Tell me a story.

About what?

I don't know, give me a good one.

Did I ever tell you about the time my father very nearly pushed me to take my own life?

No. My God. What’d it happen like?

Like any other row in the kitchen of my childhood. The perpetuity of my parents’ fighting; I think I just wanted to top them somehow, though I was also the only chronically depressed ten-year-old I knew—which, by the way, only made the depression worse, you know, feeling no one could relate, yadda yadda yadda.

That must have been hard.

Yeah, well, steel is forged in a crucible or something, right?

I guess…

But anyway, there I was in the kitchen with my parents one summer day when I was ten or eleven and I had just told them about this horrible nightmare I had during a nap that day. One of those dreams where you’re falling and falling endlessly, but then all of a sudden I just went splat! right there on the ground and my viewpoint or viewfinder or mind’s eye or—you get the point—anyway it started panning out and giving me a wider and wider angle of my body just lying there with blood oozing out on the pavement. And then there was this overriding thought that started as a whisper, and by the time I woke up it had become a near-deafening mantra, You are nothing, you are nothing and so on over and over. I woke up with such an existential rain cloud over my head that I could just not fathom any value to my existence. So, naturally, I went into the kitchen where I heard my parents arguing and I had the plan of hacking myself to bloody bits in front of them to convey the message that their arguing and their fighting and their separations were all bullshit, just like my very life was.

Jesus. Then what?

Well, I can’t exactly remember what the chronology of events was, but it felt like all of a sudden there was a huge kitchen knife in my hand, and the next thing I remember I was holding it to my throat and yelling I want to fucking die, which was strange because I don’t think I’d ever said the f-word in front of my parents before. I mean, I was only like ten at the time.

What’d they do?

Well, I remember this stone-face look my mom had, like if a feather fell on her she’d shatter into a thousand pieces. She didn’t get out a peep the whole time except Oh and then, in a voice so long and low it sounded like my dad’s bellowing, no… But my dad was the real showstopper. This sonofabitch had the nerve to say, before anything else, That’s not even the right knife.

No!

Yeah! But it got better. He leaned up against the tile countertop real slow and looked me up and down like he was assessing each and every electron in my body, and then he said, Do it.

What? No he didn’t. No way a parent would say that in those circumstances.

Look, did you want the E! True Hollywood Story over here or did you not? I’m not gonna sugar coat anything for you. Do it. Do it. DO it already, for godsake. Really dig deep and figure out if you have what it takes to do that shit, son. And if you can’t go through with it, then put the knife down and ask yourself why. All the while I’m sitting there holding this knife up to my throat, and tears are streaming down my face at this point—mostly because of the expression on my mom’s face the whole time. I was utterly, absolutely flabbergasted. Of all the scenarios I had envisioned while I was walking down the hallway and into the kitchen to do this shit, never once did it cross my mind that my father would be standing there trying to talk me into pushing a mincing knife into my Adam’s apple.

That’s where you were holding it?

What the fuck? I didn’t know any better, I was ten. So I realized then that if I was going to commit suicide I would be killing the wrong person.

Who was the right person?

My father. He was a terrorist. It was only about the umpteenth time I had thought of killing him, but this time was probably the kicker because I thought for once he had actually put my life in clear and present danger by telling me to go through with it. I stood there frozen afterward, and silently thought about possible ways to kill him without shaming my mother too badly—all this while she cursed at him and pounded his shoulders, like, To tell our soon to actually KILL himself, I can’t fucking believe you Gerald... Eventually she left the room and it was just my father and I staring at each other in the kitchen. My bitter hatred was growing because I had begun to realize that he knew me even better than I knew myself. He somehow must have known that I never would have gone through with it. In that way he denied me what ninety-nine percent of parents would have given their kids in that situation: their utmost attention. What scared me most at the time was that I was pretty sure he could somehow read my mind, and then he damn near voiced the same thought as I had it. He said, Everything you think, everything you do, I’ve been there and done that. Because you are the closest thing to me on this planet.

How’d the whole thing end?

He picked up the knife I had dropped on the counter and studied it, turning it back and forth in the air and clicking his tongue. He replaced it into its slit in the carving block and removed a long, narrow knife from the cutting block and said, Now this is the one that you would use to actually take a life. This huge one would just cause a lot of pain. Then he went on, I’m gonna show you something they taught me in the service, hopefully you’ll never have to use it. But it’ll come in handy if you ever have someone in your home trying to kill you. It’s called the lethal knife blow.

Shut up.

No, yeah, this is for real. He handed me the knife and held the fingers of my other hand to his sternum. Now, any random thrust with a knife to the torso is likely to bounce of a rib, so you gotta aim for just below the sternum where your ribcage comes together. But if you just stab right there, you’ll still have a struggling body to reckon with until their punctured lung fills with blood. So, you gotta flick your wrist something fierce once you’re behind that ribcage in the direction of the heart. If you’re lucky, the tip of that knife will just about poke a hole in their heart and it’s bye bye Betty.

Tell me you didn’t lunge at him right then?

No, no. I just kind of backed away in horror while he stood there pointing to his chest at the best entry spot for the lethal knife blow. And I wanted to finish it so bad, but I knew that he could sense that and was poised and ready for me to try. Then he would have had a great excuse to ship my troubled little ass off to some special school with latrines and “sessions.” He was goading me on a bit, too. Hey, don’t scoff at it. That trick may save your life one day. Where are you going? Hey, you forgot to put the knife back in the block.