A Hard Look Within, Part Five

 

For about five months after I had broken up with Rich I drifted in this haze of aimless irresponsibility. After two months, Jessica moved back home with her parents. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I could drink a twelve pack of Keystone beer and not get a buzz. Wow. What an accomplishment.

 I was exhausted. Unemployed. I couldn’t see any point to my life or any hope in it. I was miserably lonely. My sleep schedule was so messed up I was staying up until after sunrise and sleeping all day. I felt wrung out, hollow and empty. My landlords had let me slide behind on my rent, but that time would be drawing to a close if I didn’t do something. That was the problem. I was sunk so low emotionally that I couldn’t see a way out.

 I spent my time wandering the streets of Kalispell while the town slept. There is a sacred stillness that descends in the wee hours between midnight and dawn. The quiet peace of a dreaming town. I always felt like I was looking for something unseen and impossible to lay physical hands on. I found some consolation in the night winds blowing through the branches of the giant willow in that yard on 3^rd Street on the west side where I lived. I called her the Grandmother Tree because she is over a hundred years old if not older. I would stand a her base, staring up at the huge branches, wind whispering among the leaves, feeling somehow that if something as huge as that tree had stood the test of time and man, I should somehow, some way, be able to as well. I would sometimes go into the yard to lay my hands on her bark, a nameless yearning tugging in my belly. I just couldn’t figure it out.

 I met a few cool cats out for their nocturnal wanders and we would stop an chat, their temporary companionship easing for a moment the hollow echoes in my heart and mind. Sometimes I would go down to Woodland Park to listen to the sleepy rustling of the ducks and geese at roost in the night. Listening to the night sounds in this sleeping mid-sized city, I could hear the whisper of possibility for something more. At the same time, those night winds blew through the heart of me leaving an empty, nameless ache.

 On particularly lonely nights I would wander to Finnegan’s restaurant to have coffee, flirt with the cute waiter and hope maybe someone I know would come in. Party buddies were better company than silence. Still, bars were never my thing. I seem to hold an unapproachable air about me when I do wander in to them. On the rare occasions that I found some main street dive with a blues band I would take up a table by myself and it would stay that way. On one or two occasions much older men asked me to dance. I danced, but I never invited company or conversation and always left soon after. I had seen the type of people that inhabited bars on a regular basis, and that wasn’t my thing. I never wanted to go into heavier drug use, and I had already reached the bottom as far as I was concerned.

 It was some faceless night. I was in my living room listening to Depeche Mode, which isn’t very uplifting music for happy people, much less people in the state of mind I was in. It was 3 a.m. and I wanted to die. My life was going nowhere. I hadn’t eaten in two days and I couldn’t seem to bring myself up out of this hole of despair. To top it all off, I was out of cigarettes.

 I had a small pistol my sister had given me in case Rich ever came back. A .22 Jennings. I had shells for it. I couldn’t stop crying and I just wanted it done.

 Get out of this house.

 That voice again. Call it intuition or Divine Guidance. I think of it as the latter. At least I do now.

 “I want to die! I hate this fucked up life! I can’t do anything right!” I said aloud, tears on constant leak.

 Call your Mom.“It’s three o’clock in the goddamned morning! She doesn’t need me calling! She‘ll be pissed.”

 

 I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I had done wrong. I couldn’t even keep a job! I was a failure. I shouldn’t be alive.

 Get out of the house. Call your Mom.I should be dead! It’s not worth living, living like this!

 

 It’s not your time. Get out of the house. Call your Mom.There is nothing worse than being nagged by the voice in your head telling you to live when you are trying to find a way to die.

 

 I felt I had to do something, anything, and the voice was winning.

I left the house and walked across town to Finnegan’s. I had enough change to use the payphone.

 “Hello?” her voice was groggy. And concerned.

“It’s me.”

“What’s wrong?” fully awake now as only a mother whose kid calls in the middle of the night could be. I started to cry. That was such a loaded question.

“I’m sorry. I can’t explain right now. Could you just please come and get me?” I couldn’t keep the tears out of my voice.

“Where are you? Are you in Kalispell?”

“Yeah. Finnegan’s.”

“See you in a bit.”

 I picked a seat at the counter. Lit up the half smoked butt I’d dredged out of the ashtray outside the door. The graveyard waiter I normally flirted with cast me a few odd glances. I tried to smile and pretend nothing was wrong but I know I must have looked like train wreak. I know the smile on my face looked like it didn’t’ belong. It felt like it didn’t belong and I’ve never been a very good liar. I must have presented a fairly odd picture, pale, eyes red and bloodshot from crying. I stared into my water glass and stole a glance down the counter at the balding fat man four seats down from me. He looked like someone who had just crawled out from under a rock. I had the discomforting impression that we could have shared the same rock just then. Inward, I cringed. Another voice in my head, one that wasn’t so nice told me;

 

Look. That’s you. Different face, same broken interior design.

 

Fuck you, I thought.

Soon, the door of the restaurant opened. I was quite amazed, actually. Beside my mother stood my father. The man whom I knew didn’t even like me. My stomach lurched.

We rode in silence which was a second shock to me. I expected him to launch into a tirade at any moment. He didn’t. What was more is, I caught him glancing at me once and I was stunned by the expression in his eyes. Concern. I had seen many expressions on my father’s face before in life, concern was not one I recognized.

But I was never one to ask for help either. How could I? If I did I was either told I wasn’t trying hard enough or I was a lazy user.

 They didn’t smoke, but bum that I was then I must have gotten a couple bucks for a pack somewhere along the way. The nicotine helped me feel a little better for a moment.

 For a moment.

 For a moment I was safe. For a moment I was small again under my parents protection. For a moment time could stop it’s downward spiral.

For a moment, the demons were held at bay.

 

 

 

 

A Hard Look Within, Part Four

I knew Rich was sick. Mentally. I had just been too young and naïve to know it. Dealing too with my own issues I couldn’t see it. I didn’t really know how severe his mental health issues were until about a month after I broke up with him.

 

By then I had gone on my own sort of rebellious path of self discovery/destruction. Mostly it involved men and booze. Then one of the boozing men introduced something I had only tried twice with ill results: marijuana.

 

I guess back then what happened was that I had felt so repressed growing up in high school, then in that relationship with Rich that I just took sowing wild oats to a whole new extreme. At least an extreme for a shy, introverted girl raise by Depression Era parents with a religious background. What I did would be nothing for most people, but for me this was extreme, over-the-top behavior.

 

I had been reputed to be a bad ass in school. I didn’t do a lot of the things I wanted to do, like sneak out of my parents house because my Mom for years had told me how much my sisters doing that had hurt her. I didn’t want my parents to be any more ashamed and angry with me than they were. Really, I only wanted them to love me and actually enjoy my presence in their lives. I didn’t want to hurt them. I, save for a handful of times, always went where I said I would be and always came home when I was supposed to. Looking back on it now I really wish I had snuck out more. Perhaps it would have saved me a headache later.

 

After Rich I turned for the first time in my life hardcore to the party life. My friends Jessica and Mona moved in to room with me and we started drinking a lot. I lost my job at the dairy because staying up all night screwing some guy I used to go to school with was more important to me. The truly sad part was that the guy told me not to tell anyone we slept together because he didn’t want to ruin his reputation. That made me laugh because everybody in school thought he was a fucking putz. It also hurt me a lot. I convinced myself that I was using these guys instead. And more guys there were. With no job I didn’t buy food but somehow we always had money for beer and coffee. I lost 40 pounds the first month after I broke up with Rich and for the first time in my life discovered the power of my own sex appeal. Which I used like a common slut, I might add. I found a smorgasbord of men for one night stands. Well, it was a smorgasbord for me anyhow. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty in a very short period of time.

 

I picked a hitch hiker up that ended up being my boyfriend for three months. He was the one that introduced me to the joys of marijuana. Jessica was my partner in crime. We soon ran Mona off, I think the wild life scared her.

 

We had no phone service. One night my hitch hiker, Terry had stayed over. Early in the morning there was a pounding at the door and Jessica answered. It was Rich. She gave me an odd look when she told me he was there. I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks. I came out to see what the hell he wanted. He walked into the house. I had to either walk backwards or be stepped on. He was talking non-stop the whole time. He wanted to know who was in my bedroom, what I was doing with someone in my bedroom. I told him it was none of his fucking business. He started to babble at me that he had walked the seventeen miles to Kalispell from Columbia Falls and he had counted every one of his steps. I asked him if he was fucking drunk. He then started to tell me all his friends had turned against him and it was all my fault, that I had turned them all against him.

 

I told him I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about and told him to get the fuck out of my house. He shoved past me to the kitchen and I asked him what the fuck he was doing and continued telling him to get out. When Jessica heard me yell, “What the fuck are you doing with that knife?!” she was out the door to try and call the cops from the neighbors house.

 

Rich grabbed one of my kitchen knives and proceeded to try stabbing himself in the chest through his shirt and coat. I freaked out and tried to grab him. Ironically, the only though in my head was, What the hell am I going to tell the cops about a dead body in my house?

 

He and I struggled by the counter, he jerked away from me and I heard a pop noise and felt warmth flood over my hands and legs. I froze in shock and he reeled away from me.

 

For a brief moment I felt myself truly teetering on the thin edge of sanity. My mouth was open, but I couldn’t breathe. I expected him to collapse thinking I was watching a man die. He’s stabbed himself in the heart! I thought. Then I realized he was not only not going down, he was still trying to stab himself. I felt a rush of confusion then dared to look down at my hands. It was then I noticed the paper biggie sized soda cup on the counter laying on it’s side. It had held ice the night before which had melted. Knocking it over in our struggles was what made the sound and it was water dousing me, not his blood.

 

In a snap my paralyzed fear was consumed in towering fury. I was consumed in some unholy rage right then. In two steps I was over to him and yanked the knife out of his hands, by the blade, not even caring at this point. I knew he was over the edge. Somehow we were back across the dining room and he had me shoved up against t he door, pinning me while simultaneously trying to open it. It was then I saw Terry standing casually in the doorway, one arm propped up, looking for all the world like he was watching us play a friendly game of darts.

 

“Terry! HELP ME!” I screamed as Rich began striking at me. Terry sauntered over and made a half assed attempt at putting Rich in a full Nelson. Rich, suddenly realizing there was another person there seemed to revive from his animal state and ran out the front door. Jessica came back, none of the neighbors had been home.

 

I have never been so pumped on adrenaline in my life. I knew we had to make a police report. I stood there in the dining room and we talked about going to the police station, when I rubbed my forehead.

 

“You’re bleeding!” Jessica said, alarmed, pointing at my head. Confused, I reached for my forehead, thinking I was bleeding from there and noticed the blood in my hand. I had forgotten I grabbed that knife by the blade and all for of my fingers were gashed open and oozing blood. I couldn’t even feel it right then. I stared at it for quite awhile, in complete disbelief, waiting for the pain that didn’t come until later, then went in the bathroom to wrap my hand.

 

We went to the police station and Terry took off. There were large, half-dollar sized drops of blood on the walkway in front of my house. The animal had wounded himself after all. We wrote out the police report. I told them how Rich tried to kill himself with the knife, about our ensuing struggle. Before we even left the station the dispatcher informed us the police had him in custody. They had arrested him as he was heading back to my house.

 

For the first time, I was truly scared. He was obviously off his fucking rocker. That he held me personally responsible for his friends turning against him pissed me off and worried me. He had been heading back to my house. Why? Not for anything good, that much I knew. Either the next day or the day after, I called the Violence Free Crisis line at my mother’s suggestion. The advocate suggested I try and find out when he would be released so I could get an order of protection.

 

I called the police station and got the female dispatcher. I asked if he was still incarcerated. The dispatcher asked me if I was a family member.

 

“No. I am his ex-girlfriend. The one in whose house he tried to kill himself.”

 

“We don’t release that information to anyone but family.” the dispatcher informed me.

 

“But he has hurt me before and may try to hurt me or himself again! He tried to stab himself in my house!”

 

What I heard next I still have a hard time believing, but this is what I was told by this dispatcher.

 

“Unless you are family I cannot release that information. Besides, you WERE caught in bed with another man!”

 

“WHAT?!! He’s my EX-boyfriend!” I shouted. I couldn’t believe what that bitch had just said. I hung up the phone in tears. What had that waste of skin told the police? He was my distraught boyfriend come home to find me in bed with another man? Seriously? He hadn’t lived with me in over a MONTH!

 

When I called the crisis line back and relayed the conversation I had with the woman dispatcher my advocate blew a gasket.

 

“SHE SAID WHAT??!!! I’ll take care of this. I’ll call you back.”

 

I don’t’ know what that wonderful woman told that bitch dispatcher but when she returned my call we found out he was going to the state rehab/mental health center in Great Falls for a month for evaluation.

 

I didn’t have a phone but he began calling my parents house. He was so sorry and he was getting help, etc. etc. He had a hang-up about my tattoo, the one I had gotten to cover his name. It is a collage. I told my tattoo artist I wanted a half-Elf woman and a sword or dagger in the collage. I told him to use some artistic license to put something else in it. So what I ended up with is a half-Elf woman’s face, partially obscured by hair. Over the hair on her face is a dagger. To the left of the dagger, coming out of the hair is the head of a snarling demon. The demon was my friends idea, I was 18, what the hell and whatever. Rich called my mother to ask if the demon in the tattoo was supposed to symbolize him.

 

Since the demon was my tattooist’s idea, and this tattooist was the guy that told me about Rich hiding from me at friends houses and he knew it was a freedom gift to myself, it could have been what he had in mind. I don’t know. But I still HAVE that tattoo.

 

Rich talked about getting back together. I made non-committal noises. I still didn’t want to hurt him. I knew he was sick and wanted him to get better. He informed me that before we got back together I had to go get an HIV test and be tested for STDs.

 

I ran into his father in the restaurant. Frank informed me that his son needed healing and I needed to stay away from him since I was the one who had driven him to suicide. Like having parents who raised him telling him he was so smart and could do no wrong or take no responsibility didn’t help get him there. Not to mention the genetic propensity for depression. I couldn’t believe it. Frank was telling me his fucked up son was all my fault too. It was like something Rich himself would have said.

 

Needless to say, I had no interest in getting back together with him. After getting out of Great Falls he came back for awhile and kept a low profile, eventually finding true love and a sugar mama in a cousin of a mutual friend. He and his brother Donny got drunk together, stole their other brother’s car and plowed it into a bunch of trees. Rich had his jaw wired shut. I saw him in the restaurant and to try and prove to him and myself everything was water under the bridge ( I still had nightmares then) I went over to chat with him. Soon his knew girlfriend, Pam, who was about ten years older came in. He began to tell me how wonderful she was. What a miracle what with all her health problems she had. How happy they were together. When I looked at her, it was the strangest thing. She seemed to have this darkness around her. That voice came back again.

“She’ll be dead in three months.”

 

Two and a half months later I ran into her cousin. Pam had died of a sudden heart attack from complications to do with diabetes.

 

I had nightmares about him for about two years. He would be coming to kill me. I knew this was some process of unresolved emotion I needed to work on. At first, in the dreams, I was helpless and at his mercy. As time progressed, I was able to fight him. Then fight him to a draw. Each dream I made more progress. The last dream I ever had of him, The fight ended quickly, and he was naked, cringing. In the dream I told him to leave and never bother me again. I never dreamt of him after that.

 

Sometime after Pam’s death, unable to sponge of someone else, Rich moved to Livingston with his mother. I saw him once years later and it took me a minute to realize who that scruffy, fat guy was. He was bullshitting with some guy he and his mother were having coffee with, trying to tell him his expert opinion on the guys own field of work.

 

I saw him notice me and the look that came across his face was priceless. Like he just took a big bite out of a cat shit sandwich. I suddenly realized that he was way more disturbed by seeing me than I was at seeing him. It occurred to me that the bastard still wanted everything to be my fault! I looked at him, his appearance. The years hadn’t been kind. He was pathetic.

 

He got up at one point to pass by my table. He looked like he had a stick shoved sideways up his ass and the wave he gave me looked more like an epileptic twitch response. I gave him my best condescending smile, vindictive bitch that I am. With the pot-gut, striped shirt and unkempt hair he looked like a fat hair twelve year old.

I went back to reading my book. I never saw him again.

 

Two years ago, his sister-in-law told me they found him dead in the motel room he lived in in Choteau. Heart attack, they say. He was forty-one.

 

A Hard Look Within, Part Three

I dated a couple guys in early high school from a nearby town. I don‘t know if it was because of my antisocial ‘fuck you’ attitude or just the fact that I put off the hard ass vibe, but very few guys in my school asked me out. The ones that did either held absolutely no appeal to me or did so only after I was going out with my older boyfriend. And according to one of my best friends I scared the hell out of people.

 

My social life consisted of five hour coffee marathon’s at the local greasy spoon. Because my sisters had been hell raising partiers my parents over compensated by severely restricting my movements. I only rarely got to stay the night at girlfriends houses, and the few who braved staying at my house got to see first hand my father in sarcastic asshole mode. So it was the coffee shop. Coffee and cigarettes.

 

I met Rich through a mutual group of coffee drinking friends. Witty, older, smart. Black hair and blue eyes. Smoked the same brand. It was by chance I went into the restaurant alone and found him by himself at the counter. I took a seat to talk to him. We talked for three hours. Soon after started seeing each other. He had a job and soon got an apartment. His apartment turned into party central. They only let people in who brought their own beer. People came from other towns to party there. I would come in to wake him up and find strangers passed out on the living room floor. I met GM there and he and I got to be friends. I even had a secret crush on him while I was going out with Rich.

 

Rich had just turned twenty-one. My Mom knew his mother and had known him because she was a substitute teacher at the high school. While my parents didn’t necessarily approve of the relationship, they allowed it because he ‘seemed like a nice kid’. What they didn’t see too much was the complete imbalance of power in that relationship. My immaturity coupled with his ability to manipulate, an slowly awakening mental illness. I had never known about mind games. He soon lost both job and apartment and moved back in to his Mother’s house.

 

Time and again the scenario would unfold. In naïve ignorance and out of desperation for some kind of life, I threw myself mind body and soul into this relationship. Being denied healthy friendships with my own peer group I became completely obsessed with the idea of this relationship and with him. I didn’t understand that he probably didn’t really want me as much as I wanted him. After all, he told me he loved me, we talked about getting married someday and we had sex all the time. He wanted to go hang out with his buddies which I wouldn‘t have had a problem with if he would have kept his promises to me. His friends were my friends as well, but Rich didn’t have a car so I couldn’t go with them. GM and Elmo even came to visit me fairly often and there were times I would go places with them in Elmo‘s beat to shit Dodge Dart. My parents trusted them more than they trusted Rich, I think.

 

What got to me the most was being told by Rich that he would come see me then being constantly stood up. But I was in an emotionally desperate state at this time of my life and refused to cut ties and move on. Clingy doesn’t begin to describe it. I was more obsessed I think. If he told me he would come see me and stood me up I would go to every place I knew him to hang out until I found him. I was trying to force him to be accountable. This probably drove him as nuts as he drove me lying to me all the time! At the same time though, he never moved to break up with me. Never once told me we were through, not even at the end.

 

Another aspect began to emerge. If he told me he would come see me at 7 p.m. he wouldn’t show up until 9. That was how it first started. Then it would be midnight. Then 1 a.m. On school nights. When I confronted him with my anger the way he would twist and manipulate the argument, by the time it reached its end I would be the one apologizing! He made it clear time and again everything was all my fault. He would have me so upset I would be in crying hysterics, hyperventilating, literally pulling my hair out and thinking I was going out of my fucking mind. He never apologized.

 

One incident stands out. I wanted to have a romantic picnic and brought the idea up to him. He said it sounded cool. We made plans for a Saturday. I woke up early and started cooking all his favorite dishes plus desert. I cooked for half the day. I called him and he said he was going to run out to his friend Eric’s with them. Rich didn’t have his own car. Eric lived miles out of town. I asked him when he would be back and reminded him of the picnic. He told me he knew and he would only be gone a little while. Two hours later I called out there. Only a little while more. I called an hour later. And again. And Again. Soon they quit answering the phone. My sister and mother were furious on my behalf. My sister, G was calling him everything but dirty white trash. They had seen all the effort I put in. He finally showed up at 10:30 pm. Full of apologies. It wasn’t his fault. Eric’s Mom didn’t give him a ride. Like a naïve idiot I bought it, so desperate I was for affection and to just have him there.

 

This went on for three years. I was obsessed with making him be honest with me. In the winter time I could track him in the snow around town.

 

There is a morbid, pathetic piece of very dark humor here. I stalked him, yet he never tried to break off the relationship. That was what really confused me. If he would have told me he didn’t want a relationship I would have got it and moved on with life. But he always told me he wanted to be with me and loved me. Then he would avoid me and get angry when I tried to make him be accountable to me.

 

During this time, my one saving grace is a job I got working for a woman named Carellen. In exchange for cleaning horse corrals and stalls she would give me riding lessons. This was my one bright spot of saving grace through those dark times. I even took an after school job, babysitting two boys while their mom went to school. Over the course of the school year I saved every penny to buy my horse Steele for $350.00. A full blood Arabian gelding. Working with the horses was the one time I could just be myself. Be in my body. Working with the horses I was secure in what I was doing. I wasn’t some freaky little fuck up. I was strong and right in what I did there and I was good with horses. I helped break them to ride. I worked them in the arenas. I could go home carrying that horse smell on my clothes, and the part of me that knows how to survive took that into her and held onto it for all she was worth.

 

Rich’s best friend Eric got sick. He had a form of cancer so rare only four or five other people in the whole country had it. He fought it for five months. He died a month after his seventeenth birthday.

 

Eric was the second friend he had lost in the time we had been together. One of his other friends had committed suicide. Rich had been struggling some time with depression. Rich’s father, Frank, had it. In fact, we sat with his father for HOURS at the restaurant, day after day sometimes, listening to Frank go on and on and on about his depression. His medication. How his divorce from Rich’s mother had triggered it. What he had to do every single day to deal with His Depression. It was like a soul sucking litany this man relayed to us. Eventually, Rich’s mother, Nancy moved to Livingston and the house had been foreclosed on. Rich’s siblings either went with his other or moved out of the house. Rich lived in the house for two or three months with no running water and no electricity, not even trying to get a job.

 

For me, high school was going no where. I was still too short of math credits to graduate. I mulled it over and let my parent’s know I was thinking about quitting school. My parents told me if I dropped out I could no longer live in their house.

 

Praise God and hallelujah, I finally found my ticket to freedom! School let out for Christmas vacation my senior year, 1989. I never went back.

 

I found a small one bedroom house renting for $200, a month, utilities included plus $100 deposit. My father, since he had retired with dependants under 18 was receiving $200 a month for me being there. They decided to use that to pay my rent. I got a job working for $400 a month under the table at a local dairy. My parents cashed in some savings bonds of mine my maternal grandmother had purchased for me to buy me a better car.

 

I knew nothing of budgeting or saving money or establishing credit. I didn’t even know about paying bills! Rich moved in with me. After a time, I started badgering him about getting a job. He couldn’t he said, because all the jobs were in Kalispell. He had no ride to Kalispell. Couldn’t get a car because he had no drivers license. Then he got a job at a Kalispell fast food restaurant and went in to Kalispell to live with our friend Tom while he worked. I never saw any of the money.

 

I also didn’t take this as him maybe trying to dump me. He said he still wanted to be with me, still loved me. Still lead me on. That job lasted all of two weeks before he was back. Said he couldn’t handle all the beeping from the French fry machines. I figured he had gotten employment once he could get it again. I found a rental in Kalispell. A one bedroom house for $150.00 a month, I pay utilities. No more excuses for him of not being able to get rides to Kalispell for employment. After only a week or two, he was going back to Columbia Falls where we had just moved from, staying at his dads or whatever. Still telling me he loved me, still using me for sex.

 

I was done. About two weeks before my eighteenth birthday I gave my self two presents. A tattoo to cover up his name on my right forearm and I finally told him to stay away for good. I felt like such an idiot. Another mutual friend of ours, his name was Tom, told me Rich had cheated on me numerous times. Another had enlightened me to his hiding from me and/or sneaking out the back door when I came over. I felt like such a pathetic idiot. I had wanted a fantasy relationship with a manipulative lying cheat.

 

I still hung out with him and his brother on occasion, with friends. One night a couple girlfriends and I ran into him and his younger brother. They came with us as well drove down to the fishing access to do some drinking. On the way out, we spotted a skunk in the road. Rich started yelling at me to run it over. I refused. He got furious. He was screaming at me to run over this poor little animal who had done absolutely nothing! I got furious. I told him to fuck off. This infuriated him even more. His control over me was no more. He couldn’t stand it.

 

My parents were out of town and had told me to stay at their place. We all went back to their house. We hadn’t had that much alcohol, about two wine coolers apiece. One of the girls, Mona was trying to seduce Rich’s brother. The other girl, my best friend Jessica and I decided we wanted to walk to the store for some gum. Then we detoured to another couple of friends house. Jessica decided she needed to get home, it was 4 am. I wasn’t really worried about Rich and his brother being at the house I figured they would leave once Jessica went to get Mona. Wrong.

 

Jessica and Mona came back to tell me that Rich and Donny had gotten in a fistfight in my parents living room after downing a bottle of whiskey of my Dad’s and stealing a bottle of wine and that Donny had puked on the rug. I came back to my parents house then went to their Dad’s apartment to find them. When I got to the building, Rich was passed out up the first flight of stairs with the stolen bottle of wine on the landing in front of him. I roused him and made him get into the house. His brothers were sleeping on the couches. I was furious and was planning on talking to him later but the dumbass kept trying to follow me out the door. So finally, not wanting to wake his dad or brothers arguing with him there I told him to get into the car and we went back to my parents. I was furious. It’s one thing to treat me like shit but don’t fuck with my folks, even if they can be assholes.

 

We started to argue. I told him how dare he and his brother come into my parents house, trash shit and steal from them. I wouldn’t take any of his guilt bullshit. I refused to take responsibility for his actions anymore and I told him so. It was him, NOT me. He couldn’t handle that and he snapped.

 

The next thing I knew I was flying across the room. I leapt up screaming at him to get out as he swung at my face. I thought about my father’s .357 in the bedroom and a voice that could have only been my guardian angel told me, “If you go for the gun he will kill you with it.”

 

I tried to shove him out the door and he tackled me. He sat up, straddling my stomach and began to strangle me. I couldn’t breathe, my throat locked shut by his hands. I tried to scratch his eyes out but only was able to leave a pathetic shallow gash on his right cheek. I began to panic. I knew he was going to kill me. My vision started to spot and blur.

 

I heard the voice again in my head. “Go for his balls.”

 

I reached down around his hands but was only able to get a little. I twisted, pinched and squeezed for all I was worth. A little goes a long way in a case like this. Rich let go of my throat with his right hand, drew back his fist and punched me as hard as he could. The blow landed just above my left eye. It would take over seven months for that bump to disappear. He jumped up and headed out the door. I was in some out of my head state of mind because I saw him going for my car. I couldn’t even think ’get help’ or ’call police’. I was in some visceral state of freak-the-fuck-out. I thought he was going to steal my car. When I ran up to him he grabbed me and I was air born again, landing on all fours in the gravel of the driveway. He didn’t get in the drivers side, he opened the back door where he had been sitting earlier and got his notebooks out, then stomped off, no sign of drunkenness in his walk.

 

I jumped in my car and drove back down to my friend’s house. I left the front door wide open. My mother later showed up in a panic wanting to know what happened. I told her. We didn’t press charges which was just stupid on my part. I really don’t know where my head was then. I was still angry. He could have killed me but I wanted him to feel bad for what he did.

 

I went over to his Dad’s later, I can’t remember why now. Woke him up. He sat up and looked at me, tried to craft a confused look on his face and asked me, “Dearest, what happened last night?”

 

I could tell by the look on his face he remembered everything. He was all apologies. He was so sorry, called me dearest again. I hated him more then than I ever thought possible.

 

 

A Hard Look Within, Part Two

Growing up, my mother was a very faithful church goer and extremely traditional.  Old fashioned we call it.  Marriage before sex.  Don’t talk about sex with the kids, or death and make sure the child knows about God.

In Sunday school we used to learn all about Jesus.  He seemed like a pretty cool guy what with the miracles and all.  He even liked kids!  I liked Jesus.

Then there was God.  My mother told me at age four or five that I had to love God more than my parents.  ‘Cause God said so.  I had to love God more than Jesus.  Jesus was his son.  Parents we supposed to love God more than their children.

In my child’s brain this sounded like bullshit.  Everybody knew Jesus was real, they had pictures for Christ’s sake!  Yet I was supposed to love this invisible God guy, the same guy who was into smiting and Earth flooding and sending plagues and all sorts of horrid stuff more than I was to love my own parents? He didn’t take care of me or buy me birthday presents!  Not in the way any way I understood.  It sounded like a load of horseshit and I wasn’t buying it.  I thought God sounded like a real asshole.

Things would change later and I made my peace with the Creator.  But that was perhaps the starting point of my ‘question everything’ attitude.  I didn’t trust what my parents told me to necessarily be truthful or correct.  Not that they lied to me, it just seemed like there was a serious gap in their information.  Also, my mother’s views, especially at that time walked a very narrow and unforgiving path.  My mother and I have always thought very differently.  She has always been a strict routine follower and I am a go-with-the-flow personality.  I am also very disorganized which is a downturn.

This history set the groundwork for my often mistaken ideas as I got older.  My parents were as I have said depression era children.  My parents are literally old enough to be my grandparents.  I will be thirty-eight this year, Mom will be seventy-nine.  My father would have been eighty-seven this year had he lived this long.

My sisters were ten and thirteen years older than I was.  They grew up in the sixties.  So on one hand I had my mother preaching chastity, straight laced morals and religion and the other my sisters, preaching sex, drugs and rock ’n roll.

I couldn’t have a real conversation with my mother growing up that didn’t somehow involve religious views.  My mother found her sanity with her church-life devotion.  She had married a man she didn’t love, who didn’t love her and he was an asshole.  She had to find something to make it through the forty-eight year misery of a marriage and the church was it.

My sisters both shacked up with different guys.  My eldest sister got married to her high school sweetheart at age nineteen.  It was because she was pregnant but whatever.  They are still together even though I think she drives him batshit.  My middle sister had different boyfriends and live-ins, got married and divorced and has been with the guy she’s with now for several years.

So somehow in my rather confused, budding pubescent brain I got this really fucked up idea that a guy would love you if you had sex with him.  At age thirteen I so wanted a boyfriend and there was a guy I liked who apparently liked all my friends as well.  But he made out with me a few times so that meant he wanted to be with me, right?  He flitted between a few of us.  Of all the talks I had with my mother I don’t think she ever once told me about the capacity for a guy to use a girl for sex.  My father, on the other hand always told me people were just using me, but he said that about all my friends and didn’t get any more detailed than that.  If a girlfriend wanted to stay the night so we could go to a school football game they were ’just using you’!

I honestly don’t think my mother knew the scope that guys would go to use a girl for sex.  She wasn’t’ raised in that generation.  Things were a lot different ’back when’.

At some point I got it into my head at age thirteen that if I had sex with this little bastard he would then be my boyfriend.  I also thought he would like me better than my current rival because she hadn’t done this with him.

Even now the memory of that day and this shit-storm to follow made my stomach heave.

Dad and Mom were both off somewhere.  It was 1984 and Dad had recently retired.  There was a whole bunch of alcohol left upstairs in the attic.  Two of my guy friends and this jerk I was crushing on came over.

He and I went into my room while the other two were, I thought, in the living room.

So here we were, no protection, me willing quite reluctantly to surrender this virginity thing if I could only have a boyfriend.  And what do you know! He loved me!  He said so!  He even told me if it hurt too bad he would stop. Well, it hurt like hell and when I told him to stop he didn’t.  I didn’t think he heard so I yelled louder.  He still didn’t stop.  I went ballistic.  After about three really solid kidney punches and a hefty shove, he stopped.  The other two guys had left.  That night I felt like I had done something very grown up.  Like I had matured more than my friends in the (thankfully) incomplete 20 second fiasco.  I fancied myself a woman, then.

The next day, people at school were asking me if I had really done it with that kid.  The day after that, my father was screaming at me about what a little slut I was as I sat in horrified silence at the dining room table.  The school had called.  The three boys had gotten busted with a bottle of my father’s whiskey at school.  The little bastard I had been with tried to save his ass by telling the school principle he couldn’t possibly have been guilty because while the other two were stealing the booze he had been in the bedroom fucking me.  The whole school was talking about it the next day.  All of it.

“Why you always gotta be so tough?’  my father would scream at me several times over the years.

My smartass mouth would shout one thing but my heart screamed, “Because if I show a chink in my armor you or any number of other heartless bastards is going to rip the heart right out of me and leave me one of the walking dead you fucker!”

A Hard Look Within, Part One

If GM were to read this blog he would claim that I was bashing his family. That I had no right to post any of what he would consider ‘these private family matters’ online for millions of anonymous people to read. Anyone who has grown up in an abusive relationship or been the victim of domestic violence would be able to recognize this. These are the Secrets That Must Be Kept. This is how domestic violence and abuse survive. Breeding in the shadows, unexposed like some virus waiting to be spread. There is an almost superstitious quality in this silence. Keep the silence and that makes the violence less. Keep the silence and it may stop. Keep the silence and it may not come to pass. Keep the silence and it may not be true. Keep the silence and it may go away. Keep the silence and take the reality out of it. Yet violence doesn’t go away. It is not forgotten and it is very real. Violence can fester in that dark place only to later come bursting forth in pustulant foulness, wreaking havoc and physical and emotional destruction.

My father was a man who worked very hard at his job. We had a middle class income. My father never wanted people to think he was cheap and did not believe in saving money. If I asked for a dollar he would tell me he was broke while opening a wallet full of twenty dollar bills. He was my cousin’s favorite uncle. He wanted a son, got three daughters and treated us as if we weren’t worth the flesh on our bones.

My mother was made to deal with the bill collectors. When my sister’s were small, she had to walk downtown with them in the wagon to do her grocery shopping because my father wanted to take the car to work and didn‘t want to car-pool. On the weekends he would drive the seventy-two miles down the lakeshore to stay with his mother and work with his brother. Not for pay, just to ‘help out J’. When we were smaller my mother, sisters and I were drug down there every weekend to stay at my grandmother’s house while my father either worked, or went out drinking with his brother.

My sisters left home as soon as they could so by the time I was five my mother and I stayed home alone, with no transportation, every weekend while Dad left for Uncle J’s. ( Eventually Uncle J, in appreciation for all Dad had done for him, paid off my parent’s house for them. )

We got to see my Mom’s mother and sisters once a year when we went down for the Fourth of July. My mother didn’t have a car of her own until I was ten.

When I was very small, Dad seemed to like my company. He tolerated me anyway. My parents were raised in the Depression era. Mom was forty-one when she had me and Dad was forty-eight. Usually, when I was small, if I did one of the many things kids do to get in trouble my mother would deal out the punishment. Mouth washed out with soap for calling her a Fucker, my favorite word at two, sitting in the chair for what seemed like hours for minor infractions and getting my ass whipped with either a belt, hand or metal spatula when I really pissed her off. I don’t really remember my Dad spanking me but maybe once or twice. I must have been about three or four years old when I met with the type of punishments my father could dish out that weren’t verbal in nature.

We were at the dinner table. My parents always seemed to dish up these huge adult sized portions of everything for me. We had green beans. Green beans were fat and slimy, reminded me of dead caterpillars with their legs hacked off and smelled like rotting vegetation the way my mother boiled them. I had gotten in trouble for trying to get the family dog, a fat beagle named Hilda to eat them. She had the same opinion of them as me. I was whiny. Didn’t want to eat them no way no how. My Father was sitting beside me. I was sitting on a piano stool. An antique one that’s seat unscrewed to get taller or shorter. My father was getting more and more angry at me and I was getting more and more stubborn. Out of the blue he backhanded me so hard in the mouth that both the piano stool and I went over backwards, cracking my head hard against the floor. I was surprised, scared and hurt and as I laid on the floor crying, no one did or said anything except my father who yelled at me that if I didn’t shut up and quit crying he would ‘give me something to cry about’.

Shut up or get something to cry about. So it began. His verbal abuse, name calling and put downs got worse and worse. I was ‘pig-headed’ had a ‘mean streak’ and was a ‘lazy shitass’. I wasn’t the only one who got cut down on a regular basis by my father. My sisters, before they moved out and my mother as well. My mother, who had graduated college was a ‘know it all’ and who was overweight and couldn’t ‘think of anything but her stomach’. Then there was me, who later began to have a weight problem I still have who always had ‘eyes bigger than your stomach’. As I began to get older, things were only worse. The fights my father and I had were always screaming matches. If I showed emotions like frustrated crying or anger I was always punished for it. Sarcastic cynicism grew in me and what started out as anger repressed again and again turned in me to this blinding destructive fury.

Even before my teens I lost all respect for not only my father but also my mother. I looked upon her as a spineless pathetic bitch for never standing up to my father either for me or for herself. When the screaming matches turned to physical blows and my father would punch me in the face my mother would stay in the kitchen and do nothing. I always thought it was because she was afraid for herself. She says it was because she didn’t want to ‘make it worse’ for me. She would never even see if I was alright afterwards and there is still a deep furious anger I have in me because of this. I have not been able to forgive her yet it seems.

At school I was the scary girl with the ‘Fuck You’ attitude dressed head to toe in black with black eyeliner and mascara. I hung out in the parking lot with the rest of the ‘Freaks ‘ smoking Marlboro reds in a box and cutting math class and study hall to go hang out down by the river or at the local coffee shop until it was time to go home.

Screaming matches between my father and myself were constant. During my junior high years he still had me cowed with his violent attacks. But my rage and fury only grew every year. If I cried I was punished more so I bottled it. Even now, the only time I can really let go and have a really good cleansing cry is if I smoke some weed first. I don’t cry much. It turns to anger instead.

He would always ask me, in anger, ‘Why do you gotta be so goddamned mean?’

‘Cuz I learned it all from you!!’ I would spit back.

I don’t know how many times I told him I wished he were dead. He would tell me, ‘When I’m dead you can come shit on my grave.’ I always told him I damned well would.

For some insane reason having to do with a kids self worth or some such shit, I passed eighth grade with straight Fs and was sent on to high school. My first two quarters went well enough in spite of having some upper-class girls spreading bullshit rumors throughout our whole small town school that I was pregnant the first two weeks of my freshman year. But it soon became apparent that school, especially math was not my forte and I knew by my Junior year there was no hope salvaging it unless I repeated a year and there was no way in hell I wanted to do that. Technically I am still on Christmas vacation from 1989.

This relationship with my father not only affected my feelings of self worth, but my ability to succeed in school and in some ways have a successful start in life as an adult. When you grow up being told constantly that you are lazy or can’t do something, when you grow up knowing your parents find you an annoyance and an irritating burden, the ability to become a self sufficient, confident adult becomes extremely difficult. Not only did this constant negative and sometimes violent relationship affect my ability to be healthy in my own emotions, its effects would carry through to every relationship I would attempt to have with men as well. The relationship I had with my father not only left me emotionally battered, it left me emotionally starved and open to victimization even before I left high school.

My first long term relationship was with a man six years older than me. I met him a month before my fifteenth birthday. I was supporting us both by the time I was seventeen. For my eighteenth birthday present to myself I broke up with him. Two weeks later he almost killed me.