Seesh!

I have been exceptionally crabby lately.

Mea culpa.

And now I've exhausted myself.

Here's hoping there won't be any more outbreaks of outright crustacean behavior on my part...

A Glimpse into My World

To all those who read my previous post and wondered what in God's name my problem was, well, just be glad that that bit of pent-up negative energy wasn't directed towards you. I owe no one an apology or explanation; however, I do know that there are people who are reading this who might like some insight into my mind--mainly people I care very deeply for, like my family members and closest friends. For those people. and those people alone, I will satisfy any curiosity they may have about my chaotic mental processes.

First and foremost, let's clear the air by my admittance of this fact:  I am bipolar. Very bipolar. 

That means that the world is not a safe place for me.

I don't mean that the world is unsafe for me in a paranoid physical sort of way. In regards to that aspect, I don't really feel that the world poses an more of a threat to me than it does any other given person. 

When I say that the world is not safe for me, I mean that the world is unsafe for me as a bipolar person in an emotional way. 

As someone who deals with issues surrounding my diagnosis on a daily basis, I struggle at times. Many times these private battles (which are part of a continuous war within) deal with my ability to control myself and my reactions to outside stimuli, whether those stimuli are physical or emotional. 

As anyone with bipolar disorder can tell you, my highs are higher than the Almighty, and my lows outreach the most lengthy stretches of the bowels of Hell. 

But my head is also so full of noise, noise, noise:  a cacophony of thoughts both rational and irrational and emotions both healthy and unhealthy. My mind is so busy, busy, busy--constantly. I get no rest from it, day or night. 

I often don't react to a stimulus, I passionately react to it. I fly into fits of blind rage, but I also love with my whole heart. There is no middle ground with me.

And, yes, I take my meds religiously.

I'm what the mental health community likes to refer to as "recovered," but using that word to describe my current compliant and relatively stable state is a huge cosmic joke. Being a "recovered" bipolar person is like being a "recovered" amputee:  you may have the prosthesis to help you walk, but your leg is still gone--you aren't whole. 

I prefer the term "adequately managed" to describe the daily juggling act I engage in between myself, my intellect, my emotions, and my meds. 

And it's a tough juggling act.

As a bipolar person, you're taught to learn to recognize the things that will "set you off" or "trigger" a cycling episode so you can learn to avoid them or work on learning to appropriately manage your reactions to them, but even having a "triggers list" is no fail-safe. Anything has the potential to trigger your cycling--and that is why I so viciously guard my sanity and stability. It's taken me ten years to get to where I am today--"adequately managed"--and anything that has the potential to get me cycling again--anything--is a threat to my delicate psyche. 

And I'd rather have my sanity and stability over everything else. After all, what are we but our minds?

But that doesn't let the person who the previous post is directed at off the hook. 

Part of my therapy over the years has been learning to distinguish my bipolar tendencies from understandable, healthy reactions to outside stimuli:  in short, where I end and the rest of the world begins. 

Unfortunately, I have spent a very large chunk of my life being mistreated by others--first by my classmates and later by my employers and the men that I've dated--and I'm very understandably frustrated to the maximum with a large majority of the outside world--especially since I expend a great deal of effort--both psychological and physical--in turning the other cheek and being fair. I am only now learning how to effectively express and manage my negative emotions instead of burying them within myself like I used to do. 

However, I am not perfect. Sometimes I am hasty and extreme in my negative reactions, but I have also always had a strong personality and have never been everyone's cup of tea. 

And if the rest of the world could stop pissing me off, that would be great.

Répondez s'il vous plaît

To a certain someone who has recently made a miraculous reappearance in my life:

We went on a date. We went back to your place. The next day, after I returned home, you weirded out and broke off our non-relationship via Facebook message. Even though you had my number, you weren't man enough to call me to deliver the news.

I finally understood what Carrie Bradshaw in "Sex and the City" was talking about when she was so upset that she'd been broken up with via a post-it note. Being broken up with, especially when there wasn't anything to break off to begin with, via a Facebook message is pretty low and shady. 

By the way, thanks for the preemptive break up. That always makes someone feel really good. 

Anyhoo, you've decided to contact me again--via Facebook message, of course!

After an initial polite exchange of the usual niceties and whatnot ("How are you?," "What have you been up to lately?," and etc.), I cut to the chase very quickly.

I asked you why you were back in contact with me after basically not acknowledging my existence for almost six months.

Yes, it was blunt. Yes, it was direct. 

I certainly hope it made you feel a tad uncomfortable. 

See, I'm a direct person, often to a fault. But I do know how to turn it on and off. I know when to spread honey, and I know when to toss vinegar. 

I specifically asked you what you wanted from me because I was tired of beating around the proverbial bush. Life is short, and I don't want to waste it in gray areas. 

Also, I don't believe in happenstance and pure-hearted motives--not because I'm an unkind, icy person but because direct personal experience over the years has taught me that kismet and kindness don't exist in a vast overwhelming majority of the populace. 

You have a reason for contacting me again. That extended silence showed me that you weren't stupid enough to think I wasn't hurt and upset by the way you treated me. 

So, speak now or forever hold your peace. 

Yes, this is harsh, but you've caught me at a harsher point in my personality and existence. See, when I was in my late teens and twenties, I would've been more forgiving. It would've been easier for me to just forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones.

But you aren't the first man to try to rope me into the ass-clown rodeo.

See, the endless cycle of you coming and going for your own selfish reasons into and out of my life is hard on my heart. 

You are just like all the other ass-clowns I've dated. I've dated so many of you that I even have a dating "genre" I group you all in. I like to call you guys my "Boomerang Boys" because no matter how many times you fly off into the distance, you always magically find your way back to me--sometimes even years later. 

And I am a kind, forgiving, sensitive person who tends to get taken advantage of by men like you. 

But no more.

I'm a stronger person now. I can handle loneliness.

I can't handle the constant tugging on my heart strings.

I ain't goin' to the fuckin' rodeo no more.

Story part 2

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.   

                 

A Confession about Bullying

Note:  This is not part of the story I'm working on. I'll let you know when I post more of my story here.

I've got a confession to make. I've done something spiteful.

I'm normally not a spiteful person (or at least I try very hard not to be), so this is a bit out of character. When you read what I've done, you'll probably laugh or shrug your shoulders because it's not really a major thing to have done in the grand scheme of things to do, but I felt I should confess my "sin" (if you were to call it that) because it is bothering me that I did it. I feel I can and should do better. 

So here goes...

I marked something as "offensive" on Facebook that wasn't truly offensive just to get it off my page.

What was it? Well, it was a page for a memorial golf outing for a high school classmate who died five years ago. I know damn well that the page for this young woman, A--, had nothing offensive on it, even though I'd never visited it. I know it contained messages of support and fond memories from A--'s friends and family and information about participating in the event. A standard in memoriam page. There are tons of these on Facebook, and they never bother me. Sometimes I even think they're sweet and touching. 

So what was my problem with this particular memorial page?

It was the person who was being memorialized. 

See, A-- wasn't this nice, caring, wonderful person that pages like her own make the deceased out to be. 

A-- was a bully. 

Specifically, A-- was a major bully. 

And not just to me. She had a whole range of people she tormented and gossiped about and ostracized and humiliated, but she particularly liked to focus on me.

A--  bullied me relentlessly from the first day I met her in first grade until we graduated from high school. For first through sixth grades, I had every class of the day with her, so I couldn't escape her. Ever. Once we entered seventh grade, she was in fewer of my classes, and that's when she branched out to harassing others. But I was still a major focus for her.

A-- called me horrible insults to my face and even worse things behind my back. If she couldn't think of something actual to insult me about, she made something up. She always spread these things around to as many people as she could. She didn't stop at the confines of the school grounds, either. She spread rumors, insults, and lies about me and my family in the community, too. I'm from a small area, so this wasn't that hard to do, especially since her family are fairly wealthy and prominent business owners in the town where I reside. 

She also kept a lot of people from being my friends. If someone new moved to town and I tried desperately to be their friend, she'd make sure the friendship didn't stick. Or even get off the ground. 

I know these things because she made no secret about what she was doing to me. Hell, she liked to brag about it to many people, especially to me.

And she didn't let up until she saw me in tears. 

Then she (and her minions/friends) would walk away howling in laughter.

And it wasn't just A-- involved in these crimes:  she always got her friends and family (mainly her little sister and cousin) involved in the teasing, harassing, insulting, tormenting, gossiping about, and otherwise abusing of me. 

When I younger, I would cry myself to sleep about what she was doing to me day in and day out. 

When I was older, I thought I'd grown a thicker skin because I didn't cry about it any more. 

But I was wrong. 

I had learned to swallow my anger and my hurt and my fear, but that was the problem:  I had learned to swallow it. I hadn't learned how to constructively deal with those things, those powerfully consuming emotions, and so the constant stress manifested itself in other ways:  I developed obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anorexia, and substance abuse issues. I engaged in promiscuous sex. I skipped school a lot. I let my grades drop substantially.

I never told anyone what was going on at school. Most of the teachers knew already anyway. They had working eyes and ears, but they chose to make them blind and deaf in these situations. See, this was the days before the Columbine school shooting, so bullying wasn't taken seriously. "Eh, it's just kids being kids:  the tortured kid needs to toughen up about the torment and stop giving the tormentors reasons to torture them" was what they'd all say. So when Columbine happened and it supposedly occurred because the shooters had been relentlessly bullied by their peers, I understood. 

I understood the motivation, internal and external, of two mass murderers. 

That fact still sends chills down my spine. 

I don't condone their actions and never will, but I understood the rage and the hatred and the anger and the frustration that led to their actions because, well, I could've seen myself doing the same thing had I been an inherently evil, unbalanced person with access to powerful guns. Where the Columbine school shooters had directed their explosive anger outward, I had swallowed mine. I had turned all that negativity inward towards myself. And I was no less of a mental and emotional hot mess than they were.

And all because I was bullied.

Granted, A-- wasn't the only person who bullied me relentlessly:  I had the luxury of gaining more people to torment me once I matriculated into the town's only middle school, where five elementary schools deposited their students who'd finished their respective sixth grades.

But A-- was my first bully. 

And that's why when I selected to remove the link to her memorial golf outing page from my Facebook feed, I selected the reason of finding the page "offensive" as the genesis of the need to remove it from my feed. 

I labeled it offensive merely because I was sick of seeing her smiling face every day on my Facebook page. All that smile had ever--and will ever--represent to me is cruelty and malice. 

I know the censors at Facebook, if they even get notice that I flagged the page as offensive, will look it over, determine that the page is, in fact, not profane, obscene, bigoted, misogynistic, pornographic, etc., and will not do anything to remove it, so those who loved A-- will still have the page to cherish her memory on.

Which makes my actions childish, petty, and spiteful. 

Just like A--.

And I'm a better person than that.             

Sweet Lord, have mercy! Tha' chile's been at it again!

Well, I have been at it again. For some reason, I've got a spark under my ass and an itch to write, so that's what I've been doing with myself lately. I'll post what I've got done so far in installments. There's no title for the collective body of work yet, just working titles for the sections. I don't know how long this inspiration will last, but I hope I won't sputter out like I usually do so that I can say that I finished this. Constructive criticism is always welcome, but I honestly don't care if anyone likes this. I'm writing it for me. But plagiarize this, and you will find out exactly what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. And I'll swallow your soul. That is not a threat, it is a promise. And I keep my promises. 

So without further ado, here it is...

In Dogma We Trust, All Others Pay Cash

I’m just drivin’ nails in my coffin
Every time I drink a bottle of booze
I’m drivin’ nails in my coffin
Lord, I’m drivin’ those nails over you. 
--Those Darlins, “Drivin’ Nails in My Coffin”

There we were, all gathered together again:  another gathering of the “Brat Pack.” I don’t know how we were ever bestowed such a clichéd moniker, especially since we were all children of the flannel-and-grunge 1990s, not the androgyny-and-synth-pop 1980s, but however we got it, it had stuck. Like stink on shit.

A mournful tune began to bellow on the funeral home’s cheesy 1970s Hammond organ. Across an aisle of chairs to my right, a young woman began to wail pathetically while a dour, obviously soused middle-aged female creature resembling more of a squat toad-like thing than a human being hiccupped slightly and dabbed at tears that were clearly not present at the corners of red-vined squints that were supposedly eyes.

The toad woman may have been attractive in her long-gone youth, but age, hard liquor, and lush living had not been kind to her. The wailing one was clearly a ridiculously tall and slow-witted, equally idle version of her mother, but despite her gaudy and ill-conceived Gucci dress (more appropriate at a dance club than a funeral, it was), you had to give her credit:  her emotion was genuine. Which was more than what you could say for Mrs. Toad.

Yes, Mrs. Toad was—I hate to say it, really—almost dolefully gleeful that her son was dead. She’d never loved him--not really, not like she loved her half-wit daughter--and was not really not even bothering to pretend she felt the least little bit of anything at her son’s untimely passing.

Which was why we, the “Brat Pack,” had gathered at Morely’s Funeral Home that day:  to give Micah a showing. To let him know that, though we’d done a real shit job of showing it in life, we cared. That someone cared.

There wasn’t a big crowd there, just me, Micah’s best friend Ethan, Micah’s old roommate Ted, Jake, Lizzie, and Micah’s sister and mother. His old man, the one person whose love he had wanted the most, couldn’t be bothered to be pried away from his daily golf game to attend his own son’s funeral apparently.

“Jesus, you’d’a thought the old fuckwad would’ve made an appearance,” I muttered under my breath to no one in particular. Jake glared at me from the corners of his piercing blue eyes and put his finger to his lips in an obvious signal for me to hush up.

“Eh, fuck you,” I muttered as I jabbed my sharp little left elbow into his ribs as hard as I could without being noticed. He sucked in his breath painfully and somewhat audibly and turned to glare deeply into my eyes.

I glared right back. He perpetually pissed me off, and I was mad at the world anyway at that moment, so I was ready for a knock-down, drag-out, no-holds-barred fisticuffs sort of altercation with anyone that day.

Not that Jake had the balls to try anything like that with me:  Misogynistic as he was, he was a real pussy when it came to strong, hot-tempered women like me. That’s probably why the only women he felt truly comfortable around were scantily clad, drugged up, and grinding for measly dollar bills in his lap at places with names like “Lipstick Lounge” and “Kitty Kat Klub.”

Jake rubbed his side and turned back to the think-accented officiant.

Christ, why the rent-a-reverend? I wondered. Micah was an atheist!

The whole funeral service was a farce and in such bad taste and so antithetical to who Micah was and what he truly stood for that it made the bile reach my lips. It also made my blood boil. If I had been raised in a barn, I’d’a gone over to his mother and confronted her right then and there, but I decided that some fights will just never be worth it.

Micah was the sad result of a perpetual lack of love and phenomenally bad parenting—hell, I’m the product of irresponsible breeding and equally lackluster parenting, but I at least knew love as a child—so I really felt for him. To never know genuine love from anyone—anyone—in your whole life—well, no wonder he became the sad sack of neuroses and bottomless pit of needs and wants that he was, constantly chasing one high after another with a crash and then putting a Sisyphusian effort into trying to claw his way out of the dark bowels of despair until that day--the day he had his final overdose.

Not that his kidneys and liver were going to hold out much longer with the way he chased bourbon with tequila with red wine with Coors Light and mouthwash before 7 a.m. And all before 30.

It was hard to wrap your mind around. So brilliant, so troubled. Dead before 30.

Ethan, though vacant-eyed and silent, was moved beyond comprehension. He was probably the only person who ever truly gave a damn about Micah—the only person who probably ever truly loved him and loved him like a twin brother—or perhaps even a second half of himself—and I could tell he was truly heartbroken. He’d never be a whole person again, and that bothered me. It truly bothered me.

It didn’t help that in order to get Ethan out of his house, we’d—Lizzie and I—had had to physically drag his blacked-out ass out of bed, throw him into an ice-cold shower, slap the shit out of him until he came partially out of his drunken stupor, and dress him reasonably for his friend’s funeral.

After we got him in the car and he woke up enough to speak somewhat coherently and he realized where we were going, Ethan had tried to leap out of the back seat of Lizzie’s Subaru while we were doing highway speeds until I pushed a generous handful of my Xanax tablets his way and gave him a half-empty bottle of Jack I’d found in Lizzie’s glove box. I’d thrown in a couple of vicodins, too, just for good measure—and to get him to calm the fuck down.

After all that, Ethan was still standing, but you could tell he’d never smile again. Hence the vacant look:  It’s the look of a man who’s lost a major part of his soul, a man who will be haunted for time immemorial.

I don’t ever want to see that look on anyone ever again.

Frankly, I was surprised that Ted and Jake even bothered to show up. Ted’s usually so coked up these days that there’s no telling up from down with him. Jake probably showed up to drive the final nail into Micah’s coffin, a final dose of comeuppance that could never be comeupped in return:  he’s a spiteful fucker that way. Lizzie, well, she was there because she’s always had a thing for Ethan—not that Ethan’s ever noticed.

I was there because, well, I pitied the poor bastard being so poorly eulogized that day.

I pitied him.

I hate saying it.

I hate thinking it.

Pity to me means condescension, that you feel like you’re better than the other person in some way, and I’ve never really considered myself better than anyone. I’m just another plain Jane outta the trailer park in Buttfuck Rural Southwestern Michigan. I’m not smarter or prettier or nicer than anyone else—just run-of-the-mill average. Spit in any direction in my hometown and you’ll find half a dozen just like me.

But, Jesus, I pitied Micah. He really could’ve been something.

Micah was that rare combination of things that everyone wants to be:  astonishing good looks, dazzling charm, phenomenal talent, and driving, but not ruthless, ambition. And money. He was mad money.

All of that made his ending up as friends with the rest of our ragamuffin group of slightly-domesticated Dickensian street urchins a bit of a conundrum to the outside world. But it was our total lack of pretention that probably initially drew him in. We weren’t really significant in the grand scheme of humanity and history, but we were genuine. To a fault. And that was something his mommy’s and daddy’s money and his Harvard and UCLA Film School educations and his casting agent and his powerful inside connections couldn’t get him, ever:  genuine human emotion.

Micah’s light had burned so brightly. I think that’s why it had to fizzle out so soon.

The little-better-than-storefront preacher droned on. I basically tuned him out by staring intently at the beads of sweat sliding silently down his portly bald head.

I was only briefly interrupted from my uncomfortable, vigilant reverie by Jake wincing and rubbing his ribs where I’d landed the blow earlier. Christ, if Micah could bring the tragedy, Jake could bring the melodrama. I turned and shot him my “Bitch, please!” look and then went back to staring at the minister’s sweatiness.

Ted sniffled slightly behind me. I shot him a look that could kill. I knew he was just as bored as the rest of us (with the exception of Micah’s mom—no one could match her level of boredom ever from here to kingdom come), but he should have at least bothered to pretend to not be a raging, incoherent cokehead for at least one hour of his life. Or at least done a better job at pretending not to be the next one to be following in Micah’s irreversible footsteps.

Finally, the preacher concluded his generic remarks. Ashes to ashes and all that bullshit. Worm food. We all end up as worm food.

Lizzie and I discreetly helped an unsteady Ethan to his staggering feet. Ted and Jake had already started towards the doors of the funeral home when a thin, whiny, tear-choked voice recalled us all to the decorum required of the situation.

“Um, thank you for coming,” stuttered Micah’s rail-thin, stringy-haired, pathetically mousy (and clearly bereaved) sister Evangeline.

I smiled as warmly as I could.

“We were friends of Micah’s,” I said quietly. “We’re sorry for your loss.”

Micah’s mother started to roll her eyes but then became conscious of the fact that the gazes of five people were resting upon her countenance. She cleared her throat loudly.

“We’re having the funeral dinner at the Washtenaba,” she said brusquely. “You’re all welcome to come.”

Her voice, crackled and deepened by years of chain smoking, had all the warmth of a drill sergeant’s at a military training camp. It was like she was daring us to show up. I gladly accepted her challenge on behalf of the group.

“We’ll be happy to come.”

We piled into our respective vehicles and drove the few short miles to the local hole-in-the-wall restaurant. This was really starting to stick in my craw. Micah really hated this place, but only because he could afford better. The rest of us only ate her occasionally out of collective local habit. It was the nicest dining experience in our small town, but that didn’t mean we had to like it. Or disavow our tired antipathy towards it.

But Micah wouldn’t have been caught dead here. I suppose, then, that it was only fitting that we commemorated his demise at the place he had so mercilessly ridiculed in life. The Washtenaba got the last laugh.

We took our seats at a large round table in the restaurant’s private room. Micah’s rotund mother ordered enough food for herself and a set of twins she was clearly not capable of expecting any more:  New York flank steak, stuffed baked potato with extra sour cream, a chef salad, a bowl of minestrone soup, a slice of the house’s ultra-decadent seven-layer German chocolate cake, and two bottles of the house’s most expensive burgundy.

The rest of us made much smaller demands of the kitchen and bar:  Jake ordered a top-shelf scotch on the rocks (douchey), Lizzie requested a side salad with light French dressing, Evangeline put in for a small cup of mashed russet potatoes, Ted ordered a Jager bomb (typical Ted, really), I asked for a house brew beer and a piece of turtle cheesecake, and since Ethan was still too numbly dazed to talk, I ordered a Jack and coke for him. After a funeral like that for a friend who he had loved so dearly, I figured the least I could do to help him was put booze in front of him—that would surely snap him out of his stunned mutism, if only to puke.

We sat in awkward, solemn silence in the dim and musty room until the food arrived. Micah’s mother devoured her food and drink like she’d never eaten before and would never eat again. The rest of us sat quietly, vaguely picking at our food and swallowing our sorrows quickly.

A second round of drinks wasn’t ordered after the conclusion of the first. We sat somberly and pensively, some of us absent-mindedly playing with our phones, some of us staring almost ashamedly at the floor, none of daring to utter a word against the smacking and gnashing and chewing being done at Micah’s mother’s side of the table, not even to reminisce about or toast our fresh-in-the-grave friend.

After another ten minutes or so of oppressive silence pierced only with the staccato sounds of primal gluttony, I rose from the table. I could stand it no more. The others took this as their cue to leave.

I didn’t feel right leaving just yet—well, okay, I really needed to take a hit of smack—so I made my way to the ladies’ room.

Once inside the dank and poorly lit confines of the bathroom, which had clearly last been decorated in the 1970s, I walked over to cracked double vanity sinks and looked deeply at my reflection in the grimy, gaudily gilt-edged mirror above them.

I looked like hell. Pure and utter hell. The lines I get around my mouth when I set my jaw and grind my teeth had reappeared after a prolonged absence, and my eyes were puffy and bloodshot. My black eye liner had smeared somewhat and my eyelashes had matted together in uneven clumps, but that wasn’t the cause of the dark hollows beneath the windows to my soul.

I hadn’t cried, had I? I certainly don’t remember crying or fighting the urge to. Hell, I didn’t really consider myself that close to Micah, so why would I have even come close to shedding tears? All I had ever felt towards Micah was pity and a big empty—surely I couldn’t have been crying.

I splashed water on my face, sighed, and prepped my syringe. I tightened a belt around my upper arm, looked around for a suitable vein, and steadied my slightly trembling hand.

I wanted it so bad I could actually taste it.

I inhaled deeply.

A poke.

Some pain.

The burn.

And then the sweet blessed relief.

Oh God, thank you.

All is right in the world again.

I swayed a bit on my feet as I pulled the needle out of my arm. Instinctively, I grabbed the edge of the vanity. Lord knows at this point I couldn’t have consciously willed such an action in my extremities.

Damn good hit.

I heard the bathroom door open. I quickly hid my needle and spoon in my purse and turned on the nearest tap, pretending like I was going to wash my hands.

I looked over nonchalantly. It was Evangeline, no longer crying. She was very still and somber. I remember Micah telling me about her once. She was ten years younger than him, give or take, which currently put her at about 18 or 19 years old. But shit, she looked so much older than that now with deep care lines permanently and prematurely etched into her plain, youthful face. She met my gaze.

“You’re Tinny, aren’t you?” she whispered.

I nodded sadly and smiled slightly.

“Micah talked about you a lot.”

“He did?” I asked, barely disguising my incredulity. I didn’t know he ever thought about anyone other than himself.

I was truly dumbfounded, which left me momentarily mute. I regained my ability to think clearly again half a moment later, but before I could form further questions for her in my vocal chords and project them outward through my lips, Evangeline grabbed me by the waist, looked deeply, imploringly into my eyes, and kissed me. 

The kiss was soft and delicate and closed-mouth at first, but then she forced my lips apart and introduced her tongue to mine with an urgency and raw hunger that spoke to my core.

Her hands then began to explore my body:    shyly over my clothing initially, then more assertively under my clothes as her arousal grew.

She unbuttoned my blouse, unfastened my bra, and began to passionately lick, bite, and suck on my breasts. She quickly moved down to my waist, her tongue tracing a path between my breasts and down to my abdomen, stopping only to briefly suck on my belly button piercing. Then she deftly lifted my skirt and removed my panties. She then began to suck on my labia and clitoris while fingering me gently. We were both moaning softly and panting heavily.

I could’ve fought her off, despite the fact that she almost twice my size, but I didn’t want to. I understood what she wanted in that moment because I craved the same thing:  touch, nearness, pleasure, intimacy, love, id.

She was just like me:  a poor mixed-up lonely girl adrift in the world.

It’s not that we were lesbians—hell, I’ve never enjoyed girl-on-girl sex the few times I’ve tried it—it’s that we knew no other way to relate to the world, to others. We knew of no other way to express the whole wild breadth of emotions we were feeling all at once and at that very moment, except through an endless cycle of exploitation and self-abuse—sex and drugs and more sex and more drugs and so on to infinity.

At that moment, I understood, and I understood why I could never truly break free of the titanium irons binding me to that insidious cycle.

As suddenly as it began, it ended.

I redressed quickly, looking down at the floor the whole time. Evangeline pretended to be curling her eyelashes in the mirror, sheepishly acting as though I wasn’t there and that what had happened minutes earlier had never occurred.

Finally, we faced each other briefly. She quickly looked away for a few seconds as she dug through the contents of her purse. I watched her silently, benevolently.

She pulled out a large joint.

“Do you smoke?” she asked.

“Sure.” I smiled at her.

She lit the joint, took a puff, then offered it to me. I took a long drag, exhaled slowly, and passed it back.

“Thanks, kid. I needed that.”

We looked deeply into each other’s eyes, then broke into hysterical laughter.

We quickly fell silent but continued to smoke until we reached the roach. She graciously gave me the last toke, and I snuffed it out in the cracked and stained ancient bar of Yardley soap in the soap dish on the vanity’s counter. She turned to go.

“Wait, Evangeline.”

She looked at me, puzzled. I was rooting around in my purse.

I pulled out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill and placed it in her hand, gently closing her fingers around it as though it were a piece of fine porcelain.

“What is it?” she asked as she studied it intently.

“It’s your brother’s lucky twenty-dollar coke bill. It’s from 1976. He said that was his lucky year.”

She looked at me, bewildered.

“Why 1976? Micah wasn’t even alive then.”

“With your brother—who knows? All he told me when he gave it to me was that 1976 was his lucky year. And that he really wanted me to have it. That was probably one of his most rational moments ever.”

“But why are you giving it to me?”

“Because I felt someone should have it. I was going to put it in the coffin with him to give him luck as he climbed the stairway to the best party in the universe, but your family had him cremated. So much for my plan.”

“What should I do with it?”

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” I said over my shoulder as I walked out of the bathroom.