Autobiography of a Nobody

By Nicholas Montoya

Autobiography of a Nobody

"You are no longer an American citizen. You are now Nova Martinez, from Mexico, and you are now at the disposal of the Foreign Legion."

With these words, Nic

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bush Publishing
• Release date: Nov 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636841601

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

GIVEN

I‘ve lived a hundred lives.

Most of them ended badly. Heartachingly. Some finished with the clicks of handcuffs. Some ended with loving farewells and others with rigid middle fingers. A few of them, however, were extremely relieving when they drew to a close.

Do you remember your first life? The one you were born into. Before you learned of other places and people. Where you accept everything for what it is. Before you asked questions. Before there was another way for things to be. The one in which you were taught that the flow of modern society is what we should all strive to upkeep.

It’s like this, when it all starts. You don’t really know if it’s good or bad. You don’t even know that you’re learning. Life just is. The amount of energy required to download the information into your brain is so minute, it is undetectable and happens as we grow. Other possibilities aren’t offered. No—no, those come much, much later, when biology and curiosity come together in another part of your mind. It’s not that the curriculum interests you; it’s just solely the first information you’ve ever absorbed. You were born into it.

We’ll call this life The Given.

I speak for myself. We lived in an eighty-person rural town, surrounded by vast seas of golden sunflowers, in the southeastern armpit of unstimulated purgatory: Kansas. The silence was deafening.

Keep in mind, I didn’t know this yet. If there was ever a perfect setting to go with the adage, An idle mind is the devil’s canvas, this was it. We had a school in our backyard. Exactly twenty-six of my exaggerated six-year-old steps, across the yard and alley, headed west from our spring-held back door. I learned how to write the date at that school. December 16, 1996. That encapsulates everything I remember from my education there.

Our house faced east toward Main Street and a lot that for a long time remained barren until a church was constructed on top of it. The church was forty-two steps from the front door. I learned things like this when I had nothing to do. Keep in mind this was before the internet was a common household commodity. We hadn’t even seen CDs yet. Search for and absorb information. Find something, anything to think about.

The school had a playground equipped with a jungle gym, concrete basketball court, and baseball field big enough to hit sponge soft tee-balls thirty yards or so. Even on the brightest days, it was a desolate sanctuary for idle minds. For the minds that sought stimulation oftentimes in the form of mischief. For the minds that conducted experiments such as burning small, insignificant items from the household. For destructive minds that hurled rocks at the windows, just to cause a ripple in the bland placidity. Writing profanity in sparkly purple nail polish I’d stolen from my sister on the coarse, red brick exterior of the school itself. I didn’t know many curse words, but I was sure to present the ones I did know to the world.

The playground whispered to me. I was drawn to its silent sonnet like a fish to a lure. That playground belonged to me, and I belonged to it. It was ours—ours being mine, my older brother’s, and our baby sister’s. How could it not be ours? We could spit on it from the bathroom. It was a terribly rusted metal skeleton, peppered with the peeling original turquoise and yellow paint. I had my first of many fistfights there. It’s where I first leapt from the high point of the swings to see if I could fly. I couldn’t. It’s where I smoked my first puff of a cigarette, immediately followed by a brutal coughing fit. It’s where I donned my first scar to the world, blessed upon my brow by an aluminum softball bat.

I remember the year the petite town’s council had ordered wood chips to be put down around the equipment. When I asked my older brother the reason, I was met with an indefinite, It’s softer to land on. Looking back at it now, softness did not suit that hallowed ground. But somebody older than I said it should be like this and therefore it had become. It was always like this. It always will be.

Many revelations happened in our small house, which my father owned. He was an old-fashioned sort of man. He was an excellent father as well. Worked his fingers to the bone and came home every day, often to a disorderly house. He was a provider in every sense of the word. The only downside to his character, if you could even label it as such, was that he was content. He was entirely content. He wanted nothing extra. He abstained from allowing a surplus of anything. He had his plain home, in a plain town, that held his plain family, who benefitted from his plain job. His life was undeniably and scathingly plain. It was perfect for him. His acceptance and welcoming of the mundane aside, all of his exemplary fatherly traits, however, weren’t enough to prevent the adultery which my mother would eventually commit.

Thinking about it now, I know he was destroyed emotionally. Now that I’m older, I comprehend and feel the pain he had felt, with tears streaming down his full bulldog cheeks from behind his square spectacles. The first curriculum loaded itself into the queue for future download and processing. I was learning something in that moment but couldn’t know it yet.

He was an extremely large man. The biggest out of everyone when we’d venture out into society. He was my Dad. He was the strongest man in the world. I’ve only seen him cry twice in my entire life. The first time, of course, was when I peeked through the window to bear witness to my mother’s admittance of guilt. She held anger. She shouted. She struck him. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time. Eventually though, I would learn. The data would process.

This wasn’t foreign. Consistency must first be established for something to be perceived as strange or irregular. I was receiving and downloading my normal. I remained calm and emotionless, for this was The Given, and this was how life worked. Like an obedient student, I took it as factual truth.

My mother was a beautiful woman. She had long, natural blonde hair and blue eyes. Looking at her, you would never guess that she had led a painful life when she was growing up. She had been abandoned by her father and left to fend off her mother’s and stepfather’s bizarre and psychotic behavior, along with her three younger siblings. Being the oldest, she was by default the forerunner to set the example. She had eyes on her constantly. Sometimes eyes with more sinister motives. She had been abused, molested, and raped before she had held a driver’s license. I recall once coming to the understanding that she had tried to inform her mother of the situation. Her mother denied her accusations in the form of immediate physical abuse.

My mother’s depression was inevitable. When I was a child, her mental imbalance wasn’t always present, but when it was, it was quite clear and at full volume.

My mother couldn’t wait to get out of her hometown. For a long time, my siblings and I were told she had married my Dad, had all of us children, and moved an entire eight miles away to a smaller, plainer town. The town with the playground. My parents would eventually divorce, remarry, and divorce again over the course of the next few years.

We now had two homes. We would have many, many more. I guess that was normal. This was life, or at least my first one.

CHAPTER TWO

RAGE

For as long as I can remember, there was an uncle Mike. Uncle Mike was a short, dark-haired man with sunbaked skin who would stop by the house from time to time. He always arrived in an oil company truck covered in mud and other elements. I didn’t know exactly how he was part of the family, but I didn’t know to ask either. He had a large home in the countryside on the outskirts of another town with a wife and five children.

He would come and collect us kids every blue moon, and we’d stay with their family for a few days. Their home was an immaculate, illustrious manor. At least to a young child, who could count the number of two-storied buildings he’d been inside on one hand. This three-story white behemoth with its blue shutters surrounded by an enveloping wall of evergreens was the perfect place for a midwestern family. The interior was alive with the sound of children’s feet padding up and down the carpeted staircase and throughout the rooms. The air seemed to be pure laughter and excitement.

We made our way upstairs to drop off our luggage. The floor, if there was one, was completely covered by toys. I’d never seen so many. It was amazing. There were four girls and just one boy in their family, and they were the most happy and joyful people I’d ever met.

One lazy afternoon, while lounging on the couch with my brother, one of the older sisters engaged us in conversation. She tried to tell us Uncle Mike was our real father. My brother sternly and matter-of-factly informed her that he was our uncle. The sister persisted and explained to us two young boys who our real father was.

Uncle Mike was our dad? But Dad’s our dad? Quizzical looks were exchanged between us brothers, followed by a draft of annoyance. Why shouldn’t we know this? Why did our parents keep a secret like that from us?

For the most part, nothing changed. However, this was the first time a variable of peculiarity had entered into the equation of my life. It didn’t seem to be an overwhelming discovery, but my brother knew we should’ve been informed of this information from a different source. What bothered me the most was that other people seemed to know more about me than I knew about myself. I was learning anxiety for the first time.

After my parents’ second divorce, my mother eventually found a job along with a townhouse for rent that would suffice for all of her children, in a small city farther away from the playground. It was a two-story blue house with a wooded acre, which separated our neighborhood from another. The woods became another hallowed ground for mischief and adventure. Oftentimes along with my siblings, I’d run wild through the trees, wielding sticks sharpened to a point by rubbing them continuously on concrete while sporting Native American war paint across my face and body. The paint was generously provided by the muddy banks of a creek which ran the length of my forested oasis. I’d take off my T-shirt so the color of my natural skin would blend in better with my surroundings, in order to ensure I stayed hidden during games of hide-and-seek.

Even on most wintry days, I could be found in the woods on imaginary excursions, and hunting invisible beasts with my sticks, and trying to keep a fire hidden from the view of our house, and generally just doing whatever occupied my dashing attention. I was the chief of my imaginary tribe of natives. I was a great white hunter. A warrior king. A pirate ship captain. A dragon. A Lost Boy. Everything. It was a very short time in my life when I could leave controlled society and good behavior at home and just naturally be the heathen I was. I thoroughly enjoyed the savagery of it all.

I started third grade at a new school filled with smiley teachers and laughing children littering the grounds. My brother would be attending classes in the same building, but one floor up with the fourth graders. I felt safe knowing he wasn’t too far away, and I could find him on the playground at recess quite easily. We’d been ordered to memorize the route to the school from our new house and back because only the first day would our mother drive us. Every following day for the next couple of school years, we would walk.

My mother held my hand as she introduced me to my new principal. She said her goodbyes, and I followed the large bespectacled and mustached man down a large corridor to a classroom. Once inside, I gazed upon all the young faces and loud, excited noise of friends from the previous year reuniting with each other. There were a few children who didn’t appear to know anybody and kept to themselves at their respective desks. I guessed I was going to be one of them.

Everyone had been assigned a place to sit labeled by a name tag completely taped down in the center of the desktop. I hung up my backpack in an empty cubbyhole along the wall and located my seat. I sat quietly for quite some time just looking around, taking in my educational confines. I didn’t know anyone, so I avoided talking to others. I was extremely nervous. I wondered what my brother was doing.

Then I saw my teacher. She was tall and gorgeous. Short black hair accentuated her sparkling blue eyes and full lips that bordered a smile angels would covet. Ms. Pederson. I had a fierce crush on her, and she instantly vanquished any trepidation I’d held before. I couldn’t help but blush every time she smiled at me.

I never sought out trouble or picked fights. Fights somehow had a knack for picking me though. The first really serious fistfight I’d ever found myself involved in is probably the worst one. I don’t remember all the details of what led up to the brawl, but I remember the aftermath quite clearly.

Accompanying my brother on the playground after school one day, hanging out with the supposed popular kids of his grade for a few minutes before we trotted on home, a conversation came about in which my brother had insisted to someone that I could probably beat them up. I think they were having an argument; I’m not entirely sure. I just stood there and nodded silently. I don’t believe I was actually paying attention to the conversation but had picked up on the topic of a fight. A few minutes later, while we were all standing around aimlessly, I felt an extremely forceful collision