When I begin high school at the age of fourteen, I should be a fledgling serial killer, but somehow, I defy the standard behavioral trajectory predicted by FBI profilers. Hormones begin flowing, and instead of wanting to kill prettygirls, I just want to fuck them. I lose interest in the compulsions of serial killers and in swiping Natalie’s Barbie and Ken dolls. My desires turning away from death and destruction, transforming into a voracious appetite for sex.
I’ll show that bastard that I’m better than those new boys of his.
I begin banging every chick that will let me within ten feet of her. I appreciate how abnormal my interests have run the past year or two, and perhaps being a teenaged horn-dog doesn’t make me a “good” person, but when compared side by side with being fascinated by murder and blood, it’s the lesser of the two evils.
I don’t read those journals anymore. I’d like to throw them and their unspeakable contents into the trash, but I’m afraid someone will find and read them. I’d like to burn or shred them, but I don’t have a shredder, and there’s no place I can light a fire around here without drawing attention to myself. So I stuff them into my bookcase, behind a neglected set of orange Funk & Wagnall encyclopedias.
I leave my gun-loving, bird-shooting friends behind, begin attending church willingly (I want to be a
good
person, remember.), and reconnect with my old pals Ray and Benny. The robin I killed will haunt me for years after. Luckily, none of the cats I ever shot at have suffered. I was never close enough to get a good shot.
I’m so ashamed when I realize how awful I’ve been, how mean. Whydid I desire to hurt other lives? I remember the Golden Rule from Sundayschool…do unto others…
I’m changed…
I’m a good boynow…
But I’ve forgotten to thank God for answering the prayer I said some months ago.
I’ve forgotten that I had even
said
a prayer.
I don’t know I’m a victim.
The neighbors across the road tell the police that theyheard loud pops, but that theyweren’t sure if theywere gunshots. It’s the stench of putrefaction, of human flesh gently cooked by an unseasonable late April heat, that prompts them to call. The cops break in and find my Mom and Daddy rotting. Every room is searched. The house is beyond filthy. Drug paraphernalia are everywhere. Dirt and hair are so thick on the floors that it sticks to their shoes. Moldy food sits in pans on the stovetop. More mold floats on the dishwater. The toilets are coated with shit and grime.
They use bolt cutters to get the locks off of my door and find me laying in purulent pools of feces, urine and vomit. I can’t answer any of their questions. “How long you been locked in here?” “What’s your name?” “Were they your parents, or were you abducted?” I can’t even tell them how long it’s been since the shooting. Time has burned awaynoiselessly.
In the ER, I throw up my most recent meal, which has been sitting undigested for days in my gut: paint chips, wood chips, a scrap of bedsheet, all mixed with black, clotted blood so horribly foul that the police and the nurses and doctors all wrinkle their noses. I’m so ashamed I begin to cry.
I hear them talking about me as they shift my body from gurneyto cot, poke IVs into myarms and stick all manner of tubes up my nose, down my throat and up into my bladder. “There’s no way,” the doctors say. “He’s dying. He weighs forty-three pounds.”
I want to die. I need to die.At long last, the mercyof death, an end to this guilt, pain, hunger and endless desolation that has lasted the whole of myshort life.
The two cops who had found me turn away. I can hear them crying. I keep drifting in and out, but whenever I’m in, I stare at the backs of the two cops. Mymind is enshrouded with a thick narcotic fog, and I fight mywaythrough it to form two questions: How could my parents do what they’ve done to me? How can total strangers care so much about me that they’re crying? Something bursts through mywill, mydecision to let go and stop fighting. Myheart is clogged with a wondrous pain. I know now that I have to live. If those two policemen can care enough about me to cry, there must be something to live for. I don’t rationalize this as clearly as it appears on paper, but I know I need to survive. It’s not necessarily mypreference. It’s just what I
have
to do.
They do their part, the docs and nurses, and I do mine. The feeding tube gives me strength. Mykidneys have been ravaged by starvation and dehydration, but they’re not totally destroyed, and once I am able to eat and drink on my own, they come alive, working overtime, flushing my body out. I’ve never had to pee so much in mylife!
Three weeks after I am discovered half dead, I go to a less intensive floor at the hospital.Aweek after that I am given to social services. One of the policemen who saved me, Lloyd Tafford, becomes my foster dad. While I’m laid up, he prepares his home for me. It’s a small country house a mile outside Sommerville going towards Sacramento, made almost entirely of bricks. He onlyhas about eight years left to payon it.
The dayI go home with him, Channel 10 comes to cover my story, and everyone in town is there. The sun is out, the sky is a beautiful, pure blue, with cottony clouds. I smell flowers and freshlymowed lawn. I feel like I’ve just been born.
It’s the first time I’ve ever been in front of a crowd. I’m scared at first, not used to so many eyes on me, wondering what they’re thinking. They call me a hero and I’m embarrassed. “I’m not the hero,” I tell them. “The police are the heroes. I’m not the one who saved somebody’s life.”
I’m so thankful to Lloyd for adopting me, for giving me a home.
But it’s not easy getting used to a new home, or learning to trust a new parent.After all I’ve been through, I’m afraid. I can’t tell him what I’m afraid of, onlythat I’m afraid. He soon learns that I’m afraid to let him, or anyone, touch me in any way. When Officer Bloom (Lloyd’s partner on the force) comes over, or anyone from town stops by just to talk, I retreat to my new room and resist coming out. It takes a lot of coaxing. When anyone walks toward me to say hello, I become rigid as ice---I can’t help it---my eyes filled with alarm and misgiving. I’m on guard even during sleep, my body curled into a tight ball. For the first few weeks it’s awful, and Lloyd cries at least once a day, not just because his new son is terrified and unresponsive, but because he can’t stop remembering the images from the first dayhe met me.
One night he begins to describe his recollections in detail. “You had big sores on your back from laying there so long. On your ankles where the chains dug into you. When I lifted you off the mattress you were so light…I almost threw up just from how light you were. You were barelythere…”
I wait for him to mention the infections all over myskin or the old scars in myanus, but he doesn’t.
And then he hugs me…and I stiffen as usual. His big body shudders with sobs and something inside me softens. I put my arms around him and hug him back for the first time. His arms tighten, crushing me against him and the ice inside of me begins to drip awayswiftly.
After that night, I crave his hugs. I think I
grow
on them. I gain weight and get taller, despite the doctors’ fears that I’ll be stunted because of the starvation and the kidney damage. By the time I’m fullygrown, I’m nearlyfive-six.
In those first tranquil months with Lloyd Tafford, my permanent personalityemerges. Lloyd is as much an influence on that as my biological parents. It’s still there, that fear, but now I have Lloyd to balance me, and keep it from dominating every second of mylife.
Lloyd’s never been married, and mycoming into his life must have awakened an instinct to love and nurture. He’s a great, tall man with dark curlyhair and a shypersonality. He’s a gentle man, not just a gentleman. He grew up in Van Buren, a small town in Arkansas. I’ve never been out of California, not since that long ago, blurry trip to Oregon. I love the way Lloyd talks. It’s not an out and out twang or a deep-Southern drawl. It’s verysubtle. Onlya person with a great ear for non-Californian accents would be able to detect all the unusual inflections, which I adopt as I grow up in his home. I’m glad to have an accent. I’m glad to be able to talk at all. When mybirth parents stopped coming to myroom, I had nobody to talk to, so I stopped speaking.
With Lloyd, I am introduced to a peaceful, nostalgic world. He loves old radio shows that I’ve never heard of, like
Fibber McGee & Molly
,
The Great Gildersleeve
, and
Jack Benny
. In winter, he likes to cover up with quilts while listening to these shows, or old music from the fifties. He loves really old movies starring Humphrey Bogart, Bob Hope, Cary Grant. In summer, he enjoys sitting outside on the back porch made of bricks, drinking lemonade and watching bees and hummingbirds sparring over the red liquid he puts into their feeders.
He cries easily, and after so many years of burying my most intense emotions deep inside, I cry a lot too, and the stupidest things set me off, like sad endings of old movies or the first sight I have of the Pacific Ocean. I fall immediatelyand absolutelyin love with the broad, churning teal expanse, even the smells of sand and salt and seaweed. “Let’s
move
to the ocean!” I beg him.
In fact, after smelling nothing but the rank odors of my own unwashed body---ancient sweat, pasty dead skin, stale urine and my own excrement---along with Daddy’s semen---for so many years, I’ve come to love my sense of smell again. I never go into the bakery department of a grocery store and take for granted the warm aroma of fresh bread.
All
of my senses reawaken. When I see and smell my first rainfall outside Lloyd’s front door, I run out and dance in it, loving the sound of the rain rattling the dryleaves, the sting of cold drops splattering on myskin. I trail myfingers over the bright green moss growing on the old, cracked bricks on the porch. I have a cold the next day.
My story slowly inches its way though town, from mouth to mouth. It’s moved people to write letters of outrage and encouragement to me and Lloyd. On the street, people stare at me. I don’t know if I see visages of fascination, curiosity or admiration. I know some of them want to talk to me, ask me how I emerged from hell alive, what all went on in that room…
And I’m glad theydon’t.
Even though Lloyd and I are celebrities in Sommerville, we prefer to keep to ourselves. In fact, Lloyd is every bit the recluse and eccentric I am. Away from work, he likes to be at home. Our companions of preference are the stray alley cats we’ve adopted. We spoil them rotten.
I adore these kitties, which we call our “kids.” Whenever one of them comes in with a runny nose or a goathead sticker imbedded in the tender pink pad of a paw, I fuss over them with warm, wet washcloths and salt water soaks, and I decide to become a veterinarian.
We go to church at the Southern Baptist in town and that’s where I discover how much I love to sing. It’s the onlytime I come out of my shell and get in front of crowds. Once that last lyric is past mylips and I sit back down, I’m mute.
My timidity doesn’t stop people, mostly older people, from stopping me on the street to ask me how Lloyd and I have been doing. Mrs. Cooke, the white-haired, coffee-skinned ladywho runs the bakery on Main Street, calls me in and packs a dozen chocolate frosted éclairs into a pink box. Lloyd loves them, but with their creamy pudding centers, they remind me too much of DingDongs and Ho-hos. I politelynibble them to appease Lloyd, then I hide them in a napkin.
I enter school with onlya week left of eighth grade, then I am placed into summer school to get caught up. I learn that kids my age are different from older people. I haven’t seen a classroom since I was six or seven years old, and at thirteen, I have to learn the very basics of math. I can’t read or spell. I have trouble with dyslexia, always transposing numbers or writing my E’s and 3’s backwards. It’s humiliating, and some of the kids are heartless. It’s bad enough I’m very small for my age, and their taunting over my reading level makes me feel like a baby. Nothing shields me from the critical scrutiny of my peers. It’s so bad some days that I beg Lloyd to let me stayhome.
I meet Stacy Pendleton and her girlfriends a few days after I begin school, and soon the bunch of us are palling around and they’re guarding me against the meanness of the others. They surround me like hens defending a little yellow chick, promptly dubbing me their “Baby” or “Babe.”
Stacy’s pretty, with almond shaped amber eyes and long brown hair that she takes to the salon for a spiral perm every few weeks, until too manychemicals have totallyfried it and she has it cut into a cute, short pixie do.
Stacybecomes mybest friend. She’s so laid back, yet kind of wild and crazy, always the one to come up with a scheme. At first, we all ring doorbells and run away, we have food fights in the cafeteria and get sent to the principal’s office, those kinds of things. Not long later, we discover we love music, especially the music that was new when we were babies. We listen to ‘80s new wave like Human League, Bananarama, Pat Benetar, the Police, U2 and the Smiths. We also like R&B music from the Isley Brothers, the Mary Jane Girls, Rick James, Prince, and Michael Jackson before “Thriller” was released. We practice singing songs from these bands, and we talk about becoming our own band one day.
The group of us dresses alike, dayafter day. I’m not into frilly or flowery stuff and neither is Stacy, who is called a “tomboy” because of her disdain for pink party dresses and oversized hair bows. We just like to wear jeans and printed tees of our favorite movies or bands, even in church. We dye our hair crazy colors, Stacy’s pixie cut in electric purple and my shoulder-length waves in dark magenta with bright yellow stripes. It’s then that the pastor at the Baptist church politely tells me that I can’t sing at the pulpit again until I dye it back to its natural color. I’m stung, but I decide I’d rather sing new wave anyway.
I get my ears pierced and Stacy gets a nose ring. She gets an electric guitar and I get a karaoke machine. We begin a “goth” phase together, and get high by sniffing the black polish we paint our nails with before adding a topcoat of glitter. We like to get high, and we ask each other in whispers if it’s wrong to inhale nail lacquer and take our brains to weird, wavering, colorful places. My new girlfriends begin smoking, and of course I’m invited to join them. The first sight I have of a lit cancer stick triggers images and sense memories, but before long, I become one of those awful people who actually
loves
to smoke.