Distancing (Sorry To Disrupt The Peace)

DISCLAIMER: I started with a very personal story not for any reason but my own in order to make sense of what I need to say about the craft (it might not be apparent to the reader.) This book hit very close to home for me and were a lot of parallels that made it hard to delve into the craft. Anyways, I did the best I could currently. If you want to skip over the story you can scroll down to the dashed line and under that is my craft response.

    Sorry To Disrupt The Peace by Patty Yumi Contrell initially was a difficult and emotionally disturbing but also comforting for how Helen’s experience hit so close to home for me. Last August I had started the MFA program here at Mills College when I received a call from my adoptive mother who I could hardly understand over the phone.

“He’s gone! He’s gone!” She cried into the phone.

“Who?” I replied.

“Jerid, he’s gone. He’s dead.”

I don’t remember whether I was at work, at school, home or somewhere in between them all. What was for certain was that the one person from my adoptive family that treated me like family 100% of the time has now passed and the way he passed was completely not understood, strange but not rare for his profession.

    Jerid was in the process of becoming a lineman while he concluded the rest of his training in Houston, Texas (quite the distance from Eastern Washington.) What I had found out when I headed back to the Evergreen State two days later was that he had been sent up a pole to fix a wire by his boss without any protective rubber gear. Instantly, the shock of electricity killed him as he fell into the bucket of the lineman truck. When they rushed him to the hospital the doctor called my mother and my aunt telling them, “he’ll be okay, the electricity fried his arm so the worse case scenario is he’ll have his arm amputated.”

    Within thirty minutes of that call they received another from the same doctor telling them that Jerid had passed. The electricity had completely burned up his insides and the rest we are unsure of, still (or, maybe I’m just unsure of since not everything about his death, funeral and memorial are not always communicated to me.)

    We were inseparable in our youth. We were always hunting, hiking, riding dirt bikes, riding horses, playing sports and contemplating pranks. My cousin, my brother, my ride or die. After graduation, I left for college and Jerid stayed in our small town picking up jobs here and there but mostly was an avid hunter. When i returned from my first year at college he had his own place with one of our long time friends who threw a party for us coming back from college. At this party is when I discovered my cousin, my brother had a slight drug addiction (or what could turn into one.) As the rest of us drank beers, took shots and passed the weed an older man showed up looking for Jerid. He came out of the house made an exchange with this man and ran into the kitchen. I followed him in there to see what he had got. He opened a bag that had a small clump of a white substance.

“Meka, you want to try some?”

“Jerid, you know how I feel about hard drugs.”
“C’mon it’s just a little coke.”

I looked over at the substance that wasn’t very much a powder.

“That’s not coke, Jerid. There’s crystals in that.”

“Haha, shit, oh well! Either way we’re gonna try it.”

I left the room and came back to my cousin jumping off the wall, talking a million miles a minute and proceeded to go into the garage (where everyone was) and grab a rattlesnake he had caught earlier in the day and show it around the party.

Meth. Rattlesnake venom and a fear of the unknown outside of adolescence.

    Throughout the summer this happened a lot. Every other night and every weekend. This short story is all to say that we were close (Jerid and I.) I knew things about him that his parents turned a blind eye to. In fact, before I left for college again I informed them of Jerid’s habit and ill living situation and I was told to stop telling on him and to mind my business. A few months later his mom moves him out of the friend’s house and makes him stay at home until she pushes him to move to Houston and become a lineman. After leaving that summer Jerid and I became a little more distant. We were always there for each other but my uncle had told him that I was talking bad about him and spreading rumors so naturally there was a skepticism that he had for me. About a year after that I hear of his passing.

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    The distancing craft choices that Yumi Contrell uses in Sorry To Disrupt The Peace are very evident and effective in what she is conveying in the story. Yumi Contrell’s choice to use “adopted and adoptive” infront of “mother, father or brother” represents the distance of the characters through biology and also through a love/spiritual connection. This is effective because it leaves Helen’s character as an observer of the situation at hand but wanting to be an active participant in the grieving process and with making decisions about her adopted brother’s funeral arrangements and also what exactly had lead him to suicide.

    Another way Yumi Contrell distances the characters from Helen is not using their names to address them directly or indirectly. The only time we get the names of her adoptive parents is halfway through the book. Very few characters such as Thomas, Uncle Geoff, Uncle Walt, and few other characters get referred to by their names. And, obviously this is a distinct choice by the author to show more distance between Helen and her adopted family. It shows that she doesn’t accept them as “family” exactly, but that they are family but it’s still an adoptive situation because of the invisibility and lack of connection Helen feels. This invisibility and lack of connection to her adoptive family allows the reader to get a deeper look at the complexity of this specific family dynamic. The complexity of the family rests upon race and social class which creates a barrier and enables lack of communication between Helen and her adoptive parents.

    Another very powerful distancing she uses is the balding European man to symbolize her adoptive parents’ mourning/grieving. I found it brilliant in the sense that Yumi Contrell places a character that is only visible and felt by Helen that almost imposes on her space and personal time since her adopted brother’s suicide. The balding European man also could represent and symbolize the intrinsic cultural disconnect of mourning and grieving and simultaneously shows us that the old balding European man has the authority over the grieving, also, showing the reader that in this case their grieving and process are superior (given the current racial landscape and the placement of a European man within that.)

    Throughout the story I wondered if there were symbiotic tools used that didn’t convey distance, othering or invisibility.

Jameka Townsend