My Story: Michael Totten

TITLE: My Story: Michael Totten

AUTHOR: Michael Totten

PERMISSION TO PUBLISH granted by the author.  All rights reserved.

Michael Totten has been professionally immersed for the past 50 years in working against humanity's rape and brutalization of Mother Earth/Gaia. In 1988-9, he drafted the first comprehensive climate action bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. A decade later, he received the Lewis Mumford Prize from the Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. In 2005 Totten co-led the development, testing and promoting of the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Standards - considered the gold standard for land-based carbon offsets.

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As Brian topped the hill and turned the corner, the house came into view. Normally the view on top of the world, as we called it, always left me breathless. A panorama of the Pacific Ocean filled the horizon. Far off shore sat Catalina Island, its sandy white cliffs like a beacon enticing romantic mainlanders to brave the twenty-six miles of white-capped sea between them. But at this moment my mind couldn't escape to island fantasies. Being the dutiful son to help my mom may have been the driving impulse, but risking the encounter with my father was sending physical shock waves breaking over my body. Later I was to realize these galvanic twitches of the skin were premonitory signals. Only several times in my life has my body erupted with physical symptoms warning of pending danger - when my mind refused to heed the signs.

Brian waited in the car as Sam and I approached the front door. Not a sound could be heard inside. Sam knocked again. The light flooding through the stained-glass door was suddenly obstructed by the huge shadow of my father nearing the door. He lingered for a second, sending a lump leaping to my throat. Then the door slowly swung open.

Sam and I froze in our tracks. We were staring down the barrel ofa magnum revolver. I looked up and beheld a wild-eyed maniac. A sharp spasm of pain shot through my chest, caused by my heart's frenzied pounding. Those Medusa-like eyes were fixed upon me. They had a sickening, mesmerizing effect on me. They penetrated to my deepest core, rending asunder all my basic impulses and response patterns. I stood there paralyzed, my legs trapped in a quicksand of fear.

The storm unleashed in my father's mind - a rage that had clearly unhinged him - was being played out in his eyes. Brilliant hues of orange sparks and crimson lightning flashed across his pupils, intermittently drowned out by a roiling sea of gangrenous greenfluids.

"Get in here," he said in a low, slow metallic voice, motioning us in with a wave of the gun. Like one of those lost characters in hell who entered as they cast away all hope, a cloud of despair descended upon me. My heart sank to unrecoverable depths as we marched towards our execution.

Splintered pieces of furniture were strewn about the room. The well-built oak table that had been one of mom's family heirlooms was now twisted wreckage. One of the hand-hewn leg posts lay mute in a corner, dismembered and fractured. Remains of the glass table top cracked under my feet as we were shoved towards the couch. Only the television set remained intact. It was on, babbling away like some idiot driven insane by the violence it had just witnessed. An Alka-Seltzer ad filled the screen, effervescent tablets going "plop-plop, fizz-fizz."

Nearby, in the bathroom, we could hear mom dry-heaving tears. It was a sickening sound. It wasn't anything like the normal sound of crying. Not an outcry, or yelp, or whine. No, it was more like a wounded, blood-soaked animal, broken and shattered.  The wailing, plaintiff cry fell out of her mouth in barely audible gasps and groans. If my father's crazed look left me any doubt that he was bent on savage murder, mom's body's sounds didn't. Each convulsion seared my ears, torturing me; they were sounds that smelled death approaching, like the sound of a death song played for victims about to be lashed on their funeral pyre.  Each sound made me more nauseous.

"Get in here, you bitch," he yelled. She rounded the corner. I lost my breath at the sight of her. She was almost lifeless. Purplish black bruises rimmed her eyes, giving her bloodshot eyes in sunken sockets that hollowed-out look of a corpse. Her face had aged 30 years in a night

She didn't even look up at us as he shoved her onto the couch. It was only then that I caught sight of her arm. It was grotesquely twisted out of shape. He must have snapped and broken her arm. The ulna bone in the forearm was nearly protruding through the skin. It must have happened hours ago; by now it was swollen to twice its normal size. She keptrubbing it lightly, continuing to groan and sob.

"Shut up you whore, or I'll hit you again." Then turning to me he scowled, and with a venomous look that could have poisoned me dead on the spot, said, "See what you've done, you mealy-mouth traitor." He kept staring at me, his eyes carving me up into little pieces, his deranged mind feasting on my slow, agonizing death. Then he looked to the door.

"Anyone with you?"

"Brian, to drive us back down," Sam quickly explained.

A twiste smile came over his lips for a second, then turned mean and ugly. "You aren't going anywhere."

He looked at me. "Go tell him to leave. That I'll give you a ride down." He must have read my mind, because the first thought that rushed into my head was to get through that door and run for my life.

"Just yell it from the door. And ifyou try to run away I'll blow your fuckin’ head clear off." With that he cocked the revolver and signaled me towards the door.

As I yelled to Brian and waved him away I felt my will to live ebb away. If someone had hypothesized my predicament and asked me how I would react, the last thing I would have imagined would be to accept my fate and all but offer to squeeze the trigger on myself. Yet I felt myself drained of the two instinctual powers that evolution had endowed humans with in order to survive in dangerous situations -- either to fight or to flee. I knew I couldn't escape fast enough to avoid my head being blown off by a Magnum 357. And I also felt powerless to overwhelm my father, despite the fact that both Sam and I were living specimens of physical strength from years of working out. So I sat back down on the couch and waited for a bullet to shatter my reality into a million oblivious pieces.

My father sat with his back to the television set, sizing up the three of us on the couch. He leaned back and turned up the television volume, as if he was adding some ritualistic element to what was about to take place - as if the TV noise was going to drown out the sound of bullet blasts ricocheting through the neighborhood. I caught a glimpse of the movie and thought, what pathetic irony. Our family's favorite Christmas movie was playing: Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. George Bailey was standing on the bridge about to commit suicide. Henry Travers, playing the angel, averts the suicide by jumping in the icy river and screaming for George to help save him.

"You're the cause of all this, motherfucker," he began, glaring at me. "Yeah, you! and if you look at me that way again I'll blow your fuckin’ face off." My look hadn't changed a bit, and I wondered if his paranoia was going to end matters sooner than later. My face twitched involuntarily, which must have been enough to change the expression to satisfy his whim.

"You and your elite high-brow thoughts. You had to go and ruin it all. You betrayed the family. You're nothin' but a fuckin' whore," he snarled, leaning forward and spitting his last words at me. Before I could put the pieces together, he hit me with the thing that obviously blew his mind.

"I found the letters you sent him," pointing to Sam. "I found them in his desk. How you don't want to be a lawyer. How you want to 'taste life,' his words dripping with sarcasm. "You fuckin’ prima donna...you killed this family!"

His whole body shuddered and shook, his hand tightening its grip on the gun. The trigger finger twitched.

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