(no subject)
There Are Limits
A friend of mine from the early seventies and our crazy-wild Kerouac days of waitressing late and then open miking poetry late and howling down the streets of Berkeley and San Francisco called me yesterday as I was weeding the broccoli and told me she had up to a thousand dollars to give me to come visit her on Washington's rain forest peninsula. Just add up the gas miles my old and i mean old, bench seat American car would need, plus a cuppla nights at a motel and some food to get up to her little town that had less people than my little town has. I thought about it, I talked to Dan about it and then I went back to working in the garden. I started cutting down the evening primrose and tiger lily stalks and then I stopped and sat in the tree house and read some more of "Sons" by Kafka, because it was time to do that again now that my two sons are adult. Then I stopped, my mind went blank, like a television screen and I saw my brothers as children with their pants down around their ankles leaning over the couch filthy with the hair grease of my step-father and I watched him beating the shit out of them for nothing, they had done nothing, and my skinny little arm couldn't pull his arm away from its motion and finally he slammed me up against the opposite wall so I could see my efforts were pointless...
After pulling up all the stalks in the garden and cutting them into a size that I could make a small bonfire with in the autumn, that night in bed, hardly able to move because I had fallen the night before so hard on the crowded wet laundry room floor, that I honestly thought I'd broken my knee caps, I remembered how when I woke in the night as a junior high school girl and the absolute terror of living, just plain living, came over me, I would crawl into the lower bunk bed of my brothers', even though it was wet from his urine, and I clutched his shoulders as I carefully kept my hips and belly as far as I could away from the warm wetness, while grasping as much comfort as I could from his bony collarbone and his slight snore. I stared for hours out the window at the street lamp covered with moths and saw how relentless that kind of light was...as eternal as the light at the cop shop where I knew I couldn't go even though the second story roof of our apt had a drain pipe I could slide down and run a few miles and TELL; I knew it wouldn't make any difference. They would maybe call whatever version of CPS there was back in the mid-sixties and someone might come out and investigate, but if they left me alone with my mother and the step-father, or even just my mother if they took the step-father away and put my brothers in foster care, that death I thought about when she beat us? It might happen that night. She honestly might lose the control she was convinced she had and maybe she did have a certain amount of control and maybe I was lucky she hadn't lost it one of those other nights. I wouldn't have grown up to be able to tell anybody about this just one-of-many-incidents, that I needed to talk about. She always prefaced an evening of hell with "And I don't want the neighbors hearing you or you'll get it worse, do you hear me?" So we were as quiet as we could be as she flailed us with kitchen utensils and sauce pans, madly leaping out of the way in pain, as a st. vitus dance overtook us to find air clear of torture tools.
It stopped when I was fifteen and she wrapped my down-to-the-waist hair one,two three times around her fist and started in with the big spoon, calmly, as hard as she could on my ass, and I stood there, stock still, not a move, not a sound, and she saw for the first time, I wasn't gonna be broken, no matter what. It was then that I knew I could undergo anything. Because when she finally let go of me, more out of weariness than anything else, and saw my dead face,void of any emotion, she knew it was over. I had won. I let my hair cover my face like a shiny wet greasy shower curtain and I allowed myself a tiny smile of victory. I dared not give away more than that. But I needed some satisfaction, I needed to say "Mick, you lied."
And I told Dan the next day as we inched into the gas station for one gallon of gas, "Hey hon, I don't wanna go to Washington. Do you mind?" And he shook his head, he knew my home was my sanity, was my yoga, was my Bible story and I needed to stay close...I had addresses for my sons, for my brothers and they were all within a few miles of me.
A friend of mine from the early seventies and our crazy-wild Kerouac days of waitressing late and then open miking poetry late and howling down the streets of Berkeley and San Francisco called me yesterday as I was weeding the broccoli and told me she had up to a thousand dollars to give me to come visit her on Washington's rain forest peninsula. Just add up the gas miles my old and i mean old, bench seat American car would need, plus a cuppla nights at a motel and some food to get up to her little town that had less people than my little town has. I thought about it, I talked to Dan about it and then I went back to working in the garden. I started cutting down the evening primrose and tiger lily stalks and then I stopped and sat in the tree house and read some more of "Sons" by Kafka, because it was time to do that again now that my two sons are adult. Then I stopped, my mind went blank, like a television screen and I saw my brothers as children with their pants down around their ankles leaning over the couch filthy with the hair grease of my step-father and I watched him beating the shit out of them for nothing, they had done nothing, and my skinny little arm couldn't pull his arm away from its motion and finally he slammed me up against the opposite wall so I could see my efforts were pointless...
After pulling up all the stalks in the garden and cutting them into a size that I could make a small bonfire with in the autumn, that night in bed, hardly able to move because I had fallen the night before so hard on the crowded wet laundry room floor, that I honestly thought I'd broken my knee caps, I remembered how when I woke in the night as a junior high school girl and the absolute terror of living, just plain living, came over me, I would crawl into the lower bunk bed of my brothers', even though it was wet from his urine, and I clutched his shoulders as I carefully kept my hips and belly as far as I could away from the warm wetness, while grasping as much comfort as I could from his bony collarbone and his slight snore. I stared for hours out the window at the street lamp covered with moths and saw how relentless that kind of light was...as eternal as the light at the cop shop where I knew I couldn't go even though the second story roof of our apt had a drain pipe I could slide down and run a few miles and TELL; I knew it wouldn't make any difference. They would maybe call whatever version of CPS there was back in the mid-sixties and someone might come out and investigate, but if they left me alone with my mother and the step-father, or even just my mother if they took the step-father away and put my brothers in foster care, that death I thought about when she beat us? It might happen that night. She honestly might lose the control she was convinced she had and maybe she did have a certain amount of control and maybe I was lucky she hadn't lost it one of those other nights. I wouldn't have grown up to be able to tell anybody about this just one-of-many-incidents, that I needed to talk about. She always prefaced an evening of hell with "And I don't want the neighbors hearing you or you'll get it worse, do you hear me?" So we were as quiet as we could be as she flailed us with kitchen utensils and sauce pans, madly leaping out of the way in pain, as a st. vitus dance overtook us to find air clear of torture tools.
It stopped when I was fifteen and she wrapped my down-to-the-waist hair one,two three times around her fist and started in with the big spoon, calmly, as hard as she could on my ass, and I stood there, stock still, not a move, not a sound, and she saw for the first time, I wasn't gonna be broken, no matter what. It was then that I knew I could undergo anything. Because when she finally let go of me, more out of weariness than anything else, and saw my dead face,void of any emotion, she knew it was over. I had won. I let my hair cover my face like a shiny wet greasy shower curtain and I allowed myself a tiny smile of victory. I dared not give away more than that. But I needed some satisfaction, I needed to say "Mick, you lied."
And I told Dan the next day as we inched into the gas station for one gallon of gas, "Hey hon, I don't wanna go to Washington. Do you mind?" And he shook his head, he knew my home was my sanity, was my yoga, was my Bible story and I needed to stay close...I had addresses for my sons, for my brothers and they were all within a few miles of me.