[Rain Man]

Since we're sharing....


Oh, crap. I hope I don't regret this.



(Deep breath.) Okay, this is the great thing about the Internet. You can be who you are, or you can be who you want to be, or you can be what people think you are. I guess you can also be what people think you want to be, too, regardless of whether that's what you are or want to be.

You all probably have your own mental image of me. Some of those images are probably flattering, and some of them are probably not so flattering, and that’s okay. I figure the typical view is probably that I’m extremely handsome, and that I could lift Rich Scanlon over my head until he cries if I wanted to. You probably think I have some sort of super robot brain, and that maybe I was left here as a sentry for some civilization that doesn’t even have the freaking infrastructure to get a guy a new xilanthium beacon when his old one has been broken for over four years now. Four years!

Anyway, it doesn’t matter what you think. It’s all wrong. And it’s time that I made it right.

Growing up, I always felt like I was different than the other kids. I don’t know if that’s because I was born with a small tail, but nonetheless it seemed to start early. While the other kids were toddling around playing with tea sets and GI Joes, I was out on my hands and knees, looking for bugs and eating them. I’m not saying that was right and I'm not saying that was wrong, but it was what I was interested in. Yet for some reason it was okay to make fun of me just because I was in the woods eating a beetle instead of sitting on the porch and pretending to send GI Joe into the woods to eat a beetle? Whatever. I was living life, and you were playing with a doll. And it doesn’t matter if it’s carrying a helmet and a rifle, it’s still a doll! A white, pasty, hairless human doll.

I could never relate to dolls, even when they were action figures. The little Lego people were very square, and the little Weeble people were very round, and none of them were like me. I could never put my finger on it, but there was something about them that was very foreboding to someone like me.

I stunk at shop in school. I could never figure out which tools were used for what. Everyone else seemed to just know. It was hardwired into them, and for me it was just a total mystery. For me, the only thing that was hardwired was a love of exotic places. I saw an episode of “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” when I was about six, where the grandfather visited and wanted to take Eddie on a trip to the Amazon and the dad, while he didn’t turn into the Hulk, was upset about it and said that Eddie couldn’t go, and I couldn’t understand it. Who wouldn’t want to go to the Amazon, or Africa, or any of a million other exotic places?

I poured myself into geography, and loved looking at maps. I memorized all of the capitals, especially those that were buried in the heart of the jungle in some third-world place that was a hellhole for most people but which was innately irresistible to me. Bangui, Kinshasa, Kampala, Bujumbura. These places rolled off my tongue and I counted the days until I was old enough that I could flee the Ozarks and visit them. No one else knew what I was talking about, or cared. I loved Tarzan movies, and I always saw myself running alongside him or just hanging out in his treehouse.

That reminds me of something else. I was really hairy as a little kid. That didn’t help. We moved a lot, and I'd be trying to fit in in gym class and it’s a new school and I'm the only kid that doesn’t seem to know anybody, and the effeminate kid, Greg, is pointing out that I have more hair than the rest of the class put together. And it’s true. I was a wolf boy, or so I thought at the time.

There was a moment, an exact moment in time, when I realized that I had to know more about who I was. We had two theaters in my town, the Uptown and the Ritz, and they were both those old-time theaters where you had one enormous screen and a balcony and popcorn that they kept in the basement in a big trash can if they didn’t sell it all the night before. It was the late 1970s and someone had made a remake of King Kong, and I think Jessica Lange was in it as Fay Wray, but I could be wrong. So anyway, we’re watching this movie, me and Greg (yeah, that Greg) and Randy and Steve and Duane, and we’re eating our musty popcorn and King Kong is on top of the Empire State Building and he loves Fay Wray, so he’s holding her all carefully and trying to fight off the planes, and then he falls.

One hundred and two floors he falls. He hits the ground and he dies and the people in the audience are either laughing or saying ‘ooh’ or just eating their popcorn, and I start crying. Right there in the theater as a thirteen year-old kid, I start crying. It just wasn’t right what they did to him. He only wanted what we all want, a woman to love him and a job with the circus and a place to relax at night eating shoots and berries. Why could nobody see that? They killed him, and everyone thought it was good thing, just because he was a giant ape.

My friends made fun of me, sitting there crying in the theater, and I ran out, thanking God for the darkness. I got around to an alley and I hated myself, and I remember pounding my body with my fists, pounding, pounding, pounding, and shrieking, and I remember charging at this old homeless man who started to come toward me, and suddenly everything just felt right. I ran home and confronted my mother. I wanted to know who I really was, not some story. She stuck by her tired old claims that my blood is German and English, with a little French, and she covered her ears when I told her that wasn’t right. Things have never been quite the same for us since.

I did a lot of reading and I did a lot of soul-searching. I checked old newspaper records for circus arrivals, and I’ve researched zoo manifests, to no avail. Maybe it’s just a weird twist of the cosmos, a mixing of genes from the primordial soup, back when a little more hair and the ability to eat bamboo shoots with your feet was no different than having red hair or green eyes. Maybe there was a chance encounter that my mother has banished to the dungeons in her mind, an encounter of which I and perhaps a couple of shattered banana daiquiri glasses were the only lasting physical evidence. Who knows? Yet I know what is true.

I don’t know my story, and I don’t know my background, and I probably never will. But after peeling back the layers of society and my identity and this false mannequin that is my self-knowledge, I know now who I am, and after 42 years on this earth I’m going to tell you, and it will be the first time I’ve shared this with anyone.

I am Kevin, a resident of Denver. I am a happily married husband, a diligent homeowner, and a hard-working business owner.

And I am a lowland gorilla.

I’m sharing this because I’m proud of who I am. Will I ever go to the central African jungle and take my ‘rightful place’ with the troop? Probably not, though I can’t say that I haven’t been torn. This place of steel and brick and concrete is my world, even if a part of my heart wants to live among my own. I just hope that, after sharing this, I can continue to be a part of this community and that you won’t hate me and kill me and make an ash tray out of my hand, just because I’m not like you.