Selena

by Greg Barth

  I learned three important things during all those weeks in the hospital. First, opiates are a gift from god. They truly are. Sure people struggle with addiction, and it’s real sad and all. But some of us struggle with fucking pain. Pain like you don’t know. People who have the luxury of worrying about petty things like addiction and side effects do not know how good they have it. Second, nurses are the salt of the earth. I don’t know how much money they make, but if it’s not equal to Donald Trump, it’s a fucking injustice, okay? I say free beer and lap-dances for all nurses until the end of the world. Third, you can’t offer blowjobs for more pain medicine when your jaw is wired shut, so you have to get real creative. It’s sad, I know, when you can’t rely on your talents, but you try to adapt. I tried the fucking sad eyes. I tried pointing to the pain-scale chart on the wall with all the smiley faces and frowny faces. I pointed with perfect aim at the anguished frowny face, the one with the tears running down his round little cheeks. I even tried reprogramming my IV machine. Nothing worked. It wasn’t like I wanted to get high. I just wanted relief from the pain.

  Okay, high would be nice too. But not necessary.

  In the end, I thought of my days as a cutter and how I drew pleasure from pain, how pain drove away the angst and cut through the fog. Pain brought clarity. I reflected on how my self-inflicted pain had been a preemptive block for the hurt that everyone else handed me.

  In the hospital, I lay on my back with my eyes closed, relaxing every muscle in my body, and I just rode the pain. I rode it and owned it. Fuck being a victim. It’s my body, let it feel what it feels.

  It didn’t happen all at once, but as the days passed, pain became my friend. There was no fear. There was no depression. There was no PTSD or any of that shit. I was not going to become a shut-in and waste away. There was just the constant, stroking presence of pain that I floated in and that lapped at every part of my body. Pain punctuated by the occasional relief through medication, a strange yin-and-yang pairing that I finally learned to be at peace with.

  Having been a pleasure-seeker most of my life, I was now denied all forms of pleasure. I could only find and take pleasure in the continuous, overlapping waves of pain as they crested and washed through and over my body, licking at every part of me like gentle ripples.

  Then they put me on the walker. Oh god, that torturous little therapy bitch named Heather. Hashtag fucking sadist. I wanted to stay in bed. Hell, wouldn’t you? But Noooooo. You gotta waaaaalk Selena, you gotta get beeeeeetter Selena, you gotta take more steps Selena, you don’t wanna stay in bed forever do you Selena.

  What I wanted to do was fashion a shank out of my toothbrush and stab her in her kidney.

  Once during a particularly grueling torture session, I asked her if she moonlighted as a dominatrix or worse, a dental hygienist. Turns out she didn’t, but she confessed to being into some serious kink. Bondage. I fucking knew it.

  The cops visited once. A nice, soft-spoken young lady with a stick up her ass, and a muscle-bound guy who talked too loud. I think he had control of the stick. I’m not good with authority figures. They make me nervous and feel like I’ve done something wrong.

  They took my statement. They didn’t do one of those photo line-ups like they show on TV, and they didn’t bring in a sketch artist. They said they would need to get another statement once I was less impaired by pain killers. Whatever. I had been more fucked up the night it happened. I just couldn’t remember enough details to help them. They said they got a DNA sample from one of the assailants from my stitched-up rectum.

  The story I told them probably sounded like Sasquatch porn at the ball field, but it was how I remembered it.

  I’m sure they had already gotten a peek at my prior charges and convictions—DUI’s, possession, prostitution—but I’m equally sure that didn’t affect their opinion of me one iota. Surely officer stick-up-her-ass would not subscribe to the archaic notion that you can’t rape a prostitute.

  I never heard from them again. And I certainly didn’t go seeking them out.

  The only other person to pay me a visit in the hospital the whole time I was there was Lenny. Never did a man look more out of place than Lenny standing in the doorway of my room in his leather jacket, Clash t-shirt (London Calling, fuck yeah!), jeans, and engineer boots with a vase of flowers in one hand and a Mylar balloon floating above his head held by a ribbon in his other hand. The balloon was round and had a picture of a basset hound with an icepack on its head and a thermometer stuck in its mouth. Thank god it was in its mouth. Its cute eyes looked so sad and droopy, its long ears spread out like puddles on the floor under its snout. “Get Well Soon” the print on the balloon said.

  I covered my eyes and chuckled at the absurdity of it all.

  He came in the room and set the vase down on the table next to my bed and tied the balloon to it. He stood next to me and took my hand.

  My spirits were raised by just seeing him.

  A smile the size of Texas spread across my face.

  I was dressed in a thin hospital gown that afforded me no modesty, but I had no pride left at that point. I had an oxygen sensor taped to one fingertip, an IV hooked to the back of my hand, and a catheter hose running up my gown. I was wearing an oxygen tube under my nose.

  “Forgive me if I don’t get up,” I said.

  “Jeez, kid. They sure did a number on your face.”

  “Nah,” I said. “You’ve just never seen me without my makeup before.”

  “Looks like they got you all put back together,” he said.

  “All the parts they could find, anyway. Got some surgical steel parts and some plastic parts now too.”

  “They taking good care of you here? You need anything?” He looked over at my uneaten lunch tray sitting nearby.

  “Sit,” I said.

  I wasn’t able to talk much, but I was glad he was there.

  “Really,” Lenny said. “How do you feel?”

  I took a deep breath. “It’s not just my body, Lenny. I just…you ever feel like the prom queen that got knocked up?”

  He chuckled. “Every day. Ain’t nothing fair about any of it.” He squeezed my hand. “But you’re still the prom queen.”

  I scoffed.

  “Any idea who did this to you?” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ve got an idea who it might’ve been.”

  “It was those guys that were there asking about you,” he said. “I’m sure of it. I ever see those two again, they’re dead.”

  “They may come back,” I said.

  “Maybe I should find them first.”

  I shook my head. “Whoever they are, those guys are bad news, Lenny. Leave them alone.”

  Lenny slipped me a bottle of pills before he left. “A gift,” he said. “A little something extra to help take the edge off.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Call me when you get out, and I’ll help you get settled back in.”

  I realized that life would go on.

  FIVE

  The walker went home with me. Walking with it was fucking medieval but there was no taking a step without it. When they discharged me, I took a cab to my apartment. The cab driver helped me out and got my walker set up for me.

  There was an eviction notice posted to my door. Nice. Guess they didn’t know that I had been beaten, raped, and in the hospital for weeks, but then, how could they? My key still worked, though.

  My apartment had been ransacked. I couldn’t even get through the door. Furniture was overturned, drawers pulled out, cushions inside out, walls busted open, floorboards pulled up. Surely they had found the disc in the CD player before going to this length. Wouldn’t that be the first place you would look? Had MP3 players changed us that much?

  They were angry, and they weren’t finished hurting me.

  I sure hope you found whatever you wanted, fuckhead, I thought.

  I closed the door without taking a step inside.

  I used a neighbor’s phone and calle
d Lenny. He came over and took me to my car. Lenny rides a motorcycle, which complicated things. He lifted me up and set me on the back of the bike’s double seat. It was a hellish ride. My ass and legs were not ready for it, and I had to hold onto Lenny’s belt with one hand and my folded up walker with the other.

  My car was still parked at the club, keys inside, glass still on the front seat. Guess nobody who wanted to steal it could blow a sober reading. Goes to show, somebody beats a whore half to death and then ass-rapes her, nobody gives a shit. Of course, I can’t complain, it’s not like I ever paid taxes or ever contributed to society.

  Lenny helped me brush the glass from my seat.

  “You know you can stay with me,” he said. “I’ll help you while you recover.”

  “No offense, but I have to get away from this city for a while.”

  I went by the pharmacy to get my prescriptions filled. When I saw what medicines they had prescribed me, I thought I could get some great street value off of the pills. Opiates can turn some serious green. But I thought I might need them for the pain, so I cut a couple of the pills up with a blade I had purchased in the pharmacy and snorted the powder. I realized pretty fast that I wouldn’t be selling these pills. No way. I really did need them.

  I sat there in my car in the drug store parking lot considering my next step. All I had to my name was a walker, a bag full of pills, and a piece-of-shit car. My future consisted of about a year’s worth of pre-scheduled follow-up doctors’ appointments.

  Not having anywhere else to go, I pulled out of the lot and pointed the car in a direction that I had not traveled in over fifteen years.

  I pointed it toward home.

  SIX

  It was a six-hour trip to get home. I drove the whole way in silence, almost in a daze. My tender body didn’t care for the experience. Pain seared my arms, legs, ass, and back. I didn’t trust my tolerance for the pills enough to take any more of them. I had grown even more gaunt in the hospital, going days between meals sometimes.

  I rode the pain, surfing its crests and plunging its troughs as the highway rolled by like an endless gray ribbon under me. The cool wind from the busted window was my only distraction.

  I didn’t think about my purpose for going back or even what I would do or say when I got there. I was driven by instinct to return to where I started like a homing pigeon. I only stopped once to gas up, get a soda, and use the restroom.

  Home was Eastern Kentucky. The further into Appalachia I drove, the more the terrain turned to steep, wooded hills. The road curved and wound between them. Larger mountains loomed in the distance.

  Memories flooded back as I passed familiar places that I hadn’t seen since childhood. I turned off of the highway onto a side road that led on a steep ascent into the hills. My father lived a couple of miles up a gravel road between the hollows of the mountains, on the edge of a wooded hill in a remote part of the county.

  My dad and I hadn’t spoken in over fifteen years. He had aged some. He was a good foot taller than me and outweighed me by an easy hundred-and-fifty pounds. His hair had grown long and had thinned. He hadn’t shaved in a few days. He wore the stereotypical ball cap with a number 3 printed on the front above the bill, t-shirt, and faded jeans.

  My father’s first words to me after all this time were, “Damn, girl. What the hell got ahold of you?”

  I had parked in the tall grass next to his tattered mobile home. A series of bald car tires lined the rusted roof of the trailer in two rows. One of the windows was busted and covered with cardboard with the Budweiser logo facing outward.

  “Some boys, Daddy,” I said. “They roughed me up pretty good. Didn’t treat me ladylike. But I’m okay.”

  “Well, come on in.”

  His dogs ran loose in the yard, three mixed breeds, and they circled me as I took careful, little-old-lady steps with my walker through the yard. I like dogs, but these were rugged hunting hounds. I had to remind myself that dogs invented my favorite sex position, otherwise I would have lost respect for these. Dad shooed them away from in front of me.

  I had to go up a series of concrete blocks that were stacked on top of each other to get up to the front door of the trailer.

  Dad helped me up the steps then went back for my walker and set it inside the door for me.

  The place hadn’t changed. The living room was sparsely furnished with old, tattered vinyl-covered chairs and a love seat. None of them matched. A coffee table covered in beer cans, liquor bottles, girlie magazines, and ashtrays sat in the middle of the floor. A stack of VHS porn tapes sat on a shelf above his floor model TV. Another TV, smaller, with a flat screen sat on top of the floor model. The local news was playing on the flat screen.

  “Make yourself at home,” he said. “Everything’s still where it used to be. You want something to eat?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t eat so much these days.”

  “Me neither,” he said. “We’ll have to run to the store and get some things.”

  I gestured to a bottle of Jim Beam on the table. “You mind?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  I uncapped the bottle and took a long drink straight from the bottle. The bourbon hit my stomach like a warm explosion.

  “Good to see you,” he said.

  We sat and watched TV together, chain smoking Winston reds, passing the bottle back and forth without saying much. It wasn’t as weird as I thought it would be. I could have only been gone one day verses fifteen years. We just fell back into old patterns.

  “When you get tired,” he said. “Everything in your room’s still the way it was when you…when you left.”

  I went down the hall to my old bedroom and turned the light on. The room was the size of a large closet. My twin bed was unmade, rumpled blankets and pillows in a loose pile. It was like a time machine to the 1990’s. My romance books were in a neat line on the dresser, a mixture of Harlequins and Silhouettes. One lay open, face down, marking a place that I had never gotten back to. A poster of Britney Spears in full Baby One More Time pose hung next to a small, wall-mounted mirror. On the opposite wall over my bed were posters of Buffy and Dawson’s Creek. A couple of issues of YM were on the nightstand next to an NSYNC CD and a half-empty bottle of Herbal Essences shampoo. I had been fourteen years old the night I ran down the gravel road to the highway and hitched a ride with a truck driver never to look back. The closet door was missing, as it always had been, and my old clothes were still inside, mostly cargo pants and baby-doll tees. I parked my walker inside the door. I lay down on the small bed and curled up.

  SEVEN

  I awoke to the smell of bacon frying. So gross. My mouth was dry and I had to pee. I had slept in my clothes. I realized that I hadn’t even packed so much as a toothbrush. I didn’t have as many teeth after the attack, but Winstons and Beam don’t leave you with fresh breath the morning after.

  I rolled out of the small bed and walked down the carpeted hallway in my bare feet. The bathroom was even smaller than my bedroom. It had a plastic sink, a toilet, and mobile-home sized plastic bathtub. I remembered it from my childhood, but I did not recall it being so small.

  After peeing in the small, cramped toilet, I went back to my bedroom, grabbed my walker and went to the living room. I rinsed my mouth with the last few drops of Jim Beam.

  “Morning, sunshine,” my dad said. He was standing in the kitchen over the stove, stirring bacon in a blackened cast-iron skillet. He had Maxwell House brewing in the Mr. Coffee.

  “Where’s my pills,” I said.

  “Kitchen table.” I saw the bag on the table. There was also a spot of dust on the table. Pill residue. He had been cutting them.

  “You fucking take them?”

  “Hold on, hold on,” he said. “Just a couple. No more than a couple. They’re all right there.”

  I grabbed the bag, took out the bottles and shook them individually. I didn’t want to take any yet. Fuck the pain, I thought.

  “How do you like your e
ggs,” he said.

  “Fertilized, full grown, breaded, and fried. Then puked up in a nice slimy puddle. How do you like yours?”

  “Okay. No eggs.”

  I poured some coffee and nibbled at a strip of bacon. I hated the act of putting food into my body. Hasn’t mankind perfected the art of liquid calories well enough by now to eliminate the need to eat solid food altogether? I wanted to go to the bathroom and put my finger down my throat, but I couldn’t remember when I had eaten last, so I restrained the urge.

  The kitchen consisted of a stove, sink, refrigerator, and a dining-room table that resembled a picnic table with a long bench on either side. One wall had a sliding-glass double-door that opened onto a rotting deck. On the other wall was a door that opened outward, not to a porch or deck but to a steep drop of seventy-five feet to a wooded creek in the hollow of the hill. The floors in the kitchen had softened with damp and age. My dad had placed rough plywood across the floor joists to cover the holes. The linoleum hadn’t been replaced. He simply put cheap throw rugs over the plywood coverings.

  “You remember your old friend, Jennifer LeBlanc?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Memories flooded back, us singing into our hairbrushes in her bedroom, dancing in front of the mirror in t-shirts and panties. I hadn’t thought of her in years. I remembered, Jennifer’s family didn’t have running water in their house. That wasn’t unusual in Eastern Kentucky. The nights that I would stay over with her, we would go outside around back of their house and pee in the back yard to avoid overfilling their toilet before they could get water brought in to pour into the tank to flush with in the morning.

  “She’s working down at the diner just off the mouth of the holler. I get down that way for lunch sometimes. Good chicken there if that’s what you want. They got good cold beer too.”

  “How’s she getting along these days?”