Tales of My Cubawan, III: The Early Days & A Goober of a Kid with Integrity
Hi there! For those who don’t know, this is the continuing story of how I met and lost my adoptive son a few years ago.
Some of these stories involve discussion of drug use and addiction, depression and mental health issues caused by abuse, and death by overdose.
Consider thyselves warned and thanks for hearing his story 💞🐻
Coming in late? Here are the previous installments of the story:
Part I - Part II
Welcome back to the continuing tales of me and my adoptive son! Part I was about meeting Otso and part II was about me and why it seemed like a profound cosmic coincidence that I met him when I did. At this point, I’m just going to tell this story chronologically, with some of my most foundational early memories with him.
So, very early on, we were mostly texting one another and weren’t spending a ton of time together. He was out and about being social regularly, which was in part to keep him busy and having fun and one step ahead of the demons that plagued his nights, but it also wore him down, having so many people expecting and wanting things from him all the time, and having to be so social. In the end, what he really wanted, more than anything, was to be left alone to make music.
He didn’t mind company, incidentally; he’d just tend to forget people were with him because he’d go into “the zone.” Which is fine if you’ve got something else to do, but unfortunate if you were expecting to hang out with him.
Acclimatizing to one another took some time. Honestly, I don’t think we ever quite got there, fully—it was always a work in progress. I remember the first time he came over properly, for the aforementioned (in part I) interview, but also to join a game of Mörk Borg with his roommate. He brought his A&R guy with him for the interview, but apparently he had been so nervous about it that he had done what he always did when he was anxious: a bunch o’ drugs. And boy could that kid take a cocktail. He was pretty toasted throughout the interview.
I remember that for the vague cringe I felt the whole time, like, “dang, I don’t think I can publish this… he’s too fucked up.” I don’t know if he was aware of how noticeable his slurring could be, he was so used to sounding that way. He was pretty much on something at any given time of day when I met him, so sobering up for any reason simply wasn’t something he ever did, even if it was for the sake of his music career (and let’s be real, most DJs can do their live work while on substances. They’re party people. It is what it is). I might still have parts of the audio logged into a transcription software but listening back on it is tough, because of the huge difference in his voice from when we met, versus 9 months later when we parted ways and he had quit almost everything.
We agreed, mutually, that it was better to treat that as a practice run, and that we’d do another interview at a time when he was feeling more confident. I’m sorry to say that it never happened. If I left things up to him, we often just kind of didn’t get around to them. I had wrongly assumed that I had more time than I did.
After the interview, his A&R guy left and he and his roommate stuck around for game night. And boy if that wasn’t one of the most memorable game nights I have in my memory bank.
Mörk Borg is an easy-to-play apocalyptic TTRPG with 4 stats and randomly generated characters, so while his roommate rolled a guy with a sword, plate mail, and an irate monkey companion, Otso rolled a dude with no armor and a knife for a weapon. He took that to mean that he was naked and so when we asked him where he kept his knife, the answer was obviously in his butt. Being myself, I laughed but scoffed, “it’s always the butt; I wish people would get more creative,” wiping away a melodramatic fake tear. Little did I know he was about to roll 120 silver, so when asked how he carried it, he murmured, quietly and shyly, “…foreskin.”
Otso with the picture I drew of his Mörk Borg character
Oh my fucking gawd.
To make a long and grotesque story short, this resulted in a character with a pendulous stretched-out foreskin holding all of his worldly possessions (except said butt-knife), tied shut with a piece of twine, and then proceeded to use this “wallet,” as we dubbed it, to try to club his roommate to death so he could steal his monkey. This went about as well as you can expect from a battle between nude man versus a guy in a full suit of armor. The rest of us were hunting down goblins while this was happening, incidentally. We’ve had a lot of ludicrous TTRPG games in the past, but that one stood out for what I think are obvious reasons. I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed so hard during a game night. Somewhere, an elderly person is fainting with shock because I’m telling this story.
But for me, as funny of a memory as it is, that night also stands out for being quite torturous. By the time he joined us for game night, I was emotionally done and gone, and wanted to mama him into oblivion. The only other time I had seen him since we’d met was an evening when I’d been visiting my cousins before picking up my partner from work. I went over to kill time when my cousins needed to hit the hay, but then I was immediately called for a ride, so I was only able to stop by for half a second to say hello. Painful—I didn’t even get out of the car.
So by this game night, I was ready to love him into unconsciousness, but knew that he was surely not ready for that, so instead of koala-hugging onto him like a bear made of octopuses, I had to keep a respectful distance. I had to microdose affection so as to acclimatize him to it, lest it overwhelm him. And I know that sounds like I’m joking, but I’m being 100% for reals. He was not familiar with genuine affection and too much of it threatened to drown him if I wasn’t on red alert to his boundaries at all times. So, with great physical and emotional pain, I restrained myself from smothering him.
Instead, I found myself fidgeting all evening and constantly walking back and forth to the kitchen for an excuse to pass by him and give him an affectionate shoulder squeeze or scratch on the neck (this was before we had gotten the hugs right, after all). I think that was the night when I took his hands and examined his arms, which were tattooed from his knuckles to his shoulders, and warmly told him that he had “thug tattoos.” He beamed proudly at me. There was part of him that loved being big and scary looking… probably because it meant the aggressive addicts he was often around would treat him with caution, and most other people would leave him alone.
One of the coolest stories he told me early on was a fairly fresh one. Drug abuse is awful, but every experience wasn’t necessarily a bad one. [CW: psychedelic use] He had recently (October 2021 maybe?) had a DMT trip, wherein he separated into his masculine and feminine form, and made love to himself. That probably sounds bizarre, to say the least, if you’ve never done psychedelics, but that’s the sort of thing that can happen in your mind. I’d developed a vested interest in psychedelics for their psychological healing powers in the 2020s—being depressed myself—so this story was fascinating to me. He took it this experience to mean his masculine and feminine sides were completely intertwined and he had eradicated any toxic masculinity towards the feminine. To celebrate, he dressed up in drag for Halloween that year. Apparently everyone thought he was his sister. I was promised photos, but the A&R guy was the only one who had them and he never sent them, because he was a shady and unreliable sort (more on that another time).
That trip was important though, because, having embraced the feminine so profoundly, he was thereafter very willing to use his size, stature, and general look of delinquency to be a protector. If I told you that a drug addict was a great place to look for healthy masculinity, you might think I was insane, but if healthy masculinity is all about using what power you have to protect those without, he was absolutely a stand-up guy. As much as I loathe the A&R guy for what he did to Otso overall, I will also always thank him, because he was the one who taught my cub to be nonviolent.
There was at least one bro that worked at McDonald’s with him that was really obnoxious and aggressive to the girls there, and so Otso eventually took him aside one day and said that if he didn’t start treating them more kindly and respectfully, that the two of them were going to have problems. And while this guy was big, my cub was bigger, and he wasn’t the sort of guy you’d want to fuck with at a glance (especially if he invoked his “crazy eyes,” which were very effective). You can surely imagine that all the girlies were trying to hook up with him in the back room at any chance they got.
That was also a thing. He was very good looking and had that sort of “wounded puppy” look to him that made him catnip to the girlies, even when he wasn’t actively sticking up for them. It would have been funny if it didn’t actually hurt him a bit, in that he had what I dubbed “Hot Girl Syndrome”—he said, aside from one friend who’d always been in a relationship, I was the only other female in his life who wasn’t trying to sleep with him. He wasn’t happy about it, admitting that he indeed felt like a piece of meat a lot of the time, and that he wanted someone to like him for him, not for his looks or body. But he was complicated and pretty, so sex was most of what was on their minds.
I recall one evening when I was out with his roommate and, for whatever reason, we ended up at the dregs of a party Otso had opted not to attend, with three of his coworkers. I truly have no recollection as to why we were there, but the entire time, these girls were constantly going, “Where’s Otso, is Otso coming, where’s Otso?” They were thirsty for that damaged bad-boy.
Admittedly, that annoyed the hell out of me, because they thought that their magical sex would heal broken boy (yes, that’s a Cinema Therapy reference to Twilight, if you’re wondering). The reality of his trauma was not that simple, and most of his relationships were with girls who had their own problems and therefore exacerbated his traumas, and the ones that weren’t, he had usually been the one to fuck it up. Relationships with him were not at all easy and when they ended, it was usually quite badly (I would know, right?), but all they cared about was that he was pretty and was nice to them. They didn’t care that having relationships with him without knowing what they were getting into had the potential to hurt him even more in the long run.
He was also a bit of a surprise to be around in many senses. As a very masculine person myself, I have a lot of traits that blend well with the personality of a 20-something male, but I had to be quite careful with how I let that out around him. For example, after having a rough bout of serotonin syndrome, he developed an extreme sensitivity to bad smells. You can imagine my surprise when I was like, “oh, 23-year-old boy, I can for surely pass gas in front of him and he’ll probably laugh,” but I was quite wrong about that. For someone that I commonly and affectionately referred to as my little trash panda (I only called him a raccoon when it was aggravating me, which was rare), because he lived in mild squalor, he was really sensitive to the squalor. He also ran water every time he went to the bathroom, and it wasn’t for the sake of others.
At the time, he lived in a very small flat (probably somewhere in the realms of 20 m^2) with the aforementioned roommate who was very obviously undiagnosed autistic. They seemed to have a fairly symbiotic relationship: the roommate was a source of stability, in that living with him meant that Otso wasn’t homeless and had someone to count on if he couldn’t pay rent, while his roommate was, in his own words, the type of person who would be an unwashed basement-dwelling dweeb if he didn’t have a cool, popular guy to take him out sometimes.
One of my early mom tasks I assigned to myself was cleaning up his kitchen whenever I went to visit. The sink was pretty much always full of dishes when I went over there. He felt bad that I “worked” when I visited, but sometimes I’d show up before he had woken up (chronic trauma-induced insomnia meant he kept bizarre hours) and needed something to occupy myself with, and I enjoy being helpful. Plus, they actually had a dishwasher so half the time, the task was just loading it and turning it on.
I was introduced to the nightmare that was his bed my first time visiting their place. First of all, the monstrosity was so squashy that it didn’t surprise me in the least that his body was a gigantic knot. Plus, a pit bull had chewed a hole in it at some point? Don’t ask, I don’t have an answer to that.
But even worse, of course he had C-PTSD insomnia—to tell you another horror story about his youth, apparently when he was about 7 or so years old, one of his older brothers had gone out and gotten messed up on alcohol and/or something else, and came home feeling murderous. So, little Otso and his little sister were yanked out of their beds in the middle of the night and thrown into a bathroom with the door locked, and the older brother started stabbing through the door with a knife screaming that he was going to kill everyone, like a scene out of The Shining.
From that moment on, Otso learned that sleep was not a safe space for him, so it came seldom and often with nightmares and sleep paralysis. Until he met me, at least, and it wasn’t just because I immediately got him a new bed (I remember the A&R guy getting choked up over that, but it was literally no big thing). I was like a narcotic for him. For whatever reason, he felt so safe with me that the first couple of months were a struggle because the kid could not stay awake in my presence. I’d be wanting to spend time with him and get to know him, and he’d be unconscious within 30 minutes of arrival. And for the life of me, I could not bear to wake him. The poor kid was so sleep-deprived that I just couldn’t bring myself to rouse him, but I was desperate to get to know him better at that time.
A strange quirk of his was sleep eating. Like most other things, this was a side effect of his rampant drug abuse, but for whatever reason, he would sleep eat all the time. To the point that later on I suggested to his roommates that they put child locks on the fridge and pantry. After all, you can’t really control someone who’s doing something in their sleep, right? So pivot or hide your food somewhere else, I guess. He once told me a story about how he was extremely allergic to eggs, but I guess he got very high on various things, then slept-ate a whole carton of eggs, which managed to miraculously reset his allergy (do not try that). His roommate was baffled as to why all of his eggs were gone the next morning, but also why Otso wasn’t dead from it.
Yes, he had quite a lot of stories to share with me and he shared them all. I mean, surely not all of them, we only had so much time together, but there was no filter on him and for me, I took that as a sign of trust from someone who had no reason to believe that I didn’t have ulterior motives for being nice to him. But the fact that he trusted me so quickly and easily was almost heartbreaking in its own way. He made it very clear that he had never met anyone who treated him like I did and it was confusing but enjoyable for him. And I enjoyed being needed and loved back for taking care of someone. He wasn’t great at showing appreciation all the time, but when he did, it was pretty phenomenal. But more on that another time.
Thanks again for hearing his story. There’s lots more to come next week.
Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻
READ MORE: I also wrote a fair bit of fiction inspired by my cub. The Bear Forge was written about our meeting, its sequel, The Broken Anvil, is about our estrangement, and the finale, Everstrong, is a poshumous letter written from him to his mamabear.
Note: the latter two are only available to paid Substack subscribers.
I See You was inspired by a F(r)iction prompt, “unseen.” Elegy for a Lost Soul was written after he doubled-down on the path of destruction for the final time.
