On Paranoia, Survivor’s Guilt, Dereliction and Telling the Truth
When I wrote the first half of my first novel, I was spending eight to ten hours a day prancing around a room full of middle-aged Fairfield County housewives and female professionals pushing weight. By weight, I mean actual weighted bars, Life Fitness machines. I do not mean drugs, which is a metaphor I had picked up at my previous job, police reporting for a daily newspaper two towns over. After I was laid off, I decided to quit smoking and have my revenge by working a lower stress job for more money. I succeeded in the lower stress part, less so in the money and anti-addiction realms.
At any rate, it was humiliating, tawdry and at times grim, such as when I’d have to time bathroom breaks around a cued CD set.
“The next workout will begin in sixty seconds; please proceed to a station,” the cue CD would report.
Then I’d know that I had about a minute and a half to set four women up on one machine each, make sure they each knew exactly what they’d be doing for the next two minutes of their harried, sometimes debauched, lives, turn on the music, usually to the New Wave Sirius radio station, expel whatever had digested of yesterday’s 5 a.m. Starbuck’s protein plate, scarfed in the cleaning supply closet, also between sets, and return to my minions.
This scenario would repeat itself every thirty minutes. It was worse than clockwork, and sometimes approached, I felt, the existential torment of A Clockwork Orange, as I struggled to reprogram myself to this new population of people and their many, fragile, sometimes touching, expectations.
I had adapted to this ultra-mundane, almost militaristic life, out of pure economic survival instinct. I had an inclination to write after my bosses at the paper had pulled me into a conference room and let me know in no uncertain terms that they were failing to make sufficient money off information in the information age.
I felt, instinctively, that my grandfather was turning in his grave. I have a second cousin who claims to be able to channel him, but this has yet to be confirmed.
I had to concede that this might be karma as well. He had risen up through the corporate ranks of a major communications company busting unions and reorganizing distribution staff. He was known as an emergency man. Sometimes my grandmother, aunt and father would have to stay in safe houses because of the threat of union retaliation.
After my first six months at the paper, they withdrew overtime privileges, but pressured us to work off the clock.
When I complained, my editor, a former union president, looked at a fellow reporter’s empty desk and said, “Joan does ten hours every week and never says anything.”
“When I don’t say anything, it’s like I’m working for free,” I said. “When my work is free, I feel like a whore. No, worse than a whore.”
I covered cops, so I felt like I could use this kind of language with my editor.
After my bosses at the fitness studio I was managing a year and a half later sat me down in my office and let me know in less laudatory, casuistric terms that my position was terminated—something about me being too much of a “big risk taker”—I had even more of an inclination to write. I was bad at sales, and the novel was by then half finished.
My frosty-haired, botoxed boss asked me if I were not relieved to be dismissed. I looked at her equally frosty-haired, botoxed husband, who was a salesman for an analytics software company that supplied cheatsheets to bond traders and had afforded her the studio so she could restore her career-woman chicness after staying at home eleven years with three, yes, frosty-haired, but genuinely so—they took after their father—boys. The bitch was actually asking me if I felt relieved to lose my job in the deepest recession since the 30s. I almost asked her if she would feel relieved if her husband suddenly croaked, but thought better of it.
* * *
One does not go hysterical overnight. It takes years and months of quiet, contained madness to make one meltdown, especially if you are an alpha female. The lion in winter, etc.. The small women’s college I briefly attended as an undergraduate had graduated Katharine Hepburn, reluctantly, after she went skinny-dipping in their cloisters, and had among its former faculty Woodrow Wilson.
I left for financial reasons cloaked in mental health absences. But the mental health absences were also based on fact. Some of the most talented of my peers were amphetamine addicts, and I became even more of one. I’d been taking decongestants since I were five, to cope with my father’s smoking. By the time I graduated high school, I’d lived with him for two years and taken up the habit myself. At this college, I was so racked with academic anxiety, though, I’d peel the skin off the bottoms of my feet and down a pack of Sudafed daily. Like a blistered ballerina, I liked the pain of walking around on layers of flayed, twisted flesh and could stay up all night five nights a week.
But the darlings of this college were anything but ballerina-like by the early 2000s. They were butch lesbians who accosted me in the hallways because I had a pixie cut, then made fun of me because a) I lived off campus and b) I lived with my husband who was c) a man.
After this latest dismissal, I decided the bitch wasn’t worth it, collected my gum and personal effects from my desk, and went home to collect unemployment. Again.
But I regretted the loss of structure that not having a one hour commute both ways and odd, off-kilter hours that left whole spans of afternoon to gaze out cafe windows in between work that could be done standing up and to music. I wondered what it would do to my writing.
I felt, after years of writing through blissful and dangerous manic spurts, that I’d finally found a life boring enough to get some real work done. It’s just that, very often, I was at pains to decide who this life belonged to, for I could not recognize myself in it anymore.
I live on the Connecticut shoreline, which is so majestic, haunted and beautiful that I often feel I am living on a resort and about to get kicked out for lack of payment.
By the time I started my graduate studies in creative writing at a low residence, i.e. ten days of what they called ‘intensive’ and I mistook for 'retreat’, my coworkers at another gym were prodding me to help create a gizmo that creates glute muscles and could be manufactured cheaply overseas and sold through late-night cable TV infomercials because “butts are really in right now.” I felt that I’d had enough of boring. I felt that boring could frankly go to hell.
I had no idea who would read the novel. At the creative writing program, I was asked to identify “my audience.” I tried to come up with anything more specific than cyberspace and poor pathetic souls who wandered to dinner at my house. Also men I slept with.
Young adult males, was my conjecture. The former Aderall junkies my 22 year old roommate, Max, had once brought home. They would be hunkered down in the living room on Friday afternoons when I came home from training, and I’d take a nap. The warmly percussive sounds of Call of Duty and the smell of swag and unwashed boys was really comforting, like my favorite hoodie. I think living alone is overrated. I had trouble explaining to them that I really, really did not know how to take Kid Cudi, though.
The literary market was glutted with chick lit, and it was starting to remind me too much of my dayjob to slog through pages of what I considered only Facebook worthy prose. When I was really honest about whose interest could be piqued by my stories, so full of juveniles acting out in strange, self-abasing and at times pyrrhically heroic ways, I had to recognize my coworker Sam, who was the only person I told about my graduate studies and who wore as part of his daily uniform a pen and ink defaced pair of Converse sneakers the canvas of which was a print from a Spiderman comic. Sam was a cash-strapped, overly responsible, neurotic, insecure and lovable character. He tried to get his parents on the shitty insurance plan the gym afforded, because they were both out of work, and he wasn’t allowed to. He still lived with them. He was 24.
At work, he was already my perfect audience.
The thing about chick lit that I couldn’t stand or understand was how all these women were writing their hearts out but did not, ultimately, expect a heterosexual crush to come of it.
When I was younger, I’d go out with my second best, in an effort to make my first choice jealous. It was hard to accept that these women weren’t somehow deferring their true stories to these flawed, messy characters they were creating. I thought I was braver, until I took notice of how men handle their own cowardice.
When I was reporting, my first big story came just after midnight on Good Friday. A superbly diligent officer and veteran of Desert Storm had “been shot and killed in the line of duty.” I had been on the beat for four days, was at a bar having martinis and slid home to the sound of so many sirens that, even without having a scanner yet, I knew I would have to go back to work. The whole station was swarmed with media from all the major outlets. I was a total novice. This was my first real job. It was almost overwhelming.
In a seminar with Maria Flook, author of Invisible Eden: A Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod, I had a chance to think about point of view and to hear it discussed in a creative setting. Turns out, Matthew Morelli, a very thorough and meticulous young cop, whose wife had just left to go to Australia with their young daughter, had not in fact been shot in the line of duty. He killed himself in his patrol car. The cops went hysterical, started terrorizing all of South Norwalk. The emotional fallout was tremendous. Because I had no sources, I started firing emails to the P.I.O. Some of them were meant to rule out friendly fire. He later explained how off-putting these emails were, and said that I was writing more like a lawyer than a reporter. At any rate, one of the most aggravating things for me as a professional about the whole story was that I had included a paragraph about a question that was raised in one of the four press conferences the day afterward. The question was, “Is suicide off the table?” My editor, a complete bully—he bullied me, he bullied everyone, some said he was just doing his job, some went to our higher-ups and filed complaints—took it out. Rather than fight him on this point, I let it go.
It turned out later to have been a blessing that this was happening my first week. It was referred to many times during that week as “my trial by fire” by the entire department and other reporters.
Later reports stated that Matthew Morelli had shot himself with his service rifle from Desert Storm. This is not an easy thing to do. He also did it within four minutes of calling himself in to headquarters and reporting shots fired from the back lot of a house in a neighborhood that was also zoned for industrial purposes. The lot was just blocks from headquarters, which was also located in the crime epicenter of Norwalk. The average response time for a back-up unit during one of these calls was about two minutes. It never got clarified in my reporting or anybody else’s reporting how a person could pull a trigger aimed at their own throat over the span of a rifle, but cops and military men are ingenious this way, we had to concede. I had to let it go to get over the bridge of my rookie year as a reporter.
In the newsroom, there was always backtalk about the publisher. One of the copy editors who would be subject to the first round of layoffs was always saying that the mayor and police chief “had to have something over Chet.” This criticism was both prosaic and salacious to me. I feared and hated the guy as much as the rest of us. He had gone to my alma mater, Temple University, and struck me on our first meeting as a sociopath. A hungry sociopath. So much less than the sweet-hearted, larger than life, dapper Scottish gentleman I had known, mostly through familial recollection, of my grandfather, who ended his career publishing The Lubbock (Texas)-Avalanche Journal. He taught me, I think, to speak and read and write by taking me around the newsroom, the dark room, his office and the press room.
His death mirrored his life. My grandmother reported that he was in a very good mood, whistling as he dressed for the symphony. Like all good publishers, he was considered and considered himself a pillar of the community. He collapsed, tux on, during intermission. The community erupted into scattered, confused applause. When word reached the newsroom by phone, editorial staff laughed. They thought it was a joke. I later learned this from my fiance, who heard apocryphal stories of my grandfather while editing the business pages when I was in high school. One of the worst mistakes I made in my relationship with my grandmother, who was, mostly, what you might call a “stage grandmother” was to actually share this information with her. Not a writer or a reporter herself, she didn’t grasp the division between business and editorial side, or its politics. She thought I was knocking him.
Whispers of The Hour’s publisher, Chet, included that he wore make-up, which I think he did. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt; maybe he had some skin disease, maybe he just overestimated his publication and felt he had to always be camera ready..
“Penelope, we’re just really sorry, but your position with us is eliminated.”
“Faggot,” I wanted to say.
But didn’t.
It takes clout to burn a bridge like that. I took up long-distance running instead.
Cut to three years later, and I’m emailing my “big sister” in the creative writing program asking for gas money to get back and forth to class. Still trying to get a foot in the door. On our first meeting, I have to pull out a restraining order I’d just taken out against my new roommate, Jean, who had replaced Max. A promiscuous Haitian immigrant in his early thirties whom I could tell within three days had a history of not holding his shit together around women in first world terms. I have to show it to this blond who tells me she wants to be a free lance journalist full-time but who is currently in marketing. She offers to go with me to court. I decide against it for reasons of personal propriety and out of an ingrained, let’s-not-let-the-shit-sprawl sense of public safety. She does not offer me gas money. I decide she is best off writing fluff.
I end up not even going to court because I am swamped with work.
I wonder why my life is such a fucking disgrace that I did not even read the schedule until the night before I was supposed to show up for the first day of our retreat, upp, intensive. Counselors later explain to me that I am going through the twelve stages of grief, which seems overblown considering my lack of feeling for the Haitian dog-child who told me two months ago that his “cousin” was coming to stay with us “for a couple of weeks” then banged the shit of her on my lunch breaks, then claimed to have left a rent check out that “blew away” because I left the window open, then chided me for not being “friendly” enough with him.
Self-blame is one of the stages, they say. I am unswayed.
The charges amount to fourth degree, the sexual equivalent of a speeding ticket. Instead of catching up on workshopping stories, I spend the week before my intensive pouring over Jean’s meager book collection: A Dictionary of Criminal Justice, The Human Body, a juvenile fiction book about a boy who gets beat up by his older brother and has a crush on the smartest, prettiest girl in his class and thinks he has superpowers, The Seat of the Soul, Women Who Stay with Men who Stray: What Every Woman Needs to Know about Men and Infidelity, The Twelve Laws of Becoming Indispensable, and The Teaching of Values: Caring and Appreciation.
This last one disturbed me the most, because the last thing I said to him during our encounter was “I appreciate you.”
I felt it would be an adequate substitute for rape for one night and went back to sleep. This is common in such cases, counselors later explained. It is called “going into shock.”
I am unswayed until the second time Jean comes to collect his things. By which time I’m in danger of failing out of grad school for lack of attendance and gas money. I decide this would be an appropriate time to once again go into shock, and I do.
Actually, no, I didn’t decide. It just happened in that order.
* * *
In the psychiatric hospital, I have to share a room with a woman coming down off meth who borrows my make-up then lifts up her shirt to show me an active case of herpes shingles and claims that she does drugs to quell the “constant pain” of it. The woman is highly literate. She was a classics major. She tells me I remind her of her college roommate. She does not mean it as a compliment. She has the same name as my former boss at Get In Shape for Women: Juliet. Piece by piece Juliet is telling me a twisted tale of how she must make a desperate choice between her children and her husband, who is dealing. I get it, but it’s hardly William Styron.
In the morning, I tell the treatment team that I am finding the hospital as stressful as just being home alone, and they let me go.
Often in writing I have to find the stress points in each of my characters, like doing psychological acupuncture on ghosts. Sometimes I press too hard and cause instead some adverse response in myself.
For instance, prior to reaching this exhausted, strung out point, I’d tried to pull an all-nighter in the lounge of the Catholic religious retreat where we study. It is a former monastery. I keep thinking of my grandparents and how much they would want me to be published by now. They are both dead, but they bother me more now. She died two years ago. He, when I was five.
I’ve just finished a short story about a fourteen year old who is based on my mother. In it, this girl must make hard choices to save her little brother.
Many of my female protagonists are tricksters. Almost all of them. Many of them are motivated by vengeance and insecurity. Most are facing life and death choices. Most of those choices involve the life of someone close to them, not their own.
After he had read the story and a vengeful Facebook post I created about another one of my former roommates, this one a coke-addled, slutty 31 year old who swindled me out of hundreds of dollars a month, my friend has some close to home points to make. My revenge in the piece is so naked as to be almost another threat. I had a tantrum, and a lot of property damage was done. I am satisfied that the statute of limitations is up, so I post it and move on with my life.
I feel proud that I’m finally using Facebook for personal stuff.
Then I feel ashamed at our culture at large.
Michael Harris, my older guy friend, a sustainability expert I met through Occupy, had these questions for me: “Was the FB piece an example of something deeper and more real than ‘chick lit’? Are you able to bring into your own consciousness any unconscious motivations for the piece and maybe even articulate that too? What would that do to the piece? To you? To your writing? Because although we can’t be aware of our unconscious stuff, when we project it into writing or art or other people/places/circumstances, it is there to see. Can we, are we, willing to then look at that which we projected and see it/learn from it/enter into a place of choice with it (now that it is known)? If there is a measure of truth in the idea that every writer writes the same story over and over, what is yours?”
I know this is not intended as criticism criticism, but I’m not ready to hear it. I want to tell him to fuck off/go to hell/eat a bag of dicks. I want to say that I don’t write for spiritual growth but rather so that other people can have spiritual growth.
This last question sticks in my craw: If there is a measure of truth in the idea that every writer writes the same story over and over, what is yours?
I respond with:
Thank you very much for workshopping this piece with me. I am taking all your comments into consideration as I write and rewrite in preparation for sending out for publication.
I am waiting also for Jim Connolly’s perspective. He knows quite a bit about human trafficking from his line of work, so, no offense, but I want to see what is confusing to him before I do another version of the story.
I feel the need now to explain, though, some of what was confusing to you in the story.
First, human trafficking is the trade in human beings, in their person or their sex. When I was covering crime and court cases for The Hour in Norwalk, I came across what we call a spot news piece, that is, something that had just happened, at 23 Charles St. A blurb from the scanner said there had been a stabbing. It was about nine o'clock in the morning, and myself and the other reporters who were competing with me in the market had just arrived for our daily dose of abuse from the police. This was called “the briefing.” Anyway, we all left the briefing to go to 23 Charles St. and to see about this stabbing, which had actually taken place some time in the early morning hours. 23 Charles St. was an average looking South Norwalk home not far from where I lived. The house looked sort of clean, there were piles of garbage outside but not much, and the inside was barren, just mattresses and not a lot else. It looked like someone had just moved in or was on their way out when I peered inside.
The fucking TV people were there, broadcasting the initial nonsense the cops gave us. The initial nonsense was this: two males and a female had been sleeping inside the home when they were attacked by three females who were driven from New York to Norwalk by a male driver. The suspects had all been arrested and detained. The victims were still at the hospital, getting bandaged up.
I loitered at the scene until the TV news trucks and other reporters had left.
I saw the victims drive up in their banged up piece of shit car. They did not look terribly injured. I tried to speak to them, but they only spoke Spanish, and I only speak English. They were not eager to talk, anyway.
When the story aired on the noon broadcast it was reported as a “crime of passion” and “JEALOUSY!!!” because the victims had told the cops that they were stabbed at the impetus of one of the females (primary perpetrator) who was upset that one of the male victims (primary target) had taken up with another “wife.”
Okay. Whatever.
Months later, in court, I saw the perpetrators arraigned. The prosecutors and defense attorneys told the court that the three female perpetrators had been lured by the primary victim to South Norwalk from Mexico. They were all told that they were going to work in nail salons and make a lot of money to send home to their families. Then they were used as sex slaves and pimped out to a population of day laborers, illegals imported to do lawn and construction work. These day laborers would gather in droves along certain South Norwalk train bridges and certain known underpasses in Stamford. They would get picked up by sheisty employers and do their work for cash under the table. Because they were disconnected from their families, wives, girlfriends, etc..they would sometimes spend their extra pay on these whores. The court papers said that the primary victim was a well-known pimp and that the police found business cards with only a number and a picture of a “clown” and the words “the clown” on them in Spanish. “The clown” was only one of a number of opportunistic shit bags doing this in South Norwalk at the time. The women told the police and their lawyers that they had escaped “the clown” and fled to New York to actually work in nail salons. They stabbed him because he withheld their pay from him to keep them in further bondage. They could never work off the debt they incurred from transit fees he charged them. A coyote is a person who ferries illegals across the border in exchange for a fee.
The coyotes in the story are Middle Eastern. It has been a right-wing conspiracy for some time that Islamic jihadists are ferrying illegals across the Southern border of our country in order to make money to create dirty bombs. I know this because, when I was still married to Kevin, whom, as you know is big on right wing conspiracy theories, I was asked to do some investigative reporting for an online offshoot of The Washington Times. My editor at this offshoot, now defunct, called Insight on the News, mentioned this during one of our many, many phone conversations.
What Rina is doing with the iodine packets is 1) sanitizing these girls who are on a combination food truck/brothel because they are about to get gang raped by patrons and 2) giving them fake blood to simulate the breaking of a hymen because they garner more money if they are billed as virgins. She is also administering epidurals to dull the pain they are about to experience. The owner of the food truck allows her to do this because it soothes the girls and makes them more docile. In exchange, he gives her a fee for her services. She steals the equipment from the hospice she works in.
Also, when I was covering crime and court cases, I wrote about a drug addict nurse who got fired from Stamford hospital and later returned, in uniform, snuck into a pregnant lady’s room, and stole an epidural by literally pulling it out of her back while she was in labor. It became a major civil case that I covered. So that’s where I got the idea for that. Also, my mom, who was a respiratory therapist until October, used to steal packets of saline and biohazard marked plastic waste baggies from the hospital. She used to pack my sandwiches for lunch in the biohazard bags. Try explaining that to your junior high peers. The man in the court case told the court that he stole the epidural to give to his dog, who was dying.
Okay. Whatever.
None of this ever made the television. This is why I refused to cave to my grandmother’s demands that I go into TV because I were, in her opinion, “pretty enough” and that’s where “the real money is.” That’s where the real money is, but not the truth.
My style is dark because it is drawn from real life. I refuse to make apologies for this. This is the premise of speculative fiction. I wish I could say to you that not all of my work is this dark, but I don’t like to lie. Plus, most of it has not been written yet.
Everything you read about in the FB post is true to the best of my recollection. My former roommate stole from me. She is why I have refused to have female roommates since, but since Jean, I am going back on that.
Your comments were extremely helpful. Some of the occupiers I have shared the story with mentioned publishing this as an e-book. I don’t know about “e-books”, so I am holding out hope for print.
I hope you don’t mind if I share this correspondence with Jim Connolly and the director of my creative writing program.
Thank you,
Penelope
So I don’t need to explain myself. See. I am a thief. I am a very good thief. All good writers are. This is something my family never wants me to acknowledge. Theft is wrong, they seem to say, go into advertising or broadcast or nursing or anything really but what you are doing. My ex-husband, too, is afraid of my thievery, with good reason. Chick lit, he says, is not something he wants to see me “have to do.”
No. Shit. Hon.
* * *
After my nervous breakdown at the age of 20, my father, who is paranoid from having smoked and dealt pot for about twenty years, decides I am a full-blown meth addict and is scared witless that I have been prostituting myself. I confessed to taking speed when I was arrested for public intoxication in Kentucky. I actually thought I was in Tennessee. I was doing a strip tease to Kid Rock on top of my Nissan Altima which I’d just accidentally wedged against a boulder poised over a backwoods cliff. All of this seems relatively minor to me compared to the shit prostitutes have to go through.
Only the oil pan on the car is scratched. I do not have a concussion, but after a couple of hours of interrogation, I confess to taking speed, which I never did. It just seemed the most reasonable explanation for all this behavior. The portly sheriffs’ deputies finally let me be alone in my cell.
I am not alone for long, though, because I start to have auditory hallucinations. I think I am being hassled by other prisoners in this quaint little sheriff’s department jail. But then I notice that the fellow prisoners know things about me and about my life that there is no rational explanation for. They start to erode my trust in just about everyone I know: my husband, my family, my friends, my professors, this guy I have a crush on in my modern poetry class. They tell me the little girls in my cousin’s house in Georgia are being molested by their father. They tell me the guy I have a crush on would come and save me, but he is too busy being gangraped, by them. They tell me a lot of things.
I decide that I have died in the car accident and gone to hell. I decide to bust my skull open on the cell door. I know the most efficient way to do this is to take a running leap forward and proceed to do so. Typical Aries. After about the fourth or fifth time, I stop.
If this is hell, it has layers, I tell myself. If it has layers, there is the distinct possibility that whatever comes next could be worse. I decide to persist in the layer of solitary confinement.
It works. Later I am released into the custody of my father and taken to a psychiatric hospital in Texas.
Earlier that semester I’d been taking a social psychology class. 9-11 had just happened. Our professor is sporadically unavailable because he is a terrorism expert and is often called to interviews. He suggests but does not require that we read up on Chinese torture techniques used in communist prison camps during the Great Leap Forward. I notice that the voices I am hearing are deploying similar techniques against me even though I am physically unharmed.
I think now of my main character in “The General” who is really based on my mother who, as a child, half-reared her little brother and who grew up to become a respiratory therapist. It used to shame me that she was a hysterical single mom. It used to shame her, too; she was raised by one. Really? I felt like saying, for real, Mom? We can’t afford regular sandwich bags? I went to a private Episcopal school where most of my peers had parents in the medical and legal fields, only their paygrade was way higher. Only later did I have a sense of pride about what she did. Only later was I able to see how much of the screaming and the alcoholic tantrums was based on job-related stress and to have an appropriate chip on my shoulder about the fact that she regularly brought people back from the dead. She was an avowed advocate of euthanasia. It gave her deep anguish to see people revived for no better reason than, as she put it, so that money-grubbing relatives could collect another social security check or see their half-lifeless grandparent to their dessicated 91st birthday out of self-indulgent and paltry ignorance of suffering.
So in hindsight I can see how much of my mother is in Rina; it’s just a bitter pill to swallow.
At this point, we’ll call it borrowing. Or, if you consider that I missed calling her on her birthday this year due to an anxiety attack, we’ll call it literary bartering.
My grandfather used to be part of an underground gambling ring. It was small town, small time stuff. Later I reckoned it was just something all publishers do, given how much of the media turns on blackmail. In fact, given what I now know about publishing, I’m fairly confident it was just business as usual. The mayor, the police chief, poker and football games, porn. In Greenwich, Connecticut, where I briefly worked in a gym that charged clients $120 an hour for one yoga session with me, a fellow trainer, a former Division II college athlete from Jamaica who played basketball as his walk-on sport and who totalled his first Mercedes C-class which he bought with his per diem “snack money,”told me that the captains of finance have moved on from temperature controlled wine cellars to growing their own weed in elaborate Mendocino County-style labs. He also told me that a client of his imported whores from Thailand for his Superbowl party. This was awkward knowledge for the trainer, but he said he now understood why the client’s wife, whom he also trained, kept “accidentally” sending him pictures of her newly toned, naked ass.
We agreed that our client population was sick in a way we couldn’t help them with.
Anyway, after I’m born, my grandfather decides that neither of my parents’, boomer ne'er do wells, in his opinion, really deserve me. He decides that the custody battle could get intense. He decides to take pictures of me in an effort to prove that my mother is molesting or abusing me. There is a lot of truth to these allegations as my father has been beating my mother now for six years. What no one knows until I’m about thirteen is that I am fully present and awake during all of this. I recall dialogue from before I could speak fully. I recall it verbatim. It scares the shit out of people. It creates a lot of problems for dealing with me as I become a really bitchen, whipsmart teenager. The type who can’t quite keep her mouth shut. I volunteer for a women’s shelter and learn all about domestic violence while I am living with my father. I am in the middle of being interviewed by a freaking TV journalist in my junior year of high school. I am building a table for the new shelter when she asks me if I have ever witnessed domestic violence. I wincingly, quietly answer in the affirmative.
It airs on the six o'clock news. I have to go home and deal with my sullen father. He spends most of my senior year, after he’s been laid off from his factory job leaving wads of cash about for me, my stepsister and stepmother, while he goes on a golf tour and gets high for months at a time caddying for this black man, his best friend, who helps him pick up cans for pocket money at the golf course where he works part-time as a custodian. My great aunt tells him he can’t stay in her house when they go to Georgia, because the friend is black.
While I’m writing “The General”, I start to have flashbacks to these formative, picture-taking years with my grandfather and can’t figure out why. I start to wonder why my grandmother thought it would be a good idea to hire a private investigator following my nervous breakdown at and disappearance from Bryn Mawr given that paranoia is already one of my symptoms. She said a lot of hurtful and revealing things that led me to this conclusion. Apparently there was footage of me walking around barefoot in my hospital gown after I had escaped the same afternoon I was admitted and returned home. I had to make coffee and schmooze the cops into letting me stay home over the frantic, now overly protective, protestations of my father.
Anyway, in the lounge at this retreat center, sometime around 3 a.m., the witching hour in Catholic ideology, in my diary, I start to make nasty accusations against my grandfather. These allegations are not entirely baseless, my psychiatrist later decides. Picture taking is a “gray area.”
I already know this from having covered crime and court cases for the paper. The statute of limitations for kiddie porn is quite lengthy, a detective once explained, because every time someone views it the law considers that the victim is retraumatized, even if the victim is unaware of the viewing.
Having paranoia is like losing your virginity. It makes you have insights that you can’t take back, no matter how much you wish you could.
I decide that maybe an artistic temperament is the closest thing to borderline personality disorder and that I’ve got this in spades.
I decide that my best friend, whom I already feel quite enough guilt toward, because the molestation and the rape she’s been through would have killed me, had good reason for her last suicide attempt and probably should not have been left alone with my former roommate and definitely should not have been kicked out because I was on deadline for “The General” and just couldn’t talk about her feelings anymore.
I decide that I should never have been a cops reporter at all, that I was too callous to begin with. If a fourth degree sexual assault came up in the morning’s log, the dialogue in the briefing room went something like this:
“Fourth degree…he touched her breast… it was over the shirt…you want it?”
“No, have to do catch up on my weekend stories…covered a damn dog show off Vet’s Park…wait, was it a cop? Was it the mayor? No?…Fuck that noise.”
I remember all the waterworks on the stand at the trial of Ray DeCamillo, a cop charged with sexual assault after he apparently groped a teenager he busted at her prom for pot possession and a woman he pulled over for not using the handsfree function on her cell phone.
It all makes all too much sense now.
I decide that writing requires too much ethical decision making.
I begin to go in and out of consciousness. I believe that someone else is in the room with me, but I can’t see them. The bust of the pope is glaring at me, it seems.
I decide that my grandfather pawned naked pictures of me to his private security goons who probably pawned them overseas. Considering what kiddie porn fetched in the eighties, I am still pretty lucid.
I think.
I go for a walk. I sit vigil by the statue of the Virgin Mary and decide that grad school is the least of my problems.
I hear my second cousin raking me with the mantra, “You’re the last of the line, Penelope!” Because there are no more Gristelfinks after me. I have no brothers and no male cousins.
I decide that being a minor intelligence spike in a Southern Gothic, white trash chain of events is enough for me, and I miss my quiet life as a personal trainer/office assistant, and I go home.
Home.
Where a writer’s work is never finished.