And the rage at my father, that sanctimonious prick who stands at the pulpit, Sunday after Sunday, preaching hellfire and damnation to "kids who don't live by the Word of God," all the while disregarding me like a piece of crap in the gutter.
I start to hate Mom too. I blame her for having to work and not being around enough. I blame her for being dumb enough to screw a married man. I blame her because he doesn't want to be my dad.
When she is home, she tries to establish a rapport with me. "Please talk to me, honey," she pleads. "We used to talk. What's bothering you? Please tell me." My side of the conversation is in single word sentences, one syllable replies.
In an attempt to show her love, she gets me a puppy. He's small, white and furry, part Pom and part Chihuahua, and I name him Cotton. I abuse him whenever Mom's at work, holding him down and grinding my elbow into his paw until he emits high-pitched screams of misery. The frightened look in his round black eyes makes me hate him more, so I beat him. He lays down and cowers whenever I go to pick him up, trying to prepare himself for my meanness.
I stick my fingers up his rear end like I've seen Uncle Price doing to Natalie not long after her first birthday. I don't think it, I don't plan it. I just do it. I feel like I'm in some kind of a trance. I'm not truly aware that I'm doing it, or that someone is watching me, until I hear Mom's voice, miraculously composed, "Tammy, don't do that."
I'm relieved when she gives Cotton away.
Mom begins to avoid me around the house. Seeing me doing revolting things to my dog has caused her to raise a wall around herself. I'm left lonely, alienated, misunderstood. I hate how she's afraid of me.
And I hate her more than ever before.
Having long since grown apart from the kids I did the newscasts with, I hang out with boys whose names I scarcely remember. The class clowns, we mouth off to the teachers and disrupt class any way we can, always seeking to make people laugh. The principal has had several conferences with Mom before seventh grade is half over. She grounds me, makes me get up on Saturday mornings to do yard work, drags me to service every Sunday.
But nothing works. After school, my friends and I sneak behind old buildings and smoke pot. We go to Chris's house to play video games until his mom comes home. Todd's dad likes guns, and though most of the good ones are locked in his safe, we have access to the BB guns, and we begin shooting at birds and cats. One day I shoot a robin and knock him off his feet, then I aim the BB directly at his chest. It doesn't even occur to me that what I'm doing is cruel, since the other kids do no different. I only know that it balms the sore inside of me.
I want to talk, really talk to these friends, about the disturbing things in my head, but they're not interested in discussing anything except movies, music, video games, sports, weed, chicks and porn. I'm nowhere near as close to them as I was to Ray, Stacy and Benny.
I try to cry. I sit with my eyes wide open until they begin to dry, and hope tears will come to them. Nothing happens. I have to find other ways to grieve the loss of Uncle's love, the absence of my dad's.
During my thirteenth year, I start going to the library to check out books about famous killers like Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, the Boston Strangler, etc. When the librarian asks why a boy barely into his teens is so interested in serial killers, I tell them it's research, and half of me is telling the truth. It's preparation for my great future as a top newsman, perhaps a famous exposé reporter, a true-crime authority like Bill Kurtis.
The other half of me reads the grisly books with a keen absorption that spooks me. I begin to scribble my dark thoughts into "marble" pads, fantasies about doing away with Natalie, who is now going on three years old. A girly-girl already, she has a huge collection of Barbies, Kens, Skippers, and PJs.
My stories morph into a serial about a serial killer who murders young girls and chops up their bodies. The girls are of different hair and eye colour, all shapes and sizes, all pretty. Later, my victims are older men. The lurid particulars of my writings repulse me, but not enough to stop. I'm an angry boy. I steal Natalie's dolls and beat them and scalp them, slash them open, tear their plastic limbs off, and bury them in the backyard.
Mom is always working, and I'm a latchkey kid, so I go untreated.
Until Mom, upset by my refusal to relate to her, but still too traumatised by what she witnessed with Cotton to try to relate to me, urges Pastor Asshole to "talk to me". I go to his office at the church, believing he's called this meeting to inform me that he's finally going to acknowledge that I'm his offspring, that he's going to be the dad I so badly want and need. I give him my hope-filled attention, searching his sternly handsome countenance for any signs of myself in that coffee brown hair, or those narrow, somewhat severe brown eyes. I perk my ears, keen to hear his plan to involve me in his life straight away.
Nope. He proceeds to chastise me about my choice of friends, my "dabblings with dope" (I have only smoked two or three joints thus far, and beer isn't a drug!), and the shameful matter of what happened with Cotton. He tells me about the evils of bestiality while I sit, shifting from annoyance to anger to shame to nausea. By the time Pastor has finished his sermon, I feel as tall as a microbe. After our little get-together in his office, he goes back to barely speaking to me.
The shame pierces me deeply, and I hate my mom all the more. Thinking Pastor's fixed everything all hunky dory, she tries to make small talk with me, tries to invite me out to movies on her days off.
I ignore her.
I pray to a God whose existence I question, Please don't let me be evil. Please don't let me hurt any more dogs, or cats, or birds, or any other animals... and please don't let me hurt any people. Please make me a good person. I don't want Mom to be afraid of me. Please make me good. Please...
When I begin high school at the age of fourteen, I should be a fledgling serial killer, but somehow, I defy the standard behavioural trajectory predicted by FBI profilers. Hormones begin flowing, and instead of wanting to kill pretty girls, I just want to fuck them. I lose interest in the compulsions of serial killers and in swiping Natalie's Barbie and Ken dolls. My desires turning away from death and destruction, transforming into a voracious appetite for sex.
I'll show that bastard that I'm better than those new boys of his.
I begin banging every chick that will let me within ten feet of her. I appreciate how abnormal my interests have run the past year or two, and perhaps being a teenaged horn-dog doesn't make me a "good" person, but when compared side by side with being fascinated by murder and blood, it's the lesser of the two evils.
I don't read those journals anymore. I'd like to throw them and their unspeakable contents into the bin, but I'm afraid someone will find and read them. I'd like to burn or shred them, but I don't have a shredder, and there's no place I can light a fire around here without drawing attention to myself. So I stuff them into my bookcase, behind a neglected set of orange Funk & Wagnall encyclopaedias.
I leave my gun-loving, bird-shooting friends behind, begin attending church willingly (I want to be a good person, remember), and reconnect with my old pals Ray and Benny. The robin I killed will haunt me for years after. Luckily, none of the cats I ever shot at have suffered. I was never close enough to get a good shot.
I'm so ashamed when I realise how awful I've been, how mean. Why did I desire to hurt other lives? I remember the Golden Rule from Sunday school: do unto others...
I'm changed.
I'm a good boy now.
But I've forgotten to thank God for answering the prayer I said some months ago.
I've forgotten that I had even said a prayer.
I don't know I'm a victim.
four:
jamie pearce
(aged thirteen to fourteen)
The neighbours across the road tell the police that they heard loud pops, but that they weren't sure if they were gunshots. It's the stench of putrefaction, of human flesh gently cooked by an unseasonable late April heat that prompts them to call. The cops br
eak in and find my mom and daddy rotting. Every room is searched. The house is beyond filthy. Drug paraphernalia are everywhere. Dirt and hair are so thick on the floors that it sticks to their shoes. Mouldy food sits in pans on the cooker. More mould floats on the dishwater. The toilets are coated with shit and grime.
They use bolt cutters to get the locks off of my door and find me lying in purulent pools of faeces, urine and vomit. I can't answer any of their questions. "How long you been locked in here?"; "What's your name?"; "Were they your parents, or were you abducted?". I can't even tell them how long it's been since the shooting. Time has burned away noiselessly.
In the ER, I throw up my most recent meal, which has been sitting undigested for days in my gut: paint chips, wood chips, a scrap of bedsheet, all mixed with black, clotted blood so horribly foul that the police and the nurses and doctors all wrinkle their noses. I'm so ashamed I begin to cry.
I hear them talking about me as they shift my body from stretcher to bed, poke IVs into my arms and stick all manner of tubes up my nose, down my throat and up into my bladder. "There's no way," the doctors say. "He's dying. He weighs forty-three pounds."
I want to die. I need to die. At long last, the mercy of death, an end to this guilt, pain, hunger and endless desolation that has lasted the whole of my short life.
The two cops who had found me turn away. I can hear them crying. I keep drifting in and out, but whenever I'm in, I stare at the backs of the two cops. My mind is enshrouded with a thick narcotic fog, and I fight my way through it to form two questions: How could my parents do what they've done to me? How can total strangers care so much about me that they're crying? Something bursts through my will, my decision to let go and stop fighting. My heart is clogged with a wondrous pain. I know now that I have to live. If those two policemen can care enough about me to cry, there must be something to live for. I don't rationalise this as clearly as it appears on paper, but I know I need to survive. It's not necessarily my preference. It's just what I have to do.
They do their part, the docs and nurses, and I do mine. The feeding tube gives me strength. My kidneys have been ravaged by starvation and dehydration, but they're not totally destroyed, and once I am able to eat and drink on my own, they come alive, working overtime, flushing my body out. I've never had to pee so much in my life!
Three weeks after I am discovered half dead, I go to a less intensive floor at the hospital. A week after that I am given to social services. One of the policemen who saved me, Lloyd Tafford, becomes my foster dad. While I'm laid up, he prepares his home for me. It's a small country house a mile outside Sommerville going towards Sacramento, made almost entirely of bricks. He only has about eight years left to pay on it.
The day I go home with him, Channel 10 comes to cover my story, and everyone in town is there. The sun is out, the sky is a beautiful, pure blue, with cottony clouds. I smell flowers and freshly mowed lawn. I feel like I've just been born.
It's the first time I've ever been in front of a crowd. I'm scared at first, not used to so many eyes on me, wondering what they're thinking. They call me a hero and I'm embarrassed. "I'm not the hero," I tell them. "The police are the heroes. I'm not the one who saved somebody's life."
I'm so thankful to Lloyd for adopting me, for giving me a home.
But it's not easy getting used to a new home, or learning to trust a new parent. After all I've been through, I'm afraid. I can't tell him what I'm afraid of, only that I'm afraid. He soon learns that I'm afraid to let him, or anyone, touch me in any way. When Officer Bloom (Lloyd's partner on the force) comes over, or anyone from town stops by just to talk, I retreat to my new room and resist coming out. It takes a lot of coaxing. When anyone walks toward me to say hello, I become rigid as ice—I can't help it—my eyes filled with alarm and misgiving. I'm on guard even during sleep, my body curled into a tight ball. For the first few weeks it's awful, and Lloyd cries at least once a day, not just because his new son is terrified and unresponsive, but because he can't stop remembering the images from the first day he met me.
One night he begins to describe his recollections in detail. "You had big sores on your back from laying there so long. On your ankles where the chains dug into you. When I lifted you off the mattress you were so light—I almost threw up just from how light you were. You were barely there."
I wait for him to mention the infections all over my skin or the old scars in my anus, but he doesn't.
And then he hugs me, and I stiffen as usual. His big body shudders with sobs and something inside me softens. I put my arms around him and hug him back for the first time. His arms tighten, crushing me against him and the ice inside of me begins to drip away swiftly.
After that night, I crave his hugs. I think I grow on them. I gain weight and get taller, despite the doctors' fears that I'll be stunted because of the starvation and the kidney damage. By the time I'm fully grown, I'm nearly five-six.
In those first tranquil months with Lloyd Tafford, my permanent personality emerges. Lloyd is as much an influence on that as my biological parents. It's still there, that fear, but now I have Lloyd to balance me, and keep it from dominating every second of my life.
Lloyd's never been married, and my coming into his life must have awakened an instinct to love and nurture. He's a great, tall man with dark curly hair and a shy personality. He's a gentle man, not just a gentleman. He grew up in Van Buren, a small town in Arkansas. I've never been out of California, not since that long ago, blurry trip to Oregon. I love the way Lloyd talks. It's not an out and out twang or a deep-Southern drawl. It's very subtle. Only a person with a great ear for non-Californian accents would be able to detect all the unusual inflections, which I adopt as I grow up in his home. I'm glad to have an accent. I'm glad to be able to talk at all. When my birth parents stopped coming to my room, I had nobody to talk to, so I stopped speaking.
With Lloyd, I am introduced to a peaceful, nostalgic world. He loves old radio shows that I've never heard of, like Fibber McGee & Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, and Jack Benny. In winter, he likes to cover up with quilts while listening to these shows, or old music from the fifties. He loves really old movies starring Humphrey Bogart, Bob Hope, Cary Grant. In summer, he enjoys sitting outside on the back porch made of bricks, drinking lemonade and watching bees and hummingbirds sparring over the red liquid he puts into their feeders.
He cries easily, and after so many years of burying my most intense emotions deep inside, I cry a lot too, and the stupidest things set me off, like sad endings of old movies or the first sight I have of the Pacific Ocean. I fall immediately and absolutely in love with the broad, churning teal expanse, even the smells of sand and salt and seaweed. "Let's move to the ocean!" I beg him.
In fact, after smelling nothing but the rank odours of my own unwashed body—ancient sweat, pasty dead skin, stale urine and my own excrement—along with Daddy's semen—for so many years, I've come to love my sense of smell again. I never go into the bakery department of a grocery shop and take for granted the warm aroma of fresh bread.
All of my senses reawaken. When I see and smell my first rainfall outside Lloyd's front door, I run out and dance in it, loving the sound of the rain rattling the dry leaves, the sting of cold drops splattering on my skin. I trail my fingers over the bright green moss growing on the old, cracked bricks on the porch. I have a cold the next day.
My story slowly inches its way though town, from mouth to mouth. It's moved people to write letters of outrage and encouragement to me and Lloyd. On the street, people stare at me. I don't know if I see visages of fascination, curiosity or admiration. I know some of them want to talk to me, ask me how I emerged from hell alive, what went on in that room...
And I'm glad they don't.
Even though Lloyd and I are celebrities in Sommerville, we prefer to keep to ourselves. In fact, Lloyd is every bit the recluse and eccentric I am. Away from work, he likes to be at home. Our companions of preference are the stray alley cats we've adopted.
We spoil them rotten.
I adore these kitties, which we call our "kids". Whenever one of them comes in with a runny nose or a goathead sticker embedded in the tender pink pad of a paw, I fuss over them with warm, wet washcloths and salt water soaks, and I decide to become a veterinarian.
We go to church at the Southern Baptist in town and that's where I discover how much I love to sing. It's the only time I come out of my shell and get in front of crowds. Once that last lyric is past my lips and I sit back down, I'm mute.
My timidity doesn't stop people, mostly older people, from stopping me on the street to ask me how Lloyd and I have been doing. Mrs. Cooke, the white-haired, coffee-skinned lady who runs the bakery on Main Street, calls me in and packs a dozen chocolate frosted éclairs into a pink box. Lloyd loves them, but with their creamy pudding centres, they remind me too much of Ding Dongs and Ho Hos. I politely nibble them to appease Lloyd, then I hide them in a napkin.
I enter school with only a week left of eighth grade, then I am placed into summer school to get caught up. I learn that kids my age are different from older people. I haven't seen a classroom since I was six or seven years old, and at thirteen, I have to learn the very basics of maths. I can't read or spell. I have trouble with dyslexia, always transposing numbers or writing my 'E's and '3's backwards. It's humiliating, and some of the kids are heartless. It's bad enough I'm very small for my age, and their taunting over my reading level makes me feel like a baby. Nothing shields me from the critical scrutiny of my peers. It's so bad some days that I beg Lloyd to let me stay home.
I meet Stacy Pendleton and her girlfriends a few days after I begin school, and soon the bunch of us are palling around and they're guarding me against the meanness of the others. They surround me like hens defending a little yellow chick, promptly dubbing me their "Baby" or "Babe".
Crush Page 3
