Authors: Joe Putignano
I found deep pleasure and satisfaction in my desire to hurt her. She deserved it; she was responsible for my despair; she was the woman who clipped my wings. Her boyfriend received the same treatment. I never missed an attack as he walked by, cursing him like I was a vengeful gypsy as I sent all forms of psychic torture his way. I was upset with Michael for bringing me to that house of darkness. Then I realized that despite our nonworking relationship, my mother was not pushing me out, but reaching out to help me in her own way. And I returned the touch of her kind hands with poison. If I stayed there I’d end up back at the nuthouse, so I begged my father for another try. I went back to his house, where he set some rules for me. It was like caging a hurricane, since rules were never part of my upbringing, but I agreed to them in an attempt at normalcy.
The house rules were no alcohol or other drugs. My father would keep my medication and administer the two pills like the nurses did in the crazy ward. I liked this plan, because we were trying to heal my wounds. He spoke with the pharmacist and told her he wanted to wean me off of my medication. She told him it might take a very
long time and to be patient while we made little changes at first. I was defenseless against the overpowering urge to take more pills after swallowing even the tiniest dose of medication, and I didn’t know why.
I told myself I didn’t need any weaning and could do it like I did things in gymnastics and stop completely, and so I called upon the strength of my childhood warrior. I would find that pinpoint dedication to just quit and not use alcohol or other drugs, no matter how bad the detox got and no matter how bad I felt. As a gymnast I was stronger than most people, and would refrain from using those fucking pills that were killing me. The quickest way for me to start getting back on track was exercise—finding myself again through sweat and endorphins.
On a beautiful morning by the sea I started jogging toward my new destination, with anxiety trailing close behind. Inhaling the saltwater air, I watched the beach pass by as each stride drove a deep footprint into the soft sand. A small runner’s high started to hit and I smiled, but panic was still there behind me. Then panic came through me, matching my pace and growing from the ground below me. It became so physical that I couldn’t breathe. I began to shake and sweat, not knowing what had happened. I tried to catch my breath as my heart pounded in my chest. I would outrun this feeling. I knew I could beat it, knew I could get over this hump, so I ran as fast I could through the sand, pushing out the anxiety that was streaming through my veins.
As I ran along the curve of the waves crashing into the beach, the world suddenly went crooked and upside down like I was inside a snow globe. I tried to keep running and fight the dizziness, but the pressure inside my head was extraordinary, and my skull bounced onto the sand. I refused to stay down; a gymnast could handle balance in any situation, so I stood up, but was aggressively pushed back down. My body repeatedly smacked against the wet sand, hurling itself over and over, in complete powerlessness.
I don’t remember standing up or going home, but as I walked through the front door my stepsister looked over at me from watching TV in the living room and said, “My god, Joey! What happened to you?”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. “You’re covered in sand and it looks like you threw up all over yourself.” I looked down and noticed foamy puke all over the front kangaroo-pouch pocket of my favorite raver hoodie. I called the pharmacist my father had talked to earlier and she said I had had a seizure, and this was the result of stopping my medication. She insisted I slowly wean myself off the pills and that it could take months. I was scared because I knew I couldn’t decrease the dosages. If I took even the smallest amount, I would lose all of my senses and go crazy.
After hanging up with her, I took two pills. My psychiatrist had increased the dosage after my suicide attempt; they were the strongest dosage made. As the pills hit, so did the desire to eradicate all emotions. I remembered my stash of pills in the mattress. I ate about ten pills and downed them with water because my father had locked up all the alcohol in the downstairs refrigerator. I had heard of people locking up their alcohol, but had never seen it before. But there it was, an actual metal lock on the side of our basement refrigerator with all the alcohol inside. I went down to confront the big white beast and tried to break the lock, but couldn’t get it open.
I went back upstairs, surveyed the living room, and saw a bottle shaped like a woman. It looked like a decoration, but there was some sort of liquor inside; they must have overlooked that one when conducting the liquor lockup. I took the plastic wrap off with a knife and downed it, guzzling its warmth into my stomach. It felt so good and hit me hard like a lightning bolt. Filled with a rush of euphoria and freedom, I took more pills and finished the bottle. I filled it up with water and tried taping the cover back on, but just ended up repeatedly spilling and soaking the dining room table in my drunkenness.
I woke up the next day sometime in the afternoon with no recollection of the night before. I walked into the kitchen and could feel the ions had changed in the room. My father was sitting at the table, looking angry and distant. He asked, “What happened last night?” I honestly didn’t know what he was talking about, and then he said, “Someone drenched the table and opened Lynn’s bottle of liquor and tried to
retape it.” I knew I was guilty because I had done things like that without recollection so many times.
“I’m sorry, but I laid down the house rules and no drinking was one of them and you’ve already broken it. I’m sorry, Joe, but you can’t stay here any longer.”
I flipped out and expressed my fury in the most violent way I could muster. I screamed that if he hadn’t abandoned me as a child I would not have grown up like this. I released my hatred in the most diabolical phrases to punish him forever. But even as I hurled those dreadful words, I knew deep down he wasn’t responsible for my drug use. I had made the choice to take those drugs and I couldn’t stop, but it felt good to blame someone else. I knocked him down with my words and cut him as deeply as I had cut my own arms. He just sat there and took it. In that moment of rage, I hated him and never wanted to see him again.
His anger began to rise, and I was surprised he didn’t punch me in the face. Instead he said, “Get your things and find a new place to live. I’ll drive you to the bus station.”
I didn’t know where to go, but I grabbed my things and decided to go back to Holyoke and wait until spring break to go home with Nick. My father dropped me off at the bus station and I called a friend from Southie, who brought me some pills. I got on the bus and headed back to Staunton—back to another place I had been kicked out of.
I
T WAS IDENTIFIED AS THE
digitus impudicus
(
IMPUDENT FINGER
)
IN ANCIENT
R
OME, AND REFERENCES ARE MADE TO USING THE FINGER IN ANCIENT
G
REEK COMEDY TO INSULT ANOTHER PERSON
. T
HE WIDESPREAD USAGE OF THE FINGER IN THIS CONTEXT IN MANY CULTURES IS LIKELY DUE TO THE GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES OF THE
R
OMAN EMPIRE AND
G
RECO
-R
OMAN CIVILIZATION
. A
NOTHER POSSIBLE ORIGIN OF THIS GESTURE CAN BE FOUND IN THE FIRST-CENTURY
M
EDITERRANEAN WORLD, WHERE EXTENDING THE
digitus impudicus
WAS ONE OF MANY METHODS USED TO DIVERT THE EVER-PRESENT THREAT OF THE EVIL EYE
. D
URING THE
H
UNDRED
Y
EARS’
W
AR, THE
F
RENCH CUT OFF THE MIDDLE FINGERS OF CAPTURED
E
NGLISH ARCHERS SO THEY WOULD BE UNABLE TO USE THEIR BOWS, AND AFTER THE
B
ATTLE OF
A
GINCOURT, THE VICTORIOUS
E
NGLISH SHOWED THE
F
RENCH THAT THEIR MIDDLE FINGERS WERE STILL INTACT
.
The five days before spring break I stayed at a coke dealer’s house, doing so much coke that my nose was raw. We weren’t going to Nick’s house for spring break as planned; instead we were going to Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to the house of a friend of his from the football team named Greg. We were going to stay with him because his father needed some help with landscaping and he was going to pay us for helping. Any opportunity I had to make drug money, and I would be there. Nick and I thought it would be fun because we could smoke weed in the woods and then help out all day.
We started our first day of work. Greg’s father, a man of few words and much action, rented one of those giant wood chippers. He was clearing out a big section of his backyard. A supervisor accompanied the machine, making sure it ran properly, and once Greg’s father saw we knew how to use it, he left for work. Our job was to feed tree branches into the chipper, and every now and then I would overfeed it, to which the man would give a stern “No, that one is too big.” After returning him a dirty look, I’d search for smaller ones. The warden left after an hour, leaving his mechanical kraken unguarded.
Greg went inside to get some beer, and Nick and I thought the quicker we finished working, the sooner we could get high. Greg told us he had a good source for coke, and we would get some later that night. That motivated us to work harder and faster, so we decided to push everything into the wood chipper all at once. The machine made a huge coughing sound, and we burst out laughing. That inspired us to gather more things unsuitable for chipping, like rocks, bricks, and tree stumps. Laughing hysterically, on the count of three we threw our pile of unbreakable objects into the spinning blades. The machine let out a sharp zipping sound, and the rocks ricocheted back at us as the stump and bricks got stuck in its mechanical grasp. Next, a horrible sound like screeching train wheels blasted out from the machine, followed by a huge plume of black smoke. We fell to the ground in laughter. The machine was dead.
We ran into the kitchen to tell Greg the machine wasn’t working, and on the kitchen counter was a prescription bottle written out to his mother for Percocet. This was too good to be true. I picked up the bottle, found Greg, and asked, “Dude, can we take these?” He said, “Sure.” We each took three with a beer. I said calmly, “There is something wrong with that machine. It’s not working right.” We walked back to the site and could smell the last wisps of smoke emanating from the engine. Greg tried restarting it, but it wouldn’t budge; there was no resuscitation. Nick and I began picking out the rocks from the front of the chipper to remove any evidence, and then Greg asked, “Wait . . . where did that guy go?”
“I dunno, he just took off.”
“Well, it’s his fault; he should have been here with his machine.”
The man seemed drunk when he came back, and started yelling at us for breaking his equipment. We met his drunkenness and anger with the same and told him he should never have left us alone with that expensive thing.
With our work finished, we showered and got ready to find our coke connection. It was a friend’s friend named Katherine, a pouty, hippie-wannabe girl who resembled Cloud, but only in her clothing. She was kind and quiet, and I was taken in by her gentle smile. She brought us to her friend Angela’s apartment in a seedy part of town.
The place looked like animals lived in the walls, with dirty floors and huge clouds of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. A vapor of a woman came crashing over to us with long, red, fake nails and a raspy voice that sounded like she had been screaming since the day she was born. Her eyes were pretty, but all her beauty had been tainted by something I couldn’t yet figure out. It really didn’t matter, though; she had the coke and was the most radiant person in the room—in fact, she was stunning.
We paid for our cocaine and she invited us to hang out and drink for a while, which I was into because Katherine seemed nice. The coke was weak, but still something to sniff. We stayed at Angela’s all night and she got in close with Greg, which was sweet since he never seemed to connect with the college girls.
For the next few days we made money doing yard work (sans the chipper), and blew it all at Angela’s house every night. She became more and more irritating as she writhed around the room like a pathetic, disturbed doll seeking attention. Socially awkward, she savored her delusional world as she shouted out her sexual desires. She would dance into the living room in frilly negligees, do a line of powder off her fake, fire engine–red nails, and then saunter away. Her addiction wasn’t to drugs, it was to attention. And it pissed me off how she disrespectfully toyed with the cocaine, doing it off her plastic nails.
Was she crazy
?
What if she dropped it?
Her nails weren’t even big enough to do the right amount. She bounced around the room, desperate for a man to look at her.
Her brother started joining in with his own array of shady people. Those people cast a skin-prickling energy throughout the apartment. But I was there for the drugs, not the company. Angela and her brother seemed more like lovers than brother and sister; he overbearingly protected her while she carelessly flung herself around him. Greg and Angela, meanwhile, were growing closer, disappearing into the night and returning like two teenagers in the dawn, but something about her was off.
One evening a downpour got us off work early, so we had a head start on partying at Angela’s. Her smeared makeup and dark “Hellooooooo” invited us in, but she quickly ran to the other room as the phone rang. Twenty minutes later there was a knock on the door. A man in red-and-black plaid came in, and without introduction he and Angela went into the bedroom for fifteen minutes; then he opened the door and left. At first I thought nothing of it, but when it happened again an hour later, I understood. Greg was too stoned to realize his new girlfriend was a prostitute. All her attention-whoring and sexual innuendos made sense, but I felt bad for Greg, who had finally connected with someone. The sad twilight that cracked through her dirty apartment cast a light on her painted face for all to see who she really was—a version of me. Her essence was completely dismantled in the light, while she covered it up with painful amounts of makeup and perfume. Her pain fired up her skin, creating a glasslike quality of porcelain, too strong for any emotion to pass through.