1. He tells you as he is making out with you, “Someday your future boyfriend will be really glad I taught you this.”
2. He corrects and critiques the way you break your bread, showing you how to separate the roll into four equal pieces.
3. He stays up all night scraping the black factory-painted pinstripe off of his truck because he can’t sleep until it’s entirely gone.
4. He stays up all night making cardboard hotels for cats, convinced he will be rich off of his invention.
5. He owns a limo, but it turns out he’s the driver, and he likes to tell you often what he watches the passengers doing in the backseat.
6. He explains that he likes you a lot, and will share a bed with you, but doesn’t feel comfortable sitting on the same couch as you.
7. He steals your expensive perfume bottle (again) and “secretly” gives it as a present to his other girlfriend.
8. He doesn’t have driving insurance and totals his truck while on a secret rendezvous to the mountains with his other lover, and then asks you to come get him at the hospital.
9. He says, after your first dinner date, which he planned to be out of town, that he is too drunk to drive home but has conveniently already booked a hotel room nearby.
10. He promises he just wants to cuddle.
11. He says he has a romantic surprise for you, and when you enter the room there is a “toy” and a video camera set up.
12. His father tells you, after your lover has gone missing for three days: “He is just like me, a player, and he ain’t changing.”
13. His mother takes you out to an intimate lunch and tells you, “You are so smart and lovely and kind, why are you with my son?”
14. He takes you to an antique store to teach you have to shoplift.
15. He sells you a stereo that he bought with his roommates “stolen” credit card.
16. He doesn’t come and find you when you run out of the house crying.
17. He calls his ex-girlfriend when you are still in bed together.
18. He has rearranged the photos of you as a couple each time you come over.
19. He lives with his sister, has no job, is addicted to pain-killers, and is a chain-smoker.
20. He makes you gag.
21. He makes you wish you lived on another planet.
22. He says, “I don’t love you, I’m certain.”
23. He is the roommate of the other really odd guy you dated.
24. He has an ex-wife that warns, “Watch out, he is trouble.”
25. He enters a room and every woman wants to give him his number, and he takes them.
26. He has deep dark brown bedroom eyes, and he knows it.
27. He shows up late all the time, and always has a very detailed excuse.
28. He says, “It depends, are you planning on losing weight,” when you ask him if you should cut your hair shorter.
29. He tells you how to dress.
30. He tells to wear long fake fingernails painted pink.
31. He is in therapy with you and seeing another therapist with his wife.
32. He enters the athletic gym, and the male employees look at you, raise a brow, and say in a derogatory tone, “That’s your boyfriend?”
33. He was the first man you saw after breaking up with your other boyfriend who was the first man you saw.
34. He claims he cannot tell you where he lives because it is a temporary situation and he can’t give you his phone number because he doesn’t have a phone.
35. He plans a party and not one person shows up.
36. He asks your father for your hand in marriage, shortly after his mistress, holding a baby, kicks down his apartment door in an attempt to kill you.
37. He does things with himself at stop signs you know are plain wrong, but he insists everyone does it.
38. He lies to his mother.
39. He yells at you because you packed the camping ice-chest wrong.
40. He tells you that your suspicions about his cheating on you means you are paranoid.
41. He likes beer with his breakfast.
42. He takes you out to drink “brain freeze” alcoholic shots for the first date.
43. He tells you all about his special adventures with his guy friend, with a twinkle of love in his eyes.
44. He takes you to a party and you find him half-naked in the bathroom with his ex-girlfriend, and he claims she is helping to adjust his Halloween costume.
45. He tells you how you could be prettier.
46. He asks you to buy something for his mother’s birthday because he can’t afford it.
47. He takes you on an out-of-state trip, via airplane, to his hometown and disappears in the early morning to meet up with a past lover.
48. He calls you from a phone booth, a few blocks away, claiming he is out-of-town working for a few days.
49. He doesn’t say, “You are beautiful.”
(He points out your mistakes often, like forgetting to add number 50 to this list.)
Please protect your aspie daughter. Teach her she is worthy. Love her unconditionally. Pay attention to her. She doesn’t know as much as you think she does. She thinks, like herself, that everyone is kind-hearted and filled with good intention. Teach her about red flags, about predators, about liars, about trickery, and about manipulation. Teach her about appropriate behavior and conduct. Consider her an angel on earth, uneducated about the ways of this world. Hold her and cherish her. And above all teach her how special she is.
This was my first album; I used to play this song over and over and over. I memorized all the lyrics. I was so awesome.
Random thought: What if the reason why my dog is so very happy to see me every morning is because in her reality one night is 100 years!
I awoke before four in the morning today with words and images twirling nonstop in my mind. I felt like a giant lollipop being dipped in the swirls of sweet wisdom. Although I was sleepy, and wanting to fall back into a deep slumber, I was made awake, wrapped spiritually in what could essentially be called a lesson review of sorts.
The images and thoughts came swiftly, and with a touch of deliberate humor, ended with memories of my first college course, where I sat a plum-faced, shy freshman girl, surrounded by upper classmen. I had signed up for Psychology of Human Sexuality Course on a whim, having had no clue that the course would actually be about real sex!
I giggled this early morn, as the lesson dancing in my head wrapped up, and I was reminded of the term penis envy, a popular belief back in the early days of my schooling: the thought that many of women’s psychological insecurities are caused by their subconscious desire to have the same package as men.
I chuckled inside at the memory of class, of going around in a circle, and each of us female members of the group describing our degree of envy. Back then, I was so malleable, still am, that any belief system set upon me, I innocently absorbed as truth. Thusly, I went around for many years thinking I wanted to grow male stuff.
Today, in the wee hours of the morn, as the lesson began, with my mind’s eye, I saw numerous dogs and cats posed in various ways in their silly hats and wearing their silly expressions. And then I saw a massive amount of other animals, starting with the more common American pets of snakes, turtles, and hamsters, and ending with pigs and rats, and even monkeys. The debate came to my mind between cat lovers and dog lovers, and then I saw how silly the debate was. I saw that as a society we created these pets as our favorites, and then divided the camps. I thought about why they were our favorites: cuddly, responsive, expressive, fairly clean and predictable, sensitive, and perhaps even thoughtful.
And then I thought that the love of dogs and cats was all by choice, that as a collective we could easily have chosen a pig and a rat as our favorite pets, that instead of cats and dogs that pigs and rats could be there in their place…perhaps in another time or universe.
I began to visualize the various poses of pigs in their holiday wear and with their big eyes, and with captions written across their photos. I could see the rats too, all decked out for the season, with jingle bell vests, and more. It wasn’t such a leap out of our current reality.
In truth, much of what happens is all about what we as a whole choose to make our reality.
Then I realized that the expectations we have upon animals do actually affect the behavior of the overall species. With millions of people thinking dogs are awesomely friendly, no wonder they walk around with goofy grins and wagging tails. I imagine that if the collective believed all natural brunettes were brilliant, fascinating, and someone to aspire to be, I would walk around with my bum shaking a bit too, with goofy smile to boot.
I began to wonder what would happen if we replaced all the cats and dogs (temporarily and in theory only) with two other animals. I visualized the majority of pet owners with a snake at their side, cuddling during a television show, with the turtle tucked under the covers with their owner at bedtime. And the thoughts didn’t seem so farfetched; for with enough conditioning and collective belief, we have the potential to mold any species’ behavior.
I had intense laughable visuals of a pet owner holding their ant farm during a movie or even housing a bee’s nest in their home and keeping a window open for free access to the fields. I began to see how anything was possible, if enough people believed or accepted a norm. This is evident from culture to culture, when considering what animals are revered, accepted as pets, or eaten for supper.
These thoughts led to the concept of ownership, and the fact that most domesticated dogs are entirely dependent upon their owner. I imagined what that dependency must feel like for dogs, how they must wonder when the food will come, the fresh water, the walks, the grooming, the holding, the words “good dog.” How they live their lives essentially as a prisoner to their master’s behavior, wherein the pet is entirely dependent on what their owner does.
I began to think that perhaps this dependency could cause some dogs a type of sadness, as I believe was in the case of my Goldendoodle, Scooby. For the first couple years of Scooby’s life, Scoob appeared mostly sad and withdrawn, until we brought home another dog. Then his spirit lit up and he seemed to come alive. But then he fell into another sadness spell, shortly after we moved to Washington, and he had less of a yard for roaming. He began to crave walks, and beg for walks, and on the days there were no walks, he sat in the corner forlorn. Scoob also despised all dog food. Most of his days he set about to steal whatever people food he could from out of the sink or atop the stove—like some grizzly bear at a picnic. He was adorable, but primarily a sad pup. Being empathetic to animals, I always sought to cheer him up, through fur massages and rough housing with a stuffed toy, even dancing to music. Still, he seemed to feel as if he was trapped in a life I ordained for him, that I ran, that I created.
This thought led me to the idea of the human experience, that we, too, as a people, have our own masters: our accepted beliefs; and that in truth, the only thing we can control, as many ancient teachings state, are our thoughts.
I suppose my Scooby didn’t have that capacity—to control his thoughts. Instead all he could see at certain times was missed opportunity. Even on the days we walked, he longed for more. Perhaps he would have been the happiest on a ranch estate. Perhaps if he’d had the capacity to daydream, that is where he went, to the golden fields where he could run until his legs gave out beneath him. I like to think that is where he is now, with a perpetual wet-nosed smile upon his face.
From here my thoughts turned to the social taboos of societies. It was at the age of eighteen, in that human sexuality college course, I first learned about how a society actually creates what is socially acceptable. I remember pondering about the collective creating ideals of rights and wrong, popular and unpopular, and loved and unloved.
The way my professor explained social taboo, forever stayed in my mind. The professor asked the class to visualize a planet in which it was socially unacceptable to eat in front of another person; to imagine a place where you were only allowed to eat in private or with a special significant other, a world in which people ate in the dark of their bedrooms, even under the covers; a place where chewing in public was seen as vulgar and disgusting, and punishable by law. My professor explained about how the body opening of the mouth was only to be used for practical purposes in public: for breathing, drinking, and talking. Laughing was a risk, for the mouth might open too wide.
This other world’s eating taboo he then compared to sexual intercourse and the naked flesh taboos of this world.
I remember then that a light bulb turned on in my mind. It was in that classroom I understood that much of what I was told and much of what was modeled were based on a collective’s culture and belief system, and that I was living in a world with unpredictable and shifting values.
In theory what was a norm that day and what was deemed taboo at the same moment would shift with the passing of time. I remember feeling extreme discomfort. I recall analyzing the current taboos of the time, particularly mixed-race marriage and homosexuality. I concluded that in time people’s views would shift, and as a whole our outlook and perception would change, that the unacceptable would become accepted, or at least move in the direction of the majority accepting.
The reality of the collective establishing truth boggled my mind. I could see clearly how I was a part of the collective and even though I was aware that I lived in a society that created truths and rights and wrongs, that even with my awareness I was continually molded by these created truths. I was in essence powerless.
I wondered where the truth really rested, how I could reach it, and how would I know.
I recognized that at a certain level, beyond conscious awareness, I was affected by what others accepted as truth. I recognized ultimately I was affected by what others thought. Living on this planet, the collective belief system was to a degree always to be a cornerstone of my own belief system—their reality, my reality; their conclusions, my conclusions.
I innately knew, I wouldn’t be able to fully grasp multi-dimensions, the supernatural, and the magic of the world, until the majority accepted this as a possibility, but that even then, whatever was believed and grasped onto by the whole could and would once again shift.
I was a dependent part of an intricate and mind-blowing mechanism, no less and no more, and entirely unable to escape. In a sense, I was my dog, my Scooby, waiting in my chair to see what the masters did.
It wasn’t until this morning, through all of these aforementioned thoughts that manifested in a span of twenty-minutes, that I recognized what was happening to me with more clarity: a shift was occurring.
More and more people were expanding their awareness and understanding of the illusion of the world and the power of thought, and thusly so was I.
I recognize this as a very odd post. This second chakra awakening, passion, or transition—whatever words are chosen to attempt to decipher what is occurring for me at a soul and cellular level, is directly related to reclaiming the spirit in me that was lost in my youth. My sensitive nature, depth of soul, and ability to take in extreme amounts, coupled with the circumstances of my childhood, led me to lock a large portion of my self away.
This portion locked away, was largely the part which knew I was beautifull, knew I was worthy, and knew I was desirable. When very young, I learned how not to live, how not to show joy, how to in effect dislike myself and my body in order to survive.
In knowing this now, with a profound awakening on multiple levels, I am holding a cup in either hand. To the right of me is the hope of this now found passion. To the left, balancing my position, are the memories. I am seeing how each feeds the other. The erupting passion on one side, the imploding self on the other. The flame and the joust.
Here I place the cups before you. Experience as you’d like. For we each stand with two cups. All equally balanced in beauty.
Embracing Me
One of the reasons I am taking photos of myself lately is to embrace the beauty that is me. I never have seen me before. Seen how very lovely inside and out I am. This is part of my growth process. My hair is usually unbrushed and I wear no makeup, say lip gloss. It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s fresh. I love it.
Breaking Free Maui 2012
Flame
Naked
He beckons
The depths of me
Fingers dripped in sweet
Honey-suckle nectar
Lips moist
Dew upon the fields of sunrise
Strawberry mist
Pours through
A damp fire of longing
Reclaims pleasure
Lighting the avenue of discontent
With fierce flames of gentle dragon
Until
Devoured by desire
I taste
The phantom of celestial union
Kissing ghosts
Where we once breathed
Beauty Maui 2012
The Game of Joust
My fourth grade teacher once said, “The characters in novels are multi-dimensional and a good writer will depict all sides of a person: the good and bad, the happy and sad, the pretty and the ugly. Otherwise the story just won’t seem authentic.” I mulled this over as Ben slumped across the kitchen and pinched Mother’s ass. I reasoned I wasn’t living in some novel—this was real life.
The morning Ben was over, Mother was short on conversation and spent her time searching for a cigarette. In a year she’d dropped a good twenty pounds, so the slender jeans she wore slipped off of her narrow hips. Her hair was long and straight, her T-shirt thinning. From the corner chair, Ben farted, permeating the room with a wretched smell of spoiled cheese and tuna fish. My dog Justice left the room. I slouched down in my seat at the kitchen table and tugged the front of my soiled shirt up and over half of my face. I thought of the animal claw, or possibly human nail, I had recently found in a can of tuna.
Ben heaved himself up and pulled a section of his bundled blue jeans out of his butt crack, walked over to the fridge, bent down, grunted and closed the door. He returned to the table empty-handed and swept by the back of my mother’s chair, reaching down and giving her a snippy pinch on the bottom. Mother rolled her eyes in disinterest. “Hey? Has anyone seen my last cigarette?” she asked.
Ben shook his head, circled the kitchen like a shark, and returned with his favorite silver lighter in hand. Standing behind Mother’s chair, he tossed the lighter on the table. Mother sighed heavily and turned her focus to the window. After taking a few shuffled steps, Ben stretched up exposing the black curls of his belly and let out a husky yawn, looking much like a sloth blossoming from inertia. “Shit. Where’s the morning paper?” he asked in a crotchety fashion.
“Good morning, Ben,” I said, and pushed the newspaper towards his placemat at the head of the table. Catching Mother’s eye, I smiled and then reached for a sugar cube from the pink box directly in front of me. After holding one cube hostage in my cheek until it dissolved, I grabbed another and nibbled. Ben sat down with a thud. He asked in a throaty voice, “Did you clean your room like your mother asked?”
I stared back at his one solid line of black eyebrow. “Yes, I did,” I answered, noting to myself my tone of voice, in response to Ben, eerily resembled that of Mother’s—a bit sarcastic with undertones of impatience. Ben pulled on a clump of his arm hair, scrunched his broad nose, scratched at the dead skin flakes on his bald spot and opened the paper with an air of casualness. I eyed him with caution as his mouth opened, half-expecting a fly to emerge from the depths. “Crap,” he said. His eyes were stern and transfixed on the newspaper. “No wonder all the Americans are so stupid. They don’t value education. What did I tell you? It’s the government. They know what they are doing as sure as they collect the taxes out of our empty pockets. They don’t want us to be educated, want to raise a bunch of idiots so they can control us. You didn’t fill out that census did you? If you did, rip it up. They don’t need to know anything about us.”
Mother was still facing the kitchen window. Without turning around, she waved an apathetic hand. Her overgrown fingernails were covered in chipped-red nail polish. I continued eating the sugar cubes. Ben scratched underneath his nose, coughed and dislodged a clump of mucous from the back of his throat into the purple clay ashtray—the ashtray I had made by hand in kindergarten. I thought about my kindergarten teacher, the grandmotherly woman who had died of cancer the summer I was approaching first grade. I dropped my eyes from the ashtray to the kitchen floor.
Ben turned sideways to find me. “I have a great idea,” he said as I swept off cigarette ash from my placemat.
“Maybe later,” I heard myself say.
“Why don’t you try this new game I’ve got? Once anyways, just for fun?” Ben’s tongue licked the lower inside of his mouth under his lip making a suction cup sound.
I rolled my eyes. Mother tossed a broken toothpick into the ashtray, aside Ben’s phlegm, and stepped into the conversation with her hoarse morning voice. “I’ll leave you two alone then. I need a shower.” Ben waved his stubby hand towards Mother and smiled. There was something devious about his look, about his posture, about everything he did.
I missed Mother from the moment she stepped out the room. I forced myself to remain calm while Ben fondled a sugar cube between his chubby fingers. His fingernails appeared like they had been under the engine of a car not at an engineer’s desk. The sun’s heat penetrated the glass of the kitchen window. I could feel the warmth on my cheeks. I took a deep breath trying to remember what my stepfather Drake smelled like, trying to remember his deaf son, and the smell of my scented markers. I looked down at my socks. There was a hole in my toe. I rubbed my toe against the backside of Justice, who had just crept back under the table, and now gnawed at his skin. A warm breeze blew across the table.
The leg of Ben’s chair scraped against the floor. He slurred out his words. “This is a damn good game to build up your confidence. Teach you some manners. Help you not to slouch so much, even teach you to pay attention more.” He returned his tainted sugar cube to the box, and continued talking; only this time, I didn’t hear him.
As had happened many times before, in the presence of Ben my mind wondered. I glanced down at my shirt. It was the third day in a row I had it on, and Mother hadn’t said anything. It had been a good week since we went to the laundry mat, and I began to worry about when I would have clean clothes again. I thought about washing the shirt myself in the bathroom sink, and thought back on the time I’d used too much dish soap and bubbles had escaped all over the kitchen floor. Maybe I could wash my shirt outside.
Ben paused to scratch the black stubble on his round chin. I stopped thinking about my shirt and instead stared at the overgrowth of Ben’s facial hair. Ben shook his head sullenly. “Just a second,” he said, and pushed over the newspaper. He mumbled something else in a low gruff voice, and pulled out Mother’s last cigarette from underneath a Life magazine on the table, then proceeded to fidget with his silver lighter and light up.
I despised the silence. I hated watching Ben move. I hated sitting next to him alone in a room, not because I was afraid he would physically hurt me—he never touched me; it was his words, how they could slice me like a thin wire through cheese.
“What’s the game?” I asked in a low voice.
“Shit! Just like that. That’s what I’m talking about. You can’t even wait a minute.” Ben affronted me with his words as if he were challenging me to a joust. Only I knew, and he knew, I didn’t know how to battle; I hadn’t been trained; and sitting there, in the kitchen, I felt I’d already been knocked off my high horse and was now waiting to be trampled on.
Waving my hand, I pushed Ben’s cigarette smoke out of my face and then wrapped my arms tightly around myself. My thumb twitched against my upper arm. Again a breeze came through the window. Justice stirred and slid further into the back corner. I could no longer feel his backside. I brought my feet up onto the chair, felt my socks tucked underneath me. I could hear Mother running the shower.
Ben rubbed his hand across his head, forcing one black curl to flop to the opposite side of his scalp. “It’s an easy game. You’ll get it.” He cleared his throat.
“Get what?”
“Just listen!”
“Go ahead.”
Ben smiled and slid his chair forward. “Do you know what?” He didn’t want a response. I stopped breathing for a second in anticipation. The kind of anticipation I had when I was waiting to be scolded for breaking something or talking back, those seconds that go on like long drawn out minutes, where all the scenarios play through the mind.
“You are stupid,” Ben said with a blank expression. Though in his dark eyes I could tell he was waiting for something. I watched his lone eyebrow rise up and then ease down. He tapped his smoking cigarette in my purple clay ashtray, casually, too casually. “Remember what I told you the last time we played? This is reverse psychology and it’s proven to be good for you.”
“I know.” I pictured myself lying there in the dirt with Ben’s footprint on my check.
“Are you still there?”
I nodded.
“Look at me or it won’t work.”
I looked crossly at his bloodshot eyes. At least I tried to look cross. I wasn’t cross at all; I was afraid.
Ben continued. “You are stupid, fat and ugly,” he said in a matter-of-fact way so that one might have thought he was forecasting the weather. He then stared cheerfully through me, as I fought back a burning sensation in my eyes.
I swallowed harder.
“Seriously, it’s just a game. You don’t have to be such a baby about it.” Ben took another puff of the cigarette. “Why don’t you take a stab at it? Go ahead, try your best.”
“No. Thank you,” I whispered.
Ben blew out three rings of smoke. “Now, there, those are some good manners,” he said with a sated grin.
“You’re an idiot, you know,” he said, his smoke choking me.
As the seconds passed, and more words followed, my body remained present but my thoughts went back to Drake’s house, to my room with the record player, to the Easy Bake Oven, to my days of Brownies, to the days Mommy looked so pretty, where the clothes were clean and homemade dinners were on the table—until Ben pounded his fist on the table.
“This is a waste of my time. Why don’t you do something useful with yourself?”
I leaned down and grabbed Justice by the collar. I’d give him a bath. But it wouldn’t be like the baths I remembered, the days when I chased Justice under my bed giggling with glee.
I stood on unsure knees, pulling myself with invisible puppet strings up from my chair. I accidentally brushed up against Ben. He gave me a sideways glare. “You see. The game worked.”
I didn’t know what he meant.
I didn’t want to know.
Switching the MOOD back to LOVE here. One of my FAVORITES…. This video WILL make you smile. I promise…and this is where I am today…in this state of mind.
It was an ordinary night for a child who had grown accustomed to the unordinary. My dog Justice trembled under the bed, while Led Zeppelin vibrated through the wall. Inside the sheets, all wrapped up in Mother’s essence of bath oil and sandalwood, I tossed and turned. Then I laid listless and awake—a lump of boredom. I could smell the funny smoke again and hear bottles clinking.
I pleaded with God, “Please make the people go away.”
All at once, a melodic voice called out, “Hello, Little Girl.”
But I knew the voice wasn’t God.
I was certain my God didn’t have a Jamaican accent and dreadlocks. “We didn’t know you were in here, Pretty Lady. I’m sorry if we woke you,” the stranger apologized, as he approached Mother’s bed.
I leaned over casually on my arm, wanting to seem mature and interesting enough to earn his attention. “You didn’t wake me,” I responded, with a fake yawn, tapping my little chin with my tiny fingers a few times. I was accustomed to seeing strangers in the house, but not at my bedside. Still, I wasn’t nervous in the slightest degree. I’d liked meeting Mother’s friends. They were all interesting in that odd way.
The man with skin like chocolate-syrup winked at me. I shot up—all big-eyed and bouncy—and just about jumped out of my bed all together, thinking this broad shouldered man would work quite well for a piggyback ride.
Another man with skin like milk was grinning at the foot of Mother’s bed. “Sweet Girl,” he said. “We’re not here to bother you. You just fall asleep and we’ll get going.” His voice was boring. But I smiled anyways.
“Why are you here?” I asked, my one rouge eyebrow standing at alert.
The stranger with the milky-skin stroked his hand across his dimpled chin and shifted his weight from side-to-side. His prickly face grew tight and then relaxed. “That’s a good question,” he said, keeping his narrow blue eyes fixed on me. “You see, Ben, he asked us to get something out of the room for him.”
I asked loudly, “What does Ben need?”
The men didn’t respond. Neither one. Instead they seemed to be playing a game, a pretend game of not hearing me. Perhaps I was invisible. The chocolate man, stayed at my side, and spoke so low I could barely make out his words. “It’s nothing for you to worry about,” he said, and then he dabbed his forehead with a red kerchief. “I’m worried because Ben specifically told us not to wake you. And now, Pretty One, you are very much awake.”
My heart fluttered on hearing “pretty.” I pushed my lips out in a perfected pout. Then tossed my auburn hair. I thought on the word magenta. My favorite color. My favorite word. Magenta, I thought, as my mind traveled outside the room.
The stranger at my bed shuffled his feet. I drew my eyes to his tall forehead. With his long dark fingers, he motioned his friend to leave the room. “I know you won’t tell,” he said with a quick survey of the room.
Then suddenly, his whole body lit up. And I could see an idea had found him.
“Do you know how you can tell a star from an ordinary girl?” he asked, his melodic voice rising on the word star.
I shook my head back and forth. Curious.
“A movie star can close her eyes without fluttering her lids.”
I gave him a sideways stare and my best shifty eyes.
“I bet you could be a movie star,” he said.
My heart leaped. I felt lighter, prettier, and special all at once. I nodded in agreement.
“Try it. Try to close your eyes now, pretty girl.”
I leaned back on my pillow and squeezed my eyes closed. Dreams of starring on Love Boat and Fantasy Island, danced in my mind. Something rattled on the dresser. But I didn’t open my eyes. The stranger sighed. Still I didn’t open my eyes. I was that good!
The stranger’s voice echoed. “You are perfect. You are a star. Don’t stop now.” Self-elation oozed out of every pore of my body. I was on top of the world. I was extraordinary.
I remained still, and then stiller, until there was only me, only my dreams, and I drifted to sleep.
I awoke refreshed and alive, and back in my own bed. I got up and looked in the bathroom mirror. I was pretty. I was good. I was talented. I was to be a star! I swept my arms back and forth, and glided into the kitchen—the best of the best entering the stage in evening gown and princess smile. I waved as if on a parade float. I practiced my shy giggle. I batted my big eyes.
Upon entering the kitchen, my world stopped. I was instantly assaulted by cataracts of rage. Dark shades covering my mother’s boyfriend’s dark eyes. He huffed. He hunched. He heaved. I frooze. The stardrom dropped out of me, just like that. The hopes, the dreams, the wishings.
I looked at Mother. I looked at Ben, her lover. And then I looked at my big toe. It was smaller than it’s neighbor toe. I wiggled my toe as I gulped.
“Shit,” Ben said, scratching his stubbly face. “Those assholes took the entire stash! All the cash, and even your shitty jewelry! Why’d you trust those filthy bastards?”
I peeked upwards towards Mother’s unkempt hair. Mother shook her head and sighed. The light in her eyes dimming quickly.
The scenes from the night before played out in my mind—the men—the room—my eyes—my eyes closed…
I couldn’t form words. The whole of me was frigid and stuck. The sting of one thousand wasps found way to my inner parts. I wasn’t extraordinary after all, I thought. I was nothing good at all.
Compared to my other posts, this is very mature. Part of my journey to wholeness and self-love has involved documenting events of my past. The short stories are a form of art work to me. They feel like art, as they are scribed through strong emotion and creative flow. However, the words are no longer a part of me. The little girl’s experiences are forever lost on the pages I typed.
This is not meant to be sad, but shared as a possible peer into another part of me—the melancholic artist, perhaps. Or a mature woman sharing her truth, so others know they are not alone. I have many pages of similar events, but shall not post on this blog because of the maturity-level. Someday the missing chapters, I suppose, may appear in book form as a collection of many of the thoughts in this blog.
The Sound of Nothing
My new sitter was Jessica Jensen. I called her Jess.
She was much the complete opposite of the obtuse and sedentary babysitter Mrs. Stockman. Jess was a long-limbed, freckled-faced high school freshman with thick reddish-blond hair and a ruddy face infested with whiteheads.
Initially, I wanted to make Jess my best friend, but Jess had different plans. She wasn’t mean or anything. She was actually quite tolerant. However, she was short of being my friend. During our time together, Jess feigned interest in me, in the form of an over curious stare or raised eyebrow, but within a few minutes she was focused on something else, like her fingernails or the person on the other end of the telephone. Nothing I said or did truly seemed to impress Jess. She thought I was smart and funny, and told me so. But her real interest was in her boyfriends and teenage mischief, all of which I was much too young to understand.
Jess was a roamer, and in a way I was her little naïve sidekick. I’m sure it crossed Jess’s mind several times to leave me behind somewhere, but to her credit she always kept me in close proximity. She didn’t know what she was doing most of the time. She was just some teenager from a broken, druggie home, who didn’t know better, a girl who had far too much freedom. We attended movies, where Jess covered my eyes so I wouldn’t see the full screen of naked breasts, and then afterward we’d hitchhike about town, bouncing from one kid’s house to another. Jess was in search of something, maybe an escape or a rush, something to make her forget about where she’d come from and what she’d seen.
I stood by Jess, no matter where she took me, because, like her, I had no choice. Choices are for bigger kids, once they realize they are worth something, once they know their value, once they can look at themselves and smile, liking what they see. Jess and I, we just hadn’t gotten there yet.
I followed Jess into a world that seemed a distant land from the home I once knew with my stepfather Drake. It was a place of no good and ugliness, a world with molding mattresses stretched out under the overgrowth of a beat up magnolia tree, where the backyard fence was bent and broken in all different places, where the house with the peeling yellow paint and exposed boards stank even from the outside, maybe even from the next house over—a raw smell, a dangerous smell that I imagine dogs would whimper and slink away from.
And there, I’d find her oldest brother, or better yet, he’d find me—a long-haired, high school dropout named Rick: a teenager roughened by an absent father and a strung out mother, scraped up all over on the inside like a bristle brush to stainless steel. An aimless boy who roamed a place where beer bottles lined the back porch and stray wild cats, some pregnant, some close to death, slithered in and out of open basement spaces like hairy serpents.
Inside Jess’ house were threadbare couches, half-busted televisions and food, but not the type of food anyone would want to eat, just leftover spoiled junk, crushed potato chips and cookie remnants, and bowls of sugary cereals molding in spoiled milk. It was the type of house that needed to be quarantined, sealed off with yellow tape and bulldozed down, or burnt into smoldering ash. No good was in the house. No good at all.
Rick liked to play doctor, a confusing game wherein he touched me in places a little girl should never be touched. And Jess, he’d do the same to her, that’s what I suspected, though I never said so. I just kept my mouth shut, let him do what he needed, and left, went out and found Jess, like nothing had happened. He never laid himself on me, nothing as crude as that, and he was just a child himself. He didn’t know any better; just like Jess, he didn’t know any better.
I didn’t feel nothing. No pleasure, no guilt, no disgust, felt like I would after playing a game of Twister or the Game of Life. That’s what it was, just another game of life.
One time, in the early spring, I clutched Jess’ hand in her backyard while watching the slimy-brown juices of chewing tobacco seep out the side of Rick’s cocked mouth. “Get the hell out of here!” Rick yelled, fixing his cold-hazel eyes on scowling Jess.
Jess stood her ground.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Rick continued, kicking up pebbles with his muddy old boots and letting loose a wall of dust. “Get the hell out of here!”
“You are an idiot,” Jess said. “It’s my backyard, too.”
“Screw you!”
Jess clenched her teeth. I stepped back and started counting the multitudes of dandelions. At the same time, Rick removed a chipped brick from an outdoor wall.
Jess screamed, “You’re going to get arrested!”
“Mind your own business,” Rick said with a heated gaze, adding more spit to the puddle in the dirt. “Just get out of my sight. Go back to humping your fat loser of a boyfriend!” With that said, he pulled out a dented tin box which had been stuffed in the space behind where the old brick had been. He then opened the box and pulled out a pile of compressed twenties. He fanned out the money, stopping to toss a smirk Jess’s way, and then shoved the box and brick back in place.
Jess squeezed my hand, and shouted again, “If Mother finds out, she’ll kick you out on your ass again!”
Answering back with a stiff middle finger, Rick headed out the busted back gate. “Whore!” he hollered from over the broken fence. “Stinking Whore!”
Jess turned round to find me. I gazed up at her and I thought for a moment she might grab some money for herself. Images of Budd’s ice cream cones and bean burritos danced in my head. But Jess didn’t take any money. She didn’t even go near the brick. Instead she led me inside her house to the grime-covered kitchen.
“Come on,” Jess said. “Let’s get out of here.” She grabbed a hotdog off of a plate and took a bite, then proceeded to chew with her mouth open. My mother taught me to always close my mouth while eating. I watched as Jess’ food slid about, until the hotdog moved to the side of her blushing cheek. “Now, what did you see? You didn’t see anything did you?” She swallowed and took another mouthful. A frantic look crossed her face. She paused between her words to chew. “Because… if you saw… or heard… anything… anything at all… it’s not… true.”
“I didn’t see anything,” I said, wide-eyed and innocent. I started counting with my fingers. I figured there was at least a few hundred dollars in the box.
Jess swallowed again. “Good. Good. Let’s go then. Come on.”
As Jess walked a few strides ahead of me, I could hear her disjointed whispers. A block away, she stopped and turned to me. “Never mind,” she said. “You’re too young to understand. It’s too late, just too late to do anything now.”
Further up the sidewalk, Jess stopped dead in her tracks. Her lacy halter flapped up in the wind. I reached over and attempted to pull her top down. She didn’t notice, and the wind blew the halter right back up again. Her sheer pink bra was showing. I studied the thin material. Jess faced sideways and cupped her hand to her ear. “Listen. Do you hear a police car? Do you hear that?”
I gazed into the crystal-blue of her wild eyes and considered what Jess had said. I didn’t hear anything. We waited without moving, stood still—didn’t move an inch, just like those pill bugs do when they’re playing dead. For a few seconds I believed Jess might well be a bionic babysitter endowed with supernatural hearing. I waited patiently for the sound of the police siren or the sight of a patrol car. I waited and waited, but in the end there was nothing.
