The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Three: A Dream Deferred

My fresh start in Burlington was somewhat delayed. The builders that my parents hired to build our new house were incompetent. One builder trapped glass of ice water in between the two pieces of drywall that would separate what would become our kitchen from our family room. After running a forklift into the outside of the house, the glass apparently tipped over. This saturated the drywall. A week later, I fell and crashed into the wall when my family was touring the house. Instead of smashing into the wall and falling, I burst through the paper-thin spot of drywall that the water had soaked through and slammed my forehead directly into a load-bearing horizontal board. I knocked onto my back, completely unconscious.
The incompetence did not end there. Like with the water, someone left an open can of paint in between the wall separating my infant sister’s room and the hallway. This we were not able to discover in time and my sister died from inhalation of paint fumes within three weeks of moving into the house. To this day, her room is cordoned off; not because my parents are the sentimental types that would leave the room of their deceased child untouched, but because anyone who takes as much as a step into her room will almost instantly become dizzy. This has always greatly upset my parents. They could really use the closet space.

The problems with the builders kept mounting and mounting. They showed up to work drunk; they fell off the roof; they attached chandeliers to the floor; they stabbed each other and bled all over the newly-installed carpet. In the meantime, we had sold our house and my mother had given birth to twins. We were forced to rent houses across the state in Waterbury, Simsbury, Avon, and Hartford. This was the time I was supposed to start kindergarten. My parents, wishing to save me the trauma of changing schools every few weeks until we were finally able to settle in, told the state that we were actually living in Burlington. Every morning, they dropped me off in front of our shell of a house, watched me get on the bus, went back home, picked me up from the bus stop every afternoon, and drove me home.

The rentals took a toll on the family, particularly my father’s leg which was shot in Hartford. Finally, my parents had had enough. They moved the family us into our house in Burlington even though it wasn’t finished. We had to walk around on gravel downstairs. This was still preferable to the floor situation in my room upstairs. The floor was not finished and I had to tiptoe around a gaping hole overlooking our dining room to get to my bed. One of my bed’s legs dangled over the hole and I had to be careful not to put too much bodyweight on that side. To be safe, I slept in the fetal position on one of my pillows which did irrevocable damage to my back that I still am feeling the effects of today.

I didn’t pay much attention to any of this, though. I threw myself into becoming a popular kid, though I would have settled for simply not being pounded on a daily basis. I canvassed the class like a politician. I shook hands, made promises, and slung mud with the best of them. Soon, I had a complex network of friendships with just about every group in kindergarten and I had did everything in my power to ensure that no group ever found that I was close with another group. I was afraid that when one group found I was friendly with another, they would cast me out, and naturally tell their enemies who would do the same. In addition, because my friendships were so deeply dependant on making fun of other kids, if it was discovered that I hung out with the very people I made fun of, there would be no reason to keep me around, either for the kids who laughed with me or, obviously, the kid I was mocking.

Being liked was exhausting. At recess, I would be engaged in no fewer than three games of tag, push people on the swings and be pushed myself, and would often play on both teams in kickball. At snack time, I finally got tired of running around spreading my time equally while trying to hide from everyone else, I eventually retreated into the cubbies and ate by myself. I averaged 2.9 playdates and 1.2 birthday parties a weekend. I was finally popular and it was exhausting. I hated it.