Toilet Battle

Author: Danny Sowell

I'm going to tell stories in no particular order, most of the time. I'm going to start with the earliest and clearest memory of me seeing the world in my own way and how I viewed my place in it at the time.

When I was probably around five or six years old, I had already come to see myself as different. I'm pretty sure a few other people saw a difference in me as well, although I've never been able to come up with an explanation for why. For instance, around that time I went to vacation bible school over the summers, and I had a strange encounter one day that I've never forgotten.

The pastor that led the sermons at vacation bible school was an odd guy, but he was fun. He used to have a ventriloquist dummy that he would give sermons with when it was a group of kids. He was good, but the doll creeped me out. I think I'd seen the previews of a movie called Magic where a ventriloquist dummy came to life and murdered people. This contributed to a fear of dolls of all sorts that sprung up often when I was younger. However, I got used to his dummy, and it was a fun way to learn.

I never got the full story on him because I grew up and moved on, but I believe his name was Brother Corky or something like that. He was a friendly, fun preacher but rarely seemed serious or churchy. But one day at the end of a sermon, and I believe the last day of bible school, he walked up to me with a strange, almost haunted look in his eyes. He took my little child-sized New Testament Bible out of my hand without saying anything, opened it, and underlined a few verses in John chapter five. The ones referring to the return of Jesus Christ and the dead rising from the grave. He handed it back to me and walked away, and I believe that's the last time I ever saw him. I aged out or he left the bible school or something because I have no memory of seeing him again.

I had an I.Q., in the 170's range when tested in my teens, and was always a fast learner. I was very curious and would seek out any information I could about anything I thought was important. As far back as I can remember I had a fascination with the "supernatural". I just wanted to know what was really going on. I seemed to have been born a scientist and was probably on the spectrum before they really knew what that was. If I wanted to know something, I just wouldn't stop until I found a good answer. I think that's why this stands out. I never really got an answer as to why he would behave so out of character, and why he thought I, in particular, needed to read that passage at that exact time. Just put that on a pile of things I'll probably never know but won't ever stop thinking about.

Anyway, at around that same time in my life I had already been sure I had some sort of purpose. I thought that if you learned something, or had some special ability, there must be some reason you have it and there must be something you are supposed to do with it. I read a lot of comic books and was pretty sure I had super powers or would some day have them due to other things that had happened to me in my early childhood. I believed in the old "great power great responsibility" thing. I believed that the strong must protect the weak. I believed that evil was a real force in the world and that the devil was at work all the time causing pain. Of course, I was like 5 years old, so the idea of humans just being assholes hadn't yet fully occurred to me.

Now to the actual story I'm trying to tell. I remember that I was a very small kid for my age. I was thin and had a giant head and was pretty short. One night, I was sitting on the toilet for obvious reasons. I remember looking down at my feet and swinging them forward while I held myself above the seat to keep from falling in. I know I was so short my feet wouldn't touch the ground.

It was the 70's, and we had a cheap wood panel door with probably a mass-manufactured fake grain in the wood, but the grain of the wood made the obvious shape of a goat's head with really long, pointy horns. I remember feeling like this was a representation of evil and I felt the urge to communicate with what I thought was the devil. Not that I thought the wood grain itself was signaling me or that it was evil. It just represented a focal point that I saw as a way to get a message to the him.

I remember I decided to tell the devil to leave everyone alone and stop hurting kids. I remember telling him that if he wanted to mess with someone, he should mess with me because I was tired of him hurting people all the time, especially innocent kids. I remember threatening him that some day I'd figure out how to beat him if he didn't stop. I told the devil I was coming for him basically and that he needed to get his shit together.

I don't tell this story to put me in some good light. I was 5 years old and could easily have turned into a crazy asshole by now. I tell it because it shows my frame of mind, even from a young age. I saw myself as living in a magical world with all kinds of strange things happening everywhere. I really believed what I had been taught in church and was trying to find where someone like me would fit into that story.

It was early in my journey to figure out why I was different. I was becoming very interested in why I was on this earth. Why was I so different from my friends? Why could I do things other people couldn't do? What does it all mean?

Just to head things off at the pass, I want to be clear that I'm no longer Christian. I'm agnostic at best. Also, I still haven't found an answer to those questions, so don't expect some future story where it all gets wrapped up in the end, and my purpose is revealed.

This collection of stories will be a slow process. I'm mostly doing it for my kids to some day get a view inside their old man. To see what I was like when I was a kid, and get the opportunity to read any stories I don't get around to telling them or don't find the right time to tell them. If you read more of them you will see that it just keeps on getting weirder, at least for the first 20 years of my life before the weird stuff slowed down either due to a change in me or a change in the universe or both. I have a lot of strange stories. They are all true no matter how weird they get and the explanations for them are still floating out there in the void eluding capture. I still don't know the why of it, but I'm still looking.