Finding the Frayed Ending of Your Story (or, What the Hell Did That Mean?)
I was a member of the Blackstone Millville Regional Junior Senior High School marching band. I marched with the band from 1984 to 1989 as a member of the drum corps, playing the bass drum and various percussion instruments in the pit.
This was serious business. We were a competition marching band, performing elaborate halftime shows, even though the school had neither a football team nor a football field. We practiced in a school parking lot painted with yard markers. We worked like hell. We were Massachusetts champions for all the five years that I played in the band, and New England champions in two of those years. I marched in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Rose Parade, and down Main Street in both Disneyland and Disney World. Serious business.
Every summer I spent a week at band camp preparing for the coming season. Band directors would bring us to a college campus or a vacant military base to plan and practice our music and marching routines for the coming year.
For the first few years of band camp, until Massachusetts law changed, this also meant hazing. Lots and lots of hazing. Hazing rituals included being forced to carry the upperclassmen’s drums, enduring shaving-cream bombs, withstanding blasts of CO2 from fire extinguishers, and in some cases, serious violence. It wasn’t uncommon for my scalp to be split open by the class ring of an upperclassman, turned stone down to pummel my skull. The 1980s were a different time in America. John Hughes got it right. These were not times of unity and acceptance in public high schools.
The worst of the hazing (other than the actual physical assaults) was “doughboying.” In this case, an upperclassman (or a team of upperclassmen) tossed a lowerclassman into a bathtub and covered him in a combination of ingredients: flour, sugar, cornstarch, and yeast. Warm water was then run over the victim until the mixture congealed into a sticky substance that adhered to the skin. This was usually done just before a three-hour practice in the hot August sun, thus allowing the mixture to bake on the victim.
When you had been doughboyed, everyone knew you had been doughboyed. It was sticky, uncomfortable, but most of all embarrassing.
During lunch one day, I realized that I had forgotten my sheet music in my dorm room and went to retrieve it. Unbeknownst to me, three seniors followed, including Eddie, the most violent person I had ever met. Eddie had split my head open with his ring more than any other senior. He was the person in my life that I feared most.
Eddie and his partners caught me running for the exit from the dorm and dragged me down the hall, through their room, and into their bathroom.
I never had a chance. I was a fourteen-year-old noodle-shaped boy who weighed no more than a hundred pounds. I’d yet to grow any facial hair or any chest hair. Two in Eddie’s posse had full mustaches, including Eddie. One of the seniors worked a full-time job. They were men, and I was a boy.
Eddie and his gang tossed me into the bathtub and began the doughboy process by pulling off my shirt and pouring the mix on my body. Once I was in the bathtub, I stopped struggling. No sense fighting the inevitable. Instead I used the only weapon I had available to me: my mouth.
I called them cowards. Punks. Future Losers of America. “Three against one? What are you? A bunch of chickens? You’re twice my size, and it took three of you to take me down? You suck!”
Eddie’s face darkened. I thought this was something that only happened in Stephen King novels, but no, I was witnessing it in real life. He clenched his fists. He was seething. I looked to the other two guys, who were standing just behind Eddie. Our eyes met. They knew what was about to happen. They turned and walked out into the dorm hallway.
Eddie beat the hell out of me in that bathtub. He hurt me in a way I’d never been hurt before. It took everything I had to stop myself from crying.
In my workshops, I allow students to choose a random story idea from my list of untold stories in my spreadsheet. As of this writing, there are more than five hundred possible story ideas on that spreadsheet (moments from the past and moments from my Homework for Life that have proven storyworthy). This seems like a ridiculous number to many, but only because they haven’t been doing Homework for Life for the last six years like me.
After the students choose a number, I demonstrate out loud how to craft a story from that idea. It’s the most highly rated part of my workshops: Students have the opportunity to watch me work on a brand-new story, just as I do in real life. They listen and watch as I speak about the meaning of my five-second moment, as I locate the right beginning, apply my strategies, make decisions, and often stop and start several times. It’s like peeking into my brain as I’m thinking, processing, and adjusting. It’s a way to watch my process unfold in real time.
It’s also my least favorite part of any workshop that I teach, because it leaves me feeling naked, exposed, and ineffective. A process that normally happens in the privacy of my shower, while walking my dog, or while driving alone is on full display. Students listen to my unpolished, poorly told, shitty first drafts, which they, as it turns out, like watching and hearing a lot. It’s easy to listen to a well-crafted story from a professional storyteller and assume that these things spring forth from our brains like tulips in the spring. I wish. It’s a messy process. Ugly and halting and imperfect. Knowing this makes my students feel better about their own messy process.
In a workshop three years ago, the class chose number 81 off my spreadsheet, which corresponded to the story of my beating at band camp. It read, “Eddie in a Bathtub.”
I groaned as my eyes settled on number 81. It was a bad choice. Even worse than “First Introduction to Dry Sex,” which a class had chosen a year earlier.
“Eddie in a Bathtub” was a five-second moment of my life, to be sure, but I really had no idea why. We have moments like this in our lives, when something happens to us and we know it’s important, but can’t explain exactly why. It’s a memory that lingers in our consciousness, a moment that remains locked in our heart; maybe it’s a time in our life that we frequently revisit in dreams. This was one of those moments. “Eddie in a Bathtub” was an important moment in my life, but I had no idea why.
In these cases, my advice to storytellers is always the same:
Tell your story. Speak it aloud. Don’t worry about stakes or lies or anything else. Don’t fret over where to start or finish. Just tell the story as honestly and completely as possible. Spill out all the details. Tell the overly detailed version of your story. Through this process, you will often discover (or rediscover) its meaning. You’ll come to understand the importance of your five-second moment.
That’s what happened to me on that day. I told the story — without any thoughts of craft or polish — and when I reached the end, I knew. Through the process of telling the story, I had managed to put myself back into that bathtub, and instantly I understood why this moment had stuck with me for two decades. I realized that the story had two important meanings for me:
1. It was the first time I realized that people will turn their backs in the face of evil and walk away rather than taking a stand.
2. It was the first time I felt that the world was a fundamentally unsafe place, that people will hurt you for no better reasons than traditions and payback.
It wasn’t an easy moment to confront in front of an audience of thirty students. That bathtub was a terrible place for me, and when I found myself in it again twenty years later, it was no better. I became emotional. I rushed to the end, leaving out the brutality and specificity of the beating. I wasn’t ready to share it all with an audience, but I had found the meaning. Two meanings, really.
And that is no good.
Stories can never be about two things. I explained to my students that even though that moment in the bathtub came to mean two different things to me, the story that I tell onstage someday about that moment can only be about one of those things.
This is because of what you already know:
The ending of the story — your five-second moment — will tell you what the beginning of your story should be. The beginning will be the opposite of the end.
If my story is about my realization that the world (and especially people) are fundamentally unsafe and willing to hurt you for the pettiest of reasons, the beginning of my story needs to present my previous belief that people are basically good and the world is generally safe.
The arc of the story will trace my path from innocence to cynicism. From optimism to pessimism.
If my story is about how people will turn their backs on you in moments of crisis, the beginning of my story needs to be about my belief that people can be depended upon in times of need. The arc of the story will go from faith in my fellow man to a loss of that faith.
This is why your story can never be about two things.
This does not mean that I can’t tell both versions of this story. In fact, as a storyteller, I’m thrilled to have two stories that center on the same moment. Those two stories, which have yet to be fully crafted, will start entirely differently but will ultimately converge on the same moment in the bathtub.
If I’m telling about my newfound understanding of violence in this world, I will include all the details of my experience in the bathtub. I will allow my audience to experience the beating that I received at the hands of Eddie that day. Since the story is centered on my newfound understanding of this violent world, it should reflect that violence.
If I’m telling the story of my newfound understanding that people will turn their backs in times of need, I might not include all the details of the beating. I might move time forward and simply detail the injuries I suffered, leaving the gory details to my audience’s imagination.
The same moment, told two different ways depending upon what I want to say.
This is not the only time I have discovered the meaning of a story simply by telling it. It’s happened many times. Reimmersing myself in the moment and telling as much of the story as possible, and ignoring all my storytelling strategies in favor of telling everything that I remember, has been exceptionally useful in finding the meaning behind those nagging moments from my life. I’ve also watched many people discover the meaning of their stories in my workshops through the same process. I’ve watched people break down into tears upon realizing why a moment has stuck with them for so long.
Just tell your story. All of it. Forget the strategies. Start in the wrong place and end in the long place. Ramble. The goal is to return to that moment as best as possible in order to find its meaning.
The other way of discovering the meaning of a moment is to ask yourself why you do the things you do.
As I mentioned in a previous chapter, my father and I write letters to each other. This is our primary form of communication. Since he disappeared for most of my childhood and for much of my adult life, it has been difficult for us to maintain an ongoing relationship.
We are miserable on the phone.
My father has never been on the internet.
He won’t leave his hometown.
Eventually we settled on letters. It turns out that he’s an excellent writer. He’s an even better storyteller. I just wish he would write faster, but these letters have allowed me to get to know my father better than ever before.
Just a couple of weeks ago, my wife asked what my father’s most recent letter contained. My answer: “I’ll let you read it.”
I said this because I had not read it myself. What I’ve never told my wife (or anyone else) is that I don’t open any of my father’s letters until I receive another one from him. Sometimes this means I hang on to an unopened letter for months. I always keep one unopened letter from my father on hand at all times.
It was true that for the first letter, I was afraid of what he may or may not have written, and that’s why I brought it to the movie theater to read. But even today, I don’t open one of my father’s letters until another one arrives.
Why?
In the spirit of “Ask yourself why you do the things you do,” I did exactly that: “Why do you do this? Why do you keep an unopened letter from your father in your bag?”
I thought about my father. Our relationship. Our personal history. I told myself the story of our history, starting with his disappearance from my life following the divorce of my parents up until present day. I spoke the words aloud, leaving nothing out. It took some time.
When I finished, I suddenly knew. The answer came to me as clear as day. I keep an unopened letter from my father because ever since I was a boy, I have waited for him to return to my life, and every time he has made an appearance, I am afraid it will be his last. I have lived in fear that my father will leave me again and never come back.
If I keep an unopened letter from my father, he can never leave me again. I’m holding on to this unexplored piece of him, and as long as I have the promise of reading his letter someday, he can never disappear again.
Just like that, I have a story. It’ll be a good one too, I think. The kind of story that will connect with many people on many levels.
Even better, I understand myself a little better now. I often ask myself why I do the things I do. Sometimes the answer is simple:
You’re neurotic.
You’re a jerk.
You’re selfish.
You like ice cream way too much.
You think “No Right on Red” signs are bullshit.
You despise the way neckties are nothing but decorative nooses.
But sometimes the answer to the question reveals something much deeper — a hidden truth that often makes for a great story.
Bruce Springsteen once said in an interview: “Most people’s stage personas are created out of the flotsam and jetsam of their internal geography and they’re trying to create something that solves a series of very complex problems inside of them or in their history.”
I heard that and thought, “Yes.” It was the kind of yes that filled every cell of my body.
Not yes. Yes.
Storytellers seek to constantly make meaning from their lives. We contextualize events, find satisfying endings to periods of our lives, and struggle to explain how our lives make sense and fit into a larger story.
Sometimes we see this meaning immediately. My wife says, “I know that when you were a little boy, you didn’t always have enough food to eat,” and I know instantly what this means: Elysha knows me better than anyone has ever known me. She might know me better than myself. And damn, she must really love me.
But “Eddie in a Bathtub”? I needed to tell that one. I needed to get back into that bathtub with Eddie to understand why this beating — more than any of the other beatings I experienced that year at the hands of upperclassmen — stayed with me for so long.
“Eddie in a Bathtub” was part of the flotsam and jetsam of my internal geography. I needed to solve the complex problem of my history in order to tell the story.
The unopened letter from my father, still sitting on my desk?
I needed to tell that one too. It wasn’t until Elysha asked me what was in my father’s letter that it occurred to me that my ritual with his letters was odd. Something that I was unwilling to tell her about. Something that I didn’t understand.
Those are the moments when I know that it’s time to tell myself a story so I can understand my behavior and solve the complex problem of my personal history. The solutions often make for great stories and provide us with opportunities to more fully understand ourselves. To make meaning out of who we are from the stories we have lived.