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 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!”