Toast
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It would begin with a single call, almost like quiet tears. First, very faint and gradual and then a spilling of sounds: hopeful lullabies, soaring melodies, loud discordant sobs. Then a cacophonous, echoing rush of all them meshed together – the mournful, the aggressive, the joyous and the hungry, the robins and the doves and the seagulls.
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When you begin the first five minute speech in the program, The Ice Breaker, you typically rise and walk to the podium to applause, shake the hand of the greeter and speak. You should usually begin with the phrase “Fellow Toastmasters, honored guests…” Some like to use props to make their speeches lively and also to give their hands something to do. For instance, the girl with the nearly-humorous speech on cat food, brought in several cans of Fancy Feast and a poster of Oscar, her chubby tabby.
I decided to do my first speech on self-destruction, craziness and how to come back from it. I brought all my old tools along in a bag – matches and Marlboro Lights and some Black and Mild Cigars, razor blades, and a knife. I was all set to take them out and lay them on the table, when I looked at the audience, trembled and thought, “What the fuck did I get myself into?”
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In 1994 I stopped at a rest area in North Haven off I-91, urinated, washed my hands and cut off part of my left index finger with a Ginsu knife. I then drove twenty minutes to an emergency room with it resting in the pocket of my stained T-shirt. (Surgeons at the hospital would later reattach my finger.) As I was being watched in the psychiatric emergency room, I asked to see the chaplain, a Father Timothy Shea. He knew me from previous visits and he prayed with me and asked me to tell him about the significance of this act. He was a short, stocky priest with malodorous breath and he patted my arm periodically as I spoke.
“I think of it as a talisman – a reminder,” I said.
“Of what?” he asked.
I told him that I wanted to die, that I was tired of struggling and that I almost slit my throat in the rest area before taking it out on the finger. I told him that I needed to do something that would remind me how my family would feel if I ended my life. To keep me safe.
He shook his head and said, “My God, young man, what have you done that’s so horrible?”
“I’ve done nothing,” I said and he raised his very bushy left eyebrow.
“I don’t quite get it,” he said.
“I’ll be thirty-one soon,” I said, my voice rising. “And I haven’t done a fucking thing in my life.”