Confessions of an Unreliable Narrator 3

…back to Utah…

Imagine this: six people living in a two bedroom house, with one bathroom and irritable nerves combined with substance abuse recovery and strong wills. The three years it took to win my step-father’s case were hard. Tom went to physical therapy three times a week and spent the rest of his time watching the O.J. Simpson trial. Grandma told Mom she needed to stop drinking, get a job, better herself. Mom said Grandma had always tried to run her life and she was sick of it. They screamed a lot, each accusing the other of horrible things. I kept my nose buried in a book with my headphones on and tried to ignore them. Nine Inch Nails, Hole and Stephen King, stolen Vicodin from Tom’s stash.

Mom told me once to stop reading all the time because men didn’t like bookish girls. Mavens ended up unwed, working at the public library, she said. And while I was dropping the books, maybe I should dye my hair blonde because she read in Cosmo that men are intimidated by red hair. I asked her what male attention had ever gotten her in the world. She didn’t talk to me for three days after that.

I took long walks to escape the house. Walks in the rain were the best. Petrichor rising up from the concrete. Walking cleared my head, jolted my senses out of the stupor I waded through at home. I never had any particular place to go. Often, I would look up from the sidewalk to discover I had no idea where I was. Some stranger’s house, a park I’d never been to before, an undiscovered bend in the river. It didn’t matter. Being lost was therapeutic. Click-clack of my foot falls and the cold or the heat or the rain.

Grandma and Mom fought constantly. My little brother Sean disappeared entirely. He was like a little urchin scuttling beneath tables, huddling in corners. When I could, I took him with me to the park or the library. He would play on the toys in the kids’ room and for five minutes, smile like a child should.

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And every thing else is still

I do not recognize myself in pictures from junior high. I wore a lot of black, too much eyeliner, and dyed my hair purple just to piss my mother off. I didn’t eat to conserve our meager funds, so I shrank and shrank and shrank, a shade. Serrated, rough edges. No more baby fat, only tough lines of sharp bones protruding. I tried to make myself look hard and intimidating so the kids I went to school with would leave me the hell alone. I got the same questions they asked in kindergarten about Mom and Dad and the ward. Blah, blah, blah. People tried to push me around, but I had learned a thing or two about survival in Nevada. The Utah kids were not tough the way Nevada or California kids are. They could be scared off pretty easily. One preppy chick tried to intimidate me once but backed down pretty fast when I started barking at her. I carried a switchblade in my combat boots. Just swear a lot, do weird things and you’re in the clear. Dress strange, act strange and people avoid you. I learned to disguise my own nature so well I often forgot to stop pretending.

I read voraciously. Literature feeding some deep hunger I could not name. I graduated from the creepy Romantic stuff to Shakespeare. Shakespeare was like finding God. A God who was actually there for me. I devoured Hamlet and fell in love as only a pissed off teenager could with the Prince of Denmark. I read Lolita, Dylan Thomas, Eliot, Emerson and Uncle Walt, Tom Robbins, Chuck Palahniuk, Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace, Steinbeck. Books were my escape. I began compiling my black speckled composition notebooks full of pseudo poems, nonsensical diatribes and random quotes. I have stacks and stacks of them at home to this day.

Here are a few quotes from that era:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then…I contradict myself;
I am large…I contain multitudes”
Walt Whitman

“Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.”
Dylan Thomas

“This it the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang, but a whimper”
T.S. Eliot

“Have you ever noticed that ‘What the Hell’ is always the right answer?”
Marilyn Monroe

I finally managed to make a few friends once I got to high school at Bonneville High, affectionately called “Boner-ville” by it’s inmates — all in the weirdo variety. When you’re a student at Bonneville, you are either very rich or very poor. A strange conglomerate of doctor’s kids and welfare cases. I and a few of my other comrades were some of the few that fell in the middle of the socio-economic stratosphere. I associated with the untouchables: the social pariah of non-LDS and sexually ambiguous types. There was Mindy, the Jehovah’s Witness and Sarah, the Baptist, LuAnn, the strange and unusual Tennessee transplant whose parents were even more weird and fundamentalist than the Mormons. And then, there was Krystal. Krystal was a tall lanky lesbian with an infectious laughter and a Cheshire cat smile. Her smile could melt an igloo.

We lockered together and made out in the hallways just to piss people off. I was experimenting, but kissing girls felt like an interactive form of masturbation. Still, it was the trend of our day for the confused. Bicuriosity. It was where most of us who had no idea who the hell we were landed in the 90s. Some days I thought I might prefer being gay, others not so much. Dressing like a dude some days, and then the slinkiest item I could find the next. But, I never had dreams of moving to Massachusetts or adopting babies with another woman. When I had dreams about sex, it was typically males in my dreamscapes. And so, despite its boring normalcy, I decided I must be straight. Krystal and I were just pals…who would occasionally French Kiss just to get a rise out of the grown ups.

Bill was a 6 foot 3 jolly gay giant I met in drama. We bonded over our love for Tori Amos and Depeche Mode. He loved to invite me on “adventures” when we were supposed to be in class. Trips to Grounds for Coffee, a new-age store called the Thought Continuum, and bus rides to Salt Lake to visit another ultra pagan store, Dancing Crane. He had the best falsetto in choir and made a damn good BLT. But my best friend was Ryan.

There will be time, there will be time
to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet

Ryan was the son of a psychiatrist and a podiatrist who played bass in a semi-Grunge/Punk band called Osmosis. He screamed a lot and played his guitar like he was trying to break every string on it. He used to cut himself as a kid — now he just smoked a lot of pot. He had long jagged scars criss-crossing his arms like spider webs and jet black hair that fell in his eyes all the time. Ryan wore too many earrings. He smoked too many cigarettes. He was pissed off at his parents for giving him everything but their attention. My parents ignored me too. My parents liked their alcohol, his loved their Percocets. I think we desolate types can smell our own.

Ryan, Bill, Krystal and I became an inseparable foursome. We went to free concerts, art galleries and coffeehouses. We read shitty poetry at the Bookshelf. Ryan was a year older than the rest of us so he had a license and a car. His parents were never home. We had many mini-parties at Ryan’s house while his parental units were in New York or the Caribbean or the south of France. We smoked and drank whenever we got the chance. We took long space cruises in Ryan’s purple people eater VW bug, rolling joints and listening to Radiohead, Ryan reading Kerouac. Old angel midnight, tired whore, lanky legs twisting in her solitude. She pecks a cheek in the swoop of dive, entices madness and steamy midnight burn.

….

“Make love to me,” he said.

A lot of boys tried to get me to have sex with them. Not the Jock types with their souped up cars, their Levi Straus jeans and Tommy Boy cologne, but the sad-eyed rejects who smelled like testosterone and cigarettes. They sat brooding in the corners, bulletproof, staring at me in my fishnets. Many times, I longed to give in to them, but I valued my freedom more than my hormones. I had seen what pregnancy and child rearing did to my mother and grandmother. I made a career of being impermeable, never letting my guard down. But, I loved the power I felt over these boys. It made me drunk on my own sensuality.

“Make love to me.”

I was in a Honda Civic with a kid named Zayne. I liked Zayne. His gorgeous black hair was longer than mine, he loved Red Hot Chili Peppers and rolled a perfect American Spirit smoke. He was only seventeen and already had a tribal tattoo on his left arm. His parents lived on the res, with all that that implied and when things got too rough, he was sent to live with his Aunt who had married a white man who worked at Hill Air Force Base. When we first met, he caught me reading a silly Romance novel I found on my grandmother’s book shelf. She was a sucker for those bodice-ripper-pirates took-me-hostage paperbacks.

“Why do chicks read that shit?’ he asked.

“Porn for women,” I told him.

He asked me if I’d like to hangout shortly after. He was a luxurious kisser, but I told him I had to be home soon so he’d better cool down. I had a curfew to keep. Nevertheless, I was still late when I rolled in around midnight. I had to face my mother and her violent accusations. She called me a whore, a slut, a hussy. I reminded her I had avoided getting knocked up longer than she, so who was the whore? She broke my nose.

At the ER, Grandma told me not to be so hard on my mom. “I wasn’t good to her,” Grandma said. “I beat my kids too much. My father beat me and then I did the same thing and now she’s doing it to you.” She revealed for the first time how my great-grandfather used to beat my Grandma with a horse whip. He had tried to hang my great-grandmother when he thought she was cheating on him. Grandma still had horrible ear problems because her father once held her head under the spray of a garden hose in January. “He was one cruel son of a bitch, that man.”

There I sat in Mckay Dee’s ER waiting room; the end of a cycle of abuse passed from generation to generation like an heirloom. Snotty blood dripping down into my hands.

“Not me,” I said. “This bullshit ends here. I’m never getting married and I’m never having children.”

“Then,” Grandma said “you should get a job. The sooner you start making your own money, the sooner you won’t have to rely on anyone.”

I took her advice. I got a job and I stopped seeing Zayne.

I washed all the purple out of my hair, got a yellow-flowered, black skirt and joined the responsible people in the workforce. I had a lot of telemarketing jobs, I washed dishes, served hot popcorn at the local theater. It was easy to get a job if you knew the right answers. I wore a stolen CTR ring Krystal took off one of her ex-girlfriends to job interviews. If I looked demure and told the right lies, I was guaranteed a paycheck. Ryan, Krystal and Bill all accused me of being a poseur and a sell-out, but I didn’t care. I wore the hats, they did not wear me. Pride is a commodity poor people cannot afford. I was willing to do anything to get away from my parents’ intoxicated existence and my grandmother’s good-natured denial of their problems. Personas can be as interchangeable as a pair of socks if you’re willing to keep the most precious part of yourself hidden away.

What is precious is never to forget
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the hidden spirit

Working, like all of the other institutions I had ever encountered in my life, was a horror. And yet I enjoyed having my own cash. I saved all summer to buy a car. I found a ten year old Ford Taurus with low miles and a stereo. Now I was free to roam about the country. I replaced my habit of walking with long drives to nowhere. Listening to Ani DiFranco full blast, driving to Evanston, Cedar City, Denver. I loved it. I bought books by Anais Nin, Henry Miller and Charles Baudelaire from the Bookshelf. I was building up some savings for a rainy day. Things were finally starting to look up.

….

When I was sixteen, I took a drama class. The teacher was impressed I had read Hamlet prior to the audition. No Cliffs Notes. I delivered my lines with all the emotion I could muster and got the role. The other students complained about me. I wasn’t popular and I wasn’t pretty. But the drama teacher didn’t care. I had a knack for altering myself and Mrs. Sheen was obsessed with nailing this play. She wanted to deliver something worthwhile to little ole Ogden, Utah. She wanted Shakespeare to be proud of her. I relished getting something the beautiful people didn’t think I deserved. For the first time in my life, someone looked and acknowledged me. This one has worth. This one is special.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

The stage was a place to lose yourself, to drop the things you didn’t like about your own life. To vanish into a place of make-believe as I had done when I was a child. I died a good death as Ophelia. I made people laugh as Elizabeth Bennet. I even played the role of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. Then Mrs. Sheen’s husband got a job in Virginia and she was replaced by Mrs. Kirby. Mrs. Kirby preferred musicals. I had never been able to sing a single chord in my life and I loathed the hyperbole of Broadway.

I got roles as the extra and all the pretty Mormon girls landed the leads. They all agreed, Mrs. Kirby was a much better teacher than Mrs. Sheen. I soon lost interest. Being cast as a harem girl in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat doesn’t exactly compare to Ophelia now does it? Kirby thought The Pajama Game and Jesus Christ Superstar were high art. I stopped going to drama.

…to be continued…