tyler dempsey Archives - Farewell Transmission

By Tyler Dempsey

I remember almost nothing of the 2007 Werner Herzog documentary, Encounters at the End of the World. But I remember this.

“Is there such a thing as insanity amongst penguins?”

Whether Herzog’s hyperbolic nature made him ask, or he was simply bored to tears talking to a penguin scientist, the scene that follows haunted me. The scientist, after a long pause, where he deftly skirts revealing he thinks Herzog is a whacko, answers, “Well, they do get disoriented.”

With morose Catholic hymns as soundtrack, the camera focuses on a penguin turning away from everything it’s ever known, becoming horrifyingly small as it moves farther and farther into the vast inland of Antarctica.

Disoriented, I thought. Better not contract that.

Herzog’s voiceover continues, “Dr. Ainley explained that even if he caught him and brought him back to the colony, he would immediately head right back for the mountains…But, why?”

As a kid—now, too—when I was in a car I played a game. As scenery whirred past, I slung an imaginary ball out into it. My mind was magnetically wed to the ball. And the whole game was having it sail, avoiding objects speeding past, then return like a boomerang, again avoiding what I was unable to see or predict when I “threw it.”

Equally spaced objects, like electric poles, or fence posts, made the game impulsive. And deeply rewarding. I played for hours. On road trips. Going back and forth to the store. It’s what I did.

But why?

Growing up, I often heard about a camping trip when I was two. How, in the shortest time possible, with the adults’ attention elsewhere, I wandered off and fell in a river.

My grandmother dove in the three-foot water and saved me. She’d bring it up sometimes at family events. Turning the room silent. Everyone focused inward as they replayed that terrible memory. But the thing is, I didn’t remember it. Aside from what felt like an irrational fear of water I eventually got over, it wasn’t a part of my identity the way it was for my family.

Instead, my trauma blossomed at Walmart.

I must have been about five. After getting distracted while deciding which VHS to convince my mom to buy, I finally held out a movie in front of me and ran where I thought she was. But she wasn’t there. So, I cried. And eventually a worker called her name on the speaker while I choked on air and salty boogers.

I recalled this often, feeling the emotions as if they were fresh, until college, where, in an Intro to Psych course, I learned tons of people experienced the same thing. Except, it never happened. The professor said researchers convinced gaggles of people into believing a false memory. Google “Lost in the Mall Technique.” It’s fucked up.

I called mom. Did she remember? The movie? The crying? Her name announced throughout the store? The embarrassment? The fear?

No, she didn’t. But we kept talking, and just as the researchers would have predicted, she started to doubt herself. The handrails of her memory turned soft and gooey.

“It could’ve happened,” she said.

I felt unmoored, the bedrock of my identity drifted. If anyone had recorded my face at that moment, I would’ve looked exactly like that penguin the moment before it set off.

One of my favorite pastimes is wishing I’d become something I’m currently not while I was still young.

I should’ve been a mechanic, I think. A police officer. Lawyer.

Now that I’m almost forty, it’s easy to know my tics and proclivities. I can feel the happiness these jobs would have brought seeping through the sheen of disappointment I wear like skin.

“Whatcha doing?” My wife asks, finding me eyes closed and cross legged on the couch.

“Shh, shh,” I raise a palm, imagining myself covered in grease, wrenching under a hood that isn’t mine, dollar signs floating in and out of frame.

I was fundamentally broken as a kid. What made other kids see someone doing a job and think, I could do that, wasn’t installed in me. Skills were what other people had, while I looked at them, mouth open, like an idiot.

I’d love to think it was for the same reason we tell certain people not to rush to college. That I was figuring it out. Playing the long game.

But it wasn’t.

I was scared. Of what every man is scared of.

Do you know what it is?

Lean closer, I’ll tell you:

I was scared I wouldn’t be any good.

I’m in Search & Rescue. I spend inordinate amounts of time looking at maps. The word for this affliction is “cartophile.”

By age three, humans can correctly identify a map. There’s an argument that using images to locate oneself in space is innate to our species. When someone can’t, we say they’re lost. And, there are downright bizarre behaviors and symptoms associated.

First, they panic, experiencing an overwhelming urgency to find something familiar, but failing to utilize available resources, such as maps and compasses, to do so. Instead, they wander in circles. If it’s cold, they don’t build a fire, even if equipped with the tools and know-how. Memory loss is next, events that just occurred being the first to go. And when a rescuer calls out, they rarely answer.

Finding them is a disturbing experience. Based on looks, you’d think they’ve been lost for months, when, in reality, it’s been less than twenty-four hours.

A man I helped rescue once looked me in the eyes and asked, “Who am I?” And when I asked, what, he said, “Where am I?”

There’s a term for these symptoms.

The term is, “disoriented.”

I lied. There was one occupation I saw as a kid and thought, I could do that.

Three Indiana Jones movies dropped in the ‘80’s. In every one, there was an object—an amulet, a skull, an ark—and some idiot who couldn’t wait to touch it and unleash its curses.

I could be that guy, I thought.

“Indiana Jones Idiot” wasn’t in the help wanted ads, though.

So, I continued. With no identity. No future to strive for.

It was a geographical problem, I think.

There’s a line from Kurt Vonnegut about growing up in Indiana. How, having nothing but horizon in all directions was enough to make a person religious. No wonder all my neighbors in Oklahoma eventually run to God. Try living an entire life with no goal post to orient yourself to.

Firmly grasping where you are, where you’re going, it’s the most important, but least recognized need of the human spirit. It’s what is meant whenever we say, “rooted.”

By age twenty-three, I had only ever lived in Oklahoma. I was Godless. Broke. And the only person to make me feel grounded was my older brother. Who’d just been arrested. Facing trial for something he didn’t do.

He’d be convicted of this thing he didn’t do.

And all would go to shit.

I’d leave the State two days afterward. And when I reached another State, I’d leave that one, too.

I was blind. Running without a fear of death. But, despite my efforts, something was imprinted in my soul. Telling me, if I moved in this specific, calculated way, even though odds were low, maybe I could make it.

I would have looked hopeless had you queued Catholic hymns and zoomed in from above. A twenty-three-year-old baby. In a junker car. Hood held down by a leather belt. $240 in the bank. Heading for Alaska.

But even if you caught me and brought me back to everything I’d ever known, I would have immediately headed right back for the mountains.

“The rules for the humans are: do not disturb or hold up the penguin. Stand still, and let him go on his way. And here, he’s heading off into the interior…with five thousand kilometers ahead of him, he’s headed toward certain death.”

This week I read an article about the frillfin goby. It’s not a J.R.R. Tolkien character, if that’s what you were thinking. It’s a fish.

It lives in the intertidal zone. A zone that sometimes looks like ocean. Other times, like land. When it looks like land, the goby lives in one of many saltwater pools that end up in a cup in the rocks when the tide moves out.

Sometimes, a predator comes along. Or, pool levels suggest time might be running out. So, the goby launches itself like a fighter pilot from an ejector seat. It flies through the air. Lands in another pool. And, when it gets to the next pool, it jumps again.

It can make up to six consecutive jumps before landing in open water. All from a mental map it made of the area when it looked like an ocean, before the tide went out.

“Stimming” is a word used to describe certain autistic behaviors. Things like rocking back and forth, repeating words or phrases, or spinning objects. They help stimulate a person. Or control their emotions whenever the world is shitting on them.

I have a word for my ball game.

I’m “locating.”

I don’t believe that penguin was doomed. I also don’t think when I left for Alaska I was gunning toward certain death.

I was breaking a circle. The opposite of what most people do when they’re lost.

Habits bring us closer to who we are. Or shove us further away from ourselves.

Before we turn off the lights at night, my wife always asks, “Besito?”

It means, “little kiss.”

And, every time, I think, here I am.

Tyler Dempsey is the author of four books and the host of Another Fucking Writing Podcast. He lives in Utah with his wife and dogs.

When I was in eighth grade I got so depressed I was delusional, convinced everyone at school knew how terribly unhappy I was but they were all pretending they didn’t. But, every now and then, someone would give me a look or a smile and, in that moment, I knew they knew.

I carry my stress around in my stomach, always have. When I was a teenager, I’d have diarrhea or vomit on a weekly or daily basis. Despite owning no money or health insurance my mom took me to the doctor. The doctor sent us home with a plastic container that I had to scoop diarrhea out of the toilet into so they could send it to a lab somewhere. The results were inconclusive.

I used to fantasize in bed about my stepdad’s gun cabinet glowing on the other side of the wall. Thinking of the act, or the word “suicide” would start me hyperventilating. I would desperately try to redirect my mind elsewhere before the thing that had power over me reached a point that was irreversible.

I didn’t know if the depression was a result of my circumstances so much as a byproduct of violence and anger that lived in me but tried so hard to hide. The effort of hiding was causing it to consume me. When I was fifteen, I had a moment during a night like so many other nights where I heard my stepfather yelling at my mom, calling her names. But this time I broke. The anger and other feelings wouldn’t stay back. They oozed and my body convulsed and when it was over it felt like my brain was emptied of electricity. Like everything that used to be the thing or person that was Tyler Dempsey had left. I was a shell that looked like me. I call what happened that night a panic attack but actually have no idea what it was.

A week later, I experienced my first auditory hallucination. It’s hard to describe, but a voice that was both in my ear and also outside whispered like a scream. What did it whisper? Tyler. It said my name. What’s more, the voice was one I recognized. It was Joe Tiger. A friend in grade school that wasn’t my friend anymore. I’d said something that made him mad and he never got over it. It made me sad that he had been a part of this really scary thing. Like fear wasn’t enough, whatever it was wanted to hurt me, too.

When I was in college, more things happened that made me wonder if I was, just maybe, insane. The last day of Freshman year my best friend, Brendan, and I drove to Denton, Texas, for a Pinback concert. It was late getting back. Brendan took backroads and it was raining extremely hard, the sky opening and the wipers fighting but you could barely see the road or our weak headlights. A burst of lightning hit and something very small appeared in the center of the windshield, then expanded, then expanded more, then took over the whole frame. It was veiny and a shade of brown I’ve never seen before or since. It didn’t splatter into the glass but simply vanished as quickly as it appeared. Again, just rain and wipers. Brendan said, “Did you see that?”

Fast forward to Sophomore year. We’re living in the dorms, Brendan and I, one wing apart from each other. We start having dreams. Cryptic, demonic kinds. I started hearing what sounded like a pool ball dropped on the floor of the dorm above me, rolling into the corner the whole building slanted toward. But no one lived in that room. No one lived in the whole wing actually, except me. Another time it sounds like something very, very large, running full speed, ducked its shoulder and tried to burst down my door. But you know dorms, it’s just one long hall with room after room in a line. There’s only the width of the hallway, no way something could get a running start like that. I eventually worked up the nerve and looked but nothing was there. Brendan watched a black thing with long arms walk across his room into his closet. A week later it visited me. I was in bed with my back against the wall facing a window that faced the streetlight. The light flickered and slowly went out. Then my vision distorted. I felt suddenly, irrationally terrified. I realized I couldn’t move. Then it walked into my peripheral vision. Tall, black arms, everything black. It lifted one arm and pointed out the window. Then, just as unexplainably as it appeared, it was gone. Things like this continued till one day my phone rang. The ID said “Brendan.” I picked up and there was a silence so heavy and somehow, I knew exactly what he was going to say, then he said it. “My brother killed himself.” All of the weird stuff stopped after that.

Fast forward some more, a year after my brother was arrested, I got really, really into smoking weed. I lived in California and had this bong as tall as I was. On occasion, I’d get super stoned and different parts of my body would spasm. Kind of like what I’ve read about restless leg syndrome, but it was restless everything. Around that time, I had my second, and, up until now, last auditory hallucination. Again, a voice I knew. It was a previous stepbrother I hadn’t thought of in years. This is what he said: Tyler. In a whisper, just like last time. I didn’t tell you this when I mentioned Joe Tiger, but each time, two months after they said my name, in real life, that person died. Joe was in a car with a friend who’d been drinking and they clipped a guardrail on a bridge on some backroad. My stepbrother, Colton, was caught robbing a convenience store. The details get fuzzy, but somehow a cop shot him. Poof. Gone.

Speaking of spasming, I quit doing it after Colton whispered my name, but one time—this was just a few years ago—I was coming home from a strip club with my friend and he told me something he’d never told anyone but his parents. The jist was: my life could have been irrevocably fucked if we hadn’t had the financial means to fight my way through court. I sat in the passenger seat and he caught himself, and said, “Shit, man, sorry, I didn’t even think about your brother…” but it was too late. Once again it was like a dam in my mind broke. Thoughts and feelings were suddenly flooding out and I started shaking. By the time we got to his apartment it was done but I could barely walk. I sat on his couch like my body and mind were a huge sponge that had gotten wrung out. That feeling continued, accompanied by growing depression and a fear it would happen again. Eventually, it was like the sponge filled back up. Life once again came at me faster than I could process. I never did get that checked out.

Tyler Dempsey is the author of three books and host of Another Fucking Writing Podcast. He lives in Utah with his dog.