A Man Named Dave

anniversary of my rescue. The Ten Outstanding Young Americans trophy was the same award presented to my childhood idols Chuck Yeager, Orson Welles, the actor who played my all-time hero, Superman: Christopher Reeve, along with a league of others.
    “Hello?” Patsy snapped her fingers, bringing me back to the present. “The point is, you still didn’t make it. You may have been hot then, but you’re nothing now. Those buttheads in Lincoln should have handled you better. We could have been rich!” Patsy cried. “After all you’ve done, after all these years, you don’t get it. It ain’t happening! You ain’t got it. You can act all high and mighty saying whatever it is you say, but it don’t pay the rent. And,” Patsy amplified, “if you want to know something, I think you’re full of shit. I read your book, if you can call it that. They made it look more like a pamphlet, and, it still didn’t happen. Ain’t no way no one could live through all that. I should know. Think about it; if you were that abused, if you didn’t die … you’d be psycho, messed up on drugs, an alcoholic, or whatever. I’ve been living in Marysville and Yuba City all my life, and if what you claim is true, I know the air force sure as hell wouldn’t let you enlist, let alone be involved with those jet planes. If you didn’t lie about that, too. No way!” Patsy shook her head. “No way! You’re too clean, everything’s too perfect. What’d you do, pay off those teachers so they could say you were abused? Oh, yeah, you tried to hide it, but I found out. The only reason why you wanted to hide your past from me is because it ain’t true. That’s why you can’t get paid bookings. That’s why that piece of shit book of yours ain’t in any, I repeat, any bookstores. So why you doing this? You wanna talk about trust? Come on, come clean, tell me, tell me the truth! After all the shit you put me through, I deserve to know!”
    I had reached my boiling point. “You want to know what I do? Do you? Do you really want to know? I work with kids, begging them that no matter what happened to them, they can turn it around. At the ‘hall’ I restrain teenage girls who have so much meth in them, they want to kill themselves, ’cause they’re tired of their fat, sick pimp stepdad hooking them out. Oh, it gets better! I have to stand in front of police officers and social workers, whose jobs are to find kids, babies, locked in cages, beaten to death, chained to toilets, and convince them to put on their jacket and tie, blouse and blazer, every single fuckin’ day, and go out, eat shit, and see things that no one in our society wants to acknowledge. And these, these people are treated like the enemy!
    “When I’m lucky enough to speak at the corporate gigs, I swear to you, I pray, I pray on my knees I don’t speak too fast, come off the wall with my humor and give them something, just one thing they can use to better themselves. To tell them that if I can swallow ammonia and learn to speak after stuttering for years … if I could bandage myself up after being stabbed … if I didn’t turn out, as you put it, psycho after all the shit I went through, what on God’s green earth is stopping them? And you want to know the damned of it all? I pray to God that they – all those people – never see … how I feel on the inside. I can’t even look into their eyes. Some of them think I’m all that, and I don’t feel worthy enough to look them in the eye. Ever! I know I’m not smart. I know I ain’t all that. I feel like such a fake. Even now, after all the awards, flying for the air force, getting a letter from the President … I feel so guilty … and I rack my brain and I don’t know why, after all of these years …
    “I know I’ll never be a motivational speaker – I’m not cool, smooth, I’m not polished – but I’m the real deal. I try. With every ounce, every breath, I try to give my best. That’s why I land in Omaha, Nebraska, make the ten-hour drive to Bismarck, North Dakota, hit a deer that crashes through the windshield, so I can work all day and into the night, with a concussion, do a program for the kids in a youth jail, all the time hoping my insides don’t bleed ’cause I swallowed shards of glass, just so I can save my client thirty-three dollars on the airfare! Why? ’Cause I feel guilty, that’s why! You wanna know why I do this: reliving my past in front of my eyes every single day?” I fumed. “I work so you don’t have to. I get up from fleabag motels with no