Chapter 9 – Blaze em’, The Origin Story: The Narrative of Deborah Susan Herway

Blaze ‘em, The Origin Story: The Narrative of Deborah Susan Herway

I tell them all about you drumming in the park/We put you in the ground, but I see you in the stars/Go on and take a bow, a round of applause/The best day ever, always ready, we are/Love always shines, that’s how I’ll find you/In case you forgot, I hope this reminds you.1 – Lupe Fiasco

The toddler sat in her high chair as the real estate agent paced the kitchen in her early 1980’s business attire, and slipped on a piece of cheese which had fallen from the toddler’s tray. Above the professional now, the toddler sits as if upon a throne of laughter, pointing and emanating satisfaction at the spectacle beneath. The woman rises and departs amidst laughter emanating not only from the highchair, but from the corner of the room where stood the father figure who at once overwhelmed with the prospect of selling his home, was now overwhelmed with amusement at this turn of events. Amusement garnered not from the woman on the floor, but the miniature figure in the high chair exuding an undeniable, magnetic and contagious force of humor he’d become such a fan of in just her few years on earth.

A year or two later she sits beneath a decorated Christmas tree with a pair of plastic Bugs Bunny scissors and a new haircut. The mother figure noticing this, leans towards the child with confiscated paraphernalia in hand, waving them in the child’s direction in a disciplinarian effort intended to teach her daughter that no, you don’t cut your hair with these scissors. Her long silky brown hair probably wafting to the cadence of wielded scissors, the mother-figure’s daintily freckle-spotted face succumbs to the cheesy-rosy-red cheeked blond sprouting pigtails out of each side of her head who sits opposite her. The child counters the parental gesture with one of her own more powerful—an endearing laughter reflecting unnatural gifts in and appreciation for comedy, emanating life in a way that was quite literally, incapable of not eliciting her mother’s submission. These tales were passed down from the parents who’d identified the child’s force of personality and gifts early in life.

******My Debbie******

Debbie, also called “Pooh,” was an entertainer who needed someone to entertain and I paid attention to her like a student to a teacher. On a good day, she would invite me into the basement where she’d set up a desk opposite a chalkboard. As a three-or-four-year-old, I vaguely recall the blond child two-and-a-half years my senior. She has a kid-smile that I can only describe as enclosed by the parenthesis on your key pad with the pinches in the middle, that like a picture frame, showcased one of the most infectious gestures you’d ever seen, as if her spirt was seeping through her pressed-together kid- teeth into your heart. Thrilled at having an audience, the child carries on, verbally processes, and improvises while prancing about, almost skipping, in figure eights in her expressive role, expounding upon life as good as any six-year-old could. What I remember most, was the child taking her ideas very seriously even at that young age, commanding her breathe with advanced intention, so wrapped up in expressing herself she may have barely recognized I was there. My job was to sit quietly, observe, and probably occasionally raise my hand.

She called the “game” Kids Collection. Being the impressionable and curious child I was, I sat content and entertained, looking dumb as can be with a round head of full-bodied curls over a pair of wide-open blue eyes fixated on a spectacle I called, Debbie. Certainly, an invitation to play Kids Collection would leave an otherwise occupied set of Star Wars figurines stranded and still in no time as I’d jump at her call for company, a custom that endured through the years. Imagine the contrast between Debbie’s and my first familial experiences. Debbie comes home to meet Cindy, who assumes a pertinent role in teaching the infant about the world. It’s a horrifying one for the helpless and resented new addition, who cannot defend against her older sister (I can only speculate). In contrast, almost from the time I opened my eyes, my landscape was articulated by an engaged, interactive, gifted and loving figure who longed to teach me all about her creative, wondrous world. On this note, it becomes timely to note that bipolars demonstrate advanced “mirror systems,” implying their mirror neurons are highly at work empathizing with the object of their attention. Once my therapist mentioned, in light of one parent’s drinking and the other’s fixation with sports, “I don’t know how much you were mirrored as a child.” I know now that I was.

******I Want my MTV******

When moving to Kansas, we packed into our brand new, fully loaded 1983 station wagon, complete with wood paneling and whitewalls. A 1980s housewife’s dream car. My mother and father manned the front while Cindy claimed the middle, and Debbie and I cozied up in the “way back” as we called it. I was the inhaler-totting, snotty-nosed, five-year-old stuck to a primitive, boxed video game. My counterpart was the blond, pigtail-sprouting six-year-old comedy princess. The two of us resembled twins in our sleeping bags, and I still remember the sensation of being so elated at having her undivided attention for a three-day road trip.

It was the eighties. MTV was new, as were we in a new state and a new home. So too was our wood-framed, elaborately molded, boxed television set, placed on the ground like a piece of furniture. Madonna’s Borderline was on, her first hit video featuring a blonde prancing around the streets, resembling the one I played Kids Collection with, to a tee. I fell in love with music in front of that TV, in Topeka, Kansas, under Debbie’s influence. Skipping in cadence with my two favorite blonds to a symphony of bells, synthesizers, and drums, it was sufficient stimulation for a fledgling boy with eyes so wide open under a bushy head of curls that you swore he was as dumb as people told him he was. Curls that looked like someone slapped a tumbleweed on his head and then tossed him in the washer. But all that was fine. Because I had Debbie, and I understood what Debbie was doing—she was going to be like Madonna. And she was taking me for the ride!

Our bonding over the music proved magnetic, drawing Cindy into our group for a show called Rock Blocks, which featured three consecutive videos by three top artists. The three of us like age-inappropriately placed nerds lined up in anticipation of three Madonna, Guns N’Roses, Bon Jovi, or Def Leppard videos. Before the dawn of YouTube, Apple Music, and Spotify, the three videos in a row were as close as we got to an uninterrupted “stream” of music. Rock Blocks summoned all three of the Herway kids to the box TV with VHS tapes in hand as if waiting their turn at a celebrity book signing. Cindy, as the oldest, gets to choose which band to record, which is a big deal. If a coveted band came out with a new video, for example, she’d call dibs and be the only one in the home with the most valuable piece of serotonin-spiking memorabilia for a time, as music knowledge and paraphernalia deciphered status amongst the kids. Standing behind the girls as the undisputed twerp with a tumbleweed on my head and holding a clunky VHS tape to my chest, I remember the adrenaline coursing over this spectacle called music videos, and my chance to record some of them and be just a little bit more like Debbie. When my turn comes the girls push me aside and record for themselves, signaling my place within a more understandable pecking order. A valuable life lesson our baby sister would never know.

We loved Rock Blocks, but the MTV Countdown should not be underrated. It was a defining part of our lives—a daily tournament of sorts to obsess over as an eight-year-old. Assembled by the telephone in our grandparents’ kitchen, as by this time we’d moved back to Maryland and were staying with them, Debbie engages with militant eye contact, “You have to dial as fast as you can, like this.” She punches the numbers 1-800-DIAL-MTV as if dialing 911 in an emergency while explaining, “When they answer, you say, I would like to request Bon Jovi’s, ‘Living on a Prayer.’ Then you hang up and do it again, and you keep doing it for an hour.” She demonstrated. I observed. I dialed. I spoke. I hung up. I did it again, quickly and urgently, for the entire hour before the show just like she showed me, while she carried out the procedure from another line upstairs. Then, we would sit, fidget, or as we called it, fake fight until the show started. On days when my sister was absent, I performed the drill all by myself with the same urgency.

Cindy is no longer associated with us, even over music, so the two of us would spectate as a duo. The first so many videos didn’t matter, but the final two were a big deal. It was a championship pitting the same two teams like Magic against Bird, it seemed, only ours was a cultural battle typically coming down to something like New Kids on the Block vs Motley Crue. In almost all cases as I remember, it was a hard rock vs boy band. Rebels vs snowflakes. We took this nail-biter seriously. It was an election that with every boy band victory, forebodings of mashup pop culture were prominent. We tended be up in arms like our father watching his football team lose, because it was the dawn of the boy band. Upon our losses, we raged around the room like two Skeletor Gummy Bears, bouncing and banging with our hands upon our heads, using slang to the best of our ability to express our dismay upon the state of the world. These interactions demonstrate that for me, Debbie was not a problem. She was a gift. A most precious gift, as in moving to both Kansas and Maryland, I struggled in my new schools immensely.

These were strange and awkward transitions that in retrospect lent to intense sensations of instability. Juxtaposing my crying in a classroom full of kids in khakis and ties while learning I was unable to read like them, with the countdown experience with my sister later in the day, one can understand how much I relied on her. Debbie was the most consistent source of comfort, stability, esteem, guidance and enjoyment in what were otherwise lonesome and anxiety-stricken times. At this juncture, we turn our attention to how she dealt with, or learned to, wade through her divergent error message learning process while growing up in the absence of proper guidance.

******Serotonin From Outside the Home******

In the absence of proper support, mirroring, and modeling, Debbie had to teach herself how to move within the world. Remember that movement is rooted in perception and emotion in the predictive solicitation of sensation. One behaves to survive, predict, and feel good. As a bipolar, Debbie was drawn to MTV. It served many purposes, one of which was the cultivation of her bipolar gifts—to feel and express, sing and dance, ponder and articulate. It fed her intellectual and artistic curiosities, while also instructing her on how to walk, talk, dress, and blow a kiss. Because she was of little value inside the home, she sought her value outside of it, self-evidencing what she’d learned from her interactions with MTV in terrains much less predictable than the videos would have been.

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MTV played a central role in “co-constructing” the young genius’ consciousness, with every successful social behavior solidifying her identification with images that were tailored for mass consumption and having little to do with reality. This fully impeded her potential to “infer your intentions on the basis of what I see you doing by asking, ‘what intentions would lead me to behave like you?’” Because the images she learned from were not real, and in the absence of guidance, our ten-year-old persisted with a perception derived from abstraction, identifying with pop-cultural-image-abstraction as “other things like me.”3 In this process she was truly brilliant and emotionally rewarded by serotonin derived from reinventing her music video reality within middle school hallways and house parties, where she was the closest thing to these fanatically desirable images the boys were ever going to get. Her outgoing, magnetic and confident nature were absolutely her most valuable actual assets, and they lent well here. The serotonin spikes dependent upon the gestures of feigning older boys and maybe even men, refined a default survival behavioral strategy that moved towards status like a magnet.

When I described my coming of age conflicts with Kelly in Chapter 7 I left out two things. First, I knew I was sacrificing myself by raising Kelly, not ignorant at all towards how much it bothered my mother. But second, everything I said about teenagers lacking experience with their increasingly adult- like environments, how their “cell assemblies” representing the objects in their environments have yet to undergo learning and “selectivity,” rendering their perceptions vague, their behavior less calculable, and them as individuals, vulnerable—all that is now science—I knew intuitively from watching Debbie grow up. I saw Kelly’s upbringing as a matter of life and death and sensed her increasingly at risk. Damasio is right, “precision is essential, while vagueness is costly. A vague map can lead you to the wrong interpretation or worse: guide you to make the wrong movement.”4 Movement that summons environmental change and consequences. I don’t quote these professionals for sport. This is a matter of life, no life, or a really unfavorable life.

Lacking guidance and sufficient knowledge of older humans who were increasingly populating her social landscape, and unable to predict their behavior due to a “vague map” derived from a juvenile’s abstracted meaning from the men and women on MTV, Metal Edge and Circus Magazine, my sister was hurt.

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Nothing prepares you for the sound of pushing the air from your lungs into a dead body’s mouth, especially when that person is the color blue and your sister. unmistakable. She was reigning supreme. She knew it. She loved it. And she learned from it.