The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter One: Anecdotes on Birth and Early Childhood

I was born on December 9th, 1985 in New Britain General Hospital at 7:23 p.m. They say that I had an awful cold from the moment I came out of the womb and there was an hour or two when they thought my tiny immune system wouldn’t be able to handle the virus and I would die. It was the first of many occasions where I would overcome adversity in my life and the first of an even larger number of occasions when I would almost be killed by the common cold.
My parents were reformed cultists. They owned and operated the Dairyview Commune deep in the country in Andover for five and a half years before inexplicably shutting down and forcing the members of the commune off their land. They then sold it to a realtor looking to build a strip mall and used the money to buy a house in Middletown. They never spoke of their time in the cult, but they never lost their propensity for flowing white robes, rarely ate anything but kidney beans or tomato paste, and never trusted the other to pour them a glass of Kool-Aid.

From all accounts, I was a relatively happy child. I enjoyed riding my big wheel down the street in front of our house. But my happy little life was shattered when I started socializing with other kids. A girl named Sally lived in the house across the street. She was a typical bully. She ripped the Ghostbusters stickers off of my big wheel. This was especially traumatic as the stickers had been in place for a long time and they did not just rip off; they had to be peeled off. This left sticker scars on my big wheel that I imagine remain today, wherever it is. The gunk where the stickers had been were not just unsightly. They were a constant reminder of the ordeal. If you believe in the Freudian idea of childhood traumas lodging themselves deep into your subconscious and shaping you for the rest of your life, I believe this may have something to do with my deep distrust of women.

There was a little Hispanic boy who lived across the boy named Marc Padilla. I called him Marc Pancake. This nickname was not given out of malice--pancakes were my favorite food at the time, after all--but simple ignorance. Marc took exception and tried to drown me in his kiddie pool. When that failed, he tried throwing me into traffic. The car swerved to avoid me, didn’t see Marc standing on the sidewalk, and swerved right into him. Marc was instantly killed. Though I was too young for the incident to ever register in my memory, simply hearing the story sends chills up my spine to this day. I believe I’ve carried around a deep sense of guilt and fear ever since.

Other than these two events, my early childhood was mostly uneventful. I learned simple mathematics at an astoundingly young age, but I hid this from the rest of the world. I could add and subtract any two numbers from one to ninety-nine instantly in my head. I used this knowledge to my advantage. I also had an astute grasp of distance and time which, like my skill with numbers, I only used when I absolutely had to. When my mother tried to convince me that it was too far to go to the science museum because it would take all day to get there and by the time we got there it would be closed, I told her that the science museum was only fifteen minutes away and, if we took the highway, we could get there before lunch and spend the entire day at the museum. I wielded this power with such precision that my bimonthly trips to the science museum soon became weekly trips until I dragged the woman to the museum twice daily on weekdays and three times on Saturday. My parents finally put a stop to this by buying an apartment two blocks away from the science museum, though they told me we had moved hours away. I believed them. My sense of direction remained unrefined.