Note: This is the second part of the the story that I have written.
The Book of Genesis
“It’s funny how you
know where things are—until you don’t.” –me
The “Brat Pack” was as old as any of us could remember: we’d all pretty much been friends since our
earliest memories. We’d all grown up in the same drowsy rural Southwestern
Michigan hamlet—Clumber—and attended the same schools, churches, scouting
pow-wows, after-school sporting events, and the like. Our mothers, for those of
us who had them, went to the same Mary Kay and Pampered Chef parties, our
fathers got shit-faced stumbling drunk every Friday night at the same Elks club
bar.
And like bucolic Clumber’s other denizens, we were a bit
inbred: Jake was Ethan’s second cousin
by blood, Ted was my half-brother via my mother and a long-dead paternal uncle,
and Lizzie was my half-sister via my father and a maternal aunt. Only Micah,
who parents had come from the Eastern and Central parts of the state (Big Three
and Midland chemical money, respectively) for God knows what reason and to
build a sprawling, ostentatious beachfront “cottage” on the banks of Lake
Michigan, had brought fresh blood and new life to our insular clan. They’d
moved here when he was five years old.
I forget how Ethan said that he’d met Micah. Micah certainly
didn’t attend our single-building kindergarten through twelfth grade school.
His parents had the means and the arrogance to send him to Ruthewyn, one of the
best private boarding schools in the state, during the academic year, so I
didn’t end up meeting him until I attended Ethan’s high school graduation party
years later.
This was kind of surprising since Ethan and I were pretty
close. Ethan’s mom had been my social worker with the state’s children’s
services when Granny Evvy died when I was eight and I’d been placed in foster
care. It was weird how in a town as small as Clumber, two people (Micah and I)
could have the same best friend (Ethan) for basically the same length of time
(over ten years) during the same formative epoch in their lives and not only
never have met each other before but were totally unaware of each other’s
existence.
But Ethan wasn’t being deliberately secretive in keeping
Micah and me away from each other—that was just how he lived his life: well organized and neatly, distinctly
ordered—everything had a proper place and everything fit nicely into its own
little box. With a bow and everything.
Ethan wasn’t pathological, though, just somewhat eccentric.
Perpetually good natured and innately, almost maddeningly happy at times, he
was always among the best people to be around, no matter what was going on in
the outside world. You don’t get better people than Ethan and his immediate
family. You just don’t.
Which made Jake’s incessantly oozing, fetid arrogance all
the more puzzling. How Jake turned out the way he did—inherently, obsessively
domineering, self-centered, and cold-hearted—was truly baffling. Being that
Clumber’s such a small place, I knew his parents—the head of the local
Episcopal church and his chief district librarian wife—very well, and they were
good and kindly people.
But they saw no wrong in their only son, and therein was
where the genesis of the problem lay, in my opinion. They’d tell everyone who’d
listen—mostly tourists who’d come to visit the vast array of local wineries—how
their smart, wonderful, handsome son was going to be president of the United
States some day because he could do anything he’d set his heart on and because
he was a born leader.
The rest of the town would silently roll their eyes in
disgust and try not to expel the acid churning at the back of their throats
when Jake’s parents would get into this monologue. Sure, Jake could be a
professional politician—he was one of the biggest self-serving little bastards
you’d ever meet—but no one from Clumber ever got that far, no matter how much they
tried. The closest thing in Clumber that we’d ever had to a brush with a famous
person was one of the state’s first territorial governors, Mose Gardner Hicks,
being born here in 1810. But you could easily argue he didn’t count as being a
true resident of the town: his family
moved to Detroit when he was five years old, and besides, at the time, the town
of Clumber (more like a loose collection of frontier log homes huddled around
the remains of an old wolverine trappers’ camp back then) was known as Porter’s
Lick.
But much as we disliked Jake, we tolerated him for Ethan’s
sake because Ethan saw no bad in anyone, especially not family. It was quite a
hardship, but yes, we all loved Ethan that much.
I’ve always been much more of a realist about my kinfolk
given that I spent a lot of my childhood away from them, bouncing from foster
home to foster home, because of their rejection of me, either due to pragmatic
reasons (like finances) or charming flights of fancy (like the sincere belief
that because I was born on Halloween I was actually possessed by the devil).
Ted was cut from the same intemperate cloth as my mother. He
was two years my junior, and except for the fact that we had the same dark
mahogany hair, extremely fair skin, and rich espresso-colored eyes, you
wouldn’t know we were siblings.
Where Ted was tall and lanky, I was slight and stout. He
wore his hair closely cropped in a military-style buzz cut to manage the
otherwise unwieldy mass of curls that would burst forth from his scalp if his
mane were allow to grow unchecked, while my hair, which had retained the
inherited luxuriant thickness, was merely wavy. I usually kept it past my
shoulders in length but always pinned back or pulled away from my face and
neck. (Ladies always keep their hair up to show the world their beauty, Granny
Evvy always used to say. I don’t how much of that was true for me, but after
having my thick locks violently, yet lovingly, brushed back and forced tight
against my scalp with needle-like bobby pins for the first eight years of my
life, I’d developed a real distaste for the feeling of free-flowing and loose hair
around my face and on my neck.)
And where the constant instability of my upbringing had
given me a certain tenacity and pluck, Ted’s life of middle class normalcy had
made him a perpetual whiner and spineless fuck up. It was his bitch mother who
made him that way, though. She couldn’t have kids of her own, so when Uncle
Jimmie got my momma pregnant, she didn’t hesitate to petition the courts for
custody of Ted, given that my momma was big into meth, booze, and running off
with random men, usually bikers or long-haul truckers, for months at a time.
Granny Evvy already had full custody of me by then, and she tried to get Ted,
too, but Aunt Glenda had just a little more money for slightly better lawyers,
so she won the battle. Ted went to go live with her and Uncle Jimmie.
However, Aunt Glenda’s maternal instincts were severely
deficient when it came to children other than Ted. When Granny Evvy got
pancreatic cancer and tried to get Aunt Glenda to take me so that Ted and I
could be together as siblings again, especially since she was dying, Aunt
Glenda yelled and swore and screamed at Granny Evvy that she would “never, ever
take that whore’s (my momma) child (me)” as her own and that Granny Evvy could
kiss her ass and “go to Hell” as far as she was concerned. Tears streamed down
Granny Evvy’s cheeks as Aunt Glenda stormed out of the trailer and slammed the
rusty aluminum screen behind her.
I’d never seen a grown-up cry before, especially not Granny
Evvy, who was always so happy and cheerful—the ladies at the Pentecostal church
we attended on Wednesdays and Sundays called her Mrs. Sunshine—so I went up to
her and gave her a hug. I told her to give her sorrows to the angels because
Jesus would make it better.
Granny Evvy was horrified that I’d seen that whole ugly
scene and told me to forgive Aunt Glenda because these things were hard for
grown-ups. She promised me that I’d understand when I was older.
But I already understood at eight years old: Aunt Glenda wasn’t going to take me to live
with her, Ted, and Uncle Jimmie because I looked just like my momma, and my
momma had always been prettier than that fat sow.
I tried to obey Granny Evvy and forgive Aunt Glenda for being
such a flaming bitch at first, but when Granny Evvy wasted away in a miserable,
painful death two weeks later in the hospice house, I was so mad at Aunt Glenda
for making Granny Evvy die and sending her to Hell that all I wanted was blood.
So I prayed every night for three straight weeks for Aunt
Glenda to die and go to Hell, too.
But she didn’t die.
Three weeks and one day after Granny Evvy’s death, Uncle
Jimmie fell out of a deer stand and broke his neck in three places on the first
day of deer season. He died before the ambulance could arrive.
That’s when I knew God didn’t exist, but evil does and that
you can’t contain and control malevolence once you set it loose upon the world.
Uncle Jimmie, who’d always been really nice to me, didn’t deserve to die. Aunt
Glenda more than had it coming, but Uncle Jimmie was innocent.
That’s when I decided I would never ever pray for anyone’s
death (or harm) again. Bad juju is powerful stuff—too powerful. Best not to
mess with it in the first place.
After Uncle Jimmie’s death, Aunt Glenda, who’d always been a
smothery, hovery parent to Ted, became exponentially more so. And so Ted grew
up to be the insecure, indecisive chicken shit that he was.
However, in spite of his inherent spinelessness, Ted got the
bright idea to join the Marines right after high school. That obviously didn’t
last long.
Ted went AWOL after three weeks of basic training when his
erratic behavior led the brass at Camp Lejeune to demand a drug test and a
psychiatric evaluation. He was caught two weeks later at a pawn shop twenty
miles away trying to fence a $10,000 Rolex watch (which he’d stolen from a
dying hospital patient) for $200. He then sat his little drugged up ass in jail
for about six months until Aunt Glenda could scrounge up a fairly large sum of
money to hire a lawyer competent enough to get him out.
Technically, Ted’s still on parole in North Carolina and
isn’t supposed to be unemployed, on drugs, or back in Michigan, but obviously
the fuzz in the Tar Heel State aren’t watching him too closely and aren’t
looking for him too intensely since that mess with the watch happened about six
years ago.
I liked Lizzie better, especially now that she was an adult
capable of independent thought. But she hadn’t always been that way.
My father had married my maternal Aunt Bettina after my
momma had left him to ride to New Mexico with a bona fide member of the Hell’s
Angels motorcycle gang. My momma came back to Clumber about four months later
when she was very visibly pregnant. She claimed that she was eight months along
and wanted to marry my dad to give me a proper upbringing. Given the timing of
things, my dad didn’t argue with my momma about the paternity question, but
Aunt Bettina had already gotten him to the altar by then.
My dad had gotten Aunt Bettina pregnant in the time while my
momma was gone, so they had been married in order to maintain an air of
quasi-respectability. Aunt Bettina immediately took to insisting that my momma
had lied about who my actual father was and even went so far to claim when I
was born on Halloween and Lizzie was born on Christmas Day of the same year
that it was a literal sign from the Almighty that I was really and truly a
child of Satan and that Lizzie was actually favored by Our Lord and Savior.
Aunt Bettina, who was a stricter Pentecostal woman than
Granny Evvy (but who is also the meanest devoutly Christian person I’ve ever
met), drilled that Bible-babble bullshit into Lizzie for years and used it as
an excuse to keep us apart. Lizzie believed it hook, line, and sinker for about
seventeen years. That’s when she finally did the math and realized that her own
mother, by getting pregnant out of wedlock, had been just as much of a Jezebel
as my mother (according to the teachings of the church). She lost some of her
attitude then.
The final wall between us had been broken down when Lizzie
got dealt a real shit hand by life shortly after graduating high school. She’d
married her high school sweetheart (Jeff Peyton—yes, that Jeff Peyton, the
Reverend Samuel Peyton’s son, the same Reverend Peyton who has been the pastor
at Clumber’s Pentecostal church, the same church which my whole family has
attended for generations) at nineteen and quickly conceived. Instead of being
all smiles and excitement, Jeff slapped her with divorce papers. As it turns
out, he had taken to having more than platonic relations with a man in the next
county, and they had planned to move in together.
Lizzie was obviously humiliated and devastated. The stress
and shame resulting from the whole situation caused her to give birth to a
stillborn baby girl five months premature. To top it all off, the rest of the
family turned their backs on her during her greatest time of need because she’d
married a “sodomite.”
I was the only one in the family decent enough to take
Lizzie in and hold her and soothe her while she cried endlessly for almost a
full year. She’s capable of joy and smiles and laughter now, but she does have
that same look in her eyes that Ethan now has:
the haunted look. She’ll never be truly whole again.
Unfortunately, it took the experience of being a permanent
family outcast and not having a support system for Lizzie to finally understand
what I’d been through my whole life. But once she understood, she totally
changed her tune, and we formed our own empowering dynamic.
And the more time she spends away from the caustic,
hypocritical dysfunction of our family, the more layers of stringent rules and
teachings and dogma fall away from her, which makes her much more tolerant and
tolerable.
She’s even started to become dangerously adventurous, at
least in the eyes of the church. She’s recently cut her ridiculously long hair
into a chin-length bob, started wearing a little bit of makeup, and got her
ears pierced. She’s also developed a healthy taste for wine and bourbon, and I
even got her to try a cigarette. (She wasn’t so fond of that, but she did enjoy
smoking a marijuana joint with me about a week later.)
She’s also purchased a couple of pairs of pants. She has yet
to wear them, but she insists she will someday. I believe her since she had me
come shopping with her for the expressed purpose of helping her find a pair of
jeans that would make her ass look phenomenal. (I should mention here that
Ethan is a fan of the female derriere, so I know the real purpose behind the
purchase of those jeans. For that reason alone, I know she will at least wear
the jeans. I hope it works. Lizzie really deserves a good guy like Ethan. Or at
least a night of really hot sex.)
Micah, like I said before, was a real sad sack of neuroses
and a bottomless pit of needs and wants. Thankfully, he wasn’t inherently
malevolent, so he actually turned out to be a nice enough person. He was very
likeable. Hell, I liked him, and I’m usually not one to warm up to people
easily. But, God, was he troubled.
It started with his parents:
being descendants of wealth, power, and privilege, they were
dyed-in-the-wool, textbook-example narcissists.
His father had grown up to be idle and worthless and his
chosen profession (though he’d never had any real reason to work) was that of
an investment manager—mostly just for his equally wealthy family and
friends—and for someone who had never worked more than fifteen or twenty hours
in a week in his whole life, had done exceedingly well. He barked orders brusquely at people, thought
only of how to make his next dollar (and avoid paying taxes on it), and played
rounds of golf at the most prestigious local country club at least five days
out of the week. He was a serial womanizer, drank the finest scotch
incessantly, smoked like a chimney, talked and thought only of himself, and
gambled in Las Vegas and Monte Carlo like the day was his last. He couldn’t be
bothered with the wants and needs of a wife and children, so he just threw
large sums of money their way to keep them quiet and out of his hair while he
went about his own separate, selfish life away from them.
Micah’s mother was no better. She’d easily been the
prettiest girl in the room at any event she attended in her youth and young
adulthood. She and Micah’s father had married right out of college, and she had
promptly taken up a permanent residency amongst the country club set and became
even idler than her husband. Not that she’d ever known any different. Her
mother and her mother before her had always proudly counted themselves among
the ladies who lunch perpetually group who spent more time screwing the tennis
instructor or gardener than bothering to get to know their children. But the
years of dining on lush food, drinking gargantuan quantities of liquor at all
hours, and not intellectually challenging herself had taken their toll on her
outward appearance, and she resembled a toad-like death warmed over in Chanel.
Micah had been born about two years into his parents’
marriage, and from the moment they’d brought him home, he’d been too much
trouble for them to pay attention to or bother with at all, so he’d been raised
by a series of nannies at first, and then instructors at some of the finest
private boarding schools in the state. The few times he’d been around his
parents, they’d made sure to let him know how perpetually obnoxious and
inconvenient they’d found him.
Which must have been all the more upsetting when his sister
Evangeline was born and they spoiled and doted on and fawned over and
mollycoddled her ceaselessly. He knew where he stood with them: He could do no right. Ever. He was unworthy
of their love.
Micah had found no relief or real love at the boarding
schools he’d attended. At one, he’d been repeatedly sadistically sexually
abused by a teacher, and at another, he’d been gang raped by a group of fellow
male students in the showers after a physical education class.
His high intelligence, good looks, eagerness to please
everyone, obvious eccentricities, and perpetual neurotic anxiety made him an
easy target for bullies at every school he attended—even college. As an
undergraduate, he was pretty awfully humiliated and hazed and snubbed by a
fraternity he’d so desperately wanted to join during pledge week.
Micah had never really caught a break socially until he met
Ethan and became a member of the “Brat Pack.”
Ethan and Micah were great natural compliments to each
other. Ethan was your cut-and-dry, black-and-white methodical engineer, while
Micah, who had bachelor degrees in photography and creative writing from
Harvard and a PhD in film studies from UCLA film school, was your wacky,
bombastic, totally-off-the-wall artsy type. Where Ethan was somewhat
introverted and private, while Micah would tell anyone who’d listen his whole
life story, often to the point of boorishness.
That was also the primary difference between Micah and
me: he would shout his secrets from the
top of every steeple until the end of time, and I am an unwillingly-peeled
onion, layer after layer of information and knowledge forthcoming only after a
great struggle and much digging at my outer skins.
Yes, I am a very reticent, almost secretive, person, which
is going to make this next part, the part where I talk about myself, rather
difficult.
I’ll start with the easiest part, my name: Tinkerbell Annabel Harris.
Yeah, go ahead and laugh. I don’t know what got into my
mother (LSD, perhaps?) to make her think that she should name me after a Disney
fairy, but that’s the name she gave me. Everyone just calls me Tinny, though.
Granny Evvy was the person who came up with that nickname. She said Tinkerbell
was too much of a mouthful for any right-minded person to say at any time, and
everyone else agreed, so it stuck.
As I alluded to before, my upbringing wasn’t the best—after
Granny Evvy, that is. Between eight and eighteen, I was in twelve different
foster homes.
They did try to put me with Uncle Jimmie and Aunt Glenda,
but that old hag refused to take me on accounts that I look just like my momma,
and she didn’t want any reminders of Uncle Jimmie’s affair with a woman
prettier than her homely self. Uncle Jimmie loved me though, so I know he
would’ve taken me in had the decision been his.
Aunt Bettina and my dad didn’t take me in—though I know my
dad loves me and would’ve done it in a quick minute if he could’ve—because by
the time Granny Evvy had died, they had six kids of their own and a seventh on
the way. They could barely afford their brood, so another mouth at the table to
feed just wasn’t feasible. That and the fact that Aunt Bettina would swear up
and down everything holy that I was a child of Satan because I was born on
Halloween. She’s a real fruit loop, that one.
I’m just shy of thirty now, and as an adult, my life hasn’t
really been any more stable than my childhood was.
I’ve lived in fourteen states in ten years, and I’m a sort
of “Jill of all trades” in terms of my working life. I’ve been a cashier, a
waitress, a security guard, a secretary, a freelance writer, a bartender, a
first responder, a phlebotomist, a kennel tech at an animal shelter, a nursing
assistant, a stripper, and a prostitute.
Yeah. You didn’t read those last two jobs wrong. I’m a
“scarlet woman,” so to say. I’ve done those two jobs to supply the necessary
money I need to feed my opiate addition.
I’ve been an addict since I was eighteen and first tried
heroin at a house party. About five years ago, I got caught with enough smack
to put my ass in prison for a pretty significant period of time, but they gave
me a deferred sentence since I had no previous criminal record. But one of the
conditions of the deferment was that I go to rehab and stay clean once I got
out.
I stuck with that until just recently, when the time on the
probationary period of my sentence expired. Now that I’m not being drug tested
every week, I don’t have to answer to anyone, so I can do as I please.
I went back to heroin, and I’m not sad that I did. See, I
love smack more than life itself, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Not to be a
whiner, but I suffered through some pretty fucked up physical and sexual stuff
as a kid, so I have some unresolved issues with that. I’m also bipolar, like my
momma, so I’m pretty much in a state of constant emotional chaos all the time.
Yeah, I’ve got some demons.
And heroin is the only thing that has made peace between me,
my demons, and the rest of the universe. Ever.
I’m not ashamed I use. I don’t steal or hurt other people to
get money for my habit, so I’m only hurting myself when I shoot up.
Also, I feel somewhat entitled to the sleepy, blissful euphoria I feel when I
use. Other people get that same feeling from prayer or meditation or a massage
or a good book or a vacation or fishing—I get mine from heroin, but am I any less
deserving of that sense of inner peace because it comes from the opium poppy?
As far as my appearance goes, I’m not the prettiest painting
in the gallery, but I’m decent looking enough. I’m very short (just barely
reaching five feet tall), voluptuous, and neatly kept. When I’m not working as
a prostitute or stripper, I’m modestly attired. Sexual attentions paid my way
have always made me feel a bit queasy and uncomfortable, so I tend to hide
myself in my clothing to keep as much of them away from me as I can.
My major strength, however, has always been my uncanny
intelligence about the world around me and my ability to make a quick decision
and put it into action even more quickly. See, my childhood made me a chronic,
obsessive planner out of sheer necessity in order to get from day to day
relatively unscathed.
My childhood also made me inherently distrustful of everyone
around me, which is why I value Ethan’s friendship so much. Ethan is one of the
few people in the world I genuinely trust wholeheartedly. That’s an honor I
don’t bestow on just anyone. It’s also why I felt so grief-stricken on his
behalf at the loss of Micah.
But there I go again, getting sentimental, and if there’s
anything I’ve ever learned about the reality of this world, it’s that sentimentality
kills more people than cancer.
