A Bent Bildungsroman: A Look at Brandon Shane’s “What Was Wrong With me”
When I was younger, I watched the animated film “Fern Gully” at the local movie theater. It was one of the first times I recall being alone in public, “let loose,” while the “adults stayed away.” I spent the day in joyful solitude, walking there and back, probably talking to myself as I’m prone to do. Although I don’t remember many specifics (other than loving “Fern Gully” and earnestly collecting cans on the way home), I do remember feeling free. I ordered what I wanted and sat wherever I pleased. It felt momentous: to explore, to choose without asking, without justifying.
I don’t know if the narrator of Brandon Shane’s “What Was Wrong With Me” felt the same kind of delight when they were “let loose.” There’s a freedom here that isn’t so much liberating as it is untethered as if floating in space. The narrator is vulnerable to the slightest force that might send one drifting off. Danger permeates the piece.
Shane’s poem, at its heart, is a bildungsroman, albeit a slightly bent one. We have the call (“At nine I was let loose”), the apprenticeship (“I stole from chain stores”), maturity (“these people…/ really know how to live”), and finally acceptance (“Everyone else is dying. / Look at them die.”) The narrative flow is captivating, and the child returns home changed. This isn’t a poem that peacocks for attention, nor does it need to. The balance between the domestic and the dangerous are beautifully, plainly observed.
One of my favorite things about this piece is the way safety and peril play against each other. They create a domino effect, alternating between risk and reward. “The adults” (safe) stayed away and thus “the world” (danger) shows you its cards. The creeps and bullies (danger) are run off by “the homeless who scared them” (safe). The homeless are afraid to steal from the chainstores but the child, whose face is still “taking shape,” becomes their safety net. The poem offers balance, symmetry.
The last third of the poem we find the danger becomes something less external, physical, and more internal. We have a sick father and an uncle with a different kind of sickness. We have the child who ran away, looking for something beyond the experiences of home: not a father diagnosed with cancer but people who “really know how to live.” Not a rich uncle who drinks but people without a home, and on them empty bottles.
It’s in the last several lines I feel I understand what was wrong with the nine-year old narrator. In a move reminiscent of a spell or ritual, the child brings dirt from beneath the toes of the homeless (those who know how to live, as he described them) back to the house. He places the dirt beneath the parents’ pillow. Is it to help them stay alive as well? To keep them safe? The poem goes on to say he did this until he was “grounded,” a phrase that could mean punished as well as secure, stable. What things did we do as children to get grounded, to feel grounded? In an uncertain time, we do what we can to feel a sense of safety against the risks inside and outside our home.
“Everyone else is dying,” Shane writes. “Look at them die.” Those final lines feel defiant and desperate, and I fluctuate on whom I think Shane is referencing. I don’t even know if that matters; we all know, eventually, it means everyone.
