The Scribbling Vagabond 1/23/13

The Scribbling Vagabond
by David Sherry

    My name is David Sherry, but they call me Nilotic. This may be because I am one and a half parts masculine, one part feminine, and two parts pseudo-Egypt. However, if you want to get super factual about it, I was hatched just like everyone else; if you trace back far enough. On the day of Creation I was excreted from the vaginal prison at Hinsdale Hospital. It was October 24, 1989. I remember it vividly.
    After my expulsion, Mother, Father, my sister, and I all lived in a little blue house in Lisle, IL until the age of six. My sister is two years older than me, so she would have been eight. Afterwhich we departed the burbs to go settle down closer to the heart of the city. The place agreed upon was a skinny brick house on LeMoyne street in Wicker Park. Now, you are missing a vital piece of information necessary for understanding this story. But have no fear for I will enlighten you.
    After my mother gave birth to my sister and I, she decided that in order to fill the steadily growing hole in her soul, she must embark on a spiritual quest. This search led her to becoming a born again Christian, dedicating her life to doing the work of the Lord. My father went along for the sake of keeping the family together (or so he says in hindsight). That being said, the reason that we decided to move into the city in the first place was because my mother said she had been called to go into ‘urban ministry.’ They had already joined a church in the area. The congregation was called Freedom Church.
    The first year we lived there, I had one of those moments in life where you know that that one single event altered the fabric of your entire existence. One of those cataclysmic events where you know it’s either the work of God or some devils. If absent, I may not have become the writer I am today; which is very well likely because it was while living in that house that I first put pen to paper.
    The Gift of Writing runs in the Sherry blood. My father’s father is a published author himself. He started out as a journalist and also published fiction and nonfiction books. And my father is a lawyer, so I guess you could say it technically passed to him. Lord knows how many briefs he’s written in his life.
    I changed schools five times before I turned twelve. By then I was in sixth grade at some private school called Catherine Cook. This was when my parents’ marriage started to dissolve. My mother had moved on from Lutheran, to Baptist, to Messianic Jewish; finding herself part of a little congregation called Temple Shalom. After a while I refused to go and just stayed home with my dad while my mom and sister went. My dad was also seeing another woman on the side (whom he later married).
    So there was a divorce. Irrevocably splitting our family like a fault line in a desert. Each half ended up states away from the other. My mother and sister in Missouri, and my dad, his mistress, and I in Illinois. All these problems and turbulence sparked some sort of angst in me which I then transfered to my pen, spilling forth stories and poems I did not know were in me.
    To make a long story short, we moved. Again. To Park Ridge at the beginning of eighth grade. I was the new kid again. That seemed to be the story of my life. But at the end of that year I shot my first short film. So I guess the year wasn’t a total waste.
    There was a relatively traumatic summer before high school though. I had spinal fusion surgery to correct my scoliosis. There were thirteen vertebrae fused. That’s no small potatoes. Throw some physical pain into the mix with that emotional pain. Before I had the surgery, I was a little hunched, and for the first few months after the surgery, I had to wear a plastic brace. Both of these things contributed to the fact that all my classmates called me ‘turtle.’ All of this was fuel for the creative fire.
    I coasted through high school, making a few films here and there and writing quite a bit. All the while living with a stepmother who I knew wanted to get rid of me. It was like a combination of every evil stepmother from every Fairy Tale by the brothers Grimm. She finally got her chance on Halloween my senior year of high school. What happened was that there was sort of this misunderstanding and my father caught information that he misinterpreted to mean that I was plotting to kill my stepmother--which consequently I wasn’t.
    By this point in my life, my mother and sister had moved back to Illinois and were living in a one bedroom efficiency apartment in Crete, IL. That being said, my father dumped me off with my mother. I remained there until my father made me two appointments to get me psychoanalyzed by two different doctors. He tried to use my writing as proof that I was violent. That tactic failed miserably. Both doctors said I was not a threat to anyone and it was not a crisis situation. Nonetheless, my father refused to take me back unless I agreed to take medication. I flatly refused. Hence, I had to go live with my mother and sister.
    After that I went through a period of almost three years where I didn’t speak at all to my father. My mother supported my wish to attend a two year film school after graduating from high school. Needless to say, my father didn’t. He had his heart set on me going to a four year university. To me, that seemed like the most dreaded prospect.
    My mom and I decided to just say “Fuck it” and enroll me at Flashpoint Academy in the film department. The only kickback from that was a lawsuit between my mother and father that dragged out for years to come; all over who had to pay for my tuition.
    I graduated from Tribeca Flashpoint in 2010 with an Associate’s Degree in Film, spending a brief two months over the summer of 2009 working as an intern at TriCoast Studios in California. They promised that there would be jobs for us when we graduated; but if you did not wish to go into corporate media, advertising, or reality television, then you are shit out of luck.
    But I moved out anyway, getting a job at a movie theater in Chicago, and moving in with another filmmaker I met during my travels. We had a good run, shooting some music videos and documentaries, but his time in America was abruptly cut short. What I failed to mention is that he was an illegal Mexican immigrant. He finally got deported for too many arrests and DUIs.
    Around this time I caught wind that my father was going through another divorce and finally coming to his senses after all these years. He wanted to see me to discuss some things. So I met with him. The impression I got was that he wanted to make up for some of the ways he had treated me and how he had made things worse in our family. So his proposition was to put me up in any city that I wanted to live in, for two years, all expenses paid, while I tried to get my freelance filmmaking business/record label up and running.
    I humbly agreed, afterwhich I found myself in Providence, Rhode Island of all places. I drove straight there from Chicago in the dead of winter through blizzards and nor’easters. Believe it or not, I fell in love with the city and decided to stay.
    To make a really long story really short, in that first year I lived there: I managed my own record label, recorded lots of music, worked with other artists, performed several shows, shot videos, and wrote a gratuitous amount. But good things must sometimes change or come to an end. A strange spiritual struggle descended on me at the end of that year. The outcome of this was an ordeal which left me frozen and hospitalized for two and a half weeks. The consequence of this was that my dad completely cut me off (he couldn’t pay me anyway since most of his money was being stolen by his ex-wife). He took my car back and left me with no way to pay for my apartment and my bills. Looking back on this, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
    Eventually I found my way down to the Occupy movement in Providence during early 2012. I absorbed their struggles and their stories until I decided to take a bus back to Chicago in late May.
    After a failed romance over that summer, I ended up moving back in with my mother in Crete, IL. My sister had already married and moved out. Even though I deliver pizza now and am taking a Journalism class at the local community college, I have no plans on slowing down. I will write, I will write, and I will write some more. And maybe perform some shows on the side until I am regularly read, listened to, and watched. Which is not far on the horizon.
    I would venture to say that that’s me in a nutshell, but to be more accurate, I’d be in more like one of those Russian dolls. Layer upon layer upon layer upon layer... until you get to the moment of conception, and that’s where it ends.

        or very well starts over again