"It [writing] literally forces us to reprocess the feelings or memories using different neural pathways; forces us to rethink by just trying to structure the feelings into words." --S
This isn't going to be pretty.
My father didn't discuss conflict. All of my childhood, I witnessed one method of handling adversity: That never happened. We addressed nothing. The rapidly diminishing point here is, at least initially, that I was taught to pretend that adversity did not exist, to sweep it under the rug. No, it wasn't taught, per se, because those who employ this method seldom actively teach anything. It was observed and it was enforced indirectly, over and over again. It's actually considered a trait of my family, it's that ingrained as a behavior. Do you know what happens to rotten things that are hidden away instead of being properly handled and disposed? They fucking rot, dude. They rot and fester and become pungent to the point of putridity that can no longer be ignored. Even if the foolish host who hid the decomposing mass continues her self-delusion, someone at some point is going to look at her and say, "What the fuck is that smell?!"
So... it's me. I fucking stink. I'm trying to throw some shit out.
Call me a fucking hoarder of pain.
[disclaimer/warning: prepare for run-on sentences galore. and no apologies.]
I "ran away" from home at fifteen, which was actually just me lying about going on a camping trip with a family I used to babysit for and instead spending the weekend in a motel with my forbidden lesbian lover, forgetting the crucial necessity of bringing my oblivious co-conspirator in on the trick, who, naturally, called and asked me to babysit that Friday night when I was supposed to be miles away staking a tent with her family at that very moment... and dad called the police. The police told dad that he had to file me as a run away for their assistance. He had to press charges on his own daughter. So he did. The lady I used to babysit for was a cool and progressive lady and she knew about my girlfriend and she'd been pretty cool about me racking up the long distance phone bill calling my forbidden lesbian lover, probably because I was the only sitter in town who'd watch her four kids, two of whom were twin baby boys, for $20 a night. I found out later that she shared as much info as she knew about me and my girlfriend and the motel tryst I must have mentioned planning at some point... because the phone in the motel room began to ring, and my little getaway rapidly melted into a fucking guilt and angst-ridden nightmare. My gf and I, having laid on the bed in paralyzed horror for twelve hours, tried to plan how to ditch and where the hell we were going to go. She'd taken the bus for eight hours to see me and we were teenagers. It was Saturday and her bus didn't leave to return home until the following afternoon. We didn't have any money. There was no where for her to go and I didn't want to eat crow and go home and miss out on this time with her that was so fucking rare, despite the fact that the anxiety of being on the run was so excruciating that I was miserable to the point of violent nausea. To this day, I do not know how it was so effectively imprinted in my brain to avoid disappointing my father. He never said it. He rarely directly addressed anything. Nevertheless, just the theoretical concept of how disappointed he was with me in that time was unadulterated agony. I couldn't enjoy the time we had together at all. I couldn't relax. I was a live bundle of nerves.
My gf and I were making our escape when I saw my father and the officer in the motel office. We could have kept going, their backs were to us, but it was the moment at which you drop the gun and raise your hands in the air. The anxiety and imminent failure were too much to deny and I was just exhausted. I turned myself in. I sheepishly walked into the office, Dad's face quickly molded into recognition, then relief, but he didn't say anything to me, only rather quietly pointed out, "That's her," to the officer.
Being no longer on the lam was immediately a sort of relief, but I felt furious at the failure of my lie, and mortified at the effort (and, still, that effort was absurd) that my father went to to find me. That was not like him. Not at all. He never paid attention to me and I'd never been in trouble in my life. I was a straight A student. I'd never been in a fight. I'd never missed class. I'd never missed work. I don't know what motivated him to go to these extremes that weekend. My first inclination is homophobia, but I don't think that's it. There is plenty of evidence that my father was very tolerant and accepting of homosexuality, which I won't get into details with here, but suffice it to say he took me to the wedding of my gay cousin and his husband when I was ten years old. In Montana. That was 20 years ago and that shit STILL isn't legal in Montana. That's some forward-thinking and familial acceptance demonstrated from my father, who probably attended five social events in my entire childhood, one of which being the gay marriage. But he did have one hell of a homophobic and meddling live-in girlfriend who I'm quite positive set the fire under his ass. He may have had some feeling of obligation to act when he learned I'd lied to him, and that sad puritanical drive parents seem to have in this country to prevent their children from having sexual relations for as long as possible. I don't know. We have never discussed it.
So the cop put me in the backseat of the police cruiser, driver's side. My dad sat in front. I was livid. I vividly recall my immediate and powerful urge to kick the back of the policeman's seat. It rolled through my head like a wave of fire, igniting the adrenaline that had been boiling without direction for the past 24 hours, aching to explode in a fit of teen anguish directed at the portly and rather bored-looking public servant. Am I allowed to feel pride for restraint for something I did not do fifteen years ago? I didn't know what the consequences would be. I'd never been in a police cruiser before. The only cops I'd interacted with were teaching the DARE program in school, or regulars at my dad's diner, as I'm certain this one was, though I didn't recognize his face. They all were. If you didn't want Denny's or 4Bs, my dad's diner was the only option in town. This is probably another reason my father enlisted the police. I don't think he'd ever had the occasion to before, and it was a very small town. They were all pleasant acquaintances he'd surely been supplying free coffee to for over a decade. Surely they could return the small favor by locating his lusty dyke of a daughter. And they did. And I didn't assault the guy. I didn't know what assault was at the time, I just thought it was probably better not to piss off a cop. Looking back, knowing what I know now, that was probably a distinct crossroads in my existence. Writing this, I'm very curious suddenly about that other path. What became of the me who kicked the back of the cop's seat? Would someone have yelled at me to 'knock it off!' and that'd be the end of it, like a disobedient child in the back seat would typically be handled? Or, because of the charges I was being detained for, would the cop have been obligated to add this to his report and charge me with assaulting an officer? Would his countenance with my father have saved my stupid ass from this seemingly dark alternative path of my life? If there is some parallel universe, I cannot help but wonder where that version of my self would be today. Seems like some kind of life-changing potential.
They took me to the police station. I think it was a formality. Just inside the doors, I saw someone being finger-printed and the whole thing suddenly became too real. It was all to absurd, I hadn't broken any laws! I hadn't even left the damn town, I was a few blocks away from my father's diner in a tiny motel downtown. I didn't run away. I just lied about where I was going. What teenager didn't do that?? I remember feeling scared that they were going to fingerprint me, that I was going on record as a real criminal and that it would follow me for the rest of my life. I was terrified. But the scene was so ... wrong. I thought I should be handcuffed. People should be yelling. I should not be allowed to stay with my father, they should lead me down some dreary anonymous hallway in cuffs as I begged them to go easy on me. There should be aggression here, or at least some authority...? It was bizarrely passive. The cops working there were quiet and studious, all looking down. I don't think anyone looked at me once. Even the perp getting printed was silent, resigned to whatever his fate might have been. For all I know, he was being printed for his Property and Casualty Insurance License. Not a perp at all. It was a very small town, after all. Maybe only the police station (which I'm pretty sure was also the court house...) had the necessary equipment for making fingerprints. Them, and the kindergarten teachers.
I have no idea what we did in the police station. Maybe some kind of paperwork. All I remember is feeling invisible. No one said a word to me. It was disappointingly anticlimactic, as strange as that sounds. Maybe they knew my father that well and knew he didn't want any scene of any kind. Part of him probably knew damn well that it was his fault the shit was going down at all. I mean, you can't even file a missing person report until someone has been gone for 24 hours, but you can report them as a run away? I should have protested somehow. It never even occurred to me. I never questioned the authority of law. I'm sure he was embarrassed. Hell, he was probably mortified. My father was a quiet and private person all my life. Good thing I hadn't shaved my head yet... though I think I did have the nose piercing at that time, which would have pigeon-holed me before I ever opened my mouth. Which is probably why no one invited me to. I was just looking around, waiting for something, anything to happen.
It didn't. Dad and I got in his truck and drove away. I mentioned that I needed to return the VCR I'd rented for our motel stay. I had the foresight to keep that in my possession... I worked for a video store, after all, I knew about those fees! [yeah... see what I mean? I'd never done a wrong thing in my short, pathetic life]. Dad grumbled some incoherent annoyance at that errand and we swung by the rental store on the way home. He never spoke to me about any of this. Never. Not a word. I guess he didn't need to. I knew it was wrong. I did have to go to court. So I was charged with committing the crime of running away. That's bizarre to me. Dad went with me to that hearing. Still, never a word. In court, before the judge, we were told I could do community service or go to a psychiatrist for x number of hours. Dad looked at me for just a second and selected the counseling. That's what I'd been voting for... I didn't want to pick up trash on the damn road. The judge told me that if I completed my hours of counseling and kept my nose clean for the next three years, my record would be sealed at 18 and it'd be like this never happened. The court gave us paperwork about my sentencing, Dad handed it all to me, told me to arrange it.
I found my own counselor and I went for my hours. That's another story, God, what a joke that guy was. His name was Dudley. I want to put his full name because it was sing-song and completely ridiculous, as much a joke as it turned out the guy himself was, but I don't want to risk the numb skull googling himself and finding this blog and coming after me for slander or something. He probably remembers my name as well as I remember his. I was, shall we say, uncooperative. This was the first in a stream of grudgingly-forged relationships with intellectual inferiors in my life. So.... to all the small town Dudley child psychologists out there... it probably isn't you.
I chose the guy because of his address. My favorite number was his office address.
This is a weird fucking exercise. These memories are stored in my brain, the same brain I use today, the same brain that identifies as 30-year-old mother, adult, insurance agent, etc etc etc today. Yet these memories were filed by my 15-year old self. I feel her anger and am acutely aware of her ignorance. How odd is that... to be a stranger to yourself, past versus present.
So, that was an absurdly long illustration of how my father never talked to me about anything. There's one key exception to this, though. My father is an alcoholic, but usually a sad and lone alcoholic. When he was drunk and happy, and I happened to be around, he'd come and sit in the doorway of my bedroom, on the floor, his legs outstretched in front of him, his eyes half-closed, that small but constant smile on his lips, and he'd want to "talk" to me. Suddenly his self-perception included fucking Father of the Year. God, I hated that. I don't even remember a single detail of anything we ever talked about in those times. I just see his face, which I found repulsive, annoying, and pitiful. I always knew when he was drunk. He spoke differently (and... he actually spoke), and he had that stupid fucking expression. Sometimes he'd still be holding the drink in his hand, a bottle of beer, but usually, because all drunks think they have the world fooled, he'd be holding a blue can of RC Cola. He also liked Surge... does that still exist? It was like a Mountain Dew competitor for a while but it was dirt cheap, like 99 cents for a six-pack, and my dad loved that shit. Dad was a coffee/caffeine/sugar junkie. Oh, and alcohol, let's not forget that, but that was usually bottles of clear vodka clanking against each other in his briefcase that "nobody knew about." That just added to how pathetic he was, sitting like a child, sounding like a child, on my bedroom floor, actually seeming to believe he was my friend or something.
We fought a couple times. Once, when he was drunk like that, I became angry and tried to get away from him, away from the stink of that breath and the guttural slurring voice that was like fingernails on a chalkboard to me, I despised that so much. He grabbed me by my upper arms and held fast and we kinda wrestled on the floor for a while, me grunting and screaming in frustration at his overpowering strength despite his ivresse. The next day, I had bruises the shape of fingers on my arms. I remember noncommittally telling him I was going to turn him in for child abuse. He was sober. He pretended to laugh, but cut it off immediately like someone had quite suddenly closed an icy vice around his throat, and went on working without another word, though sporting a frown he thought passed for concentration but was clearly worry. After all, that had never happened. Bruises are ethereal and dissipate like dust.
sweep, sweep
At twelve I wanted a phone in my room (this was before cell phones) and he wouldn't allow it. There was a phone jack in his bedroom, adjacent to my own, that wasn't being used and no jack in my room, so I drilled a hole through my bedroom wall into his room. I purchased a phone at a friend's garage sale and fed the cord through the hole into my dad's room while he was at work. This was brilliant because the hole and phone jack were obscured by my father's large computer desk on the opposite side of the wall. I crept into his room, a strange and foreign space that was dark and smelled heavily of him, and reached behind the desk, fumbling for the cord. I'd tied it around the stem of a screw driver and fed this through the hole in my wall, across the gap between the sheets of sheet rock, and through the other side. I felt the metal head jutting through the jagged hole and pulled it through, bringing the cord with it. This I disentangled, working without breathing, listening for the slightest hint of approaching footsteps on the carpeted hallway. It was difficult to reach the phone jack from the side as the desk was nearly flush with the shared wall, so I stood and dropped the cord behind the desk, wanting the slack to remain concealed by the particle board furniture. The jack was in the corner which was just hidden by the rear leg of the desk. I had to pull out the desk chair and crawl under the desk to locate the dropped phone cord and plug it into the jack, but soon my ears were pleasured with the satisfying tell-tale click! of the plug finding purchase and I scurried butt-first from beneath the desk and shot out of the room like a bullet from a gun.
I had a phone. Oh it was deliciously devious. The problem? I forgot to turn off the ringer, and my father has ears. Whoops. The first time it rang, I heard his furious response and though I'd turned it off before he threw open the door, I'd been found out. He grabbed the phone from my hands. I seized the cord in-turn and we had a brief tug-of-war. My father despised being defied, as there were really so few things he ever told me at all, much less the clear things I was forbidden to do, and having a phone in my room was one of those things. It was illogical and unfair, of course, in my mind. My father continued to tug, rather silly, but intent on not being further defeated. I held fast, ever defiant, and reached a pair of scissors from the cup on my desk and cut the phone cord, leaving my father with an inoperable phone in his hands as he stumbled backward from the stored kinetic energy, and myself with the culprit cord running through the hole I'd drilled. I remember his look then. He was not drunk. He was at first confused and then shook his head in this baffled amazement at my audacity. "You realize you destroyed your phone." He told me. It was not a question. I stared back at him with the red-rimmed eyes of teenage defiance. "I don't care," I responded. He let out a sort of quiet chuckle and head-shake of disbelief and left the room.
This is not the only time this sort of exchange has taken place in which I destroyed my own property to prevent someone else the satisfaction of successfully taking it from me. Strangely, the next occurrence also involved a phone, but it was a decade and a half later. Remember how I was just talking about that rifling through my mental file cabinets and marveling at my fifteen-year-old perspective? Imagine what it feels like when you realize that some of that shit is not limited to your youth. Some of that shit is ingrained and is representative of a deep-seated personality trait.
I was twelve years old when Dad and I had the phone show-down. I'd been through two divorces, abandoned by two mothers, my biological at six years old and my first stepmother at ten years old. I'd been working full time for two years as well as babysitting and maintaining a paper route. And the straight A's, of course. I was overwhelmed and burdened with responsibility and seething with the typical hormones and motivations of puberty, heightened by the confusion and guilt of recognizing my homosexual desires and living in a community, which was the whole world at the time (this was pre-internet), that would never accept a homosexual teen. I was finished being a child, and I was finished being a victim (the latter turned out, of course, to not be entirely true).
The same sort of righteous rage consumed me during a fight with R who was much stronger and faster than I. I was trying to get out of his house. He was interrogating me about S again and I was trying to leave, but he heaved his weight and strength against the door and chased me when I attempted to race to the back door, overtaking me, then again to the front. This was infuriating. He decided to try to take my cell phone from me and it flipped open in the scuffle, me holding the top half with the screen and he the bottom with the key pad. Just like Dad, a tug-of-war. Fuck them. I may be a weak fucking woman, but I have a hell of a grip. My father once dragged me across the kitchen floor, jerking so hard he nearly took my arms from its socket, trying to wrench a rolled newspaper from my grip. I wasn't letting that fucking phone go, and I wasn't playing R's fucking games. I held fast and twisted hard, separating the phone's halves in a creaking release of snapping, yielding plastic and electronic wire. It was mine. The texts were mine. That language shared with S was something R could not take from me, regardless of how much he'd already taken, regardless of what a victim I'd been, he was not going to win this fight. S was mine. He was not going to destroy the one piece of personal, sacred treasure I had left. When I ripped that phone in half, I didn't even feel it cut me. I didn't even look at the phone. I stood there, starting into R's eyes, breathing like some kind of massive animal who'd just charged, my chest heaving. My hand was in the air, blood running down my wrist, the top half of a Bubblegum pink flip phone [yes, Constant Reader, I still own and use it's out-dated replacement] in it like a beacon of triumph. I remember R's face as clearly as I recall my father's in the nearly identical scenario. It was the same. First puzzled by the extreme reaction and unexpected destruction of my own property just to keep it out of their hands, then that sort of soft and disbelieving, head-shaking laugh that I swear fucking men reserve just for the pathetic women in their lives. R said, "Wow, you really didn't want me to see those texts." The initial tone was of bewilderment, but in R's mind, that quickly morphed into the implications of what the texts must have contained, such lust and sin his mind could hardly fathom it! [the irony of this situation is that I was dating R at this time, not S. S and I both knew that. R had given me permission to maintain a friendship with S, which I rekindled after two years of forced separation with gusto. The text conversation was a few brief lines about a cat. Innocuous. But R didn't trust me, despite my obedience, and he never once respected any personal space or boundaries. S was precious to me. He was the dearest friend and confidante I'd ever known. R was not going to soil that with his sociopath control issues].
Something snapped in me that day with R that never repaired between us. Perhaps the phone was the metaphor. They say you marry your father. That was the first time I saw it so clearly that it was like vomit rising in my throat. I am small, I am meek, I am naive and absurdly patient and kind and I get walked all over all of the time. But, I have a breaking point. I have a point at which your dull tool that you've used to dig and dig through my flesh over spans of time, attempting all the while to distract me from your work with fanciful language and empty promises; reaches my soul. Not everyone gets there. Only a few have. But, when you arrive, you awaken something that no one sees until they do. That, and my darling S will recall this story as he seemed to relish the thought, was the day I broke the phone between mine and R's hands and it is the same day I told him that I hoped I was pregnant so I could abort his demon spawn.
I have never said something so ugly before or since.
I still hear those words in a shrieking voice I don't recognize.
I feel that shaking, teetering on the brink of falling into some unknown chasm of lost control, that last thread of the rope of sanity and consciousness the only thing preventing my fall.
That's the only time I've thought of hurting someone. That day. All the hours of his spit hitting my face as he screamed into it like I wasn't even human, the hours curled in the fetal position hoarse from begging him to stop, and years I'd lost as a caged animal, the crack of my daughter's skull hitting the pavement...
fuck I can't write that right now. that's a bad one. that's a bad bad bad one
add it to the list
That's a side of me that has emerged so few times in my life that it still shocks me that it occurred at all and, if I didn't have the memories, I would never believe that the self I know was capable of that kind of behavior or words.
When I first thought of writing the list, I felt guilt and shame.
I'm seriously fucked-up, right?
They'll take my daughter away.
S will run screaming for the hills.
I heard a phenomenal story on This American Life on NPR not too long ago about a boy who reached this brink, and then fell into it, and killed his foster parents [citation below]. What seemed to surprise the NPR reporter more than anything was the compassion and empathy people felt for that boy. People who'd been abused as children immediately related to him and reached out to him. A family adopted him, though he was an adult when he got out of prison, in order to provide him with love and a supportive family that he would need when he returned to the 'real world.' Is this really so shocking? The shocking part, in my opinion, is how fucking hard we try to pretend how normal and great and wonderful and peaceful everything is. The moment I cut that phone cord... the moment I wrenched that phone apart with my bare hand, was not unlike the moment in the backseat of the cop car, when the furious thought raced across my conscious brain to kick the cop's seat. These instances, and there are more, I felt honestly that I was being violated at some level, that the injustice of the current events exceeded my capacity to accept them. Now, with the cop car example, I quickly accepted both the circumstances, though they didn't match the crime, they logically progressed from it, and that I was going to seriously limit my freedoms if I acted on that immediately impulsive reaction to retaliate. Also, that would have been an act against someone else's body and property. In the instances in which I did react, I only hurt myself, and only destroyed my own property.
There is some horrible metaphor for my life here, I'm sure.
The list is going to take a long while to write. I guess this was the beginning of item one, my father, which is probably a tome of itself. Or, let's say, it's one of the books in the series umbrella-titled "The Men in My Life."
Then there's W, N, M, J, R and S.
S you know fairly well by now.
R... he needs his own book too.
Let's hope there are no more than 26 people in my life or i am going to have to resort to using colors.
No, that's too Reservoir Dogs.
My life isn't quite that bad.
Though I wouldn't mind spending some time with Steve Bucemi.
Citations
This American Life Podcast #485: Surrogates. January 25, 2013. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/485/surrogates
Photograph: still from the film "Ghost World" starring Thora Birch and Steve Bucemi [pictured]. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. 2001.
