My literary career began with a suicide note.

Actually it was more of a letter of suicidal intent.

I was six years old and severely depressed. I pinched myself for being a bad person. I’d try to hurt myself to the point of tears.

I labored over how I would write my suicide note. It was the first time I wrote anything that wasn’t assigned to me in school. It wasn’t about what I did last summer. It wasn’t about Dick and Jane. It was to be my first piece of literature. Non-fiction.

The non-fiction genre has always been a hot sell. But I was six years old and writing only for myself and those who would needed to know about my suicidal thoughts. I was too young to know I could pitch the story to a magazine.

When the lights went out at night, I didn’t fall asleep, I stared at the ceiling. My thoughts raced through my head. I needed a pen and paper. All writers need pen and paper.

After weeks of trying to figure out the words, putting together what could have been the final documentation of my literary career, I finally dared to put it on paper. I wrote:

I want to kill myself.

I put the note behind the sofa for my parents to find. I knew my target audience and I wanted to pull at their heart strings. I wanted to be understood. My platform was solid since the demographic of readers had given birth to me and changed my diapers when I was a baby and drove me to school every morning.

But, there was something that gave me hope in my life. Something holding me back from pinching myself into the eternal ether.

Girls.

When mom and dad had other married couples to their house they laughed and seemed so happy. They left our front door into the vast outside world, holding hands and laughing.

I knew finding a girl and leaving my family would break me out of my depressive funk. I needed a girlfriend. I needed a wife.

In my first grade class, I was the kid who peed his pants. I didn’t know that I could ask my teacher to go to the bathroom. So when the urge pressed through my bladder until the urine was about to blow back into my kidneys, I just let it go. The rest of the day I smelled like pee.

There was a girl who wore the same clothes every day. Her name was Shelley. She didn’t mind that my pants were wet and I smelled like urine. She was my girlfriend, though looking back I realize she probably didn’t know we were going steady. We played on the monkey bars together. We swung the tetherball back and forth.

One day, mom smelled urine and asked me why I peed my pants. The other question was why I didn’t wear underwear, but that’s a story for another time. I told her that I couldn’t hold it until recess and she explained I could go to the bathroom during class if I asked my teacher.

I never smelled like pee again. And I was able to play with other girls at school who wouldn’t have played with me before. One was Pamela.

We sat behind the bleachers to hide from the other kids and the teachers. We’d sit together and watch the activities of everyone else. We observed. She had been doing this on her own until I came along and didn’t smell like pee anymore.

I finally got the courage to ask her the question:

Will you marry me?

Without taking her eyes off of the kickball game the rest of our class played she said: Yes.

I was engaged.

She was tan and had dirty blond hair. She was my six year old Farrah Fawcett. I wasn’t sure how to proceed, but I knew my future was looking better.

We never officially called off our engagement, but Pamela moved to a different school.

My friend Vince came over and we wrestled to see who was the strongest. We decide we were both the same strength and then we played checkers. We sat on the living room floor as he took three of my black pieces. When it was my move he found a piece of paper under the sofa. To my horror he opened it up and read it:

I want to kill myself.

What’s this, he asked.

Thinking quickly I said it was something my mom wrote. Then I grabbed it out of his hands and put it in my pocket.

I was a writer. I could write. I just wasn’t ready to take credit or criticism yet. Or for my friends to know that I had suicidal thoughts.

The more girls I fell in love with, the less my suicidal intention became. My suicide note turned into love letters. Poetry to Michelle about her beautiful smile. Her return letters were scented with perfume and words about lusting over my big blue eyes.

When I turned sixteen, I finally kissed a girl for real. And she kissed back. An older friend advised me to roll my tongue along her teeth. I didn’t know he meant the back of her teeth. Rebecca probably felt like she was getting an invasive, erotic dental exam.

The kisses worked for a while, giving me hope, putting suicide on hold by burying my tongue past someone else’s soft lips.

When I found out Rebecca was kissing other guys, my anger spewed inside me. I was in a strict religion, so anything more than kissing was out of the question. Kissing stopped working and dread returned. Life was like a delicate pair of hands, slowly choking me, becoming stronger and growing bigger. The hands started to develop callouses and the choke felt strangely comforting. I could just die and be done with it all.

But hope has a way of creeping up on you and the hands loosened their grip when I found literature. Books by writers who seemed as depressed and angry as I was. Honest books about longing, anguish and desperation for something more.

I would kiss those books from beginning to end. Then I’d put pen to paper and scribble my thoughts, thinking I was just as good of a writer as they were….that one day, I would be a great writer.

When I was a few years older I left my parents' house and moved into my car. Literature held my hand as we walked out the front door to a life in uncharted realms.

I still plan on killing myself. The memoir I wrote at six years old was factually accurate.

I'm going to kill myself when I’m 93 years old. I'm going to catapult myself into the eternal nothingness. Or if there's a God I'm going to give him a sucker punch.

Whatever happens, I’m going out like a literary rock star. Like Brautigan. Like Hemingway. Like David Foster Wallace.

My obit will begin one of three ways:

Washed up writer, Tony DuShane, died yesterday of a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head. DuShane had a successful debut novel, then completely lost his mind but was able to semi-function like a normal human because of the proceeds from the film adaptation of…….

America’s novelist, Tony DuShane, died yesterday of auto-erotic self asphyxiation.  Despite the utter failure of his debut novel, he kept pushing the limits of the written word and found his voice with his ninth book…..

The oldest dishwasher at Hooters, Tony DuShane, died yesterday of a drug overdose. DuShane claimed he had a novel published earlier this century. It was during a time when people had the patience to experience the labor intensive, tedious and time wasting entertainment thought to be intellectual in 2010…..

TAGS: brautigan, David Foster Wallace, debut novel, engaged, Farrah Fawcett, first grade, Hemingway, kickball, suicidal thoughts, Suicide, suicide note, tony dushane

Tony DuShane lives in San Francisco's Mission District. He reads books made out of paper and tends to like the longer ones currently referred to as novels. His novel, Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk, comes out on Soft Skull Press, February 1, 2010. Check out www.tonydushane.com for details. He's also a radio show host (www.drinkswithtony.com) and writes and blogs for magazines and newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com, Mother Jones and The Believer. He uses Oregon's Wildman Moustache Wax. From droop to handlebar in ten seconds.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 12:11 am and is filed under Memoir, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.