6.07.2016

13% [chapter 10]

SUICIDE GIRLS


The 2nd blossom to burst open in '89 was that of Suicide.


When you were still a kid, sitting in your favorite hiding place next to a tiny window at the back of a hall closet upstairs, you considered throwing yourself out onto the ground. But you knew this short fall would not kill you. So you pet the kitty instead, crawled across furniture on your hands and knees, ate some cat food with her and meowed. You wondered if being a feline was any less depressing than being a 10 year old girl, stuck living in a brown house with a brown car under a brown cloud. The brown kitty meowed.


Once, your mother abruptly grabbed the car keys just before dawn. All bleary-eyed and hurriedly shoved into coats, she hurled your brother and you into the back seat and threw some crap in the trunk. It seemed as though she had finally come to her senses and decided to leave her abusive husband. Both of you kids beamed with the excitement of being removed from those corrosive strokes that haunted your small darkened days. Feeling this short warm blast of your mother's love, such heavenly protection that you had for so long craved, you couldn't wait to go anywhere she decided to take you. At last, you've been saved!


But less than a mile went by before she pulled into a Burger King parking lot and started to cry. You sat silently staring out of the window at 2 tiny broken twigs in the drifting early morning mist. Then she started the car, pulled out of the parking lot and sat with the engine running at the empty crossroads of Black River Boulevard and North 46. Watching the light change from green to red to green to red and green again. "Go straight", you howled in your head, "please just go straight ahead!" She turned left. Back to the house.


You sank, gutted. In a flash of panic, you and your brother looked at each other. Reaching out, you clasped hands. Both of you knew there would be hell to pay for this. And you knew it would be years before either of you would be big enough to protect yourselves from those hard impatient fists that your mother, sadly, had neither the strength nor the will to resist. She would never know how much this seemingly insignificant event completely crushed her children's spirits.


Only once did you ever witness your father physically attack your mother. Screaming that she was a stupid bitch, he kicked the back of the chair she was sitting in. When she fell, he pushed her face down into the carpet, as if he were potty training a dog. But far more frequently, she'd put up with a formidable browbeating every 20 minutes or so for 50+ years of marital bliss. Still, she stayed with him. And to this day, still is. "I promised Til Death Do Us Part," she quivered. Then voiced that she regretted everything she ever did, "including giving birth to you kids." Stick it in. Then twist.


So your family remained immobile for a short while beneath the woeful skies of Mohawk territory, under the deafening noise of a military base runway in Rome, New York. It's surprising how quickly the brain can become accustomed to such an intrusive sound, strangely missing the thunderous roar of fighter jets when they were no longer there to drown out the yelling rounds. But the beatings and gropings only seemed to increase with each drop of degree in the weather, which, in upstate, brings new meaning to the word freeze.


More than twice, in Roosevelt, New Jersey, you held razor blades to your flesh. Sitting in the bathtub, you tried to scrub yourself clean with steel wool to remove the vilified stains of semen and sweat. But that filth had seeped in too far below the skin. So you dug into your budded breasts in a listless attempt to cut them off. Though you only drew inch long openings before pulling out. The beauty of trickling blood instantly severed your brain from that hot buzzing claustrophobic cage of hatred. Like a cool breeze, in rivulets of relief, you hovered above your head, pulsating with endorphins and a breathless benevolent peace. This discovery stuck. So a cutter you would come to be. Fascinated, you watched the body's unstoppable healing process as it did its best to remind you that there are other emotions you can feel besides loneliness, abandonment and melancholy.


That was the year you testified in court against your dad. He was sentenced to 5 years probation. It could have been significantly worse for him had you told the truth on the stand. But your non-communicative mother was obviously not on your side. And in this meantime, you still had to live with these people, with their dagger filled eyes stabbing you for dinner every night.


You began to wonder if it was a mistake to bring the abuse to light at all. Or to tone down its severity to the Family Services authorities. But you told yourself you were doing it for this dysfunctional family's sake; to keep you all together. Right after dropping the bomb that laid bare this disgrace.


So you lied.


You lied so that your dad wouldn't get sent to prison where he'd be killed by inmates. You lied so that your jobless mom wouldn't be deported back to England, leaving your brother and you to be thrown into foster care - a decidedly worse fate. You lied so that you wouldn't be mechanically separated inside the system of trafficked child care; where you may be free from the torture of a known biological devil, but now, you'd be thrown into a deeper hell, being owned by the satanic red tape of the state. At least, that's what you had pictured in your 13 year old brain. "You're crazy," they'd say. You're welcome, fuckfaces.


Many long disaffected Wednesday nights were spent driving to Trenton for the group therapy sessions you were now required to take. It already felt as if you were being punished for having brought this matter of sexual abuse to society's attention, but now you were being punished again, stuck in the car alone with your father. Therapists told him to be open with his feelings, so he openly shared all of the gory details of his ongoing wet dreams that always featured you. You said nothing. Just turned your head and stared out the window at the waning moon, drooping through a blur of passing trees in deep set indigo fields of gloom.


In Trenton's huge civic meeting rooms, tinted lemon yellow cement bricks and cracking tan linoleum tiles were lit in spastic flourescent twitches. A welcoming circle of cushy orange vinyl loveseats and low oval tables crowned in thin metal ashtrays did their best to comfort the embedded stresses heard at Group. Spurts of muffled laughter and boisterous yells would waft up the hall from the gathering Men's Group.


One evening, all of the other sexually abused girls passionately declared, "Yes!" They would love to kill their perpetrators. Even sweet doe-eyed Latisha who was 7 months pregnant and excited about giving birth to her own father's baby. But you said no to this question. Everyone, including the social worker, demanded to know, "Why the hell not?!" The only answer you could verbalize was that no matter what damage you could do to him, there'd be no escaping the fact that this fucking man is still your fucking dad. Dead or alive, you're forced to live with that.


Then you'd eat as many of the free crackers and cheese they put in front of you, getting fatter and sadder and more withdrawn in little increments, week after week. And every time, 15 year old Sandra would tsk tsk tsk, clucking disapprovingly while you stuffed your face. "I gotta stay skinny for my men," she'd proclaim, "cuz that's how they like me." Her impeccably manicured hands gliding down her sheer lavendar blouse, from her ribcage to her tiny waist. But you remained fairly certain that, fat or thin, it made no difference. Old men would just as soon grope you as stick it to an anthill or a warm sack of poo.


These days, even your beloved brother had ceased speaking to you due to his own complete teenage withdrawl. He had his own issues to deal with. One of his 2 best friends had just attempted suicide, and later succeeded, after the 3 of them went on a summer vacation to Israel under the watchful eye of a local rabbi-turned-priest, the late Reverend John Gruel. They returned from that trip severly damaged after the holy pedophile's yearly retreat. He had raped well over 150 young boys, maybe more, during his highly praised life. Almost the same number of people that he'd bravely led to safety, helping them escape certain death in the Nazi concentration camps of WWII on a ship known as Exodus. Only to destroy the lives of their grandsons. Is there enough forgiveness in God's hands for this?


Listening to Pink Floyd and Kate Bush tapes on your headphones, or riding your yellow 10 speed bike for miles, or practicing Beethoven on the piano at school, or typing RUN to play the 'E.T.' theme song you programmed on a Commodore 64, or hiding up in the big old elm tree at bedtime, or taking square pictures with your 135mm camera, or swimming down to the drain grate at the deep end of the public pool were the cherished bright spots of solace still left open to you. But then you had to Get Out Of The Water. And walk to your towel. With all those incriminating small town eyes either judging or pitying or rubbing up against the not so private parts of you.


Suicide started to look real good after such vulgar demolition took what was left of your tattered cellulite squeezing self esteem. Enter the emancipation of razor blades --so many years prior to their reappearance in your life as a tool for rendering snortable all those thick crunchy rails of crystal meth up into yer sunken ol' reject face.


Just writing that made you crave it's rapturous pain again.


Cringe. Wash it off. Breathe. Deeper. Sit with it. Don't avoid the grief. Breathe it in. And breathe out relief. Not just for yourself, but for every single person on the planet that is, at this very moment, struggling with the same weakness, the same need to feel free from society's sickness. Sing something. Breathe. Then turn the page.


At 19, you experienced a small bout of freedom, of what life might be like outside the parental penitentiary where all of your belongings were routinely inspected and sometimes confiscated. Things like your Dayglo Abortions record and your favorite pair of Converse hightops. Your father had retired from The Air Force as an electrical engineer and was
now a proud card carrying member of the Reagan/Bush Task Force, helping to develop America's first spy satellites. So it's no wonder he continued to invade your privacy daily.


After graduating from high school in Huntsville, Alabama, you accepted a scholarship that granted you a semester at Montevallo University in Birmingham. For a few months, you breathed more easily. The following winter, your parents told you they were moving back up to the east coast for a job promotion. You wanted to go with them because the South was a place where rocks were often thrown at you with taunts of Witch! Dyke! Satan Worshipper! Freak!


On the flip side, the South was also a place where you knew who your friends were. These were the sweetheart punks that you were tripping on acid with in basements, in cars, in forests and on mountains. Drawing geometric patterns in the stars to an impressively diverse soundtrack that ranged from Big Black to Bessie Smith, from Agnostic Front to Arvo Paart, from Minor Threat to Bob Marley, from Cro-Mags to This Mortal Coil, from Saccharine Trust to The Sugarcubes, from Metallica to REM, from Bad Brains to Brian Eno, from Janis Joplin to Fishbone, from Agent Orange to Edith Piaf, from Jane's Addiction to Nina Simone, from The Specials to Killing Joke, from Lighetti to Love and Rockets, from Bach to Nico.
Sometimes you had to gently remind your peaking friends that it was not a good idea to lick the church or prostrate themselves in the middle of the highway if they wanted to avoid jail time.These were also the honorable hard core skins that you defended, slipping a steel pole out from the sleeve of your leather jacket during the violent attacks from gangs of jocks and sons of the cops. Their dads, sitting in their patrol cars watching, laughing and egging on their kids, "Git tha nigger boy! Git 'im!"


One summer, your friend Dee was beaten half to death with baseball bats because she was riding a pink bicycle in a pink dress, her pink hair blowing wildly in the wind. Yes, in this place, you knew who your friends were. Moreso than other places that don't pose the same kind of day to day threats to people whose mere existence in a public space is offensive to others. An anathema. As if you had kicked their dog. Or slapped their baby. Or spat in their stink-eyed puckered up squishy pig face. That's Life In The Big City, but what really scared you was the open obvious and proud possession of guns always within reach. It wasn't long before you found it in your best interest to learn how to use a 9mm, a 12 guage, an AR15.


By January, your parents reluctantly agreed to take you north with them. Charging you rent to live in their house was meant to teach you a lesson. You learned that they didn't want you around. Fair enough. Not long after the move to Massachusetts, you took half a bottle of sleeping pills. This was your first somewhat serious attempt to commit suicide. Clearly it wasn't serious enough since you didn't take the whole bottle. But you would not call what happened next a dream. It was a vision.


Descending upon a landscape, circling down to a flat barren plain somewhere in the midwestern states, you see a deteriorating white wooden farmhouse. The year is circa 1888. A woman, weathered with fortitude, wears a heavy gray woolen dress. She is frantically gathering her children together to send them into the root cellar for shelter. A tornado is rapidly approaching. You can see it hurling up debris from the empty acres of fields gone fallow. Clouds beckoning ever blacker with each surge of the winds as they strain and funnel down, rumbling and devouring everything on the ground. Pushing, the solitary tree trunk groans and lurches. The woman's gutteral screams can barely be heard. "HURRY!" Pulling at the irritating weight of her dress, it drags at her with it's unnecessary girth, but she must hurry to keep the children safe. She must hurry! The tornado is whipping in closer, spitting up earth.


You are so close to her now that you become her. The gravity of her terror is suffocating. All you kids get in! Bolt the cellar door! The twister is coming, coming straight for us! Everything I have worked so hard for is going to disappear in this horrid wind. Is there nothing I can do? What can I do?! I must DO something! I have to...sacrifice something. Sacrifice myself. Give myself to the storm. If I give my life to it, to God's mercy, my children will live! Yes, I must do that. Run! It's coming - RUN! I will I will I will! I love them, God I love them! I must do it for them! I must die for them! I MUST!


Across the stabs of broken dry corn stalks, we run. Across the lonesome years of ache and toil that barely kept the little ones going, we run. Across the losses, the regrets, the beloved husband we long since put down in the soil beneath that tree that will soon uproot, we now run to our own illusory deaths. Edges catch and tear, ripping off dirty mended and remended ends of our heavy woolen dress, yet we run. We run faster and harder, losing everything, we've lost it all, gone is our last breath.


At the cusp of the tornado's upward strength, we don't need to run anymore. It picks us up from 7 or so rows away. We are sacrificed. But this deed does no good. A storm holds no tally. Souls are not scores. There is no game. A tornado does not care what people believe. The children may or may not survive. Nature's indifference thrives. And all we feel inside the spiraling eye is unending human suffering. A seething sense of regret that can never be corrected. And we are trapped in this torrential swirling fugue, this mass of countless souls in desperate misery, suspended and wailing with such unfathomable sorrows.


You rose from your bed and gently went outside into the snow and silence. Wandering along dark suburban roads in a daze at 3am, you came to a wooded field at a dead end. Silky black ash branches glittered like wet ink against the city-lit orange clouds that scudded across a low lying sky. After the owl cries fell mute, all things hushed. In this diffused place, a promise was made that you have managed to keep, still to this day.


Then, you realized you were only wearing pajamas. It was about 23 degrees. And you were not asleep.



*u can call me ph!*