Sealed in a Jar
By Kyle Brown
Chapter 12
Three associates and I were in the “cool room,” essentially a huge walk-in closet with Metallica posters, black lights and drawings all over the wall. Mom had drawn an eye on the wall and wrote under it, “I’m watching you.” In that room was a small sofa, some chairs, and my surf board propped up on two shelves. Tom and his girlfriend, Ashley, used to come over, and one time Ashley brought her friend. We talked, made out. It was my first time feeling up a girl. We listened to Cypress Hill’s “Hits from the Bong” and made a bowl from tin foil. I was in the 5th grade. I had no fear whatsoever about getting caught. I did not take parental law seriously. I never did. If my mother tried grounding me, I would run while she was using the bathroom. Or I’d catch her off guard and bolt.
In my room I raved like a mad man, pouted, then threw up.
If something was taken from me, I’d go off on a tangent punching holes in the walls, breaking chairs, lights, glass tables, anything that was convenient. I once put a hammer through my surf board. I broke my computer to demonstrate that it could not be used to control me, which of course it could. (I got so mad at myself afterwards!) When my mother tried to ground me for smoking, I locked her out of the apartment. Then I proceeded to spray paint my room, bash my stuff up and smoke pack after pack of cigarettes. In my room I raved like a mad man, pouted, then threw up. The noxious paint fumes and cigarette smoke made me ill. I may have seemed like a diabolical mixture of Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson, but really, I just wanted to curl up in a ball and cry.
When I was a little kid, my Dad had taught me to hide my emotions, to seal them in a jar. I always bottled them up, but he wanted me, at times, to be inexpressive. So I copied him, sucking in a little air and biting the inner part of my cheeks so I wouldn’t smile or sneer. This helped, because if I was really upset I wasn’t supposed to cry: I was supposed to suck it up. What I didn’t know was that my jar leaked a poison that was starting to burn the sweet, loving, and caring little boy right out of me. By the time I turned fourteen, I had cultivated an irrational anger that would soon be amplified beyond reason. It was so blinding that I did not care who I hurt. It is questionable that I even cared about hurting myself.
About Kyle
Kyle doesn’t remember missing his father, a Navy man, who was overseas a lot, but when his father returned and moved his wife and child to Virginia, Kyle’s world crumbled. His father didn’t quite see it this way, and taught his son to seal his emotions up in a jar. Kyle retreated to isolating computer games. But by the time he was fifteen, he had reinvented himself as “a young punk with something to prove.” Tired of getting called the computer nerd, he joined the rave scene in Hartford and then the gangsta scene.
But Kyle’s need to prove himself, socially, proved to be his undoing. At a party on the beach, out of money and out of sorts after being rejected by a girl, he beat and robbed a man. “We left him there, laying in the sand, his unscathed girlfriend crying next to him. It was August 10, 2001. I was 15, and, though I did not know it, I had just landed myself in prison.”
Kyle Brown was released in February of 2009 from Indian Creek Correctional Center. Incarcerated at sixteen, he left prison at age twenty three and is now living with his aunt and uncle in Ohio, making plans to attend college.
