A Quick Look into My Life: The Early Years

I was born on the sixth of January, 1987, in a spit-in-the-road town in the Oklahoma panhandle called Guymon. This was during a blizzard, where the sole anesthesiologist was absent due to the need to attend to the crash of a school bus. This resulted in my birth taking a day and a half, with my mother’s water breaking at around 7 a.m. on January the 5th, but I was not actually born until the following evening at 6:35 p.m. I was found to have a right ingual hernia at my birth, and did not stay in Guymon for very long. I was whisked away to receive the minor surgery to fix this to a hospital in Amarillo, Texas. After the repairs, my parents began raising me (for the first three months of my life) in the neighboring town to Guymon, Goodwell Oklahoma – a town so unbelievably small that it did not even have a hospital. Hence, I was born in Guymon.

After those first three months, the remainder of my first three years (close to four, but not quite) were spent in and around Lubbock, Texas – or as I like to refer to it – HELL! Not because the area was bad, but because my father was practically THE DEVIL!! The abuses I suffered in those infantile years of my youth are too numerous to name, even if this were a thousand pages long. However, I will strive to bring them down to the most psychologically traumatic and physically crippling. At the age of one, my father shook me violently, resulting in the damage of my right frontal lobe, which I could cite as the cause of my autism (though I doubt this), but it could not be denied that it certainly exacerbated that issue. This I consider to be, whether that was the intent of my father or not, as the first of his three murder attempts.

My father’s abuse did not just extend to me, of course. There was plenty of abuse, both psychological and physical, aimed at my poor dear mother. For example, there was the time that my father went upside my mom’s head with a damn typewriter. Or the time my mom shielded me from a beating from my father with a plastic bottle of vinegar. Then there was that night at a gathering of my father’s friends where dear old dad got angry with me and tried to decapitate me with a chain saw!! Luckily dad’s friends managed to wrestle him off of me in time. And when I do dream, which is exceedingly rare (more on that later), I still have the nightmares!! It also affects some of my favorite hobbies, such as gaming, in interesting ways. For example, whenever I am playing a game where the enemies are wielding chain saws, I have a tendency to go overboard in killing them, wasting way more resources than I should. However, in games where a chainsaw is a wieldable weapon for your own character, I end up wielding them almost exclusively, with a very few exceptions.

Then there was the time at my cousin’s birthday party, who is a fair amount older than I. His father, my Uncle Kenneth, had gotten him a small BB gun for hunting. Where the party had gone on a small hunting trip with my cousin (it was a small party), my dad, while no one was looking, took out his 9 mm. and made absolutely certain that he was never going to have any grandchildren by shooting out one of my balls! Then, at the tender age of three, there was the time that my parents had an argument and my dad ended up smashing the TV controller, which, due to the poor design of the TV we had at the time, was the only way to actually control the damn thing. Mom scolded him for it, and my dad took a hammer and simply smashed the TV! I was watching Sesame Street at the time! My thoughts at the time were “Daddy killed Big Bird!” I have not watched another episode of Sesame Street to this day.

Lastly, we come to my father’s third and final murder attempt, and the one that I am by far the most shocked that I survived, where my father simply decided to straight up stab me in the gut, with no provocation. I had the scar until I was about 15. It was at this time that I would like to note that while my father was a particularly bad egg, his family are actually lovely people whom I love to this day, and it was only my father who was the bad egg among them. They couldn’t help the fact that he was a sociopath!

Through the grace of my late Aunt Jo on my mother’s side, we finally managed to escape my father in October of 1990. It was at this time that we came to live here in Topeka, living with my Aunt Jo and Uncle Bill until we could find a place of our own. Upon finding a place of our own, I lived in the first of three domiciles while living in Topeka – an extremely small apartment in the Chalet Apartment complex, right next to Gage Park. It was here that the first signs of my mental disabilities were made manifest. During these, my preschool years, I was prescribed many different psychological medications, in spite of the fact that I was not actually diagnosed until later. These include, but were not limited to, Thorazine and a combination of Lithobid and Cylert. Pretty hard-core stuff for a four- year-old! Close to the time that we moved to the second (and my longest lasting) home, I had the first, though by no means the last, of my many hallucinations! On the wall, we used to have a large portrait of a jaguar, which upon heading to kindergarten one day, I could have sworn tried to leap out of the painting and eat me! But that hallucination was nothing compared to the granddaddy of them all that sent me to the nuthouse at the tender age of six!

This is what I remember: my room started spinning and the dinosaurs in the picture on the wall were dancing and in the corner Friendship Bear and Braveheart Lion were fighting and one of them was wearing a German Nazi uniform. Then a T-Rex bit off Braveheart’s head, and there was blood, and a bird flew in and shat on the T-Rex. And then the Devil came and there was lots of fire and he was juggling Mickey-heads and he was laughing with Darth Vader. And then the Atom Bomb dropped and there was more fire, and Godzilla was swimming in the fire and the fire turned into rainbows. Then Lion-O came and he killed the rainbows with the Sword of Omens. Then we went to a dance party with the Ninja Turtles, but Mikey got sick because he had too much pizza, and he barfed up Satan. And then Slimer came and played skee-ball with the Turtles and their corpses were the balls. And then my teddy bears from my toy box came and killed Slimer with knives, and there was more blood. And then the jaguar poster ate the teddy bears, and tried to eat me, but I ran away in utter and complete dread!

This is what sent me to Topeka State Hospital for 11 months, from February to November of 1992, where I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, (a form of Autism), mild dyslexia, as well as mild pyromania. And I learned through brain scans that I very, very rarely enter into REM sleep, hence my earlier statement that I very rarely dream. As for how I would rate my time in the nuthouse, it was actually one of the happiest parts of my early childhood. I made a great deal of friends there. Sadly, over the years, I have since lost contact with all of them.

As for the other events that shaped me outside of the early years, there is the immense discipline through decades of training in the martial arts (which helped me immensely to overcome my anger issues), my religious and cultural training as a Choctaw shaman, and the love and mentoring of my grandfather, as well as the never-ending love and support of my mother. All these things have come together to shape the man that is now Peter Mabee [assigned pseudonym].