Background Report: You know what you did to me, you knew in advance the consequences and the repercussions of your behavior, there was no 60-Minute televised devastating surprise presented to you in an effort to acknowledge the damage you were causing - it was well known and you didn’t care. So, when we are all wondering how did I get here, we know. I know you know, you-know I-know, and you know that I had the same lack of control or will power that would have made me the stronger person we wished I was were that it was true - again, this is the best version of me to date. Imagine that, like an IBM computer, a classic Camaro, I’ve got industrial Steele designs and sleek features but can’t turn a corner to without fishtailing and unless you like staring at black and green screen - I’m out dated, I can’t be younger, I can’t be better, I am the leader that made the rest of you even smarter and faster - and one day, maybe, kids you can out form your master but for now, we’re all stuck.
Today, I discovered, unknowingly that my depression is clinical. Clinical. It sounds clean and removable. Like maybe tweezers and a Boy Scout with all his patches could remove it if he had to and no hospital was near. But that’s not the case, apparently, after years of chaos and fight or flight mental torture or maybe strengthening I am now like the inward disease, fighting myself in health thinking that I’m sick because my programming is off and wants to self destruct at the very threat of abandonment, yet, I am designed to set myself up to reel into spiral from disappointment and seek out reward versus having stability because my whole life was gambled on the amount of ice cube and the hand that poured the drink.
In other words, I’m chasing the ghost of my mother and grandfather in every person I meet.
Life is Better by the Beach: I am a product of the environment that is never stable, requires a cart before the horse dance like a BMX bike trick and fuck you motherfucker’s, I’m a pro-fess-ion-ale - so much so it should be spelled in a romantic language when I say it.
Thursday night, the sky is settling into hues of sick clouds strewn in cheap cotton torn out of an aspirin bottle, blue and peachy pinks. There are tennis balls, popping and dropping between sets, children scowling and dogs running off the leash in the complex.
There are fourteen hundred units in this complex. That’s like a little city. I live in the Phase 2 YS Building. My neighbors are either non-existent, elderly, or quiet. I know this because my downstairs neighbor gave me a $20 gift card to Starbucks to be less loud during quiet hours. I had thought my feet sounded heavy and my voice carries as does my laugh or sneeze. My mother said so long as I was alive and sneezing or laughing, my grandfather was still alive.
Flashback: It’s dark, it’s between eleven and midnight, the walls are chartreuse but the lighting makes it the color of the moon in a dark sky. He is bloated, like he’s been dead for days under water, and he’s heavy as fuck on top of me. We hate each other. He’s tried to poison me in the last week but we are depressed, desperate and alcoholic kinetic. I can’t breathe, he’s choking me, and the weigh tof him is making my chest unable to inhale and exhale, I make noises but he thinks its part of the kink, but I say, I can’t breathe and he knows he’s fucking fat and he knows he’s fucking me and I’m just there squeaking like a mouse that is about to die and he doesn’t stop, he covers my mouth and nose so that I really can’t breathe and I can’t move, he’s that heavy and I’m pinned to the bed as he thrusts until he cums and let’s go and I gasp for air and start crying. He says “Shut up, Lenny will hear you.” His son, my step-son. He pulls his pants on, stumbles out the door and closes it and I cry for three hours, no one heard me.
The Next Week: I’m a waitress at a diner, down the street. I hate my life, I hate my home, I want to die most days and I’m conveniently located right next to the liquor store that opens at the same time my break starts. I walk over daily to buy cigarettes and place rumplemintz in my apron, it gets me through the day and gives me fresh breath. I don’t drink around him and I don’t drink more than to calm my nerves because I’d have the shakes even if I wasn’t drinking, my anxiety is intense, so much so you can see it in my eyes like rapid breathing, I am in fear all the time, not knowing which direction to turn in a moment that’s always too late.
The Setting: I go home and reside on the sofa with him. He’s drunk. Like liver failing, quick drunk, ready to box shadows and chase windmills on the front lawn. He is babbling nonsense and his spectrum gives him the fantastic ability to rattle off sports scores and trivial information dating back to BC on any given sports topic with which he does not care how bored or how disinterested you are, it must fill the room, because silence, for him, is like suicide. I pretend to listen. I decide to clean the bathroom. They, the men I live with are in the spectrum, I’m the only neurotypical person in existence and it’s a constant pick up sticks mess in this house. I use to love this house from the inside out, painting, planting flowers, twinkle lights and decor but now I hate this place like my own existence and the residents are only part of the problem. I run piping hot bathwater into the tub, pour bleach to try and remove the stink and stain of men who shower once a month and leave a ring around the tub the way fake jewelry leaves your finger green, it takes days to remove.
The Scene: I sit back down on the sofa. Watch the old men argue over basketball and debate college teams. He rambles on, then like a lightbulb or set of pyrotechnical ignited him all at once, he says “I’m going to take a shower!” He might as well have had his finger up to the air like it was a first time idea George Jetson style animation. I say okay, great, because he needs one. I wasn’t paying attention that day. I broke my glasses. When I can’t see, I’m irritable and I really can’t see. One thing about me, I’m a bit OCD. So, this hidden drinking, wasn’t a problem, until today - despite the reprimands at work, this was the defining moment. I usually bought two or three take home rumplemintz and the thing about those bottles is they are sticky if you don’t screw the cap back on right away and while I hate to use words like never, but I never forget to put the cap back on and I usually throw them away where he can’t see them or pile thump in the back of my Nissan Altima. I guess that lightbulb, that moment of insane animation and determination, because I could hardly believe he could walk that day and his enthusiasm was bizarre struck me odd but I chalked it up to him being mentally gone, sugar and drunk high of the man near the end of his alcoholism but I was wrong.
So, while he’s showering, and I was puttering somewhere else, he placed the bottle on the sofa table next to me. And this is how dumb I am, I think, that’s weird, I wouldn’t have left that out. It looks funny, like bubbling, but I like them frozen, maybe it thawed out I tell myself. Is this how heroin addicts end up injecting that fatal stupid ass dose? (That was a new thought) So, I don’t have my glasses, but I have my phone and so I take a picture of the bottle because while I’m not paranoid, I’m wondering why I did this and does it look off? But the phone dies. I never enlarge the photo. I think, well, I’ll take a sip and see. I take a gulp and realize it’s bleach water.
I am stunned. When he comes out of the shower, sits down beside me, I ask him, “you know I was bleaching the tub right?” He says Yes, emphatically. Nodding like crazy. I ask him, “so you know that you filled my mini-bottle with bleach water.”
He starts giggling, like it’s funny, like he just played the best prank of all. “Of course, I did!” He is smitten with himself. I am sick. I go into my step-son’s room and tell him, I think I’m crazy but this just happened and he says, no, that isn’t crazy, it sounds right, and it must be stopped. He calls the police but you try and explain that one - and the cop said “son, I’m nowhere to fix you and your Daddy issues. Ma’am, have a good day.” And that was that.
The Safety Plan: I am going to tell you now that the safety plan exit strategy is a bunch of bullshit because every time I tried to enact it - it failed miserably. I won’t advise anything else, but get the fuck out and fast. You’re fucked either way.
Do the Gaslight: When my fiancé would gaslight me, it was so often and so natural it became a household joke. I would stop and make a disco dance like we were on some kind of syndicated roller skating and dance hall hosted with pauses in between sets “Do the gaslight” and the entire crowd would perform the gaslight dance under disco balls and then resume normal conversation/actions as if it never happened.
After the rape, after the poisoning there was the incident of the gasoline. I had been packing my belongings bit by bit and placing them in the garage. Upon one of the occasions I tried move out, I saw that my step son was lonely for my cat, so I found him a rescue cat our of Lawrence and it should have been obvious there was something wrong with this cat, and I can only tell you that it should wear a helmet, no joke, that the person who droppped this cat off did so in a torrential rain / hurricane warning and Bello, much like my Austin, would chase my LilyCat through the house nd lock her into a corner or hotel litter box and would not let her out because her existence, literally, made him crazy. Bello was a nervous cat too, and he liked to hangout in the garage and he didn’t like the tension in the house before I was leaving and he seemed to have an animosity toward me knowing I was part of the underlying tension so the boxes that I was safely keeping in the garage, he was marking, repeatedly. I didn’t know this until five miles into my drive from Kansas to California and was forced to throw out every piece of my lifeI tried to save that would not be able to be remedied within the parking lot of a Walmart.
Because the cat was retarded and I mean that in every sense of the word itself, it couldn’t jump well and would never make his target, so he often knocked over everything he came in contract with and I thought, the day I came home and the entire house reeked of gasoline that surely, Bello knocked over the gas can in the garage and got it everywhere, because that’s something Bello would do.
I thought that something catastrophic was happening and rushed into Lenny’s room and asked him “Did you do this?”
He said blandly, “I am not an arsonist yet.”
I agreed.
Austin was unaware of any odor and said I was crazy.
I inspected the garage and it was all over the place but I dismissed it to the cat, no one knew what I was talking about.
Do the gaslight.
Smoke on the Horizon: On the weekends I usually do catering job for weddings, etc. I’ve got three jobs most of the time to stay away from the house and still no strategy or exit plan, most of the money I make is spent on the gas and maintenance my car needs to get there and then idle in parking lots until I think he’s asleep and come home. The nearest parking lot is a funeral home. It’s always empty. I figure p[people will leave mea lone, like maybe, I was grieving and I am.
It was one o’clock in the morning or later when I arrived home to the house which smelled like a fire had been put out. The entire front room, hallways, bedroom, kitchen and den were filled with thick black smoke and ash. He is sitting on the sofa, catatonic, “what happened Austin?” He doesn’t answer me, stares out in front of him. “What happened?” No response. I go to my step-son’s room.
Lenny says, “this idiot, left. A pan on the stove with nothing in it.” And Lenny who is generally unaware of his surroundings didn’t notice this until the pan was catching fire and ash was everywhere. “I even burned my hand on it and used the fire extinguisher.”
I walk into the den and ask Austin what the fuck is going on. He starts cussing me out and telling me what a loser I am and need to get the fuck out and his son too, that we’ve all turned against him and I can see the reflection of windmills in his eyes.
Eventually, I convince Austin to go to bed, I have another gig in the morning and will be making noise so he should sleep in the bedroom and I’ll be out of his hair early. He agrees and stumbles into the bedroom, I hear him hit the floor in an effort to fall on the bed. I picture him and the cat in helmets on a Christmas card sent with a family letter update on how great we’re all doing.
I wake up to Austin cussing me out and telling me to get up and get the fuck out. What have I done now, I was sleeping for Godsakes. Foul language and defeat, I pass back out exhausted.
I heard him in the kitchen, thought he was making himself an egg and or ramen to calm his stomach he’d been on a good bender.
Later, I am awaken by the smell of ash again and my eyes are burning blindly and I rush to the kitchen to take the pan off the stove and throw it by the shoe rack outside the kitchen.
It hits me, he hates everybody and he feels like a failure and that his family has turned against him and its my fault but for once, he doesn’t give a shit about his son and I realize, this is what he is, has become. He will never be the same bright man I fell in love with and his insurance policy on the coffee table wasn’t for renewal, his drunk ass was checking.
I’d put a sign in the kitchen, “STOP USIING THE STOVE, THERE’S ENOUGH OIL IN IT TO IGNITE A FIRE” months before but they ignored me and I refused to do another deep clean that would be sabotaged by their sloppy and oily cooking sessions, leaving more grease than a diner can accumulate in years of operation. This needed forensic cleaning and I wasn’t living there at the time and stopped giving a shit.
The sign was long gone and the oil pans were all on top of each other, nothing other than pour them in and too lazy to toss the old oil out they just used new pans until the oil could not be reused anymore.
I surmise, he was going to burn down the house and everyone in it, he didn’t care anymore. He’d set that pan on the stove with nothing in it and walked away.
But Mama, I love him: My brother has always had keen sense of when it’s time. Whether that’s to pay the bill at a family dinner in a restaurant to get the fuck out of the conversation, or to peel out of a parking lot, or when his sister was in danger, that kid, my baby brother, has father skills that make him the most amazing person in my life and he never shamed me for any of what I’d been through. Every social worker I have has told me he’s tremendous and they ask more about him than my mental health - I told him he’s barking up the wrong trees, he needs to date one them and his friend laughed, he said, “no way, they still have hope.” I couldn’t help but laugh, but, Jet is the kind of brother or man that gives you hope. The world needs him.
He’d booked a flight for the following week, knowing that my time was closing in and I was in denial. My brother and I don’t talk like strategy and make maps or itineraries, we speak in blunt truth and vague response time and given the way I’d lived the last three years, I didn’t know if he’d book a flight next week or next year. “It depends on how things are going…”. (For either of us, we advised).
After the second arson attempt failed, he said “I had a flight to arrive on Tuesday. I’ll be there tomorrow, be ready.”
I was and I wasn’t ready. I just knew, it had to be.
Jet pulled up and as well loaded the car, Austin introduced himself and tried to shake his hand, Jet obliged slightly and ask Austin walked away, he said “That man is druuuuuunk.” I said “oh no, it’s morning, you should see him by noon. That’s sober.” Jet rolled his eyes.
Left Turn at Albuquerque: I had been silently crying, Jet kept checkin on me, was I okay, what did I need, should I talk, he just wanted to help me and be there and I couldn’t even fathom what he thought of me at that point. I didn’t know what I thought of me, I had been processing and preventing and running myself into the ground for so long to survive, I had no idea, really, no idea how hard it must have been for him to see me the way I was. I was angry and depressed and owed with nothing to show for myself and no one to offer reparation.
When we started to hit the painted desert, it hit me. You’re probably thinking what? Like it was obvious right?
But I started to have so many revelations and epitomes that I was forced to reconcile, I am a fucking idiot and common sense or sensibility is not a miracle.
The retarded cat, didn’t knock over the gasoline and spill it, because he can’t turn a gas cap.
Yup, that’s when I realized how I got to where I was in that moment, tears rolling down my cheek and eyes and my brother just wanting to help an fix me or feed me and me not understanding where I was or why - he knew the pan would catch fire and if the gasoline caught, all my shit and everything in the fucking house would burn with it and fuck his son too, he’d hit him and called the cops on him, he didn’t give a fuck what happened to us, not even himself as he slept the bedroom and let it burn.
There are more chapters but this one, keeps repeating in my mind, like I need to digest the truth and even though I’ve been through so much more since then, and come to realizations I soon forget in an attention deficit manic moment, I have to recognize that the reason I FINALLY left was because I’d been raped, poisoned and he was going to burn down the house with all of us in it.
That needs to resonate.
It still hasn’t.
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