creative nonfiction rant, trauma, draft

  I'm all for women working together in support of their reproductive rights, belonging to different discussion groups that center around gender-related issues, sexuality-related issues.  I believe that there is power in numbers, that it is the very differences between each and every woman and their ability to  work alongside other women for certain common goals that makes this unity so  effective. When we can look beyond your  next door neighbor’s  differences from you, her perfectly manicured lawn and constant string of "appointments" with the nail "girl", the therapist, the dermatologist, the psychiatrist, the stylist who gives her a perfect blowout three times a week, her lifestyle coach, her private yoga lessons; you hate yourself for being so damn judgmental until you happen to look up from preparing your family's (healthy, low-sodium, almost all organic yet still thrifty and decidedly delicious) homemade dinner to see through the window above the sink the newest maid (you think she is the newest because they come almost every day, or that's how it seems to you)standing just within view from your neighbor’s side yard. Her face is so red, her eyes bloodshot and swollen, her mouth opening and closing in rapid-fire movements punctuated by her lean, muscled arms whipping all around her, pointing in front of her in swift accusatory jabs, the maid's sloppy ponytail loosening as she first grabs at her face as if to cover it, to contain it, then making a fist and shaking it at something, her entire body shaking  and convulsing, her mouth still moving, not opening and closing so much as it is quivering along with the rest of her body, like people in movies who have some big beef with God and the big man isn't coming through for the guy after the hour and a half the character has spent rebuilding his spiritual life and repairing all the wrongs he has ever done to anyone ever from the time he was in utero so that maybe his son won't succumb to leukemia or his beautiful 13 year old kidnapped daughter will be returned to him in one piece but of course the son, who seems to be rallying both physically and emotionally, and he's in the hospital for his last scheduled  chemotherapy and radiation treatment combo, he accidentally falls in the bathroom and gets a nasty scrape on his arm, but no one's really worried too much because even though there isn't a single white blood cell left in his system, a fresh gauze bandage and a short intravenous course of a broad-spectrum antibiotic will keep any infection at bay, but because the overworked nursing temp with the physically abusive boyfriend and the useless crackwhore thief of a daughter nursing didn't take the time to read the charts, didn't bother to ask if he was highly allergic to penicillin until he's dozed off at that time of the night, she always has to work the graveyard because her boyfriend's asleep and doesn't need anything from her and if her crackwhore daughter does come into the house at that time of night, it'll be her the boyfriend punches, not her, and the quiet of this ward of the hospital is  soothing at night, so impossibly unlike her own house, her own life, that at first she thinks she's dreaming about here days working in the ER when every light and sound in remission leukemia boy's room goes apeshit and everyone start rushing towards his room and she tries to push past some of the RNs to see what's wrong, to see if she can help because he was perfectly fine just a little bit ago but she catches a glimpse of his face, his skin, his eyes and she knows she killed him, she screams Penicillinpenicillin hecan'thavecan't-allergic-
allergyallergy and another nurse who has been by his side every night for months just turns and stares as they all try to resuscitate the dead kid, it's just the two nurses there alone in the room and leukemia boy is dead and the nurse who will do time for manslaughter at the same time her boyfriend does. When  he did beat the crackhead whore to death when she came in the house (she brought it upon herself, he kept telling her, when her momma's home she can deal with her sorry ass but when she ain't there, it's his obligation to his girl, not to mention his obligation as a man to handle the situation as he sees fit.  And, he tells her, he's got a lot of things he wants her to know).  She's  so  fucking high that she laughs at him and then turns around to go . . . somewhere, wait, where is she and where is the guy she was with? And did she tell him to take her here?  And she still has some rocks in her pocket so she goes into a bedroom and closes the door, mom's boyfriend all but forgotten and she gets high really fast and sees his wallet on the nightstand and starts to shove it in some part of her clothing but she keeps dropping it, all this time boyfriend has just watched her with pure hatred, in his own fucked up way he loves his girlfriend and maybe she wouldn't be so uptight and preoccupied all the time if she didn't have to deal with this pathetic husk of a human being, he can't believe he's just been standing in the corner of the room for at least a quarter of an hour, at least a third of that time she had put the pipe in her pocket when she saw the wallet. He started laughing, he realized she had  tried to steal his wallet three times now, spent over five or six minutes trying to put it in pockets she didn't have and when she heard him laugh she came back to reality a little and just dropped the wallet on the floor and said nothing, her mind was crackling and sizzling like bacon being fried on high in a pan she had to get out and the rocks were burning a hole in her jeans pocket. He told her to sit down and smoke and she said thanks and each time she hit the cheap piece of metal he hit her and then he got bored and she didn't know where she had gotten so many rocks did she steal them? She thought so vaguely remembered some junkie passed out while the boyfriend was inside of her and he was saying all this stuff but she really could not make any sense out of him and she was still alive enough to know that somewhere inside her she should be happy that she couldn't understand what he was saying and she just wanted to him to kill her already because she never wanted to see her mom again.  And he got tired of fucking a girl who had already died a few times and it was getting creepy so he made her smoke more crack and he pulled the towel bar from above the toilet seat out and started to hit her with it and pretty soon he was just bored and she moved a little and asked if he would help her put the rocks in her stem, that’s what she called it, and she thinks her hands are broken will he just do that I need to you before I need you to need it before and he just wanted her to shut up and die already so he just kept her face in a cloud of smoke and it couldn’t have been long until her skinny arms and legs and neck started flopping and bouncing and her eyes were rolled back, just the whites, please. That's how his girlfriend asked for her eggs at restaurants, it used to piss him off but he didn't think he'd mind it any more. The boyfriend watched her shake everywhere on the bed and he was positive she wasn't gonna fall off the bed so he went to the bathroom and pissed and rinsed whatever nasty filth his girl's baby whore might have had on her off of him.  He even wore a condom with that girl but he was having a hard time keeping it up enough after the novelty of raping a little girl like that wore off.  It took a little while, he was good for a while, but he could tell when she needed to smoke that stuff to make her as stupid as they both wanted her to be. Maybe for the same reason she probably wanted to be dead after the way he raped her for hours  Maybe she wanted to be dead before that.  The boyfriend never did that kind of dirty shit - he knew he wasn't a fucking angel, okay, but he didn't so he could sell it and keep it which most people can't do at a small level because they end up retarded like the whore on the bed, and he knew how much, roughly, say, this guy who's this big does, and how much more crazy bitches can go, but he knew not a lot about like what happened after a night and they kept going because that wasn't his thing. He did think she way more rocks than an ugly strung out crackwhore would ever have on her at one time, though. She was too fucked up to have made that kind of money, too fucked up to be able to save it up like that.  Maybe she got lucky and rolled an OD'd rich old man doper. He couldn't stop wondering if she had planned to get it all and smoke it like she had with him. Her boyfriend remembered her needy face with sores and burns on her lips and he tried to pull her once or twice but it just came right out. With her broken hands? and he thought she was going to have done it anyway. The boyfriend thought back a while, when he was a punch drunk piece of shit and maybe if he was given a rock then he might have been like that whore his girl called her daughter.  He thought that maybe he was no better then that skinny little whore and then he heard something. Well, not something.  The boyfriend heard nothing and thought  that he had been hearing all 85 pounds of noxious smoke and blackened glass pipes like bones and maybe last inside she had burnt brillo pads, steel wool or whatever and they all had come loose, when she was convulsing they all came loose and that was why her eyes were broken like the glass eyes break on those old dolls, just big clean rocks rattling around in her eye sockets, his girl's little girl had died looking at what she loved.  He stopped looking in the mirror and left the bathroom. She was mostly still on the bed but she had really fucked up the sheets and some of the wooden slats in the headboard were separated from their slots. No, not damage, he thought as he slid the headboard's slats back into their proper slots. No damage, he thought as he picked up the girl from the heap she had fallen into when he pushed her off to fix the bed.  He went to the linen closet and pulled out an old sleeping bag.  It had been his since he left home at sixteen or whatever, and until 5 or 6 years ago, when he finally had gotten settled into his job and had a little money to spare, he had really done it for his girlfriend, he really wanted to make a go at it, have a real life with her.  They had always gone camping and fishing down on Assateague Island, wandered around Chincoteague Island, watched the huge, sweaty, beautiful wild horses run up and down the beach, through the foam and spray of the waves breaking close to the shoreline, or the break colliding the receding water if there was a strong riptide pulling the water back into itself. He surprised her for his birthday one year and made her take some time off work; she worked too long and too goddamned hard for his liking anyway but as least she didn't sit on her ass all day like all the guys' wives at work did. Some of the shit these men - they weren't even men, and to him, that wasn't no woman, neither. He had always yelled at His girl for working (well, after he had gotten his shop running good). But now she didn't need to work; really didn't need to work no that the little whore was gone. Christ, now that his girl's daughter was gone, and they didn't have to be worrying about what  TV she coulda taken, what DVDs he'd be missing, if his stereo was in his truck or not. She'd taken the tires a few times - once even the snow tires with the chains still on. He never told the boys he worked with about that little piece of shit, and he felt real good suddenly. Now that she was gone, he and his girl would have no more problems. She would stop feeling so ornery about her all the time - it would take a while, but after a few months she'd realize that everyone was better off without her.  Even his girl's daughter knew so; after all, she came home when she knew her momma wasn't there, at least a thousand dollars' worth of rock, and she knew how he hated her. She hated him, too, hated have to fight with him when she wanted her way, her momma would always cave in, whereas he never saw any reason to even have her in the house.  She did nothing but steal, cry, whine, beg, plead, and lie; oh, how she was getting her shit together, getting her GED, going to hair school, she just needed a car so she could move a couple towns over or states over or streets over, depending on when you asked her. The past two years, though, them years had been the worst. She was worse into drugs than ever, he knew, she was using needles, now, once you hit that there's no way back, and she knew it. A caterpillar that has metamorphosed into a butterfly can never go back to being a caterpillar; that’s just the way it is. She also knew that her momma's boyfriend's business, though profitable from the very start, was doing exceptionally well; his investments were beginning to pay off, too. Funny, he thought, I wonder if I would've made all those investments, the real estate, money markets, individual stocks, mutual funds, CDs, all these things were her idea in the first place; she begged him to go see a "financial planner" before he opened up his store.  Although his girl was skeptical even after his store had proved itself, she was still nervous, it seemed to him now.  But it was this little crackhead who was the smartest, the one who he never had to convince, never had to say "believe me" because she saw it all in her head, all the different variables and potholes and loopholes and she knew probability is far better than possibility.  Maybe that's why she knew to kill herself, and it was so clear in his head, everything that had happened since he and his best girl had been together.  If she valued probability over possibility, then there was only one way to go.  She had seen the probability, she knew herself far better as a statistic than as a human being.  Each time she tried to clean up, be it by herself - and only she knows how many times that actually was, but three or four years ago, he knew she wanted to get better.  She would save up money to go to the five-and-dime for makeup, pay the local truck stop to use the showers. If she had a friend who still lived with one foot in the world, she'd beg them to take her home with them Christmas Eve or on her Ma's birthday, sometimes even go to the Goodwill and buy something, more often, though, she'd just show up extra early before the drop-off trucks got there and they respected order. You could say she got the best picks of all, really; she was creative, putting drops of vanilla extract from the grocery store on her wrists, behind her ears, always had bad hair, that girl, hardly any of it and the color of wet sand, she's steal a packet of yellow Kool-Aid and wash her hair with it, then find a few empty toilet paper rolls, get her hair wet and try and use them like curlers. Now nobody had any reason to go to any of them big chain hardware stores an hour and then some away just to have to special order most everything they need.
raised there fists.  after crying and screaming at the evil and hurt that is everywhere but moves in slow motion in movies for cinematic effects or because the movie is made for a caliber of people for whom slow-motion is the most effective technique to get the point across unless when or an alcoholic cop who has redeemed himself through this, his last case before retirement and his last bottle only moments before his boss decided not to fire him, but let him retire with dignity working a homicide case too perfect not to garner the hearts of  the whole town finds chunks of his composted daughter in some  (you guiltily enjoy the likelihood that these gestures are probably directed at your neighbor’s almost-anorectic, self-tanned ornament of self-control, her face a constant blank page of complacency) jeopardize her job with the company she has been with for over six years now and her paycheck and their excellent dental plan that finally allowed her to afford not only her son's braces, but, at the age of 37, the braces she got with him to fix the jumble of teeth that all the kids used to make fun of so badly she still can't really smile, you see the maid's face contort into a wince as she starts to feel the pain shoot down her left leg from the pinched nerve in her back, leftovers from a slipped disk she got from slipping on dog pee on some client's  yellowed kitchen linoleum. You are frozen in time, you cannot stop yourself from staring, unable to even blink(and your mouth has fallen open, your jaw has literally dropped, unbeknownst  to you, as she runs screaming from the garage side of your neighbor’s house. lest she lose her sanity and dignity and self-respect instead, this plasticine "homemaker" who sees her kids about as often as she sees her diplomat husband (how many camps and after-school programs and lessons can these children handle?), this woman who seems to epitomize all that you have grown to be diametrically opposed to in society, in American ethnocentrism, in Life, in the very core of your sense of self, of what is right and wrong and moral and ethical, yet when your twelve year old daughter's  science teacher gets caught "touching" another 12 year old in her class, it is these differences that allow you and this woman, this same woman who only a moment ago seemed so foreign to you, agree to work together to keep other parents in the know about what has been happening in one of the few places we consider relatively safe differences make it seem as though you don't even speak the same language.