I set fire to the voices in my head. I use them to fuel the fire in my belly. They move my train down its tracks. They’re not the type that require a doctor or medication — not right away at least. Those don’t burn very well. Mine are like a fine, black piece of coal. And, like coal, you don’t see the extent of the damage they’re causing until you’ve been burning it for awhile. In my case, it took thirty years.

My therapist says we all have them. They’re the voices of our fathers, our mothers, our teachers, our siblings, our friends, our enemies. They tell us a story of who and what we are. Some are quiet and some are loud. Some are good and some are bad. Mine have never had much good to say.

Too fat. Too dumb. Too weak. Too lazy. Too short. Always too something. My voices liked the word “too” long before I would learn how to use it. The loudest has always belonged to my dad.   

A simple description of the man won’t do. A picture won’t help much either. Average height, average weight, big ass nose. Thick chest, broad shoulders, muscles grown on a farm. Quick to laugh, quick to anger, quick to jump from one to the other. A man raised by no-nonsense men better at dealing with their alcoholism than their feelings. The type of man that suffers in silence and expects you to do the same. A cliche copy of every tough guy in every Mafia film ever made without a speck of Italian in him. A Minnesotan version of Rocky Balboa, dontcha know (A Minnesota catchphrase, nowya know). He was even a boxer. A damn good one too.

They called him Buster, Buster Blesi. A Minneapolis Junior Golden Gloves champion for a handful of years — he can’t remember how many. The trophies he won used to sit on his dresser in my parent’s room. A tiny black pair of faux-leather boxing gloves hung around the neck of a faux-gold boxer with, “Fightingest Fighter 1966” etched into its faux-gold plate. I would go into his room and roll those little gloves between my fingers and imagine what he must have been like.

Once, a man that fought out of the same gym as him stopped by the house. Despite whatever he actually looked and sounded like, my memory has transformed him into Burgess Meredith’s Mickey, Rocky’s grizzled and gruff trainer in the first three movies, only more Minnesotan. Passing through the kitchen, Minnesota Mickey grabbed my arm so hard it hurt and in a raspy voice said, “Kid, that man right there,” he jabbed a gnarled finger at my dad’s chest, “is the toughest son-of-a-bitch I ever met, dontcha know.” (It was the 80’s, you could say son-of-a-bitch to a kid then.)

My dad laughed.

Then, Minnesota Mickey started telling stories. One after another, all pretty much the same. What impressed Minnesota Mickey most was Buster’s indifference to pain. “He’d be covered in blood and keep coming at ya, always moving forward,” he growled and threw in a “you betcha” punctuated by an  “oofda” or two. With each story, the image of Buster grew larger and that was the last thing I needed.

No one ever said I had to live up to my dad. No one said it, but I felt it. It was as obvious as breathing. Before Minnesota Mickey walked through the door swinging around his lutefisk and extending all of his ‘O’s’ (MinnesOOOta), I was already worried I wasn’t up to the task. Everything Buster Blesi was, I wasn’t.

I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t strong. I sure as shit wasn’t indifferent to pain. Mostly, I was a fat, fearful little kid that liked reading books about dragons and playing video games. I wanted to be like him, but I didn’t know how or if it was something a person like me could hope for. Instead, I ate cheese and reread the Dragonlance Chronicles — for the seventh time.

In eighth grade that changed.

I loved football, still do. As a 5’7”, 200-pound thirteen-year-old, I wasn’t too bad at either. My dad was a truck driver and gone all week so he had never seen me play. On a day in October, he was going to be there. I was wildly excited. Unbelievably excited.

The poor kids playing across from me thought they were playing a normal junior high football game. I, however, was engaged in the age-old tradition of earning a father’s love and respect. I don’t remember what team we played or the score. What I do remember was being totally and completely awesome. In the four years I played after, I would never come close to that kind of dominance again. A bit of an early peak some might say.

My dad talked about it for months. There were two parts of the story he told. The first was about how well I played. He would even get a little excited. The second was a demonstration of how I did my push-ups in the pregame warmup. Buster would get on the ground in perfect push-up position, barely bend his elbows, count-off to ten, and then pop back to his feet with a laugh. His acting was perfect. I couldn’t do a real push-up.

There wasn’t any malice in it — a bit of light teasing. He liked joking around and making people laugh. My push-ups certainly made people laugh. He never once said I wasn’t good enough. He never said I wasn’t measuring up. But, his voice in my head did. My ears didn’t have to hear anything. I could feel it.

I don’t know why I grabbed those words and that laughter and threw them wiggling into an empty pit in my belly. Maybe I suspected what would happen. If there wasn’t a suspicion, then there must have been hope. Buster’s voice and the laughter simmered at first then sprouted flames. It was like coal shoveled into the firebox of a steam engine. Blood that had been pumping cool and weak boiled and a train I didn’t know existed pulled away from a station I hadn’t known was holding it hostage.

I grabbed for more. Most were things I feared he would say. “You’ll never be half the man I am.” “You’re soft and undisciplined.” “You never finish what you start.” The fire didn’t care if they came out of his mouth or my fears. They all burned the same. I grabbed a shovel and moved faster. My uncle’s voice comparing me to my brother. The boys at school poking my stomach and giggling like the Pillsbury Doughboy. The fire raged and the train barreled down tracks I didn’t know or care where they were headed.

By my senior year I had dropped forty pounds, my picture hung on the wall in my high school weight room, and I was the size of a small running back starting at center, a position frequently required to block the other team’s biggest guy. In the final football game I would play, we were losing by thirty points and I limped over to my coach on a knee that would require surgery after the season. I asked him to help rewrap my hand because blood was seeping through the tape covering the finger I dislocated the day before.

Coach didn’t want to rewrap it, he wanted to pull me from the game. Beyond the fact that I was hurt, I was also getting beat almost every play. The kid across from me must have had his dad in the stands. I started crying — not like a man —  but sobbing and begging him between heaving breaths to let me go back on the field. Wrapping athletic tape around my bloody finger and ignoring my tears falling on his hands, Coach shook his head and said, “You’re one of the toughest kids I’ve ever seen. One of the dumbest, but one of the toughest too.”

I had won. Dontcha know.

I mean, I was crying and getting beaten at every turn, but I had won. Finally, I had lived up to the image of Buster I had created. But my dad wasn’t at the game. He didn’t see my pregame push-ups — they were perfect goddamnit. When I got home, there wasn’t a trophy with a faux-gold son standing over a faux-gold plate with “Worthy of being Buster’s Son” etched into it. None of the real people attached to the voices in my head seemed to notice the magnitude of my victory — or they didn’t notice enough. I felt hollow like an egg blown clean for Easter.

“To hell with them,” I said and threw all that shit in the fire too.

Indignation, the more righteous the better, burns like magnesium, dontcha know.

            Next came college.

School was hard. I had ADD when boys would be boys and the ability to pay attention was a sign of your intelligence. In first grade, my desk was relocated to the hallway. In third grade, I was allowed to stay in class but I had to turn my desk backwards and slide it into the far corner of the room. In seventh grade, I was permanently kicked out of Home Economics for the mistaken belief that reversing the spin of a mechanical egg beater would release the girl’s hair I had tangled in it (I am still very sorry about this). That same year, I was allowed to be in Wood Shop, but not allowed to use power tools. My high school diploma was more of a gift than an accomplishment.

This kid, the one with the egg beater and no power tools, was going to college? I knew what I needed to do.

 The pile of voices for my fire was endless and many of these didn’t have to be inferred or imagined. Family, friends, not friends, old teachers, basically anyone that had ever heard of me. Their voices filled my tender four cars deep. The fire in my belly crackled and rose up to meet the challenge. My train barrelled on.

It was good I had them or I might not have made it. When it got hard, a few shovels were all it took to blast through long nights and blockades of doubt.

At my community college, I was a Student of the Year both years and graduated with honors. In law school, I was a research fellow, an associate editor on the law review, and graduated cum laude. Again, I had won. But this time, there would be a ceremony filled with silly robes and back slapping. This time would feel like a victory, because how could it not?

It didn’t.

When it was over and I was alone I was still a blown-out egg. I would pick up a diploma or an award hoping the sight of them would make me feel whole.

They didn’t.

Everything was covered in a thick black soot. I tried cleaning them off. If I could only see them better, then I would feel proud. The only tools I could find for the job were the sleeve of my silly robes and an empty bottle labeled, “External Validation.” My insides looked like London in 1952 and the only taste I had left was bitter.

I tried throwing it all in my fire. The robes. The empty bottle. The bitter taste. The blown-out egg. They wouldn’t burn. To make matters worse, my fire was dying and the train was slowing.

I found myself sitting on a couch in a therapist’s office tossing a stress ball from one hand to the other because I’d never been able to sit still. My therapist had wire-rimmed glasses she would tuck into her black hair whenever she was thinking only to put them back on her nose when she needed to make a note in my file. It sounded like she sees a lot of people having trouble cleaning up the soot left from burning their voices.

“My fire is burning out and everything I throw on it lands like a block of ice.” The stress ball squished down to nothing. “Also, this bottle I need to clean off this soot is empty and all the assholes in my life aren’t doing enough to fill it.”

“That bottle can’t be filled. External Validation is like a rain shower on a hot summer day.”

“But that’s not enough to clean up this mess.”

“No, it’s not.” She pulled something out of a box from under her desk and handed it to me. It looked like the bottle I had brought but this one’s label read, “Self-Worth.”

“This one’s empty too.”

She tucked her glasses into her hair. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

 She didn’t understand. I didn’t need another bottle. What I wanted was to find out why my old one was empty. So I retold my story of Buster and I reminded her about my voices.

“What could your dad have said that would make you finally feel like you were enough?”

I started to answer and stopped. We sat there looking at each other. I couldn’t tell if I didn’t know the answer or if there wasn’t one.

“Fill that,” she pointed to the bottle she’d given me, “and you won’t need him to say anything. And, when he does, it’ll feel like that rain shower on a hot summer day.”      

“What about my fire? What about my train?”

“Try using your own voice. Say something like, ‘I am stronger than I think I am,’ and throw that in there. See what happens.”

“My voice doesn’t burn.” 

Her glasses had refound her nose and mid-scribble she said, “or, maybe, it’s what you’ve been burning this whole time.”

She still didn’t understand, which made sense because her glasses weren’t in her thinking spot. But, when you’re a blown-out egg filled with soot playing with a stress ball on a couch in a therapist’s office, you don’t have much to lose. I made my voice say her words.

I am stronger than I think I am.

I put them on the end of my shovel and stood in front of my fire like a coal baron seeing his first wind turbine. Then I threw them in. Nothing happened. I thought about gloating and making her put her glasses in her hair so we could get back to work, but white flames sprouted from the “I”s so bright, it was blinding.

My voice does burn, dontcha know.

Now I just need to figure out where this train is headed.

– George Blesi