A Box of Fingers

I've told you so much here. I've told you alot about the pretty and the scary in my life--but that was all in my life. I've covered briefly a romantic childhood in the Lowcountry, and hinted at the bad. Now it's time for that.

In my last post I talked about an addiction that I've only brushed upon previously. Those opiates give me strength-as a better writer than I would say "an inch to an unbalanced leg,"-and now I want to confess.

I want to tell you that things havent always been pretty. It hasn't always been the sancitity of a woman and her child making jams and jellies. Sometimes it was fucking horrifying.

I have presented to you many times, my mother. She in need of protection, she who gives all love. She who begins and ends my addictions. It is she that I have searched for, she that I have found, and she whom I must protect. And she is love.

A Scene, Among Many:

It's my teenage years, and I'm stoned or drunk. I'm a slight boy in my purple room. It's a sacred temple and this is the first time it was ever defiled. The first time among many: it is the first rape.

My mother's lover of the moment is in a rage. I have retired to my room. My room with the Monet purple walls and the cherry wood furniture. The almost-mist valances and the orange-oil scent. I hear them exchanging their words, their blows.

A new tradition starts: for the first of many occasions, my mother comes to my room for her own bit of safety. It's only minutes before he comes in. His name was Robert. He would be the first undoing. The first time that thread was pulled that unwound the whole tapestry, the first time that everything was made fragile.

When she moved him in-she who was also a child of abuse, but only worse-he gave me a box of fingers. A box of severed mannequin fingers. I remember little about him-only that, this, and that he ate garlic cloves like I eat apples.

Violence. The cracking of doorframe wood. The black night was quiet and a watchful witness as the first of these tiny tragedies became real. Mama hid behind me in the expensive duvet that still covers my bed. Then everything became a blur, an unremembered horror that I'm thankful for.

He was on top of me, strangling me. The room ran fast with colors; the world became a soft-edged portrait of what was normal. I remember her standing in the doorway as the last of my air left my body. She was so helpless. It was like being in a snowglobe. Nothing was what it should have been. It was all so new and traumatic.

I remember him trying to photograph me as I died. She cried silent tears in the doorframe. I must have come back to life-I am here today, after all-but I took his camera from him and bashed it against his skull. Pieces of glass and metal went everywhere. I lost consciousness.

I couldn't tell you what happened that night, not the rest of it. But I know what happened in the days that followed.

I went off to Miami Beach to go to college, and I came back when that man had nearly killed her. I came back on a train, a fourteen hour train ride back to the Lowcountry. I got there, back to my childhood home, the morning after he had nearly killed her. That old house smelled like a meat factory. Dark blood painted the steps, the walls, the floors. She was black and blue, worse colors than that but this language doesn't have names for the shades that indicate "Beaten, shamed, right back in her childhood, almost dead." It doesn't have words for the loss of my childhood. For the loss of safety.

And In the Years That Passed

As you may guess, I have many recollections that match that one. In some she was luckier. In one, I beat a man nearly to his death. And I loved it. I only regret that I did not kill him.

In the years that went between, the bonds of love and fealty would be tested and nearly broken. The scene would be replayed. Oh, those years have disspeared. So much has gone by since then.

Thankfully-her life, at least-seems to be calmer now. Although last night in dreams I was fake-punching her, warning her of what would happen if she took up with such a man again.

And I still have that box of fingers. I use it like a VooDoo doll, a way to kill without touching. A way to bury the past.

And nightly I sniff my drugs and drink my wine.

Some things are not as they seem.