Thursday, April 30, 2009

My Story, Part V


So. There I was, a girl who had friends and who loved Girl Scouts and who got almost perfect grades, who adored her first babies- her little brothers, and who was coming into her own as a blossoming woman.
That was me on the surface.

I keep thinking about Kiwanis Pancake breakfasts. C. was a member of the Kiwanis Club and once a year they would have a pancake breakfast and he always volunteered to cook pancakes. I remember going down to the school where they had it and thinking that we looked like such a perfect family. The daddy in an apron, doing his bit for the community, my mother and brother and the two redheaded little toddlers, cute as bugs, darling boys, all of us eating pancakes with butter and syrup on them.

Yeah. We looked good on paper. Or in public.

But at home?
Different story. Different universe.

It was a dark universe and I keep using that word but dammit, it's the only one that will do. C.'s codeine addiction was getting worse and worse. The chair where he laid to watch TV was in the family room and the table where we ate was only about ten feet away. Mother and I would get the dinner ready, get the kids washed up and in their highchairs, we'd all sit down at the set table and C. would lay there, refusing to come to the table despite Mother's pleadings and we couldn't, of course, start without him.
Passive-aggressive behavior and we'd all wait, with Mother's entreaties to him growing more and more angry.
Finally he'd raise his dense bulk off that chair and come to the table where we always said grace before we ate. Of course C.'s chair was right next to mine. He would pile whatever Mother had made onto bread and his manners were at once overly-prissy and yet, at the same time, crude. I can't explain it. But just sitting there, watching him eat, made me feel nauseous. He would talk and he would ramble and he would mumble. This was during the Viet Nam war which was on our television every night and C. would go on and on and on about the "Veetnam war" and how we ought to bomb the heck out of them and how the protesters should be shot. He was a Nixon supporter, he loved the US of A. Meanwhile, the body bags were being shown on the TV, there were images of monks setting themselves on fire and villages being napalmed. Protesters were being shot, too, right here at home. And tear-gassed and arrested. All this was going on right in front of us in living color, every night while C. ate his casserole on white bread, his little fingers crimped, his mouth full of food as he railed against the world.

It was about this time that boys were starting to show interest in me. I couldn't figure that out. Despite the fact that I'd lost a lot of weight, I still thought of myself as definitely NOT CUTE. But they did. And I was told in no uncertain terms that there would be no dating until I was sixteen. No two ways about it.

I remember when I wanted to shave my legs and somehow, C. got involved in that discussion too. Why? Who knows? Another inappropriate little sliver of bullshit under the fingernail of my life in that house. Finally, after much debate, I was given permission and not only that, but was given C.'s old double-bladed razor from the freaking Army to use. Although I cut my anklebones to shreds with that thing, I was glad not to be the only girl in Jr. High with hairy legs and arm pits. But every time I used that razor I thought of him. And that was just how it was. Despite the fact that he was no longer visiting me at night, he somehow had control of intimate parts of me that a father should not have. I always felt watched. I never felt safe. I know I use that term too, over and over but again, there is no other way to put it.

I did feel safe when I was away from the house. That was one of the reasons I loved Girl Scouts. We were an active troop and camped a lot. I loved those trips, those nights in the tents, giggling with my friends, cooking over an open fire, singing songs around the campfire, making up skits, doing new things, swimming in springs. That felt so normal, so right. I was a good Girl Scout.

I feel like I'm leaving so much out here. There were people who were so important to me, who are responsible for whatever self-esteem I may have, who believed in me and who let me know it. There were people who cared and I probably wouldn't be here now if not for them.
And my story is jumping around in time and space and I apologize for that.

The summer between my eighth and ninth grades, my parents decided we needed to go on a family vacation. The two little boys were left in the care of a frankly unfit old, old, OLD woman named Pearl who could make a mean potato salad but whom I wouldn't have left in charge of my dog. No one else seemed concerned, though, so I never said a word.

The trip was taken in the family Vista Cruiser station wagon and we drove from Winter Haven all the way up to North Dakota and then to California and back. And it was hell.
C. liked to drive while taking Codeine and if he managed his dose correctly, it was semi-okay, although the drug messed up his stomach fiercely and he was constantly having to stop to...well, just the thought of that man's intestinal disorders leading to him having to remove his pants made me sick. And he liked to smoke cigars. With the window closed. And he loved country music. All the way across the country those were the factors involved.
There was also the styrofoam ice chest that squeaked like fingernails on a chalkboard right behind me every motherfucking mile of the journey. And then there was my brother who was in the "she touched me!" phase of childhood.
Good times.
Eight, nine hours a day in a car with that man. Breathing the same air he breathed, listening to the music he wanted to listen to, hating him every moment.

C. grew testier and more and more critical of my brother and me while Mother tried to smooth the waters. Finally, she grew tired of that role and was simply angry at him. We would ride for miles and miles with no one saying a word, vast endless vistas passing before us and all of us silent.

I had heard about hippies and seen them on TV but I had never seen one in the flesh until we got nearer to California. I was immediately entranced. It was almost as if everything before them was in black and white, and suddenly, it was all in psychedelic color. The rules didn't apply to hippies. They wore what they wanted and it was all beautiful, drapey, Indian print, gauzy, swirling, vintage and lovely. Beads, bells, hair down to here on men and women. They broke ALL the rules. They didn't work, they panhandled, they hung out and got stoned and they had sex with whomever they wanted to have sex with.
And best of all- they did not live with their parents.
And there they all were in San Franscisco and if I had been any older, any bolder, I would have darted away from my little group of a straight sight-seeing family and joined them. Oh. How I longed to! And how I wish I had, somehow. Even to this day.
But of course I didn't. I was too afraid. I was too young, but they triggered something in my soul that said, "You don't have to believe everything you've been taught. You don't have to follow their rules. The rules of the parents, the churches, the law. Look at Richard Nixon- why would you follow the same rules he follows?" And even if you were a kid in Winter Haven, Florida, the music gave you instructions on the hippie lifestyle.
The music. The music saved my life over and over and over again. From the Rolling Stones to Crosby, Stills and Nash, to Bob Dylan and The Mamas and The Papas. Donovan, John Sebastian, Jimi Hendrix, The Band, Sly and The Family Stone, Marvin Gaye, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors...The list never ended, the songs never ended and above them all were the Beatles. It was like there was a magical kingdom of young people and we all danced and sang the same songs whether we were in California or London or Winter Haven. My god, the music. It swept through the world like wildfire and it was what held us all together, what informed us and celebrated us. And when I say "us" I mean the young people.

The Viet Nam war had set up the old against the young and that's all there was to it. Young men were being used as nothing more than cannon fodder in a war that had absolutely no meaning to any of us. After a lifetime of being told that the commies were out to get us one country at a time, we still hadn't seen any and we didn't believe them. Viet Nam was one more example of that. The people we were blowing up and being blown up by looked a lot more like old women and babies than they did Krutschev. And them young men who were being sent over there looked like our brothers, our boyfriends, our cousins. It was a mess and a hell of a time to be growing up.

And here I was, traveling the country in a Vista Cruiser with my mother, my younger brother, and a man I hated, being forced to listen to Hank Williams when I wanted to be listening to Mick Jagger.
Ah well. Movies have been made with the same theme. I was not the only one.

Another thing I saw on that trip for the first time was a Porsche. For some reason, I fell in love with that car, too, and when I found out how much they cost, I was astounded. Huh, I thought. Well, no wonder there aren't any in Winter Haven.

Eventually we made it back home and I was so grateful to get out of that car and be able to breathe again. My little brothers were fine and I was so happy to hold them again. I had missed them terribly.

And life went on. I went to high school and the fellows started sniffing around in earnest. We had little neighborhood parties and we would slow dance to Hey Jude (which lasts for about one hour and forty-five minutes, by the way) and those dances were about as sexual an experience as I've ever had, even to this day. Teenaged hormones.

And as my hormones raged and boys started this ancient dance of exploration with hopes of discovery, C. got crazier and crazier. The not-until-you're-sixteen-years-old rule was not to be broken. I was trusted to watch over my little brothers at the age of fifteen for two weeks alone and by myself while C. and Mother took off on another vacation, but I was not trusted to go out for three hours with a boy to see a movie. That's all there was to it.
And finally, I did turn sixteen and there were no more reasons why I was not allowed to date for C. to give me. A boy asked me out, I accepted, and that was that.
C. cried when he came to pick me up, this boy, which my mother thought was just incredibly sweet. "You see how much he loves you?" she asked.
Love like that was something I would have loved to live without.

Somewhere within this time frame, I wanted to get a two-piece bathing suit. C. disapproved but Mother took me shopping (which reminds me, C. always took me shopping for clothes. EVEN A BRA!) and bought me what she thought was completely appropriate. C. insisted that I "model" it for him. My mother and her friend, one of our neighbor's, was there and also Granny Matthews.
"No," C. said, as I came out into the living room, feeling exposed and naked and quite frankly raped by his eyes. "It's too revealing."
"No it's not, C.," my mother said.
"It's darling," our neighbor said.
And then Granny Matthews took C. into the kitchen and gave him a talking-to which resulted in me being allowed to wear the bathing suit. To this day, I think she knew what was going on.

As I grew, as I so obviously became more of a sexual being, as I started dating seriously, C. just lost his shit. It got worse and worse and then, one day, he did something completely and utterly out of character for him. He drove home in a new car.

A Porsche. A new 911-T, sparkling white Porsche.

15 comments:

  1. Totally superficial response to such a post, but... I <3 Janice.

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  2. Are your mother and him still married?

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  3. Aunt Becky- It's okay, honey. Really. It is.

    Steph- No. not superficial at all. Janice is (uh, okay, was) amazing. And no, they are not still married. I'll go into that one later.

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  4. What is it with the car holidays?

    Ugh. The icechest was the insult added to injury really.

    2 1/2 weeks with your little brothers at 15?

    Swimsuit? Bra shopping?

    My God, indeed.

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  5. Whoa. That is totally surreal.

    I can definitely empathize with the car ride cross country. In our fam, we had about 5 of us and a dog crammed into my brothers Mercury... "The Merc" Everyone but me was a smoker. Of course we had the windows up because the air had to be on. Even then, I knew that was wrong. Honestly, I think cigar smoke is worse. It's amazing any of us made it out of childhood without lung cancer!

    xo pf

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  6. Your story is so completely astounding and yet, one I'm sure isn't all that uncommon. Just wanted to let you know I'm reading, I'm caring, even though I haven't known just what to say yet.

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  7. hmmmm.

    (thats me thinking... pondering...)

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  8. Thank God for the hippies and for the music. It makes me cry, among many other things in your story, how much music changed the world.

    And I just have to say that it's no wonder why you don't like shopping. I mean, I'm sure there are other reasons, but that probably adds a lot to it.

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  9. Ms. Jo- Well. Ice chest/incest. No pun intended.

    Ms. Fleur- And we wonder why we don't take family vacations?

    Ginger- Just knowing people are reading. That's all I need to know.

    Learner- Need a candle?

    HoneyLuna- Yes. I am figuring things out as I write. And no wonder I still do love the music and still do claim to be a hippie.
    I love you, baby. I do love you, my music maker, my hippie dancer.

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  10. BTW, who is the girl in the picture? I know that's not you with that brown hair! I love the car too!

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  11. Ms. Fleur- That is Janis Joplin.

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  12. What a sick, sad piece of shit C must have been. The cigar smoke, the ice chest, the fighting, bathing suits, BRAS? It makes me feel sick for you.

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  13. I hate this happened to you, but I am fascinated by this story.

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  14. Lady L- Yep. That pretty much sums him up.

    SJ- Oh, honey. I got a million stories! Don't we all?

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Tell me, sweeties. Tell me what you think.