Chapter One: Bedroom
Peter’s childhood bed revealed everything you needed to know about him. From sheets to comforter, it told stories – and Peter loved stories more than anything in the world.
The sheets were an art gallery of cartoon depictions of characters and scenes from the Star Wars movie. Luke Skywalker stood tall, blond, and heroic, with his lightsaber lifted above his head: an image of powerful youthful resilience and mystical power. The Force was strong with him.
Han Solo basked in the glowing cockpit of his spaceship, the Millennium Falcon, his trusty and lifelong friend Chewbacca at his side. The two spoke a language that only they understood – and Peter imagined that their conversation concerned why the Falcon (yet again!) – wouldn’t make the jump to light speed.
They knew, as well as Peter, that Darth Vader was in the Star Destroyer that was chasing them, firing lasers, and attempting to convert Luke (who wasn’t even on the ship) to the Dark Side of the Force. Evil and/or death chased these heroic defenders of the good, and Peter was right there with them: on board the ship, firing the Falcon’s much less powerful lasers at their pursuers, hoping with all his might that Han and Chewy could figure out how to make the Falcon work.
Peter lay on his bed as this battle went on not inside his head but in his bedroom as a whole. Years later, when he heard Brian Wilson sing “In My Room” and John Lennon sing “There’s a Place,” he knew just what they were talking about. Peter’s room wasn’t just a bedroom; it was his very soul, his domain, in which Star Wars entered him and, along with the poster of Walter Payton on his wall and the plaque of St. Paul with the instrument of his martyrdom (a sword) helped him understand himself.
St. Paul terrified him with the same fear that he had when he saw the crucified Jesus hanging above the altar at St. Catherine’s church. These men – he knew at the early age of four – were brave enough to give their lives for what they believed in. This was beautiful but also incredibly frightening. Did upholding one’s beliefs lead to a bloody death? Was a bloody death the risk that Han, Luke, and Chewy faced if they fell into Vader’s hands? How would Vader kill them?
Peter imagined himself in one of the Death Star’s frigid conference rooms being suffocated to death by the power of Vader’s willful mind. Vader and his administrative staff looked on as Peter crumpled to the floor in full knowledge that he couldn’t stop the inevitable death that was seconds away. Would the good exemplified by the Star Wars heroes be enough to preserve him as he died? Or would he plead for mercy, be turned to the Dark Side, and become an administrative stooge like Vader’s Yes Men, who looked on and did nothing to save him?
Peter fingered his scar and turned on his side to look more closely at St. Paul. Unlike Paul, he had nothing objective to show to the world. He had no sword to show why he was the way he was: what made him different and unlike any other person he knew. What was killing him – whether it was the cancer that ate away one of his kidneys or the heart failure that his cancer treatment created – was internal.
He kept fingering his scar, feeling how every inch of it rendered him mortal – and the gleaming door to the operating room came back, its silver sheen brightened by the intense lights of the hallway. And as he was wheeled in to be gutted like a fish his Bupa had caught off the pier at his family’s lake cottage, he didn’t know that John Lennon would be shot dead a couple years later, that the United States government would back fascist military coups in South America, that the Challenger (a real Falcon!) would explode in front of him as he watched television one morning when he stayed home sick from school, that one day he would unknowingly begin to make sense of all this senseless death by reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in the bathroom during his aunt’s Christmas party…
Peter didn’t know that Payton – the football player he most adored because of his indestructible physique, quiet and kind manner, and astounding feats on the field – would one day die a horrendous death as a result of liver cancer. The most humane of all men would turn yellow from jaundice, as death inched its way through his body – death, again, coming from the inside, a Star Destroyer zooming its way through Payton’s innards, blowing away everything in sight.
Peter fingered his scar again – and listened. It was his fourth birthday, and his entire family was a few feet away, beyond his closed bedroom door, unaware of what was going on inside him. He could hear them pestering him, trying to get him to “come out” and blow out the four candles on his birthday cake, hear them sing that song he hated, smile, say “please and thank you,” and, in other words, pretend that he believed in honoring the illusion of time the way they did. There was no way they could sing such a trite song and honor such a decayed, cheesy, and clichéd “ritual” if they only knew what he knew, if they only had experienced what he’d experienced.
Peter cried. He felt so alone that he cried for himself, for his family, for all the dead, degraded, and raped souls about which he’d learn one day…and the craving for Keats, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Lennon, Harrison, Drake, Jesus, Coltrane, Lawrence, Curtis, and all the others who knew suffering and expressed it in their art awoke in his soul.
Peter cried, and unknowingly his soul bent toward a lifelong mission to understand the meaning of suffering – not just the suffering that he knew well and felt himself but also the suffering of everyone he would meet in his wanderings and in his reading of books and listening to music.
How could the beauty of a Payton touchdown leap exist in a world of death? How could the values exemplified by the good guys in Star Wars? How could his Bupa endure the lonely and scary nights when he knew his beloved wife was dying in a hospital bed in their guest bedroom? How did he serve her? How did he comfort her and prepare her for her journey into the undiscovered country? How could Keats – at the age of twenty-five – leave England and his beloved Fanny to travel to Rome, where his lungs exploded from tuberculosis (death from inside!)? How could Lawrence write Lady Chatterley’s Lover and, in so doing, preach the true gospel of tenderness, when his tuberculosis had decayed his body so much that he could barely sit up in his deathbed? How could Dostoevsky compose The Brothers Karamazov and praise the goodness of God between the fits of epilepsy that flung him to the floor, where his jarring spasms almost took his life? How could the same man survive imprisonment in Siberia and see the good in the “criminals” who were his companions?
As he cried on his Star Wars sheets, Peter felt his soul opening to a world that other people simply seemed to ignore. He didn’t have the language to articulate it yet, nor did he know that that language would come. He just knew what he could do…
He ignored the happy-birthday calls that inundated him from the kitchen (they’d have to drag him out of his room – which they eventually did), slid off his bed, and crept to the closet.
Peter closed the closet door, closed his eyes, and leaned against the wall. The shirts hanging above his head were stars; his scar was a space-battle wound; his hands had Han Solo’s fighter-pilot dexterity; his giant stuffed polar bear was Chewy; his imagination transformed the closet into the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon; all the instruments worked; light speed was no problem; and the Star Destroyer that held Darth Vader was left far behind as he and Chewy shot into the depths of space, where they could hide and he could enter his inner world, where Keats and Lawrence, Wilson and Lennon, Coltrane and Mahler, Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard awaited. Like the Rebels at end of Star Wars, he and his people – historical, fictional, and real – would be reunited. And in a moment that smacked of the ending of Fellini's masterpiece, they’d listen to Harrison play a lovely acoustic rendition of “All Things Must Pass,” Coltrane render the mournful strains of “Alabama” on his tenor, and Mahler conduct his longing and searching Ninth Symphony. Then they’d hug each other in brotherly and sisterly recognition, drink Guinness, eat peanut M&Ms, and share their experiences. They’d understand each other, Payton would hang in the air over their heads in a freeze-frame of one of his touchdown leaps; and kind old Peter Gabriel would ask his namesake to sing one of his songs or read one of his poems or stories. His namesake would comply, thankful that finally someone asked him to do so.
Peter, as he read and/or sang, would remember his favorite picture. It was a picture of himself sitting on his Nana’s lap. They were reading a book together. The title doesn’t matter. But they were in the inner world of imagination together. Together.
And, as Peter read and/or sang, he felt the arms of his Nana around him. She was holding him up the whole time – and, truth be told, she’s holding me up right now, as I write, as I breathe, as I live.
As I learn the art of dying…as I finally exited the closet to celebrate my fourth birthday to see her living and smiling face in an expression of understanding.