father’s Irish supernatural rage and manic stare manifesting into a weird form of compulsion. “My loving parents also abused me, so the people I love are the reason for my pain. I hate them, but I love them, but I mustn’t say that. Oh, my God!”
Only lately had Kenny realized that, no, his OCD was not destructive and supernatural. It was simply his own subconscious going nuts because he had never ever fought back. He even remembered an ex-girlfriend’s grandma asking her why she treated Kenny with such stepmotherly dominance. She had been the only one to understand that. He hadn’t even thanked her. Taken for granted. So taken for granted, in fact, that Kenny himself didn’t even realize it was wrong. What did that tell Kenny?
Sitting there on his couch so many years later, a successful professional with house, wife, family and loads of experience? What did that tell him? He was strong, but he was only here because he had the ability to write, paint, sing, act and teach himself out of psychological damage. He was only here because he talked to himself, digging in his own lotus-flower-dirt until he found the seed that had ruined the rest.
Had he not been so adamant, he had never ever found a way out. Everyone he knew had just taken Kenny for a nice guy. One boss had even hired him, not because of his professionality, but because he was “such a nice guy”.
The guy who had decided to finish his high school diploma on his own via long distance, straight A’s as a result, had done so simultaneously with his beginning career. He had done so after crawling out of crisis. The fact that Kenny believed that his karma was old, damn old, and came from a violent trauma in a past life, okay, that was another thing.
Basically, it had been a problem that he only could have solved in a later stage in his life. The only child, pushed and shoved between parents like a flipper-ball, had constantly been thrown between heaven and hell, between song and dance routines with laughing artists and explosive scenes of people yelling: “No, no, no, this was so special, don’t ruin it!” That had kept him on-guard, hadn’t it?
“Crazy artists are always bouncing up and down in their mood swings, aren’t they?”
That was a cliché, though, wasn’t it?
Half-way into his own self-therapy, his daughter returned, complaining that the Mp3-player he had put together for her had all the wrong songs on it. It turned into a raging fight, one that surprised his wife, to say the least. Kenny shouted, but he also knew that his daughter’s explosion only had triggered a strong reaction in him because he had already been shouted at once that day.
The last straw? Was that what it was called? Well, that's what it was.
Kenny dashed off, recording a video of himself singing and doing impersonations, surprising himself again how utterly up and down the Richter scale he seemed to be. In one minute ragingly confused, the other happy-go-lucky.
He needed to work on that.
But was that a part of his own personality?
Wasn't that ... uhm ... cool?
Yes, maybe the gamut of his own emotional knowledge made him a greater artist. Maybe.
In any case, by nightfall emotions had calmed down, his wife showering, his daughter happy with the Mp3-player and Kenny now with a glass of Spanish red Rioja.
An old Asian proverb came to mind, one that might help him cope with the rollercoaster ride of life. Kenny, after all, craved for harmony, needed it, hoping someday to be able to say that he was emotionally stable.
“If you are sailing downstream on wild river, you better go with the flow.”
Going with the flow. That sounded good.
Kenny went to bed that night, promising himself to meditate, vowing to at least try not trying to control reality, but following his gut how to react to the twists and turns of existence.
What had Frank Sinatra and James Stewart said about their acting abilities? “I am not actor, I only react.” In that sense, if they knew anything, they certainly knew how to “go with the flow”.

---