SIXTEEN
This is a public service message. If an individual is strangled by an abuser even once, they are 750% more likely to be killed by that person.
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I am fifteen and I am being strangled by an adult male who has also threatened me with the handgun in the glove compartment of his car. I will describe for you what it is like to be strangled so that if you don't know what it's like you will perhaps feel how it is like nothing you could imagine because one might suppose there is always some way to fight back or run and being strangled is not like that. I could do nothing when I was being strangled.
I’ve always thought of him as choking me, that’s the word I’ve used, but I’ve been wrong. Choking is when the windpipe is blocked, such as by food, a foreign object is in the body and obstructs airflow. Strangulation is when an exterior force applies pressure on the neck and concerns not only the blockage of air but restriction of blood flow to the brain. Medical and victims of violence websites have become quite definite on marking the difference between choking and strangulation. Of course I’m not the only one at fault, my use of the word “choke” is learned, it’s commonly used when a woman has been strangled by a familiar man, and the term chokehold is used rather than stranglehold by law enforcement as regards certain forms of physical restraint they employ, perhaps because “strangle” is active and more dangerous, whereas to “choke” is a step removed from intentional lethal force, when the victim isn’t killed or the aggressor is said to not have really meant to do it, it’s a softer term to use in the case of what might be described by some as a crime of passion meaning the aggressor was insensible, a softer term to use when it was “only” a threat and the aggressor is excused as not having intended to carry it through, just like a “chokehold” is a restraining move and said not to be dangerous if done correctly by law enforcement or in martial arts. “Choke” is, in a sense, a passive word, though it’s clearly deadly if one chokes on food. To choke someone, to put them in a chokehold, suggests they are safe, no real harm is risked, just as food is inanimate and doesn’t intend to harm you neither does the cop or other aggressor really intend to harm you, they’re only controlling. Never mind martial arts arguments that there is a difference between a neck hold that is only intended to asphyxiate, which is a chokehold, and a neck hold that is intended to be painless by putting pressure on the carotid artery, cutting off the blood supply to the brain, when exterior pressure is applied to the neck that is strangulation. Carotid restraints, vascular neck restraints, respiratory neck restraints are all strangleholds.
The setting is an old 1960s car, what would be called a muscle car, which is just the kind of car this person would drive, because as it turned out they were into things like
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drag racing. When I picture the car it is always far down across the front lawn sitting curbside near the end of the drive at the house on Edinburgh, I don’t picture walking down the drive toward it, the car is just there waiting, parked on the street and facing right toward Cambridge, the street Edinburgh ends on, begins on, whichever. It is my sophomore year in high school, 1972-1973, back in a time when normal run-of-the-mill cars don't have bucket seats, both in the front and the back the seats are like riding around on a sofa, some more or less comfortable than others. The front seat being like a sofa, if you’re a passenger you can sit as close to or as far away from the driver as you like and he is usually relaxed against his car door and and I’m usually backed against mine. We are at a drive-in movie. I am drunk. He has been drinking but he is not drunk like I am. I'm not out with this guy because I like him. He is not someone with whom I’d normally be associated, but I won’t know this until I meet him which is the first time I go out with him, and I don't like guns. Weeks beforehand, when he first showed me the gun in his glove compartment, I was and was not surprised, the way you can be both things at once, I’m not gun curious and wasn’t then, I didn’t ask to handle the gun, I’ve never wanted to learn how to use a gun, to aim at a target, to pull the trigger and feel it go bang in my hands. I looked upon the glove compartment and its gun content as a learning experience about how this person lived. He said he needed the gun for protection. As if in encouragement, he said his girlfriend liked to play with the gun, which I could imagine, she was the one who was my friend, not this person, a girl who in junior high was an interesting conversationalist, who was smart, she had since gone the kind of boy crazy that scorned exhibiting intelligence and I had begun to suspect the girl I’d once known was gone for good, it was easy to visualize her with the gun in her hands playing flirtatious with the seductive intrigue of the go-bang firearm hinting at just enough outlaw Belle Starr daring-do in her that she promised to be a good playmate, but not so domineering as to be threatening to the boyfriend, and I said that wasn’t me, I didn’t like guns.
When I am in my late twenties, a musician MK and I knew would drop by to visit at the duplex we rented, which a carpenter who did repair work on told me was one of the old catalogue-order Sears houses, the materials of which they would deliver by train, this house was right across the street from the railroad and three-quarters of a mile from the old train depot, how convenient was that, every time the train passed by it was so loud you had to stop talking if you were on the phone and wait for it to pass, the passing of the train shook the house so that one day the thick plaster ceiling in the bathroom fell in just as I was walking out of it, but the carpenter who repaired the bathroom wasn’t the same one who informed me we were living in a Sears house. One night we confused with a train what we learned was the rumble of a tornado and because we thought it was a train we just sat throughout watching a rented VHS movie on the television. For years, I proudly told others, whether they would find it interesting or not, that we lived in and then past-tense had lived in a Sears-kit house. One day I became determined to find out more about that Sears-kit house we’d lived in, just for the fun of it, and I eventually came across an ad for Sears houses that showed several different models and the topmost one was, with the exception of a few minor details, exactly like the one we had lived in, down to the wrap-around porch, the placement of the fireplace chimneys and gables, I was comparing the ad
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with photos, not relying on memories, and MK agreed it was the same house, but the models of the houses weren’t named in the old ad, they were each accompanied by approving remarks by a purchaser, so I didn’t save the low-information ad because I didn’t anticipate I might need it later, like now. Then the house we had lived in, which had since been renovated, went up for sale and the realty described as built in 1904. If true, this means it wasn’t a Sears home as their kits didn’t become available until 1908. Could the 1904 date be in error? As is typical, there are going to be multiple stories about a thing with conflicting accounts that negate one the other. If any detail inclines me to believe it was not a Sears kit, it’s that I read five cross-raised-panel interior doors seem to have been popular interior doors with a Sears home, but the interior doors in ours were six cross-raised-panel, which one source says were common from 1895 to about 1908. I’m not coming across six cross-raised-panel interior doors in any Sears homes so—wait, here is a 1911 illustration showing one such door. As it stands, because of conflicting information, because of that 1904 date of build, that fun fact of my life has been obliterated, I can no longer claim with certainty that I once lived in a Sears kit home, I’m locked out of that endearing club. But it was a Craftsman bungalow, however one without frills, the fireplace mantels and surrounds were chunky, the house displayed little in the way of refined detailing. What it had as the attractive plus were the original heart-of-pine floors, though they occasionally shed dagger-size splinters, and plenty of space, the original layout had been a single-family dwelling, then divided, probably in the 1970s, so it could be rented out as a duplex, the original kitchen ripped out and rudimentary kitchens installed on both sides plus a new bathroom in the smaller side. The bathroom in the larger side would have been the original install as it had a huge linen closet, it had also an old porcelain tub that had been at some point painted black, perhaps by “hippies” in the 1960s or 1970s, though the black paint had been stripped remnants of the old paint job remained. Neglected by an absentee-landlord who owned more than several adjacent houses that were split into apartments, it had become a band house, each side occupied by one musician or another who played in a band MK was in, and when one musician moved out another would take their place. That’s how easy it could sometimes be to move before gentrification blew through and houses were all snapped up for cheap and renovated, before corporate one-bedroom so-called “luxury” apartment buildings multiplied and devoured the single owner or smaller realty apartment buildings. At that time a guitarist who had formerly been in the band lived in the right-hand side, the larger part, which we would move into when he moved out. When we first moved in we were in the left-hand side of the split, facing the street, which was about the size of a studio apartment and had its own entrance to the expansive, covered porch that even had an old double-swing. This person who was visiting that day was the current drummer in the band. When he pulled out his handgun and started to clean it while sitting on the porch, my visceral response was so strong I felt like I was going to throw up, I felt this wasn’t casual like he was making it out to be, that it was an act of passive aggression, a performance, look at me I’m a big guy with my gun, not that he was dangerous, he wasn’t, but our politics were very different, he was a good drummer who was Deep South conservative, and I rubbed him so much the wrong way we eventually stopped speaking. When this drummer pulled out the gun on our porch and began to clean it, I told him you don’t carry guns
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into people’s homes without asking their permission, not my home, he ventured to argue the point but I wasn’t having it. The situation was simple and what the situation came down to was he was carrying the gun and now he needed to go because he said he wasn’t going to leave the gun in his car because there were gangs in our neighborhood and it wasn’t safe to leave it in his car in its glove compartment. He was right, there were gangs in the neighborhood, the police would chase people through the parking lot behind the house at night while a helicopter with a search light circled above. This drummer used to live in the house and had left because of the gangs, but for us the cheap rent, especially when we were in the spacious side that gave us room for art and music pursuits, rehearsals sometimes held there for my plays, outweighed the problem of living next to several drug houses. A friend called it Little Beirut, some visitors to our little corner of the neighborhood were held up with Uzis, I found a gun lying outside on the street and called the police from where I was then working to report it (they asked for my name and I hung up because) but I was fond of our neighborhood and our corner, the six homes owned by the same absentee landlord became an art colony of musicians, artists, photographers, sculptors and writers, with the exception of large sculpture you couldn’t leave anything outside without it walking off, even the enclosed-porch washing machine of a neighbor attempted to walk off, was left bloodied, then was successfully made away with a few nights later, but we were never broken into and I freely walked the area not only during the day but late at night, walking home from the train station a few blocks down (I could conveniently take the train to and from work), yes I was hassled from a distance when I passed the liquor store when walking home from Little Five Points, sometimes called out for being the white woman with wild frizzy hair walking through the neighborhood every day, but a lot of it was just joking that I was the one white woman walking through the neighborhood, I was otherwise left alone, and then there was the time when I was thirty-nine and standing on an overpass, looking down at East Lake Drive below, a man passing by stopped to joking talk to me, he said it made him nervous when he saw someone looking down over a bridge. I said I was fine, but he wouldn’t leave until I left the bridge. He never demanded I leave the bridge, he just stood there talking, smiling, telling stories, he said he would keep me company until I left the bridge, and after a few minutes we walked off the bridge together. The truth is I had been looking down pondering if that would be a good place from which to jump. Being a neighborhood regular, observed for years walking through it, carrying my backpack, I had imagined if anyone noticed me standing on the bridge they’d think I was pausing for a short rest or just to take in the view of the road below, the cars passing underneath.
Through examining the census I know the neighborhood was originally white, had become derelict and predominately low-rent, on the back side of a project, all the artists were renters, I felt (some would argue) we couldn’t be said to be gentrifying as were renters and doing what artists desperate for low rent do, seeking affordable spaces when we were gentrified out of former neighborhoods by escalating rents, new homeowners renovating properties and new businesses being planted and sustained by the dramatic uptick in neighborhood wealth. Every time a new business tried to enter the neighborhood, it sank. Except for a corner gas station slash
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convenience store, and a dry-cleaners across the street, for years the only business that thrived was a hair and nail salon for Black clientele. But gentrification did hit, about the time of Atlanta’s Olympics, white and black upper middle class moved in. One day I was out walking, passed by two white women in a yard on a street that had seemed to turn over, several blocks of it, in the space of a couple of months, and one of them said to another, “She’s walking, see, we can walk around here, it will be safe,” I don’t know if they would have said this about a black woman (no) though upper middle class black families were also moving in, and five years later the area was completely gentrified, the absentee landlord returned, sold all but one of his houses, emptying out our corner, we located to another low-rent apartment building in another neighborhood, we lost the art community but the century-old building we relocated to had its own magic and housed people who had been there for decades.
One day you’re an artist among artists and feel great about your neighborhood and all the art and music and photography and writing everyone’s doing, the creative energy bouncing around, then gentrification happens and you’re at a children’s birthday party at the house of a new next door neighbor and another new neighbor asks something about you and your home to which you reply, “We rent,” and they turn away from you like you’ve said something foul. It may be true that artist drive gentrification when monied artists are involved who purchase space and create businesses, but my experience has been with artists who aren’t buyers they need cheap spaces to rent and aren’t in a position to attract money to the community.
These two individuals, the drummer and the guy I knew a part of my sophomore year, the one who strangled me, were not alike yet they were in that the disclosure of the gun was a challenge. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s always this way with a person who carries, but we’re all aware there are those for whom the gun is a self-esteem booster, a big metal dick. Here I am with my gun, what are you going to do about it. In the case of the guy I knew when I was fifteen, he said he thought I should know he had a handgun in the car, which I respected, I’d have preferred not to open the glove compartment for some reason like if he asked for some gum from it (he was always chewing gum) and find out about the handgun that way, but I also felt he was showing off and the way to respond was to not be impressed, which I wasn’t, and to not act surprised. I can’t say I was even made nervous by this revelation, because I wasn’t. I knew that a lot of guys were interested in guns. They were drawn to histories and movies that worshipped gun power. And he had a rifle on a gun rack in the rear window of the car. A gun rack I the back of a car, not a truck? I swear to god, there was a gun rack. When I first got in the car with him I saw the rifle in the gun rack in his back window, which was a new one on me, I’d never been in a car with a gun rack and rifle in the rear window, and I thought, oh that is this kind of person, they have a gun rack with a gun, damn. Well, the world is a big place with people living different kinds of lifestyles and I wanted to be a writer which meant knowing about how different people lived. In the case of the drummer, I knew he wasn’t a danger to me, but I was shocked and repulsed by the gun being displayed on my home territory, for whatever reason he was either showing off or pushing boundaries that day, and as he wasn’t going to part from his gun he was given no choice but to walk out the door. Death can happen in a million and one ways, but I look at a gun and I feel the rotted
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and warped muscle of death within and behind it. While there are people who must carry a gun who hope never to have to use it, I imagine that most guns dream of shooting to kill. In the minds of their owners guns dream of their potential waiting the release of their purpose. They dream of shooting in fine detail, and repeatedly, rehearsing the potentiality ad nauseam.
Some of us who are resolved never to keep a gun are as viscerally determined as we are because we’ve somehow become acquainted with that dream. In my case, when I was in my late twenties I dreamed I signed a contract with myself that I would never keep a gun. I was in a cave in the dream. Caves in my dreams have been the settings of profoundly mysterious and mystical happenings that have, however very rarely, sometimes acted as prophetic intercoms, forecasting unanticipated events in the real world. I wasn’t then considering getting a gun but the dream let me know, for the future, that I must never do it and in this emphatic, contractural way to which I agreed. Not that I would be a danger to anyone else, but I would be to myself. The dream was loud and adamant and self-fulfilling to the extent that, enacting the dream, I wrote out a physical contract and signed it. The physical contract no longer exists, but it was just an echo of the more binding dream contract. I had that dream while I was living in the small side of that duplex, probably not too long before I told the drummer who pulled out the gun that he had to leave. When we were living on the larger side, not too many years before gentrification forced us out, a woman who had moved into the smaller side became fascinated with police, she took some program where she was introduced to what police do and rode around in a police car, before long she was having police over, and whenever they passed by our kitchen window they would peer in it like they were programmed to look for contraband. The police would get drunk with the woman and they all played with their guns and one day when an additional woman was partying with them she didn’t realize a gun was loaded and they were drunk and she pulled the trigger and it went bang. That bang could have gone through our living room wall and struck our child. I was furious. Furious too about finding handcuffs left on the lawn. I mean I was crazy furious. MK was furious. You fuckers, how dare you endanger our child. One could argue we should have called the police, but we would have been calling the police on the police and who trusts the police anyway. Instead, a talk was had with the woman and the situation ceased.
Things are always more complex than a sound bite synopsis such as this. One can argue how guns are also beneficial.
But the USA is crazy about guns. As of 2025, for every 100 citizens there are 120 guns, nearly double that of the country that comes in second, the Falkland Islands, a sovereign state of the United Kingdom, located way down off the coast of Argentina, that has a population of about 3700 people. But gun violence isn’t a problem in the Falklands. Their guns are for sports. In the United States, firearms are the leading cause of death for children up to the age of eighteen. Though there are 120 guns for every 100 citizens, forty-three percent of households have at least one firearm, while about thirty-four percent of Americans own a gun.
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Guns rule the old Western films but the way guns came to be treated in 1970s movies marked a shift in what both censors and the audience would tolerate. Whereas the good guys previously were generally reluctant to use their gun but were invariably the best shots when shooting was necessary, guns became shamelessly eager to kill. Dirty Harry had come out in 1971, in which Clint Eastwood changed lanes from mysterious Western anti-hero to a vigilante cop role and everything I heard about it struck me as gun-worshiping police-brutality vile. Roger Ebert described it as fascist, but people loved the movie. Vigilantism was suddenly popular. The world was dangerous, crowded with drug pushers and killers and thieves and rapists with which law-and-order couldn’t cope as it was bound up with red tape that kept one from succinctly taking care of business. In Dirty Harry, the bad guy, a serial killer, targets women, homosexuals, and blacks, and we’re supposed to be persuaded Harry’s violence is in the right as a response to misogyny, racism, and homophobia. He saves a suicidal individual by antagonizing him into a fight then punches him out, and onlookers complain, “He didn’t have to hit him,” because no one understands Harry’s methods look bad but are for the good. But the writing is disingenuous, he remains a fascist wolf in sheep’s clothing. When the serial killer pays a black guy to beat him to a pulp, the intention being to get sympathy by asserting Harry was the culprit, the beating comes off as a fetish, and one feels that a strange truth about the film is inadvertently revealed. At fifteen, I’d not seen Dirty Harry but from the advertising alone I felt betrayed by Eastwood’s swing to the right, considered that I needed to reevaluate his earlier work, and never trusted him again. >Billy Jack came out in 1971 as well, and one felt sympathy for his character was demanded because he was mixed-Navajo and a Vietnam veteran, but he was still a vigilante with a hungry gun, and what did I know but even though he was given a license to kill due the oppression of America’s indigenous, it felt like a white guy’s fantasy, just as films about revenge-seeking raped women who hunt and kill their rapists feel like white guy fantasies. Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan was back with more vigilante gun action in the 1973 Magnum Force, then Charles Bronson is a vigilante in the 1974 Death Wish. Google AI lists Martin Scorsese’s 1976 Taxi Driver as a vigilante film, when instead it made Travis’ vigilantism an outlet of psychotic gun-hunger after his initial plan to assassinate a politician is thwarted. The girl Travis rescues from prostitution is his excuse for a blood bath that traumatizes her. The plot line Travis had conceived for himself was classic murder-suicide, after killing the men who trafficked the girl he would shoot himself, but he ran out of bullets. A Vietnam veteran, he is clearly a mentally ill individual who has been unable to reassimilate himself into civilian life. The public, however, accepts his violence as heroic.
The writer of the Dirty Harry novel said he got the idea from the rage he felt when his wife’s purse was stolen, and another time his car was vandalized. He wanted to kill the person, then later realized this was a primitive response, but wrote a novel about a man who didn’t emerge from that rage.
That a person would want to kill another for breaking into their car amazes me. When we lived in Midtown, our car was broken into sometimes twice a year, and it never occurred to us to kill the person responsible. We knew who was responsible, the houseless, usually those who were seasonal to Atlanta. It was part of living in
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Midtown. We didn’t keep anything in the car and it still happened. In the 1980s, a bracelet of mine was stolen from a small shotgun-style house we briefly rented in a mill town area of Augusta, and they left a calling card, they smoked a number of our cigarettes, left the butts right there in the ashtray for us to see, and perhaps rummaged through MK’s music equipment. We learned from a neighbor that before we moved in some neighborhood teens would sometimes enter via a loose decorative window alongside the back door through which they would reach in to unbolt the door, and we reasoned it was likely them, because the cigarettes were so brazen and only the bracelet was stolen. Having learned about the window, we had it fixed. I wasn’t enraged, I just felt, oh, damn, I liked that bracelet. (One of the most terrifying nightmares I had in my life was at that place.) The bad break-in was at the apartment were we lived in Little Five Points, the thief lived in the building and the police knew who he was as he’d been seen breaking into another apartment in the building that night. He was quiet, used a crow bar to take the apartment’s entry door right out of its frame and no one heard him. He was crazy, on drugs. When he was informed he was being evicted, he decided I was responsible and told another tenant he was going after me that night and they warned me. I was terrified. We had two entrances to the apartment, both onto the same second floor interior hall of the building, the doors located a few feet from each other, one in the living room, the other in the kitchen. I sat and waited, ready to escape through the “back” kitchen door the moment he crashed through the brand new front door. Instead, that night he was caught breaking into yet another apartment in the building and that was that. It still didn’t occur to me to get a gun and sit at my door prepared to shoot him, I could feel despair and rage over the loss of what was for me an expensive piece of equipment that I needed in order to write but I didn’t want to kill him.
I was once in a nightclub in Athens where MK was playing, it was attached to a motel, and I heard a guy talking to himself about Vietnam and about killing everyone there, I went and told the management at the front desk, the guy had gone out to his car and the police intercepted him toting his rifle back into the club. No shots were fired. He was a Vietnam veteran in crisis. The police said he was likely not dangerous and had been hoping to be caught, which was why he’d talked loud enough for me to hear him. It still didn’t occur to me that a gun would be any help to me. It’s apparently not part of my psyche. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, that I plan possible escape routes instead. I have always remembered how, when we were loading in that afternoon, I took notice of the earrings the bartender wore, two earfuls of a really nice arrangement of earrings, and my looking at them, telling her how I liked them, but for some reason for years I pretty much blocked the memory of the veteran. I knew it had happened, the thing with the veteran had happened and it had happened that night at that club, MK always remembered it had happened, he remembered all about the police, but my memory of what happened was pretty much gone, it was blurred, all I could remember is how I’d been in the lobby waiting and waiting and then it was all over. Why I was in the lobby was I knew what the guy looked like and after I’d warned the desk and they’d called the police, I stood near the glass front doors of the lobby waiting for him, in case he returned, I didn’t know for certain he would return, or if the police would get him in time, so since I knew what he looked
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like I remained by the glass front doors and waited so if I saw him approach I could warn everyone. The management hadn’t locked the front doors because of “business”, I’m not sure they really believed me, though the police were called, and even if they did lock the doors they were glass and I reasoned they could be shot out. So I waited in case it became my lot in life to run and warn everyone. And then it was all over, he was caught with his rifle, they were taking him in, whether he’d meant it or not was up for grabs, and I went back to wait for the band to finish. But I remember how on edge I was, it wasn’t over for me, I’d stood by those plate glass doors waiting, watching for him, because I truly believed he would return with that rifle and if the police weren’t there first I’d have to run and warn everyone. I can feel it, too, now, how I was left hanging there in the air with all that pent-up anxiety of waiting by that door and watching, picturing what I was going to do when I saw him return, how I’d yell first to the front desk, which was just a few steps away, it made me even more anxious when the clerk left the front desk to go into the office so the desk wasn’t manned, I was the only person in the lobby waiting and watching. That bothered me too because if they left the front desk I didn’t know whether to interpret that as meaning they didn’t want to be in the lobby in case anything did happen, or they weren’t concerned at all, which made me wonder was I making a big deal over nothing, was my waiting and watching for the guy with the gun absurd on my part, I was overreacting and should go back in the club. But I couldn’t. I waited, playing out possible scenarios. If no one was at the front desk when I saw him returning, I thought it might take too much time for me to go behind the desk to the office, my priority would be to just call out and run into the nightclub down the hall from the desk and warn everyone to get out the back. I didn’t want to be put in the position of having to scream out to the people in the office when I saw him, because I didn’t know if that would trigger him to shoot me right there through the door bang, I would be a clear shot through that glass door, what I wanted was to see him before he was at least maybe half the distance of the parking lot from the door I thought that would give me time to warn the desk and run and warn everyone in the club, there were interior doors to the club in the hall and those could probably be shut and locked, too. I knew if I saw him first I could get to the club’s doors before he entered, I knew I’d have time to do that. I considered, too, if he opted to shoot me through the door before he even entered then there was nothing I could do about that. I wasn’t scared, I was just doing what I felt I had to do, but I was anxious, and then I guess there was nowhere for all those raging fight or flight hormones to go afterward. So, I’m feeling them again, from that night, for the first time in decades, right now. And I just feel a little sad for myself. It’s strange, but I feel like if I’d been given a congratulatory hug for doing a good job, and a few smiles, that would have eased the transition for me out of hyper-preparedness to waiting for the band to finish the gig. If the people at the desk had said, great job. If the police had said, great job. If someone had just slapped me on the back in a comradely type way. Instead, I couldn’t transition, I was left hanging there. Had my actions saved anyone or had no one ever been in any danger at all, like the police said, he had wanted to be caught. I would never know. Did it even make any difference whether or not anyone was in any real danger, as long as I had done what I thought needed to be done. I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to feel about any of it in the end except that I was all alone when it was over with no one to talk to
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about any of it, the world went on, thankfully, nothing had happened, thankfully, now I just had to wait for the band to finish, the night to be done, to load out and go home to a world where my story of waiting and watching wouldn’t matter because, thankfully, nothing had happened, so there was no point to tell the story to anyone, besides which, who would believe me.
Violence had, in fact, increased dramatically between 1960 and 1970, and would peak in the 1990s during the time I demanded the drummer take his gun and leave. By 1993, Dirty Harry and Travis Bickle had transformed into Michael Douglas’ William Foster in Falling Down, the 9 to 5 white Everyman who breaks down when the air conditioning in his car fails during a traffic jam, which triggers a rampage against the modern world and the loss of the paradise of his youth. As he journeys home from work on foot, he responds with increasing violence to both minor annoyances and physical threats. The film has him kill a homophobic Neo-Nazi, which doesn’t mean he’s not a fascist, he just doesn’t accept he is himself a bad guy, a person with bad rage problems, for which reason his wife divorced him, has a restraining order against him and is deathly afraid of him. The film recognizes how domestic violence is a red flag and is often discounted, so it has a cop not take the ex-wife seriously when she admits to him, despite her fears of her husband, that he never did hit her, instead the potential was there. But the detective who is pursuing Foster understands that he is headed “home” and the end game of his odyssey will be William Foster killing his wife and child then committing suicide. This doesn’t happen, it would have but the ex-wife and child are able to flee and Foster instead commits suicide by cop. Thirty years in the future he would perhaps be a type whose rage would be channeled against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and the fact that the humor he used to enjoy was considered bigoted and no longer socially-appropriate.
MK believes he’s the one who told the drummer to put up the gun and leave, but he also doesn’t remember the drummer as being on the porch, instead he was inside our apartment. At least we can be confident it happened, we just disagree on the how. I have always remembered seeing the drummer take out the gun on the front porch and my feeling like I was going to throw up, then in the midst of my shock and fury, my sense of violation, I wondered if it was all right for me to complain because he wasn’t in the house proper, he was on the porch sharing band stories and talking musician shop talk, about the instruments one has, the instruments one has had, the instruments one is looking at getting, and because many musicians are deep into gear, its history and aesthetics, what makes an instrument sound like this, who made an instrument sound like that, what made an instrument special, many interested not only in the instruments they play but other instruments as well because that’s what makes for a band after all, it’s a synthesis of sound, no matter the array of personalities and how disagreeable one may think another, making music is the communal chord of harmony unless or until a pile-up of grievances has destroyed professional boundaries and things fall apart, not to mention that talk about instruments is great dopamine, and no one wants to miss out on a good band story. Is it possible that I told MK I wasn’t comfortable with the gun and he was the one who addressed the drummer about it but inside the apartment and not on the porch? I’m willing to concede that could be the case and that I’ve forgotten this detail as I was
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also engaged in having him leave. Either that, or my spouse stepped up in my defense, also saying the drummer needed to leave, and has come to remember himself as taking the initiative. It is a shared experience that we’ve never discussed more than a couple of times, and that was in shorthand, the story cut down to that time the drummer had to leave because he did the weird thing of pulling out his gun to clean it. There’s no reason to ever refer to the episode, for though it was vitally important to me in the moment, it wasn’t a key event in our lives. However, our refusal to let him carry a gun into our home marked the point after which he never visited us again, so it must have been significant for this person as well, but he was in MK’s professional circle, they of course continued to play on gigs together, to record together. The event was by no means a professional break. I always felt it was a showdown with me, my principles, a woman who had overreached her female place with her opinions, that this was his way of marking his existential territory.
My association with the first person, the one who took me to the drag race when I was fifteen, was short but it was an education, I’m one of those individuals who believe that to be conscious is to be in a position of learning, which is not an ask for a pat on my head, we are born natural learners, but I don’t go so far as to believe everything that we experience happens to us for our good as an enlightenment up-skill. Sorry, but for those who believe this, give it another think because it’s beyond fucked up and excuses abuses of all kinds and extremes. For instance, there’s no silver lining to child labor, exploitation, slavery, rape, torture, hunger, disease, or murder. Step out of the influencer feel-good heart frame of bent index fingers and thumbs joining in a moment of positive vibery and stop with the the law of attraction, how love energy manifests only love energy but if the universe sends a bomb, anthrax in an envelope, or fascists to stomp on one’s face it’s still good because the universe is love and everything that happens in it is ultimately love and learning. You say, “Law of attraction…” to which I reply, “Let’s talk about the millions of people who have been ruthlessly exterminated in acts of mass genocide, I don’t think they were even subconsciously asking the universe to kill them and their family and friends.” The fact is the person who says “all is good and for your own spiritual enlightenment” has likely experienced great privilege and luck they believe they’ve somehow earned, god must be pleased with them, they’re on a special wavelength, or they’re a sociopathic grifter, or maybe they’re nervous about how scary life is, how it’s not all coming up roses, and this is their bubble of a life preserver. Fine, if a person needs this as a life preserver, they can tell themselves all they want that everything that happens in the universe comes from a place of love and healing, but stop with spreading the message to others under the guise of being a healer and spiritual guide. Pain and poverty are bad. This is an area where a confidence man playbook of deliberate manipulation collides with the innocent well-meaning fervor of “I’m sold! I’m a believer! Now I’ll sell, too, because maybe if I’m selling it will work for me!” It’s a mess of a blend because day-in day-out despair is an impossible way to live, and faith as a healing elixir is the first, last, and only hope and comfort for some.
As already noted, things are always more complex than a sound bite synopsis. I’m not going to get into transcendental mysticism and ego dissolution here, I’m sticking with the realities of everyday human life and essential boundaries. As a twelve-step
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alumnus, I know something about grabbing onto faith as I had to believe that one day alcohol would no longer be my demon partner, and while I owe my life to the twelve-step program, it isn’t as sacred as can be presented, there are aspects that can be questioned. (Hold my freaking horses. Right? How did I get here from a 1960s muscle car and a gun in the glove compartment and just where am I going.) At root, twelve-step programs depend upon what was once called the New Thought Movement, and the 1909 Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science by Thomas Troward. I have read Troward, and read Emmet Fox’s New Thought Sermon on the Mount. From Fox came “One day at a time” which may be all one has to hang onto when one is first getting sober, that and not taking that first drink. Fox wrote of a daily exercise of love-consciousness, of love healing and illumining. Early members of Alcoholics Anonymous would, after meetings, go listen to his lectures. A twelve-step sponsor of mine took me to the Woodruff Center of Arts for Sunday lectures at the panentheistic Church of Religious Science, founded by Ernest Holmes in 1932, another projection of the New Thought movement, and I purchased several books and read them through, they would be found on my bookshelves in the mid-1980s, I remember trying to educate an apartment neighbor on them, because when you’re twenty-four years of age and trying to save your life by not drinking and doing drugs, you can be very open to the idea you’ve not done so well for yourself and you take very seriously the advice to pay attention for a while to the ideas of others (plus, the neighbor had knocked on the door and asked, he was concerned about his drinking and the part it played in his relationship with an abusive boyfriend). Not that I hadn’t already been taking seriously the ideas of others, hadn’t I long devoured the thoughts, the writings of others, curious about what they believed, how did they come to believe what they believed, I was eager to know about the experience of others, and had wondered too at how in the hell did things snowball so some influenced others so that such-and-such movement coalesced, which would transform into some other movement. One doesn’t acquire a respectable-sized library of dog-eared, secondhand paperbacks, cast-offs of former college students—fiction, poetry, philosophy, memoir—without finding value in the lives and thoughts of others and having a fascination for how their various perspectives are expressed. When I say “trying to save your life by not drinking and doing drugs, you can be very open to the idea you’ve not done so well for yourself and take very seriously the advice to pay attention for a while to the ideas of others” what I mean is I had been directed to pay attention to ideas of others that were respected by a number of people who were a part of my initial twelve-step experience, it drilled hard into my head that in them would be essential support in reformatting my head for sobriety, that’s what I mean when I say I immersed myself in the ideas of others, voices with which I’d been previously unfamiliar, and you can become something of a convert, even to your detriment, as sometimes twelve-step programs don’t take into account the broad view of a person and those things for which they’re not personally responsible, so that one may uncritically blame oneself for everything in one’s world when told, “The monkeys bothering you are your private circus”, whereas the CDC - Kaiser Permanente (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, of 1995 to 1997, shows a clear relationship between childhood trauma and elevated risk of alcoholism, drug abuse, chronic depression, suicide, smoking and certain kinds of illness. Or at least that’s the
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way it was in the 1980s, twelve-steppers and others were on guard to ignore what might have fueled the dumpster fire that was one’s life, the problem was instead you picking up that drink—and, in truth, it kind of has to be that way for at least a little while, just focus on the problem at hand, the alcohol, because it will kill you and harm others, don’t drink, concentrate on that one day at a time for now more like one minute one second at a time one second at a time because it’s about all one can often handle. Just as an individual may not be at one’s critical-thinking best when not sober, when one is first getting sober one’s brain may be on vacation for an extended period except for learning not to take that first drink ever, which means placing a hell of a lot of trust in the others who are at twelve-step meetings. They tell you what to do and you do it, though you’re able to make certain changes to fit your life, such as there were those who were adamant about not being around alcohol at all but I couldn’t avoid places that served alcohol and had to be comfortable with it as I lived in the music world. Then there’s the big stumbling block called one’s higher power, often times named as god, in which one has to profess to believe is bigger than oneself and can help in one’s recovery, but what if one is an agnostic or an atheist, then one has the option to believe in whatever one chooses, the group, the principles, the air one breathes, and while there can be a lot of god talk my experience was that there was more higher power talk rather than god talk and atheism was accepted.
Sponsorship. A sponsor is someone you connect with who you can contact between meetings and they will help remind you to not take that drink. This sponsor that I had, who I chose after having been sober about a week and having heard her speak about no-excuses sobriety in one meeting, eventually turned out to be a Reaganite and closet John Bircher (how the hell was I to know that a supposed devotee of the New Thought Movement could be a John Bircher) but I was warned not to judge others who had years of sobriety whereas I didn’t, one is told too that the program isn’t people and personalities, it also isn’t politics, the program is the steps and traditions, one is expected to adhere to these and use them as one’s guide for judging what is appropriate behavior, personal life and preferences shouldn’t intrude upon territory ruled by twelve-step principles, and it thankfully took some time before she overstepped boundaries, because she was fallible, a thing of which I may insist I never lost sight, except that when I was several days sober and bleary all I saw was that she seemed to know her sobriety stuff and was hard core about it, she had been sober for a long time, she was erudite, somewhat brash, serious as needed but fond of laughter, a middle-aged woman with a smokey voice and dyed-red hair who when she was young had probably taken Rita Hayworth as a personal model for her style. Over twice my age, her aura nearly pummeled one with confidence and life experience, and I preferred this over an attitude of retiring humility or maternal coziness. I didn’t want a mother. She wasn’t Christian or religious, which was important to me, and she seemed like she wouldn’t be thrown by me and my closely-shorn hair and punk attire (later she confessed that she was, but I couldn’t tell it). But then several months short of my two years of sobriety, she took a look at a selection of philosophers I was carrying and said I needed to stop reading them. I’d moved to another city after my first seven or so months of sobriety, then returned after about nine months, and we had continued with our sponsor relationship but it felt different, stressed, as if I was now being played against a couple other young women she had begun sponsoring
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during my absence, who would win at being her favorite, who would win at being the better protege, which was an award that didn’t interest me, a contest for which I’d not signed up. She was giving me a ride to a meeting, I sat myself in the passenger’s seat and she took note of the books in my open backpack (I always had a backpack, always had books in it, I was then deep into Soren Kierkegaard, who I’d read before and was reading again to see how my perspective and apprehension had shifted after two years of sobriety, because I read existentialists, thus Kierkegaard) and she said I needed to stop reading that trash and that I intellectualized too much, I thought too much. I don’t remember if I said anything in response. I had always recognized her as good about some things and not good about others, but she had begun digging into my personal life, making judgments on things that were none of her business, now she had begun an attempt to mold me into someone other than what I was, and that was the end of that association—a hard punctuation exclamation point period stop being when she purchased a pearl-handled revolver cutely appropriate to carry with her in her purse everywhere and displayed it to me, having become freshly obsessed with the idea that the lower classes of the city were a dire threat wherever she went, then dropping me off back home she had said of my spouse—who we never discussed, who she was only around a couple of times at most—that I should leave him as he didn’t have the personality of a “go-getter”, by which she meant he wasn’t an ambitious to be the king of a hill type. For her, my problem was no longer being an alcoholic but being an alcoholic who was nearly two years sober and still lived in a rented apartment. I wasn’t going to try to convince her of anything other than that she had broken trust, and simply replied she didn’t know my spouse and my marriage was my business. She shrugged. These two things took place the same day, the gun and her telling me I should leave my husband, and I only needed one of them to happen, which was the last time I saw or spoke with her, I didn’t call her and she didn’t call me so we never had a conversation about how we might amicably end the sponsorship relationship. I had actually let the relationship go on too long, she had begun dispensing gifts and job offers to the others she sponsored, which was a confusing situation to which to return, while telling me that I was too proud and my ego needed to be broken, and I shouldn’t have permitted this but twelve-step literature advised we alcoholics were ego-centric and that the twelve-steps were intended to deflate ego, even puncture it, so I was unclear where was the sponsor-sponsoree boundary on this, for my sobriety’s sake was I somehow not humble enough, I also hadn’t wanted to appear I was ungrateful for her role in getting me through my first hard months of sobriety.
As far as the Church of Religious Science went, at that time more than a few progressive twelve-steppers I’d met attended. They would have recoiled from the “prosperity gospel” and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking that also grew out of the New Thought Movement, but that the New Thought Movement was also a seed-bed for ultra-conservative lines helps explain how the woman who was my sponsor and progressives could be found grouped together at the Church of Religious Science. Fox and Troward and Holmes, of the New Thought Movement and Christian mysticism, had some good things to say, but I shortly put them away after familiarizing myself with the literature, for such ideas as we “form our own destiny by
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our thoughts and our beliefs” are problematic. Simplistic. Slaves do not form their own destiny by their thoughts and beliefs. Society has had a problem with blaming women and children for abuses committed against them. Society has had a problem with blaming the poor for their troubles and excusing the rich and powerful. Individuals who adhere to the notion of the law of attraction, as promoted today, may not have ever heard of the New Thought Movement. They may not connect the dots between today’s law of attraction and Pentacostalism’s Oral Roberts and his “prosperity gospel” prayers and affirmations and assertions that as you give to the church and God so will God reward you with blessings, health and prosperity. From there refer back to the New Testament’s Galatian's 6:7 and “God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap.” Is it true that if you plant wheat then what you will reap is wheat and not tomatoes? Yes. But you may also sow wheat and reap nothing because the global climate system that year decided to not give you water. A wild fire might speed through a town and wipe out your family because there was one road and they didn’t have enough time to get out of the mountains. Not their fault. People in different places of need, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically, economically, are easy targets for law of attraction affirmations as their abrupt, blunt ideas can work in limited areas, and people in need need hope, but when pushed as a one size fits all solution they will fail ultimately and probably immediately, for which reason the fine print that the “law” is a law and unfailing and you are the problem if the law is not working for you. You are the problem. But if you have sowed wheat but reaped locusts then how are you responsible for the locusts.
That the Church of Religious Science held its meetings at the Woodruff Art Center might be confused with carrying an implicit fingerprint of intellectuals and artists can be understood, whereas all the Woodruff Art Center wanted was rental income. If I’d seen in black-and-white newsprint the ads for the lectures in the 1981 Atlanta Journal, “What Mind Can Conceive, Man Can Achieve”, I would have said “I don’t think so” to that part, because this was “you are solely responsible for your destiny” talk and I knew where that led. There are over eight billion people on this globe and finite resources that have always been magnetized to those who have wealth and power. If one is rich and powerful, one will be handed free goods and services all day long, and if the have-nots buy into “you are responsible for your destiny” it’s because they’ve no other route around systemic inequities.
I was perhaps about two months sober, maybe three, when I found myself, courtesy of my sponsor, in what was an American Opinion Bookstore. In the mid-1960s, the John Birch Society had 400 of them. Several months in the future, on 2 July 1981 The Atlanta Journal would publish a piece on activities of the John Birch Society in Metropolitan Atlanta, there weren’t that many members but they had plans for becoming a quarter of the voting population of each of the USA’s congressional districts and thus redefining politics. While I knew what was the essence of the John Birch Society, and understood how they had influenced current conservative politics, I thought of the society as old news, they were birthed in 1958 in the avenging compost of Joseph McCarthy who died in 1957, mom and pop and apple pie Christian white nationalism terrified by the civil rights movement, communism, and socialism. The Birchers’ conspiracy theories and paranoia had eventually made them an
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embarrassment for those who had a religious faith in the Establishment, who were scared of talk of subversion that implicated anyone who didn’t have a little bit of something observably unwholesome about them, the Birchers had gone too far for those who believed in the righteousness of hierarchy and wealth, their brand of extremism was well into sunsetting, one occasionally heard about the Ku Klux Klan as a threat but the John Birchers had been too confusing for the mainstream and talked themselves out of a job (but then there was Larry McDonald, a section of Interstate 75 in Georgia was named the Larry McDonald Memorial Highway in 1998, McDonald having been a congressman representing Georgia’s seventh district, he became chairman of the John Birch Society in 1983, and it would burn me every time we traveled over it). How familiar were my sponsor and I at the time is perhaps the question, I don’t remember if I’d yet been to her home, a three-story modern construction of a lot of glass, some wood, no traditionalist embellishments, a tall box half-tucked in suburban woods, built on the side of a hill, almost the entirety of one side composed of windows that spanned the second and third floors exposing the interior to the trees and vice versa (there were no window treatments), the first floor had a couple of rooms such as an office that looked like it wasn’t used except for a desk holding phone books, maybe a guest bedroom and bath, I don’t know, a large garage certainly, that floor primarily functioned as an entrance leading to the staircase that delivered one into the expansive great room of the second floor which had a high ceiling that soared into the third where a balustrade enclosed an abbreviated balcony library and a master bedroom that masqueraded as a loft in the way it took possession of the house, afforded a grand view. A few other rooms were tucked in here and there at the house’s rear, but they were modest, near as insignificant as those on the first floor. At the far end of the great room was a wall behind which was a fair-size kitchen, hidden away to the left of an open dining room that merged directly into the great room and increased the sense of its size though the height of the ceilings differed, both the kitchen and the dining room directly under the master bedroom, its closets, dressing room, and bath on the third floor. What mattered was the great room, the balcony above and the bedroom, those were the primary stages and held all the drama. Modern in its furnishings, there was sculpture and modern art on display but so nondescript that my eye was never attracted which means its style was decorative. There was enough Buddha statuary and bits of East Asian art that a visitor would assume the inhabitants were at least philosophically inclined to Alan Watts circa 1959-1960 and his Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life episodes recorded for KQED public television in San Francisco, just enough glaze for the eye to suggest that here was a place for cool meditation sprinkled with the tinkly tones of wind chimes that could be sometimes heard from a porch off the kitchen. The living room also wanted one to imagine complex, even heated discussions on culture and spirituality amongst sundry people of elevated minds gathered on salon nights to mill before the great fireplace over which was hung a large portrait of my sponsor painted when she was younger. She never discussed books or music or movies or the arts with me, but this was the impression cultivated, which I realized was for show, but it didn’t matter as the reason she was my sponsor was to remind me not to drink because it would kill me. After a few months she began hinting at meetings she said she shouldn’t tell me about but she belonged to a group
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of people who held regular gatherings that were only for elders who were spiritually-advanced, for which reason they weren’t open twelve-step meetings, they were too spiritually-advanced for the rest and for youth, such as I, and I had thought, “Well, doesn’t that go against twelve-step principles, aren’t meetings supposed to be for everyone,” but these weren’t public, they were private meetings, so maybe they didn’t count, what I knew was that I was supposed to feel an outsider to this, an air of mystery intentionally cultivated. On the dining table was always a large bowl filled with the gourmet confection of jelly beans in seeming dozens of flavors that I refrained from exploring because I knew they were there because Ronald Reagan had made them fashionable, and I did not partake of them because the ever-present and always full bowl was a symbol of her privilege, and I felt a restriction there, that I must not taste of it and be interpreted as taking advantage of. I was wary of wealth and of any buffet laid out by people who are apt to feel those not attired appropriately are stealing. An upper middle class person would never be thought of as stealing the jelly beans as they were economic peers, but a person who lived in an apartment complex of Vietnamese and Latino immigrants, such as I, was not a person who Had, and as I didn’t already Have I would be suspect if I took. I did attend one party at her home, she’d gone on a physical self-improvement program after I’d moved away, cut her hair, lost a great deal of weight, had a very artistic face lift, not too much just enough, cut her hair, restyled her wardrobe and her make-up, exchanged pantsuits for stylish but relaxed separates, I’d not seen her since her transformation and she lounged on the floor before the fireplace, barefoot, in slim capri pants and a soft wool sweater, perhaps cashmere, exuding the perfectly posed but nonchalant glamor of a 1950s Bell, Book and Candle red-haired Kim Novak updated for the 1980s, same woman, different shell, the house read now as if it had been originally designed around this version of her, she was the centerpiece of the room, this was her theater, which is not to be disparaging, I’m not going to fault anyone for being a star in their home, she obviously felt good and I was startled at the change and the way it effected how she moved, what occurred to me was that I’d never thought of her as lacking in confidence but she’d magically turned back time, was home again, this was the vision of her that she would have wanted to be eternal, to survive death. That night I met two of her friends who I suspected belonged to the secret, spiritually-advanced group of elders she’d spoken about, I naturally grated against the impression of powerful knowledge their bearing was intended to communicate, people who wanted you to believe they could skry the truth you'd hidden from yourself, they will try to stare one down in the studied way that is supposed to make one feel they have immediately intuited the kernel of one’s soul, aren’t you curious, don’t you want to know who you are, to learn it from them. The evening was winding down and gathered before the hearth they told a couple of individuals what they could tell was the essence of their true selves and as the simple fact of their attention was supposed to inspire the gratitude of being noticed perhaps that was why people agreed with their revelations or maybe they honestly felt known. When these two turned to stir the pot of that conversation in my direction, “You’ve got the wrong person,” I said, and they paused and studied me briefly up and down, but backed off, and that was the end of that. What shouldn’t be lost in the telling is that people were also present who weren’t like this, they balanced the room. There were different groups one ran into in the program, their bubbles
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already formed. The program was like the greater society, all these bubbles of small groups of people, they circulated around and bumped up against one another, mixed a little, and floated away, what was the unifying factor was that they were at least all bubbles composed of people living one day at a time in their determination to not drink, as were you, that was the foundation that made each person the same, everyone had the same struggle. I watched one such bubble of people descend the stairs to exit, they arrived as a group and left as a group, good night, people I liked, who I knew wished me well, as did I them, but as with this group they too had their own protective lock and I stood outside, between these bubbles. Floating within the meetings at large were bubbles formed by class, by sexual orientation, by profession, by levels of professional success, by religion, by hobbies, by color of hair. A particularly gregarious and entertaining bubble was one of horse jockeys (that was in Augusta, they were from Aiken), and that was their natural bubble because they worked together and lived around one another. Every bubble was its own world out of which people stepped in the collective of meetings. And there were people who didn’t belong to any bubble.
I may have been getting sober, but I also felt my job in life was to observe, to learn about people.
But that’s in the future. In my first couple to three months all I know is that one second at a time I must not drink, I am struggling to not die. It’s a real concern, an intense period of time, considering the events of the previous year it felt like my last chance, when one is kicked out of a hospital (state) where you’re supposed to find help (attempted suicide while drunk), and the doctors, who gave you Antabuse but never suggested any twelve-step group, say you are a hopeless alcoholic and there’s no point treating you (I was kicked out after I drank on Antabuse, they said they couldn’t take responsibility), then it’s not without reason to feel you’re up to your neck in the grave. I was dedicated to replacing the trails of thought that glued my brain to the promise of alcohol as an escape hatch, and yet not tossing out the me of me, there was also that consideration, the question around which science and philosophy and religion have long flailed, beating the bushes for an answer, is it environment or genetics that make us, do we have choice or are we ruled by predestination which knocks choice out of the game so why bother with struggling over personal decisions if what will be will be, if all is fated then the belief any of our efforts have effect and that personal ethics matter is only an illusory consolation. Some creatives worry that if they stop drinking then the font of what makes them creative will dry up, but I didn’t write or make art when drinking, when I drank I did nothing but drink. My belief was that I had limited choices within the machinery of the universe. The night before I went to my first twelve-step meeting I had been obsessed with the idea of igniting the gas tank of a car parked near the entry to our apartment complex, a car that was away from the buildings, taking myself out with the resulting explosion, I was that angry with myself and done with living, I curled up before the front door on the floor in despair that this was it I couldn’t go on, then the thought sprang into my blurry brain that a couple of years before I had tried calling about those mysterious meetings for alcoholics and the person on the phone had told me I was too young to be an alcoholic. The doctors at the hospital who kicked me out
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didn’t seem to think I was too young, and it occurred to me this was a last chance, I could try calling that number again.
A meeting house turned out to be a twenty minute walk from the apartment complex where we lived and I daily walked there or caught rides with people I soon met, as well as regularly catching rides to other meetings with a few friends I made, in the first ninety days it was recommended one go to as many meetings as possible. All the meeting places had a different personality established by regulars. The morning, afternoon, or evening groups that were held at the same meeting place could be different from one another because of the meetings having different regulars that contributed to a meeting’s tone. It was encouraged one experience how this was despite the unifying factor of the steps and traditions, that the character of meetings wasn’t the same from place to place. If you didn’t feel at home at one meeting you might at another, but because of the steps and traditions one was supposed to be able to find at any meeting the basic needed tools and the company of others who were just like you on at least this one point, they couldn’t drink and needed the help of others like them to stop. So I went to meetings everywhere, the north, south, east and west side of the city, most of them in churches or houses that were dedicated to twelve-step meetings, I was there during the days when people were talking about changing things so some meetings would be non-smoking, and some meetings would be only for women, some would be only for men, some would be only be for gays, and the old-timers were saying, no, they need to be open for everyone, as the traditions hold that wherever a meeting is taking place anyone who needs help should be welcomed. Strife existed as well over the differences between alcoholics and drug addicts, not everyone became an alcoholic whereas everyone who took addictive drugs would become addicted, there were alcoholics who didn’t like the drug addicts and didn’t want them at support groups for alcoholism though alcoholics couldn’t do drugs either, sometimes drug addicts were being told by others outside the alcohol support group that they could drink they just couldn’t do drugs, some people felt that the only substance they couldn’t imbibe was the one with which they had a problem, and this was a source of great contention with those who felt alcoholics couldn’t do drugs (alcohol was my drug of choice but I quit other drugs as they always led me back to alcohol). I was there for the early arguments on whether it was all right to take psychiatric medications or did they impede sobriety, and there was a lot of discussion on this because it was when psychiatrists, some motivated by insurance companies, were shifting from a talk model of therapy to drugs as the only treatment. Every day these debates were taking place. Maybe it’s this way with many but I liked my “home” group the best, the first place I went to a meeting, which was one of the so-called “club” houses, a place dedicated to recovery, where there was always coffee, and there was always a volunteer who brought cookies, which helped me out as I was so broke there were days when I had almost nothing to eat at home so I looked forward to a few free cookies, and when I had no money to donate for coffee and a couple of cookies I helped with cleaning up as a way of paying back. I felt the camaraderie was best at my home group, but maybe I felt this way because it was the place in which I found my first acceptance and was welcomed back. Keep coming back. They seemed genuinely pleased to see me when I came back. This was
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significant to me because I looked like an outsider, my hair was never more than an inch long, I cut it myself and measured the cutting by the width of two fingers, I wore naturally-tattered, paint-stained jeans or nicer pairs of black pants, a short black leather jacket or a long black trench coat, a brown leather cap, thrift store shirts and sweaters, sneakers or boots, sometimes vintage heels, ordinary “punk” attire that was still looked upon by society as aggressively outsider especially on a woman, it wasn’t a costume, I wasn’t interested in fashion punk, these were the clothes in which I lived, not for weekend performance, I had always taken pride in having individual style that set me apart from trends, and put everything together with touches of personal adornment and vintage clothes that distinguished me from going in men’s drag though I did bend gender stereotypes as was typical in punk, which I associated less with punk than generations of people defying convention. However, a woman cutting off all her hair is still considered a radical act, the cutting off of my hair was partly out of rage against the male gaze, I did a lot of walking to get around and was stressed by the catcalls, the vulgarities, being followed by cars, accosted by passersby on the street, I was exhausted by a threatening encounter seeming to happen every day since puberty, being always endangered because I was a girl then a woman, and I hoped if I cut my hair off that misogynistic aggression would have less to hone in on, for long hair was clearly associated with women who were to be continually reminded of how they were subject to men. While what I wore was natural for me I expected people to interpret my clothes as a signal that I was disinterested in the status quo, probably anti-capitalist, leftist, and in the arts, so they were also my calling card.
There were people who might have looked more like me at meetings dedicated to drug abusers but I needed the meetings dedicated to alcoholics, which weren’t often frequented by young people, and while when I started I was an adult, twenty-three, for the first year I was always the youngest person at a meeting, any meeting, except for a Saturday midnight meeting on the north side of town I visited a couple of times with a friend because it was late night, but its focus was on teenagers who mostly had drug problems and was thus uncomfortable for me, it felt awkward though it was open to everyone, the environment was not so much the bond of the steps and traditions than that especial manner in which youths coalesce a fortress, which is natural for them, they are vulnerable and transitioning the difficult territory of the power differential between between themselves and adulthood. The cohesion of the youth was palpable, how they were at a stage in which they moved together like a school of birds or fish, which isn’t to say they didn’t also act as individuals, all adults know what that’s like of course as we were once their age, though even when I was seventeen and eighteen I was an outsider. One can argue that if their sense of relationship to the twelve-step meetings and their purpose was through their group as a filter, it’s not unlike how adults can function this way as well, I’ve already spoken of how there were defined social bubbles among the adults. Perhaps the primary problem was that I felt constrained by their youth, I felt I was in the position of having to be an alert guardian when I was freshly sober and and struggling and fuzzy with a brain and body battered by alcohol and drugs, and it may be that the dynamics unconsciously reminded me of my hospitalization as a teenager and of the outpatient teen support group that met at the hospital, both only bad horrible memories, which
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hasn’t occurred to me until now. Never had I any wish to be reminded of that teen support group, because reminders had the inevitable and immediate conclusion of thinking about how another person in that same lousy teen support group died by suicide during my senior year of high school, gassed himself in his car early one morning on the football field of the school I was attending, he didn’t even go there, I’ve no idea why he chose that as the place to end his life, we had hidden from our mutual friends that we already knew each other from the hospital, which means we never talked about it, we instead had this secret eye handshake we’d shoot one another and exchange occasional in-jokes that were so obscure no one would question them. I don’t mean to give the impression we were fast friends, we were only close in the way it is when you’re intimately aware of each the other having had troubles, but his death was a shock and difficult for me, though we had drinking competitions against one another (I won) I had thought he was going to make it, and when he died I was, in hindsight, less compassionate toward his family than I should have been, I was instead flooded with rage and bitterness. Okay, now that I’ve realized why I was so unsettled by the meeting where were all the youths, I don’t feel as stressed writing about it, now that I’ve realized of course it reminded of my being hospitalized as a teen, a time I didn’t want to think about, and of my friend’s suicide as well, which had hit me hard, and no one could know why, because even though he was dead, I felt I couldn’t say we had known each other from when I was fourteen due our being thrown together at the hospital. We were never intimate, such a relationship would have felt like violating a sibling taboo, and it even seems to me somewhat illogical that I’ve remained determined to not forget him. When a website called Find-a-Grave happened where people put up cemeteries and their graves, I went and found his, all alone, no familial graves linked to his, perhaps because he was an only child and after the deaths of his parents and the birth of this website there was no one to think to “home” his grave with that of his family.
This twelve-step meeting dominated by youths that I’d attended when I was twenty-three was an open one, not only for youth, and while my friend enjoyed the atmosphere, which bordered on party-like, I felt unsettled. These teenagers needed this for themselves but I needed the stability and grounding of a broader spectrum. Less of a factor, the meeting house also made me uneasy, not emphatically so, instead I entered a state of circumspection, wary, the aesthetic was middle class suburban ranch, but its plan was like Alice in Wonderland drinking from a vial in the White Rabbit’s home, then growing and growing until there is no room for her and she must put an arm out the window and a foot up the chimney, only the house was Alice, it had started out from a suburban middle class perspective then had gotten out of control in its aspiration to escape the middle class through a display of wealth that grew it into a tasteless, grandiose wood cabin bound up in dark wood paneling, piled with stone, a large rock fireplace in the living room, and all its other parts broken up by exploding what was at heart a banal plan and rearranging the parts with what would have been supposed to be ingenuity but instead made for a crazy house. At least, that’s how I perceived it at the time, I don’t know if I’d feel the same now after decades of McMansions and ever-escalating displays of wealth that cast shade on this as amateur. A profoundly insular house, on a main artery but tucked away in the woods on a hill, one could feel how everything for regular living—the eating and
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sleeping part—was extraneous, and that the organs for which it existed were likely in a recreation room below. I was told it had been the home of some mafioso-type kingpin involved in drug trafficking, guns, everything that goes along with that, I don’t recollect, that the house had been confiscated by some branch of government, and I don’t remember how the drug traffickers’ den had become a twelve-step meeting house. I looked at the size of the picture window in the great room, how small it was, and the lack of openness seemed to fit with drug paranoia, the window made sense to me as a look-out portal in a castle, but none of the lore may have even been true, was only believed to be factual, I dig through the newspaper archives for a couple years prior but the case of Atlanta’s Mike Thevis consumes the criminal results, Atlanta’s big time pornographer and murderer, he was noted for having a mansion, and this wasn’t it. The bands MK had played in sometimes brushed up against what were described as Georgia mafia, though usually lesser types, what I thought of as backwoods mafia when the taverns were out in the sticks but packed at night, sometimes the haunts of motorcycle gangs. His first gig after we were married, the owner of the South Carolina bar they played at turned out to be one of these many small-time gangsters, which we discovered when he passed the band bad checks after their two weeks run, which was our rent money, MK went to the district attorney because we were young and didn’t see how one could simply not be paid for one’s work, and the district attorney told him to drop it, that if he pursued the matter there would be trouble, that the club’s owner was wanted for two murders in Georgia, was under the protection of the North Augusta, South Carolina, law, and the best thing to do would be to walk away as we would never get the money and might be physically harmed if we pressed the matter. These things happened, playing bars around the Southeast you occasionally ran into these types and they reasoned they had easy license to screw over musician kids in their twenties, there was nothing these musicians could do, no one was going to care, the general public believed if you worked you were paid and if you weren’t it must be your fault, what had you done wrong. In one situation that band was covertly threatened with the display of a load of guns in a car trunk, which was also a thing you didn’t go around talking about. You quickly learned to keep your mouth shut, you instinctively kept your mouth shut except for warning other musicians, do not play at that place, steer clear of these people. I remember the situation as being bad, and to fact-check myself I go to the news archives. A Washington Post article from 1982, on Georgia law officers involved in trafficking drugs, described Georgia as facing a greater smuggling problem than any state except Florida, that it was like going back to the moonshine days of running liquor. Guns aren’t mentioned but we knew that was going on as well, it wasn’t only drugs, and close to the military bases there was very obviously human trafficking. The news reports that six sheriffs and ex-sheriffs had been arrested, two police chiefs, two county commissioners, six deputy sheriffs, two state troopers, nine police officers, a police narcotics squad secretary, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, one county prison warden, two deputy prison wardens, a state forest ranger, eight Coast Guard sailors who were guarding the coast against drug smugglers, and a Georgia state senator, Roscoe Dean, Jr., who had promised drug smugglers carte blanche if they financed his bid for governor. The previous year, a Georgia public official was arrested on drug charges every nineteen days. The article describes how
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in Georgia’s rural outback, the sheriff was a one-man band, the nearest GBI agent was far away, and they took their bribes and let the smugglers have their way. This article doesn’t mention Sheriff William Anderson from Richmond County, who I now look up as we’d always heard about him, it was common knowledge amongst some of our friends in high school that he was dealing drugs. He had served as sheriff from 1971 to 1976, and was convicted in 1979 on charges of two drug deals involving five pounds of marijuana that he sold to a former deputy sheriff and his brother, for which he received two concurrent ten-year sentences, half to be served on probation. The deal had been arranged in a nightclub and I wish the name of it had been given in the news because I might have been familiar with the club and would enjoy picturing the setting. His obituary applauds his election to sheriff on the Republican ticket, that he even got a letter from Richard Nixon congratulating him on being the youngest sheriff in the state of Georgia. His conviction isn’t mentioned, only that after being sheriff he became a general contractor and owner-operator of a business that did debt collections for major retail chains, and there are listed all the many organizations, including law organizations, and the church to which he belonged, in other words he was a strong community man. I’m reluctant to even mention him as he was popped for marijuana, which should never have been illegal, but he was selling when he was sheriff and putting other people in jail for selling or possession so he got less than what he deserved. Roscoe Dean, Jr., the senator who aspired to be governor on drug smuggling funds, was twenty-eight when elected, he held office for fourteen years, his obituary applauds his having been the youngest state senator. After the 15 May 1972 attempted assassination of segregationist Alabama governor, George Wallace, Roscoe co-wrote and produced the single, “A Ballad to George Wallace”, with Lee Greene of Lee Green and the Shining Knights of Greene, who were obviously not worried about being outed as Ku Klux Klan proud. “A Ballad to George Wallace” is not a song. Set against a plodding snare-driven march of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic", it’s a spoken word paean to Wallace as a Great American, the All American Man. In a 17 June 1972 interview, Dean said, “I don’t exactly sing, I narrate a very inspirational message with the strains of the 'Battle Hymn of The Republic’ in the background”, and added that all members of the band had Indian ancestry. If one wonders what the American Indian ancestry has to do with “A Ballad to George Wallace”, in the Southeast, Native American ancestry has sometimes been used to legitimize Neo-Confederate views, and a good chance is had that none of them had indigenous ancestry, they likely belonged to old families that had displaced the Cherokee or Creek and having appropriated the land they had turned into being legitimately there by reason of claiming American Indian descent, and as American Indians weren’t fond of the federal government then they could be safely Neo-Confederate. Maybe one of them had some Cherokee ancestry, that’s possible, but not Dean and Greene and every member of the band, not all of them. Also, somehow it had escaped Greene and Roscoe that though the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" had been written during the Civil War, the work was that of an abolitionist, Julia Ward Howe, and was an adaptation of "John Brown’s Body", which had been, of course, about abolitionist John Brown. In the interview, a version of which first appears 1 June 1972—they recorded the tune that quickly—Dean gave the record as being produced by the Great World of Sound Corporation of America, of which Bill Stith was
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president, who had been responsible for the single “Welfare Cadillac”, which I never heard (until I looked it up after learning about it, and it’s a slimy piece wrought by an aging country comedian-musician) but I read was popular, despite being decidedly unmusical, and precedes 1982 Ronald Reagan and his tales of how the hard-working middle class was being cheated by Welfare Queens who drove Cadillacs. In 1976 we knew an individual, a friend of MK’s family, who wanted to join the FBI and when he came over to visit he would sit at our table and go through our mail like it was the most natural thing in the world for him, that privacy didn’t exist, during one visit he complained about how people on welfare weren’t really poor they were just using the system to pull in wealth, and that he had seen the welfare Cadillacs they drove. When I argued, he argued back, he could prove it, he had seen those welfare Cadillacs, and that was the last time he visited. As for Stith, he was a young, former school principal from Kentucky who did vanity records and after an article on the sketchy ethics of his operation appeared in The Miami Herald, 18 June 1972, news about Stith dries up though he was still around. As for Roscoe, he served a bit of time. Roscoe’s mother said her beloved son had done nothing wrong and was a political prisoner. I would guess she meant he was a victim of the Yankees.
Some people live in ways where they don’t come in contact with much outside their box, and where that stagnation had seemed profound to me, in what I’d experienced of life thus far, was in suburbia, so MK and I always steered toward in-town neighborhoods. We had been to college. We’d started off with a plan but had some catastrophically bad luck almost immediately, that ripped those plans and their goals out from under us, from which it would take years to begin to try to recover, and from which we also never did recover as far as those initial plans and goals. We were young leftists who loved literature and art films, pursuing our creative dreams while I worked odd jobs and MK played in many indie bands, some years often on tour, but in order to make a living had also to play in cover bands that ran the gamut from blues and rhythm-and-blues to disco and funk to party and wedding bands to country bands (many composed of good musicians, even some great musicians, there are many good musicians who aren’t famous) and due this range of music he played for a variety of audiences. He played in places with cages around the bands to keep them safe, in clubs packed with motorcyclists in the deep woods, in good nightclubs, in the mansions of the wealthy, in many festivals, and music halls and concert venues around the country, and regularly in local music clubs. For a short period of time I was legitimately along for the ride, running lights, but unless I was between odd jobs, most of the time I was driving to meet up with him on the weekends and would observe and talk to and listen to people, at least at the time I felt it was important for my development as a writer, to come into contact with a broad range of people with different origins, politics, outlooks, and lifestyles, however people with no interest in literature or the arts, in what I was interested in, nor did I talk about myself with them, I was generally (not always) accepted as an interested ear, the outsider who’s passing through, I didn’t want to be elitist and removed and distanced by an exclusive relationship with the arts, which I later realized wasn’t ultimately to my benefit, where my focus should have been was networking and clawing my way up through the literary and arts worlds, but I was a disaffected, I was doing what I felt was important at the time, which was learning about the experience of others.
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I wasn’t a social drinker, so I wasn’t learning about the experience of others while drunk, I knew that wasn’t possible. I had first experienced black-outs while drunk when I was sixteen, but I’d a remarkably high tolerance, which crashed when I was seventeen. After I fled my parents’ home, I was always struggling to abstain and would be successful for long periods, would begin to do some drugs, then more, which was my way of trying to keep from drinking, then I’d begin drinking in private, trying to keep it hidden, and a couple of times finally in public before shutting myself off from society in order to do nothing but drink. That was my pattern. People who had seen me drunk, knew I shouldn’t be drinking, because I wasn’t a social drunk and so wasn’t a fun drunk, I only drank to obliterate myself, and they didn’t encourage me to drink, if they saw me drinking again they would say oh no you shouldn’t be doing this, and I’d tell them it was the natural thing for me to do as I was an alcoholic, of course I was drinking. The periods between these devastating binges grew shorter and shorter until the ability and desire to hide my drinking eventually broke down. The last four or so months of my drinking I’ve scarcely any memory of, bits and pieces, and later when I was getting sober we would come upon drugs and alcohol I’d hidden around the apartment and I’d no memory of having done so. I realized I was in a very bad place when, unable to abide the sound of alcohol bottles clattering in the dumpster, I found myself at about three in the morning (meaning a while after midnight and safely before dawn) burying bottles beside a bush that bordered a side wall of the apartment building in which we were then living. As if partly surfacing out of senselessness, maybe it was through the effort of digging, I came to, rising out of the deep waters of a black-out into a fleeting, vague sense of time, the physical world is briefly registered before one sinks back down again, what I felt was that I was too drunk to be on my feet, I’m unable to say if it was cold or not or what I was using to dig the hole for my bottles, it was near pitch black dark, that I remember, and that the dumpster was only a few yards from me, I understood the reason I was burying the bottles beside the building was because I couldn’t stand to hear the clatter crash of the bottles against the steel of the dumpster, and I didn’t want anyone else to hear it either, and I would have only been drinking and not eating for a while, because when I was drinking I stopped eating and the bottles were about all I had for garbage. Then I blacked out again because I don’t know if I completed burying the bottles or gave up and went ahead and disposed of them in the dumpster, and though I was always aware this had happened I even forgot about the incident until sometime after I’d stopped drinking. As far as a timeline goes, this was after I’d landed in the hospital for several weeks, and they booted me out because I drank on Antabuse, and they said I was hopeless, that I’d never stop, no use wasting effort on her. There’s a sort of derangement of time that happens so, such as the incident with burying the bottles, the timeline will re-sort itself so it will seem to me that happened before the hospitalization, when it came after. I managed to stop drinking for a time after the Antabuse incident, I went for maybe a couple of months, I’d thought I’d finally stopped drinking, but I hadn’t, I started again, then did quit after the night I planned to blow myself up by making a molotov cocktail of a car.
The twelve-step meeting house that was my “home” was an old craftsman bungalow in which the walls had been knocked out so the meeting room was composed of what had been the living room and the dining room and a side room, they formed a T-shape
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where all attention was focused toward a desk at center front, but there was almost no place in the room where you couldn’t turn your head and see everyone else. The arrangement was coincidentally not unlike a traditional church, the living room as the nave, which faced the crossing between the left room, the gospel side of the church, and the right room, the epistle side, these sections were originally separate rooms which had been opened up, and everyone there facing the apse that was kind of compressed into the crossing, which was where was the desk from which business was conducted, where the leader of the meeting sat, and if there was a speaker that’s where they would speak from. There were metal folding chairs in what had been the living room and sofas and upholstered arm chairs and dining table chairs in the left and right transepts, my “home” was, as one entered, through the living room and in the side area on the left, on a sofa if it was available, but the meetings were usually packed so I eventually sat everywhere, but if I had a choice, and I often did, it was the left transept where I was to be found. There was a front porch where one hung out if one showed up before the person who had the keys to open the house for the meeting. As one entered the house there was on the immediate left a small room dedicated to a large chrome coffee urn and cookies. Beyond the desk, at the rear of the house, on the left side was a small meeting room with a table around which smaller discussions were held, and on the right was the kitchen where the large coffee urn was cleaned and regulars kept their coffee cups. This house no longer exists as a meeting place, probably because of gentrification, but many people passed through its front door, many people found sobriety, and many people didn’t.
That time I realized my sponsor was either a John Bircher or at least comfortable with them. She was giving me a ride home from a meeting and said she needed to make a stop. I didn’t question it. I was the passenger, she was doing a courtesy giving me a ride. I knew her at this point through meetings and phone conversations, always about not drinking, getting through the day, nothing personal. I’d not yet been to her home, and I never invited her into our apartment before or after we moved out of town for a time, perhaps because I knew she would negatively judge small apartment life, perhaps because I needed a measure of privacy, I don’t know, I wasn’t averse to inviting people over but those who did come over were typically people who had the mindset of artists and understood how there were artists who might not live a middle class lifestyle, we were spartan because, apart from rent our money went into our ability to pursue the arts, and we were always broke so we had little enough money for food much less furniture. Our furnishings were musical equipment, my typewriter and desk, my art supplies and canvases and paintings. Those days, my mind was still in a haze and I wasn’t then aware that the stop my sponsor would be making took us in the opposite direction of where I lived, not far, because I was in a haze it seemed in limbo land, except that I always believed it was on one of Atlanta’s main roads when instead, now that I track it down, it was on another main road, though only two blocks from where the road I always believed it was on intersected with the road the building was actually on. I knew Atlanta very well but I somehow had no geographic idea of where we exactly were, because of the route she took and because things were hazy for me for a while. She pulled up and parked in front of a dark-brick, simple block of a circa-1950s building of two floors, the first floor right space occupied by a store that had dated office furnishings in the dusty windows, carcasses of obsolete
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large metal adding machines, and I think the other business was a print shop. She entered a door in the center, between these two shops, and I followed her up a dark, unlit staircase to the second floor, the atmosphere such that it felt seedily secretive, I had some anxious concern she was about to introduce me to the fact she was into hard-core sado-masochistic pornography and sex toys, and I didn’t want to appear puritanical but I preferred that be a private matter, all I cared about was not drinking, but I was grabbing a ride with her so I steeled myself for whatever this personal lifestyle detour might reveal. Plus, it would be a learning experience. At the height of the stairs were two doors, one to the left and one to the right, she knocked on the one to the left and we were admitted into the surprise of a bright and sunny space that looked like a library, rows of books on shelves, and seated at a front desk a woman who was every bit the stereotype of the prim librarian, who broke into a great smile and rose as the two greeted one another with eager familiarity, a hug, and the promise that they and their spouses must soon do dinner again. My sponsor, as it turned out, was returning a bowl from a prior dinner get-together. This was a bookstore? I loved bookstores, how did I not know this one existed as I thought I knew where all the bookstores in Atlanta were. While they talked, I went to browse and found only a couple of shelves of one case dedicated to those that were for sale, which were mostly Ayn Rand, who I’d heard about in college and steered clear of, I’d had no interest in reading her, and there were were pamphlets and slender volumes which, as I browsed them, I realized were about such things as the New World Order, including None Dare Call it Conspiracy, on its cover a big dollar sign, a hammer and sickle, the emblem of the United Nations, and the All-Seeing Eye of Providence in a triangle. Opening the book at random I saw anti-communism and conspiracy theories about how Rockefeller and the Rothschilds and the liberal news media were leading us into the satanic maw of a global government. Which is when I looked up and saw a portrait, prominently displayed on the wall, of John Birch. I didn’t know for certain it was John Birch, I didn’t know what John Birch looked like, I didn’t know that John Birch hadn’t started the John Birch Society, that it was instead started by Robert W. Welch who made his millions off being the literal king of the Sugar Daddies, as in the caramel candy, and Sugar Babies, and Junior Mints which I only knew from the confectionary counter at movie theaters and had never purchased them as I thought it bad for one’s health to devour a box of candy in two hours, I didn’t go to movies to eat candy. Trying not to look like I was now on a fact-finding mission, I wandered over to the portrait to check out the nameplate on the frame, which is how it was confirmed for me where I had landed. It was John Birch. My sponsor and the other woman were eyeing me as they spoke, and I wondered how my sponsor had not read my politics by how I dressed and the few life facts she knew about me, and I also knew that she did very well know my politics, which made me wonder what was up with this. It seemed, as ever, the best thing to do was not betray any surprise. Because I’d never read any of this material, I purchased a couple of books to see exactly what the Birchers were pushing. I’d done some damage to myself the previous year and had a bad tremor that first year after I quit drinking for which reason I kept my money loose in my pocket as the task of taking it out of a wallet was too much for me to handle, I didn’t want anyone to see how my hands would shake and fumble, for which reason I drank my coffee with two hands holding the cup rather than one, and lit my
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cigarettes away from others so they couldn’t see how my hands shook, and often didn’t even try to handle coffee or a cigarette unless I was fairly sure no one was looking at me. So I would have paid for the books out of my pocket and put my change in my pocket. When we got back down to the car, my sponsor asked me what I was thinking, and I don’t know if I said, “Not much,” or, “I thought I knew all the bookstores in town.” She either said she was surprised I’d purchased the books or that I hadn’t had to purchase any books, it wasn’t expected as I was there as her guest, and I told her I was always interested to see what others were thinking, and that’s the last we ever spoke about it. The bookstore was never mentioned again. I’ve found in several places the address for where the bookstore was located, one of my sources being the 2 July 1981 piece, “The ‘Conspiracy’ is Bircher Nemesis” published in The Atlanta Journal, which was the year I stopped drinking, I was twenty-three, and the year my sponsor took me on that little visit to the bookstore.
The feeling was that I was an exotic mouse caught by a cat who was displaying it with some pride before another cat.
I had started meetings the first of January, then had a one day relapse at the end of the month, I’ve no memory of what prompted it, a last goodbye, as though I needed to have the slip in order to make sure it didn’t happen in the future, when I had gathered enough sober days that it would be devastating, a failure with which I couldn’t cope, which would make me feel all was lost, I believe that’s partly why I had the slip, to get it over and done with, thirty days was just the right time, I walked down to the package store and went home and drank my bottle and got very sick and no one looked at me like I was a failure when I showed up the next day for a meeting and said I was having to start from day one again.
My mind always glitches on the year I stopped drinking, there’s a nick in my brain for that year like on a vinyl record and recall stumbles on what should be easily remembered due its significance. My North Star for it is that the Talking Heads played the Agora, with Kid Creole and the Coconuts, in November of 1980, and I was there, way too high on an assortment of things mixed with too many Quaaludes (the music was great). I always forget what year I stopped drinking but I have the North Star of when the Talking Heads played the Agora with Kid Creole to guide me. I’d been in the hospital the summer before that. I had then followed the pattern of trying to not drink, then doing drugs to keep from drinking, I was doing opioids, opioids were a drug of choice. After the Talking Heads concert I resolved to quit all that, I was out of work all of December, my spouse was on the road, I stayed at home with the plan of quitting the opioids and everything else I was taking and they must have been a solid amount as I was having a bad time and began having mild auditory hallucinations, I kept hearing big band music. My resolve to be sober left entirely and I went into solid drinking again, my plan to not take any more drugs turned immediately into my holing up in the apartment for several weeks of not eating and only drinking, I would spend this time drinking myself to death.
After about seven months of sobriety I was feeling secure enough to move to another city. Not the reason for the move, but why I grabbed at it, was I suddenly felt unsafe at
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my home meeting house. I’ll never know if I had any reason to be afraid, for I fled from what I perceived as a threat, I didn’t stick around. At one meeting, a man sat down next to me who was perhaps drunk, perhaps high, perhaps not, he was mumbling, he went on mumbling and after a little while I began to pay attention to what he was saying and realized he was talking about having hurt people, his voice was too low for me to hear much of anything clearly except that he was talking about a little girl he’d molested, how she was seven years old, how he loved her, how she’d seduced him, it was her fault. I listened intently, discreetly, to make sure I was hearing him correctly. It was a night meeting, a corner table lamp on illuminated the area in which I usually sat, he was new and seated beneath the poster of the cat hanging for dear life by its paws from a bar, versions of which were very popular then. Afterward, I asked a couple of others nearby if they’d heard what he was saying and they hadn’t. I knew what I’d heard and I went and got two men who I trusted had the experience to handle this, they were old-timers, and I told them about it. They said it was likely all in his imagination—but he’d talked about raping a little girl, I couldn’t let this pass. Keeping the dialogue to his physical condition, the men spoke with him and his behavior was such they proposed taking him to a hospital, which he initially didn’t want to do but the men convinced him. The hospital decided to keep him for observation. Soon thereafter, he appeared again at the meeting house, and I was told by the men who had taken him to the hospital there was nothing to be concerned about, the hospital had released him and said his mutterings should be taken as delusional, they doubted anything with a little girl had actually happened. At least this is what I was told. But that he was now going to the meeting house I regularly attended was not the only problem—and I was uncomfortable, I feared him—I walked to the meeting house, and within the week or two after his release from the hospital I saw him taking the same path that I walked, and then I saw him across the street from our apartment complex. What was he doing there? I’d never seen him there before. Did he live in our area? The appearance of this man on the path I took to the meeting house was troubling because no one else took that path except me, no one else even walked to the meeting house because they drove, Atlanta was not a pedestrian-friendly city, I’d never even seen anyone else walking when I was taking that path, back in 1981 there weren’t even many people out running for exercise yet. I didn’t know if I could trust the assault on the girl hadn’t happened, I was the one who had heard the man talking, I was the one who had alerted the men to him, I was the one responsible for his having been hospitalized. It could have been purely coincidental that he was taking my path and that I’d seen him across from where we lived, but he was a big question mark and I felt endangered, I didn’t want to be anywhere around him. I stopped going to my home meeting house and caught rides to meetings elsewhere so I wouldn’t run into him. Within the next couple of days, coincidentally, we got the opportunity to move out of the city and I leaped on it. Yes, great, let’s do it. Leaving my sponsor behind was no problem. I had already begun feeling uncomfortable with her and I thought putting some distance between us wouldn’t be bad at this point. The move happened quickly, within the month, and I felt no anxiety over relocating and continuing with the twelve-step meetings in another place, no remorse over leaving either my sponsor or home group, because the man who had spoken of raping the little girl, who was now walking my path, had cut that umbilical
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cord clean. What I did feel like was a coward, because though we would have likely moved anyway, though we had been given what seemed a good positive reason to move, I welcomed it as a means of escape from the man who said he’d raped a little girl and was now walking my path and attending what had been my home group. I didn’t tell anyone that I was had quit going to my home group because I was concerned about him, about his presence. Though I kept occasional contact with that sponsor and a few people after the move, I didn’t ask if he was still around, if they knew what had happened with him. I didn’t want anyone to know I inwardly panicked whenever I saw him, I was that afraid of him, and be told I was over-reacting.
2
Seven years beforehand, I am fifteen and “going out” with the man with the gun in his glove compartment. The only time we were in public together was when he took me to the drag races, admittedly not a very novel thing as many frequent drag races but it was novel for me. If I am describing what it was like to go to the drag races it’s because they were new to me, and the drag racing track is where this person opted to take me as representative of their world and interests, and I was game for trying it out for the experience. As it turns out, I fail at tolerating deafening noise as spectacle, I didn’t understand the attraction of ear-blasting nitroglycerine-fuel seismics, I’d not been warned about this aspect, even before we were in the stands there was no escaping what I read may have reached levels of 140 to 150 decibels because drag racing is the loudest sport in the world. It does no good for me to try to enliven the scene by writing how these cars go BOOM BOOM POP POP because that doesn’t communicate the mega decibels of however it is that these engines are filled with explosions and somehow don’t themselves explode, and my eardrums responded as hysterical dogs tearing up the room to be anywhere else as long as not within a mile of a July fourth fireworks display. But July fourth fireworks are typically viewed from an appropriate distance where I experience their noise as conversational, only a little louder than a crowds’ OOHS and AAHS. Fireworks displays go BOOM BOOM POP POP SHROOM FIZZLE, but they are warm and fuzzy BOOM BOOMS wrapped up in decorative lights and soft muffling clouds of residual smoke. At the drag race, what was obviously exhilarating for others was painful and repellent for me, which was odd to me, that those in the viewing bleachers could tolerate such a level of noise, and as I wondered how all those enjoying themselves didn’t lose their hearing it occurred to me this was why at the age of eighteen or nineteen or however old he was (old enough to buy me alcohol and no longer in high school, which would have been eighteen then) he’s already hard of hearing so that even when we’re conversing in a quiet environment it’s not uncommon for him to lean his head in and remark, “What? I didn’t hear you.” At the races I finally have to tell him that the noise is literally painful and he leans in and says, “What? I didn’t hear you.” I didn’t understand why he was hard of hearing until we went to the races, because he hadn’t been born deaf and the deafness wasn’t caused by an illness. He has a quiet even a rather gentle way of speaking, and the way he cocks his head when he admits this vulnerability makes me
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not only a little sorry for him, I feel he’s not a bad guy at all he’s just from a world different from mine. I think it’s good that I meet all kinds of people, others who don’t share my interests, who come from cultural mindsets far removed from what I want in my life, a world apart from the things to which I’ve been naturally drawn as I grew up, it helps me to realize how different we all can be, the great variety in perspectives, and that it doesn’t make one good or bad, just different. At least as long as those differences in perspectives aren’t a matter of racism and bigotry. When I’m sixteen and my cousins from Chicago on my mother’s side visit I’ll learn the one my age works in a race car pit crew, the kind of racing that is closed-circuit on an oval track. Whatever it was he did in the pit crew, for mental imagery I used my limited knowledge drawn from glimpses of the Wide World of Sports (occasional Saturday afternoon family room television wallpaper) envisioning something like the Indianapolis 500, the Grand Prix, or NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Racing), all of which were scary dangerous and I felt not worth risking life or limb for but even in my eyes were legitimized with trophies and wreathes of flowers and prize money for the winners and everyone knowing the name Mario Andretti. NASCAR style racing uses stock cars, which originally meant the car was straight out of the factory, but gave way to a modified production-based car, and by 1981 it was instead cars specially built for speed and safety that had manufacturer support from different brands. Grand Prix racing is international for Formula One open-wheel cars and can involve street circuits like the famed Monaco Grand Prix on the French Riviera. The Indy-500 style was instead indy-racing, so-called for the Indy-500, American, and was also open-wheel racing, which simply meant the car’s wheels are set outside the car’s main body which usually has one seat. I believe I knew it wasn’t indy-style, instead stock car, though I would have been hard pressed to state the differences except the cars looked nothing alike, but I didn’t know what exactly made for stock style and indy-style. For all I knew my cousin was in the pit crew carrying water, and though his bringing up that he worked on a pit crew was a bit of boast he made it clear he was small fry. Shouldn’t we all have something about which we can boast, even several somethings, however small? As part of demonstrating he knows automobiles he shows me how to hot-wire a car, a talent I’ll forget within a month, not as if I ever expected I’d need to hot-wire a car but for a short while I knew how it was done, which was fun, and I felt like this increased my knowledge of the universe at large by just a little. Then my cousins wanted to go down to the pool where my siblings swam, a place with which I had nothing to do. My brothers protest as they are embarrassed, and though they will take them down to the pool they are rude and distance themselves from their Chicago cousins who are dressed nothing like anyone in our white-collar neighborhood that caters to the Medical College as a profession. Watching them walk away down the street (from our driveway go right for several houses, turn left for a couple of blocks, turn left again and the pool’s on your right), my cousins convivial, towels draped around their necks, seeming oblivious to the scorn of my brothers, my brothers reluctant and muted, I understand why my brothers fear their friends seeing them with their cousins who appear naive in how they are naturally unreserved, but I also am pained by this being not only inhospitable but exhibiting a nasty kind of classism that has slid into our family in the years since we moved to the South and into a middle class suburbia where the wrong clothing
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label on your back means being shunned or bullied. I was just old enough, when I entered that world, to be aware and critical, and when it rejected me outright for a number of reasons, I rejected it right back, not because I’d been rejected but because it was a vapid game, grasping at superiority. The racism and classism were hand-me-down aspects of the hierarchical plantation wealth system that pushed a pretense of American aristocratic gentility but had been through tough times with, say, the Civil War, and the threat of culture-changing opportunities afforded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, and movement both down and up into the middle class. Where was one’s placement in the amorphous middle class was signaled and coded by accoutrements, bodies adorned with displays of branding for which one needed expendable wealth. What were the handbags called that were the craze when we moved south? John Romain. Reading through memories posted online by women who lusted after the bags when they were young, some seem to have simply loved them for what they saw as beautiful, or maybe it’s the romance of the bag, with many the acquisition of a bag was a serotonin fix, especially if it couldn’t be easily afforded, and that serotonin fix was still strong decades later. But where I lived the bags were a training ground for elitist snobbery, and even the fifth graders at my school, mere ten-year-olds, were primed to show off their value via a John Romain preppy tweed (actually Belgian linen) and leather bag to go with one’s correct Bass Weejuns loafers. While my parents dressed my siblings relatively well, in the styles of their peers, the clothes I had were what I could afford on my babysitting money, and when I was thirteen and showed up at school in a dress from the discount store J. M. Fields, I was mocked by people who could have only known it was from J. M. Fields because they shopped there. And while the right brands might not have had the power to make one, the wrong brands were another shovel of earth on your social standing grave. Ashes to ashes, who will remember you when you’re gone, there’s now not even a Wikipedia entry on the John Romain company that closed down in 1996, so I resort to the newspapers. In 1960, John Romain almost doesn’t exist, but well before 1966 his bags are all over the East, especially strong in the Southeast, then shoes, then belts. John Romain is such a star that in 1966 the Atlanta Rich’s store advertises John Romain himself will be making a personal appearance at four of their locations to autograph your bags. “All teen-agers and young women with any kind of social standing at all simply HAVE to have a J.R. Bag,” reads a 1968 Atlanta Journal article in which John Romain’s new clothing line is introduced. None of this tells me how John Romain became a southern essential, who were the influencer catalysts for the trend, but when the Romain name moved from accessories and shoes to clothing the new must-have was bound to unseat the king of the southern prep hill that had perhaps over-reached its saturation point by offering to entirely take over one’s wardrobe. Until that something else came along, nearly everyone I knew had John Romain bags and scorned those who were so crass as to carry looks-like John Romain. Did I eye the bags with some envy? I wondered at the magic they held, how a well-made handbag could provide social standing, but I also knew that a handbag wouldn’t save me from being an outcast, and I reasoned it was better to value what you made of yourself rather than what someone else made of you. However, at the age of sixteen I’m coming to realize that my siblings, younger, are at home in the southeastern suburbs and that they do fit in. They are comfortable with wanting and acquiring what makes
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them one with their peers. They are comfortable with going down to the pool my parents have joined, where there are no black members as none live in our subdivision, which is how it is in Augusta. They mock the intense Chicago accent of our cousins that is also foreign to my ear as our mother has no such accent, and so does my mother mock it. And it is then that I also wonder if this exclusivity and disdain is not just a matter of where we are but perhaps an intrinsic thing to our family of which I simply may not have been previously aware except for my father’s disdain for those who weren’t white collar, his mother’s acquisitiveness, and my maternal grandparents feigning wealth for social standing, which my mother makes noises of rejecting, consistently making friends with individuals who were considered from a lower class, but my mother’s seeming embrace of the lower class felt all wrong, as if she did it in order to show off her privilege. What she accepts in her friends, she rejects in her family.
With my siblings, as adults I’d find that whatever classism was infecting our family in the twentieth century had become, in the twenty-first century, privilege based in money and education (medical and legal professions) wrapped up in a conservatism for which the possession of privilege was the evidence of righteousness, the limits of God’s imagination outlined in the rewards of His (God being masculine, the Father) gift of the status quo. At a birthday party I hosted for my son when he was nine, at what should be a carefree celebration in a warehouse-sized party space filled with bounce houses, a cousin of his would tell him she felt sorry for him because he lived in an apartment in the heart of the city rather than a large house in the suburbs. From which I knew that she had been taught by my sister that I was poor and lived in the bad urban place. Briefly acquainted with my siblings after nearly twenty years, there was a tacit, unvoiced agreement to not discuss politics or religion, but we were always meeting on their home ground, the environment of the conservative and privileged, and that atmosphere flavored all discussions so that I came to feel I was the only one having to respect boundaries. Granted, we couldn’t have fit a family gathering into our apartment, which I loved, god how I loved that poorly maintained, 1920s apartment building, perfectly placed for walking access to stores and the subway and MK’s studio. Only one sibling, a brother, ever visited us there, once or twice, and I appreciated this effort. With the exception of that brother, with whom there was a broader allowance of conversation, what was left to be discussed amongst my other siblings amounted to health, diet, and occasionally a movie they enjoyed. I quickly understood we were not to talk about our lives and experiences, or our thoughts on any subject, so I knew nothing about them other than what I could see in their homes and on social media.
Then a sister shared a post on social media from a neo-fascist group, and I thought about this a second then wrote her that she probably had no idea it was a neo-fascist group and she might want to reconsider posting their content, and she responded by blocking me on social media and our already non-existent relationship officially ended. My other sister moved so far to the right in her fundamentalist, anti-choice, Roman Catholicism that our near non-existent relationship ended. What happened? Were we worlds apart because I was raised without any money, or at least no money spent on me, whereas they experienced a more privileged environment? Was it the
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matter of a slim few years difference between us, where I grew up hearing about and concerned with civil rights, equality, and feminism, values that threatened their social home territory given the traditionalism of their formative suburbanite years surrounded by conservative peers? Was it because when integration happened I was bused to a school in a black neighborhood but to avoid my siblings being bused my parents instead put them in one of the homegrown private schools that sprang up in response?
My parents may have been abusive but I had taken a small measure of pride in their not being racist, or so I believed, so I kept reassuring myself, then I realized this may not be entirely the case when I was thirteen and my parents sent my siblings to private schools rather than have them be bused as a part of integration, they said it wasn’t racism they instead wanted them in good schools in good neighborhoods with good teachers. I think it was when I was sixteen, when I decided to explore the possibility of their being racist more deeply and I asked what if I dated an individual who was black, and they lost their shit over that, I realized, oh, wait, it looks like they were racist and I hadn’t fully processed it. My proposal quickly escalated into our yelling back and forth over the breakfast bar in the kitchen as I argued they were being racist and they responded with threats of grounding me forever so I wouldn’t have any opportunity to date a black person behind their backs. It feels so odd relating this, that we could ever have had such an argument. It felt insane to me then as well.
Perhaps it wasn’t such a shock. Perhaps I’d half-expected as much, which was why I’d asked the question, to find out for certain. But I was also not confident they’d always been this racist, I wasn’t confident their move to the South hadn’t negatively affected them and primed them to slide into racism through living in an apartheid state.
Yet when I was fourteen, my mother took crochet lessons, with one of her friends, from a black man, an ex-convict, at his downtown shop in Augusta. I’d no expectations of learning who he was, yet I easily find him, first by means of an ad for his shop in the 1 July 1971 issue of The News-Review (I had thought perhaps the one Black paper for the area might have an ad, and thankfully it did, and listed his name as the owner in the ad). The ad copy for the shop reads, “beautiful hand-tooled handbags, wallets, attache cases, knit and crochet creations made to order. Suede, leather and fabric hot britches!!!!! Knicker suits, beautiful hostess outfits. Knit and crochet instructions and classes. Know that the handmade knit or crochet garment is the only one of its kind!!!!!” The ad ends with “Right on, to the final victory.” Once I had his name, finding other mid-1970s articles on him was easy. On 18 November 1972 he was arrested for marijuana possession with several others, and was out on $15,000 bond. On 28 November 1972 he was arrested for child molestation, a charge that was dropped 22 May 1973 for lack of evidence, and the marijuana charge dropped 28, May 1973. He sued the Augusta police chief, a district attorney, and a vice squad lieutenant, claiming the lieutenant had attempted to frame him on false charges out of “either personal animus or directions fro the structure”, but the suit was dismissed in 1975. In a 1973 Macon, Georgia, news article, having formed the Attica Memorial Foundation, he was part of a panel concerned with prison rehabilitation, and held that changes for
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the better could only come through people who were outside and free. He’d spent about twenty years in prison for crimes ranging from auto theft to armed bank robbery (news archives supply the information that it was in 1963, in Washington D.C., for $18,499), and had formed the Attica Memorial Foundation (according to the Kenan Research Center) as he’d been in Attica during the 1971 riots. The group’s purpose was to institute prisoner-support activities, programs for transportation to prisons, lodging near prisons, and scholarships for families of prisoners. They hoped as well to provide ex-prisoners with moral support, and assistance in finding housing and employment. The Kenan Research Center’s bio of him having been in Attica is wrong, as a 23 September 1971 article in The News-Review instead relates that though for twenty years he’d been in penitentiaries in Yew York, he’d not been in Attica but had friends in Attica that he’d met in Comstock and Sing-Sing. The extensive article is on his prison experience and the need for reform. From these articles I can gather that beginning in 1971, he was making a lot of noise in Augusta about prison reform, and I can see how law enforcement would have reacted by going after him, thus the 1972 charges against him that were dropped in 1973, but the charges and the cost of his fighting the charges had already impacted his business and efforts.
Because I was skeptical of my mother’s motives, wondering how this individual fit into her ego-trip parade, and as I was interested in who he was, I accompanied her to his shop one Saturday for a crochet lesson, which would have been when I was fourteen, in the fall of 1971, before my hospitalization, because when I was hospitalized I spent some time crocheting shawls with long fringe, popular for the time, that I sold for money, unable to make money babysitting during the hospitalization. I hadn’t set out to sell them. People would see me wearing my shawl and ask where I got it, then commission me to make one for them. I made some purses which I lined with denim. I was also enterprising enough that I made and sold a few suede leather hats, the floppy, hippy kind with an oversized brim, also then popular, and I think I taught myself how to make them on pure determination, I’ve no idea how, but it began with my wanting to have one, and I found a lot of real suede leather in the craft therapy room at the hospital that no one was using, the other patients preferred making ceramic Christmas trees with molds into which one poured the slip, that was a popular item. I asked if I could use the suede leather, which wasn’t quality, but good enough, and thus I made some hats.
That is how my mother learned to crochet, via this person, and she was good at it, and not good. Crochet was popular in the 1970s, pullover vests made of granny squares, long open-weave vests that would have a tie in the front, more intricate tops or dresses made of very fine yarn and delicate stitches appeared in pattern books but never on the street. She crocheted without stop, and had a room filled with yarn, but after producing some clothing for herself, lampshades and doilies and coasters, creativity was soon replaced with the ease of repetition which resulted in decades of rectangles of triple crochet (the fastest crochet for creating fabrics), always in acrylic yarn, and eventually only in variegated acrylic yarn: afghans took too much time and effort so she turned to small baby blankets and when small receiving baby blankets took too much time she turned to small blankets for small dogs, bookmarks, and washcloths for kitchen use. Her decades of crocheting rectangles non-stop can all be
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owed to the man who was in prison at Sing-sing and Comstock, I’m not being flippant, he provided her a reason-to-be anchor.
Crochet is a relatively new art, appearing in the early 1800s, the fabrics it formed were too stiff to drape so it has a problem with performing as clothing, people initially made things like small bags. “Irish crochet lace”, which mimicked Venetian point laces, was being taught by 1845 at the Ursuline Convent of Blackrock, County Cork, a craft worked by thousands of women as a famine relief project that might provide one the ability to emigrate (plus, it was a portable skill). Crochet wasn’t going to replace knitting, knitting was better for clothing, for sweaters, for warm hats, for socks. Crochet was acceptable for afghans, if you liked that kind of thing. For some reason, in the 1970s, there was an explosion of interest in crochet. Maybe it started out with one prisoner who had some novel ideas and he taught other prisoners who taught others and when they got out of prison they taught crochet. That would be quite a story, if true. Maybe it started because of people giving up smoking and it gave them something to do with their hands, though that doesn’t explain why they didn’t go into knitting. If you are creative, I’m sure you can do some inventive and nice things with crochet. I’m sure there were people who appreciated and benefited from such items as the baby blankets which my mother donated to a program for young mothers in need, though I wondered at the emotional cost demanded of the administrators of the program and the mothers who received them. I harbor some resentment, because every item sometimes seemed like a demand for attention that we were never granted, she spoke of her creations as gifts to the world but often became angry and complained if she felt they weren’t properly acknowledged, an emotional price that was never paid off. She gave her crochet dog blankets to a veterinarian she frequented but she was never clear with me her criteria on how they were to be dispensed, I only know she would become upset with the veterinarian’s staff if she felt the blankets weren’t properly valued, ditto the laminated printed-out phrases of consolation she found on the internet and fashioned for those whose pets had died, she was irate with the staff when she didn’t see them on the counter, she thought they wasn’t aggressive enough in giving them out, and something something about a donation jar that she would find behind the counter rather than on the counter caused confusion for me, I had no idea what was going on except that she would demand reassurances from the veterinarian that he respected her time and valued her efforts, and no matter what the exchanges would almost invariably end in resentment on her part. If I weren’t her daughter and wasn’t prejudiced against her, I might have found her crochet bookmarks both functional and decorative, I can imagine how if a person came across one of her nicer creations in a secondhand store then it might be valued when separate from the emotional baggage. The desire to do work that’s recognized as beneficial is human, and though I didn’t think of my mother as having the capacity for real empathy, I’d looked upon the crocheted squares as a compulsion she directed toward where it might derive her the benefit of appearing philanthropic. It may be that while crocheting the baby blankets she imagined the happiness of the mother who received this gift, I can’t say she didn’t feel that. She crocheted a long black and white and red rectangle that, during the time we were back in communication, I came in possession of, she didn’t know what to do with it
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and gave it to me and I purposed it as a runner on a double chest of low drawers I’d painted bright red, the crochet had a modern feel to its color blocking, but my spouse eventually protested because my mother had made it and he hated all my mother’s crochet. That’s the kind of animosity toward crochet my mother could engender, because one had always to be suspicious of my mother’s intentions.
Racism on a spectrum. In 1971 there probably weren’t many middle-class women in Augusta who would take crochet lessons from either an ex-convict or a black man, much less a black ex-convict. My mother did. But she wouldn’t tolerate the idea of me dating a black person, or was it primarily my father who was enraged by the prospect, and my mother joined in? Now that I think about it, my father may have been the one who blew up. My mother was, however, adamant against my ever going out to do anything with friends who were girls. She said she didn’t trust girls going out together.
My parents don’t bat an eye over the guy with the muscle car. They never meet him as he picks me up street curb and they act as if he scarcely exists, they never ask to meet him, which is what I want. He is, after all, my source for my pain-killer of choice. Alcohol. I wouldn’t have wanted them to bat an eye and cut off that pipeline.
I don’t consider myself to be dating this guy with the muscle car and the gun in the glove compartment. I don't like anything this guy likes or represents. So, what am I doing there in that car with him? He has alcohol and when I’m around alcohol I’m already a dedicated binge drinker who can’t stop until it’s all used up and I’m riskily black-out drunk in the dead-end cul-de-sac of a street in a subdivision that was never built. He is the boyfriend of a friend of mine and she has asked me to go out with him. My friend and I met in junior high and while I can’t recollect how we met, other than it was at school, I know I valued her for her intelligence and sweet personality. I know this because on our way to being fifteen she developed large breasts and, at least for that time, abandoned top grades and intellectual pursuits for boys, as if sex and brains didn’t belong on the same plate, which baffled me, because she had been so smart and intellectually curious and it felt odd to watch her brain cut off academically. Not that I remembered her much from junior high, I was on strong enough prescription psychiatric meds during ninth and tenth and eleventh grades that they mangled my memory, I had to ask her at the beginning of tenth grade, in high school, how I knew her and she told me it was from junior high, which I still don’t remember except that somehow I did well remember her personality and that she was one of the only other people I knew who had loved to read. A pretty girl, I also remembered her as being quiet, she hadn’t struck me as the type to ever get in any trouble, which was a contrast between what I knew of her from junior high and how she was in high school. Another contrast is that she had large breasts at the beginning of tenth grade, which was a surprise to me because she’d not been previously large-breasted, she had developed them over the summer when I didn’t see her because we only saw one another in school, so this is another way that I’m aware I knew her in ninth grade. We are fifteen-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds come up with bizarre plans, but even I am at first taken aback by her plan for me to go out with her boyfriend. He was caught in her bed one night by her parents. The story she related to me was that he escaped
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out the window, dropped down, away he ran, she was grounded and her parents were threatening him with statutory rape charges if they saw each other again. She says she really really loves him and she wants me to go out with him until her parents back down and let her see him again. She proposes this in our sophomore classroom, by the way, which adds another layer of the absurd to the picture. That's the only place where we are friends, at school, where she sits in front of me in biology class, we never got together outside of school, we don’t even talk much on the phone. She whispers this proposal in installments right before class and as the teacher lectures. My friend is afraid that, during the time she can't see her boyfriend, he might become involved with someone else, which is why she is asking me to go out with him and kind of babysit him. She trusts me and knows I have no interest in anything this guy likes or represents which is why I'm the one she picks for this favor. I think this is awkward, I have never met her boyfriend, the one who climbed out her bedroom window, but she pleads with me to go out with him as she knows I won’t be interested in him, and I agree to do it, even though I think this is an ill-formed idea, though I think it's even insane, even though I think it's fucked up for him to be escaping out her bedroom window without any clothes except for his underwear, even though I don't know the guy at all except for the little she’s told me. I agree to it because I am fifteen and don't have a clear idea on just how much you should do for your friends, and maybe this is in reasonable bounds. I don't know. Then, when he picks me up (he acts like this arrangement we have though his girlfriend, my friend, is completely normal) he has alcohol and that solidifies the contract. I will babysit him as long as he has alcohol. But, god, he is such a redneck, he has a rifle in the back, I have never been around a rifle, but I figure it's a learning experience, and there’s the handgun in the glove compartment. He says he runs guns and other contraband in the North Georgia mountains, and now I'm really feeling like this is a learning experience. I also wonder if it’s the truth. He says he's telling me this as a matter of being truthful with me. I elect to maybe believe him but am circumspect. What kind of people do shit like running guns and alcohol? I thought that was 1930s billy goat gruff, hillbilly gangland stuff. I don’t know why someone would have to run alcohol or guns when neither are illegal, though there are laws that restrict their use. I don't know if he is being truthful or if he thinks this impresses the girls. There is probably even a Confederate flag mixed up somewhere in his paraphernalia, though not in his car, and while I don’t like Confederate flags they are inescapable, even in our white-collar suburb many of the boys I know have a Confederate flag, the drummer teen a couple years older than me who lives next door with his family has his window covered with a Confederate flag, I never see him but I see that Confederate flag every time I step out into the carport, and hear him practice every afternoon, and his younger sister is often out in the front yard singing Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” while performing potentially neck-breaking back flips from a standing still position. She says if she can do it then I can, and she’s so confident in this that I let her talk me into trusting I won’t be paralyzed the rest of my life and I will one day manage one back-flip for the experience of it but don’t attempt a repeat. There were a number of these boys with Confederate flags who would likely argue that the flag meant nothing to them it was part of the soulful design of Southern Rock, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, most wouldn’t excuse the flag with the Heritage Not Hate argument, not yet, instead the South Will
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Rise on Drugs and Alcohol and flaming guitar solos is filling the gap between the dying love and peace hippie era and the disco era, one has to have something to sing about when the Vietnam draft ends in 1973 and it may as well be about Free Birds flying away then returning to Sweet Home Alabama. However, many of those boys I knew in high school, if they are still alive today and have a social media page that wasn’t wiped after the failed insurrection of 6 January 2021 and a move to Trump’s Truth Social, it will likely be filled with pro-Trump posts and complaints about how things aren’t the way they used to be, that socialism under Democrats is destroying us all, religion needs to be returned to the schools, there will be hyper-saturated fake HDR (Photoshop it with high dynamic range) sunsets with lots of HDR haloing to remind that God owns all the gifts, regular brandishing of the thin blue line flag partners NRA (National Rifle Association) love, and their wives will have walls much the same with pictures as well of the grandchildren, the beach, and maybe some sharing of their favorite casserole recipes. This guy who I’m babysitting for my friend some might imagine is on his way to wearing the bright red MAGA hat when it eventually appears, but he was also a bit of a loner and part of me wonders if he might have considered himself too much of an outlier to pay any attention to politics (no, undoubtedly he would have been whole-heartedly MAGA). He has told me he doesn’t think he’ll live much longer, but I know that he will live as I once happened on his social media page, several years ago, I wasn’t looking for it, it was just suddenly there in the friends of someone who wasn’t a friend of mine but they were a friend of someone I knew, which rather surprised me that he was still alive, because when I was fifteen he’d told me his doctor said if he kept drinking his liver would kill him within a few years. But he always had alcohol. For me.
He favors big tall cans of malt liquor. That’s what he buys me. We don't go anywhere other than places where I’m confident we won’t be seen, I don't want to be seen together, these aren't "dates", I don't want this guy to be a part of my life, I don't really want to be with him, I don’t want anyone to see us together and erroneously imagine we are dating. I have him compartmentalized way off in a side box labeled “Alcohol” and “I’m just spending time with him for a friend”. Not a single person I know is aware I’m spending time with him, that’s how secretive I am about this. I’m good at keeping secrets as I’ve kept secrets all my life. I don’t tell anybody anything about my life. As he is not officially connected with me in any way except for my friend, I am fine with our simply spending our time hanging out in suburban cul-de-sacs where there are as yet no houses, just the cul-de-sac surrounded by woods, and he talks and talks about his relationship with my friend. We don’t talk about me, of course not, I’m not here to talk about me and I don’t want him to know anything about me, I don’t want him involved in the story of me. He spends hours talking about my friend, which I encourage. And he talks about his problems. That’s what I’ll permit talk about, my friend, and his problems, nothing about me. He talks about his feelings and he may be part of a completely different world (I reason that writers should know about different worlds and all kinds of different people) but I find I feel sympathetic. I listen to his stories and I learn something about his world from his stories and I empathize with some of his feelings. I don't get at all his relationship with my girlfriend, climbing in and out of the bedroom window of a minor, I don't get his culture and his interests, but I empathize when he talks about his feelings. As it is, I don't much understand my
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friend anymore either, I don't get some of the decisions she has been making, I don't get why she is attracted to this guy about whom I see nothing attractive except for his alcohol, and to add to the confusion I am now babysitting him for her with very little communication from her, she has suddenly switched to another school, her parents aren't letting her use the phone (until she switched schools I was also supposed to ferry messages back and forth between her and the boyfriend), and as we were school friends, not living in the same neighborhood, I’ve never been to her home, of course she’s never been to mine, with her change in schools I am flying solo on a promise I made to her that I’d babysit until she and her boyfriend are able to see one another again. I don’t know it then but my friendship with this girl is already over.
In retrospect, what’s peculiar is that, though he is what I think of as a redneck, race must never had been an issue, he must never have said anything racially inflammatory at all, and I know his girlfriend hadn’t. Had he ever said anything racially inflammatory or had he spoken in politically conservative terms, had he been a hawk, then I wouldn’t have been in the car with him. He may have been simply compartmentalizing and not letting me know his beliefs, but racists didn’t tolerate progressives, especially progressive women. The fact is, I actually knew almost no one who spoke in racist terms, at least around me, my peers didn’t use pejoratives, my belief was that we were on our way to leaving that behind, I expected people anywhere near my age typically to to progressive in this way, young Americans who believed in civil rights. I thought of him as a redneck but not as a racist or bigot.
Why is he choking me?
I had never expected this to happen. I had sympathized with his feelings and stories as another human being, and he had talked and talked about his girlfriend, which was reassuring, he wasn't going to be interested in me. After our hanging out a few times he had said something about me being attractive but I'm jailbait and he says I'm smart and "not that kind of girl", he says he respects me for being "not that kind of a girl". It was very reassuring to hear him describe me as jailbait because he's already in some kind of law trouble and he can't afford to get in trouble again. How long did we hang out, parking and chatting in cul-de-sacs? And every time I am always eventually beyond drunk and to free myself from babysitting I open the door and get out and stagger around the cul-de-sac while he stays in the car watching from his side of the car behind the steering wheel, I get out and I remember that one time I am laughing and staggering. I laugh and stagger glancing back at him in the car, the expression on his face, trying to wrap my head around what I’m doing out here with this guy who I don’t like even though I do have sympathy for him as a human being. Despite my having sympathy for him, at the moment I find the expression on his face hilarious, and I laugh and point at him and then am laughing so hard that I collapse on the asphalt. I’m not comfortable with this, I know what I’m doing is rude, but I look again at him and am bowled over again with laughter. What seems a bit from a movie perhaps starts annoyingly invading at this point in my recollection, in which I am watching from the outside an actress do this, playing drunk, she too bowls over laughing, points at the perplexed man, bowls over laughing again. But I know I did this. This happened. So, perhaps I also saw something like this later in a movie, which
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doesn’t mean I’ve confused things, that I’ve taken a bit from a movie and inserted it into the cul-de-sac. I clearly remember his expression and what I felt and how helpless I was to stop laughing at him, every time I looked back up there was his face beyond the steering wheel and everything about him and me and the situation was so absurd that all I could do was laugh. But I’m bothered by this, right now, the seeming intrusion of a movie and I stop and try as I might to remember the movie, what actress this was, I see the action but I can’t place it. I try writing some more but am still bothered. I have to remember what the movie was. I stop and take a break, I go to the bedroom and lie down, trying to remember, I run one movie possibility after another through my mind and come up with nothing. I write some more and the next morning I read this over again and the scene from the movie again invades, a movie I can’t recollect, and it bothers me. I go in and lie down, determined to place it, for I have seen something like this staged. Maybe it was a play of mine, my own work, for I did have a scene much like this in one of my plays, the drunk woman laughing at the man. In the writing of the play, I wouldn’t have been thinking back to this particular episode in the cul-de-sac because I refused to think about it for decades, until now, I tried my best to forget he existed for years. I have however written about abusive men and women with whom one is not going to be wholly sympathetic, who demean one another. Eventually, I do remember the movie as well, the one that had a scene of a drunk woman laughing at a man, and even though it was a situation far distant from me drunk in the cul-de-sac I understand why it invaded my memory and latched into it. Because she laughed so hard at a perplexed man, and couldn’t stop laughing. That is all the comparison to be made.
I vaguely remember his coaxing me to get back in the car.
I felt safe out in the cul-de-sac by myself, outside the car, alone, surrounded by the trees and the dark, the night sky above. I was drunk and my sensibilities were warped by being drunk, but I felt safe and free in the pain-killing euphoria of my drunkenness, safe and free with him in the car behind the steering wheel. Not to infer that I felt threatened by him, because I didn’t. He sat on his side of the car and to my memory he didn’t encroach upon my side. Still, I had to get out into the night air, out of the car, away from the two of us sitting there together. He would stay in the driver’s seat while I was out of the car circling, drunk, around the cul-de-sac, putting as much distance as I could between us without wandering off too far into the black night. Because I didn’t like being with him, however, he was the one with the alcohol. I could have sympathy for him as a person but he still repelled me. I felt guilty about the whole situation and knew I shouldn’t be out there. I looked at the woods and wanted to disappear into them but he called out and warned me against wandering too far away.
I don't remember how long this situation with the cul-de-sacs went on but after my friend switches schools he will somehow become the one who is now relaying messages from her to me, and everything about the situation becomes more and more uncertain and shady with my not knowing any longer exactly what is going on in my friend’s world. Towards the end of the arrangement he begins to not talk so much about my friend, I’ll swing the conversation back to her, keeping her the focus, he’ll
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get angry and say he doesn’t want to talk about her, she’s not the end all and be all of everything he tells me, but I keep making her the center because that’s the only reason we’re there together, I don’t want him to get any other ideas. Towards the end of the arrangement, he confronts me with the fact that I won't go out in public with him and I remind him that we're just hanging out because of my friend, we’re not dating. I don't tell him that I don't want to be seen with him as I don't want to hurt his feelings. One night he tells me he feels like I'm using him for the alcohol, that's the only reason I'm going out with him, and I think, uh, yeah, well, that and the fact my friend insisted I babysit him. But that’s when I finally agree to go out with him in daylight, once, to the drag race with nitroglycerine hopped-up cars screaming your eardrums goodbye.
None of this was a good idea. Of course, bad ideas belong also to the adult world. I’ve known many adults who have situated themselves in worse ideas. So the blame can’t be all placed on teenage brain and inexperience but a good portion of it can. And a problem with many adults making bad decisions, sometimes such bad decisions that the world is profoundly affected, is that they are operating on childhood perceptions that have never been examined and remain automatic modus operandi. A child can behave as an adult and have surprisingly adult perceptions but they are still children and only erratically adult. I did a lot of behaving like an adult as I had adult responsibilities, and had I been cross-examined under glaring lights over some of my actions that seemed indefensible there are many times I would have been able to put together a case in my favor—had I been so articulate and forthcoming—because seeming illogical actions had a logical foundation in my tumultuous world. There are too many variants on a theme and impacting factors to address this fully except to understand that good rationalizations and behaviors are not automatically adult just as bad behaviors and rationalizations are not automatically childish, though this is how society often frames the difference between adults and children. Adulthood doesn’t mean one makes good decisions, and making bad decisions doesn’t constitute childhood. Adults made the world in which I was living, as it is with all children, and my entire childhood was trying to cope with adults not only making bad decisions but behaving badly. As a child and an adolescent growing into adulthood, this was not my shining hour. Could the adult me sit down with the adolescent me, I’d tell me that I was making bad decisions working with bad decisions already made by others, that the fifteen-year-old me also didn’t know my friend’s full story, just as most of us never have the full story. I would tell myself that I didn’t owe my friend anything, that the arrangement was stupid, the kind of thing that only fifteen-year-olds would do. Which is the problem. It was the kind of thing fifteen-year-olds would do, and we did. The fifteen-year-old me would be secretive and cagey because I didn’t want to risk anything coming between me and the pain-killing alcohol.
3
It all happened in one fell swoop. Suddenly my friend and her boyfriend are no longer
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a couple. I don't know how this happens but it does. They were so in love! But no longer. They are amicably parting. She had called to let me know this. She is involved with someone else now. So suddenly? She says if I’m interested in her ex, I’m free to have a relationship with him. I tell her no I’m not interested. She says, “Oh.” Her tone briefly sounds as if she’s disappointed with my rejection of her ex-boyfriend, then she shifts back to bright and cheery. This is the end of our friendship, I can tell, she’s moved on, I know I’ll not hear from her again. I’m on the wall phone beside the breakfast bar in the kitchen. It’s the afternoon and a soft, muted light streams in through the kitchen window. This is a phone call in which I have no participation but to listen, I’ll be given no chance to ask questions, and I’m so surprised at the realization she’s deleting me from her life, yet also not surprised, that I don’t feel like talking further, I wouldn’t know what to say. At the end of the very brief call, when she very cheerily says goodbye, I don’t think I even have a chance to respond, the call is over, I’ll never hear from her again. The reason for hanging out with her now ex-boyfriend is of course over, but I had agreed already to go with him to a drive-in movie. He said he has something he wants to talk to me about. As it turns out, what he wanted to tell me was that he and his girlfriend had broken up and he wants us to be boyfriend and girlfriend, and I'm saying, no, no. I say no, never, it's all over and done with, I'm not interested, that is something that is never going to happen, I was only hanging out with him because of my friend and that has come to an end.
Big on the drive-in movie screen is a lurid, martial arts feature, a kind of entertainment I've never seen before. When he said drive-in movie, I hadn’t expected this. I expected a movie-movie like a Hollywood film. I'm unsettled by how the film is nothing but bloody violence, men beating each other up and killing each other, blood spraying everywhere. A film in which women are exploited, every time a woman appear on screen I fear she’s going to be raped and killed. I try to put up a wall between me and what's happening on the big drive-in movie screen and getting drunk helps. I could swear that the pièce de résistance of the movie was a man’s heart being ripped out. It bothers me that when I try to look up kung fu and martial arts films from 1972 what I get is the beginning of the Bruce Lee craze, The Big Boss, Fist of Fury. Neither one has a heart being ripped out of a man’s chest. I hadn’t previously seen any kung fu films in 1972, but I have since then watched a fair number of martial arts films from the 1970s and subsequent decades, kung fu, martial arts comedy, and wuxia fantasy period films. Nothing I’ve seen from the early 1970s exactly fits the bill of what I have always remembered watching that night, albeit which I tried not to watch, and I was drunk besides. I remember modern attire, drugs (maybe), blood, rape or threat of rape, more blood, and possibly a heart being ripped out of a man’s chest. But what I saw as violent in 1972, having never seen a martial arts film before, is far different from how I saw them later on, after I’d seen a number of them and was accustomed to the aesthetics of their genres. Plus I was drunk and there may have been vibes in the car that made me feel nervous and uncomfortable and affected my viewing experience?
Or did he instead only tell me there was a kung fu move where one could rip a person’s heart out of their chest and hold the person’s still beating heart before their eyes as they died?
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Could this have possibly been Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss in which a heart isn’t ripped out but Bruce Lee drives his fingers into a man’s chest and bright red paint doesn’t spurt but streams down under his chest and down his pant legs. This isn’t what a remember but it was released in the United States in October of 1972, looking further I find this ending was considered too extreme and was replaced with another for United States distribution.
We wouldn’t have even stayed for the end of the film.
I have remembered all this taking place when I was fifteen, in the fall of 1972. Rather than pay for a subscription to the Augusta paper, I refer to the Atlanta papers, thinking what would be playing there would be similar to what was playing in Augusta, and they don’t show Bruce Lee’s films hitting the movie screens until May of 1973. There’s an article on bloody Hong Kong kung fu films, focusing on the Shaw brothers, in September 1972. I’m able to do a cursory search in the Augusta Chronicle that gives clipped thumbnails of search results and the results seem sketchy, as with the Atlanta papers. I’m not getting returns for Shaw brothers films. Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury and The Chinese Connection don’t play at a drive-in theater in October of 1973. The Big Boss isn’t given as playing at all in Augusta, but it must have. All I find in the newspaper archives is Fist of Fury played in October of 1972 in New York, with English subtitles. In October of 1972, The Big Boss, with subtitles, was playing in San Francisco. But I don’t even know if this was a Bruce Lee film we were watching. I just know it was a martial arts film.
He takes martial arts and is a fan of them but I’ve never given this interest of his any thought.
My freshman year, ninth grade, in junior high, and my sophomore and junior years in high school, tenth and eleventh grades, are sketchy with huge holes. I have tended to group events in my mental history before and after my psychiatric hospitalization when I was fourteen, which was between two or three months in duration, and the brief psychiatric hospitalization I had the summer I turned sixteen, which was only a couple of days. During those years I was on a fair amount of prescribed psychotropic medication that zoned me out and I wanted to be zoned out, and if it wasn’t enough, which it wasn’t, I supplemented with the Codeine that was available in the kitchen medicine cabinet, apparently in those days no one thought anything of prescribing Codeine as a minor analgesic for my mother, and I’d help myself to all her older prescriptions that had piled up as she ever received new ones, she was always getting urinary tract infections and always getting bottles full of Codeine for them, I reasoned she wouldn’t pay attention to the older bottles emptying out and disappearing and I was right. The timeline gets squishy because I tried as best as I could to absent myself from being conscious, and considering the drugs, I understand how the reader might feel they can then trust nothing I have to say from those years, which is a problem, isn’t it. As best as I remember, my friend was out of my life my sophomore year. I have always remembered myself as being fifteen. No, I know that this happened when I was fifteen. I don’t remember when I stopped taking the psychotropic drugs, but by the middle of my junior year I was starting to emerge a little from my haze, and was pretty well out of it by the end of my junior year. I know I was no longer on the
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psychotropics at some point during my junior year. At the end of my sophomore year, I remember making a stab at going to my biology teacher and asking her as vaguely as possible about whether it was a bad idea for me to go out with a guy (another person, not the boyfriend of my friend) who was about four years older than me, and I realized I was attached to her but she not to me because she was completely taken aback and flustered that I’d ask her about this, which was embarrassing. I had no real reason to look up to her as even a vaguely nurturing adult figure, she was my teacher and we’d had no conversations, certainly no personal conversations, she didn’t know anything about me, she’d just treated me like a human being, one of her many students, no favoritism or attention, she paid me no more attention than anyone else, probably even less, I was likely influenced by television shows and movies of the time that depicted teachers acting as friendly counselors, listening to the problems of students and giving them advice, I had seen her having friendly conversations with girls after class. What this shows is how I did need a maternal figure in my life and she was elected by default. I didn’t even look up to her in any way, she was by no means a mentor, she was simply a person I thought might be safe. My friend had been in this teacher’s class with me, is one reason I know I was fifteen. The summer I turned sixteen, when I was still fifteen I had my first “real” job, however short-lived, as a waitress, and then something happened and I landed in the hospital that second time for a couple of days, I stabbed myself with a pencil in the hospital bathroom and at that moment my brain woke up and I realized I couldn’t do that ever again, I had suddenly intuited the self-harm was an addiction, that it was a pressure release, and as it was addictive I must and could stop doing this, I must not cut myself, I must not self-harm again. I realized as well that I didn’t belong in the hospital, that I couldn’t use it as a place to escape as I had when I was fourteen. It was essential when I was fourteen that I escape into the hospital, I didn’t fault myself for what had happened, but now I was sixteen and better and this wasn’t the life I wanted. This guy who I went out with for my friend definitely occurred before all that, when I was fifteen, in the fall. Another big marker for me was that toward the end of my sixteenth year I had legitimately overdosed on opioids and about died. After that I’d had my eye surgery, that was around Easter I think, and I began to be in a better place, mentally, I was in a much better place than when I was fifteen. No, I’ve always remembered my going out with my friend’s boyfriend as happening when I was fifteen, I’m just going to have to go with that, and there was playing at some drive-in a martial arts film, that’s a key element in the story, I’ve always remembered it being a martial arts film, and my being shocked by it, even threatened by his taking me to see it, but I don’t know what it was so I can’t search for it by title in the newspapers. I think he’d said the films were popular in Augusta because of the army base, but not so popular outside of the niche of martial arts fans. Maybe they only played one day a week, I don’t know. I’m scraping, trying to recollect things that might have been said. All I know for certain is there were two martial arts films playing that night.
4
This morning an article pops up in my social media feed on The Rashomon Effect. I
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love many of Akira Kurosowa’s films but I dislike Rashomon because it has so often been used as proof that there is no truth, only differences in perspective, in memory. The story involves the murder of a samurai who had been traveling with his wife. A bandit says he came upon them, overpowered the samurai, tying him up, and seduced the wife who was at first unwilling then freely submitted. Ashamed by her actions, she demands the bandit and husband duel one another for her. The bandit wins but the wife has fled during the duel. The testimony of the wife is instead that after the bandit raped her he left, and that the contempt with which her husband looked upon her was so intense that she fainted. When she woke, it was to find her husband had committed suicide with her dagger. The samurai’s testimony is given by means of a medium, and his account has the wife agreeing to marry the bandit after they have sex, but she asks the bandit to kill her husband first, which disgusts the bandit. The wife flees and the samurai commits suicide with his wife’s dagger. A woodcutter states that after the assault, as the woman wept the bandit begged the wife to marry him. He says the bandit also told her if she didn’t marry him, he would kill her. Finding her dagger, she freed her husband, expecting him to kill the bandit, but her husband said he wouldn’t duel over a ruined woman. He even told her she should kill herself. When the two men refuse to fight over her, she confessed when she’d learned the assailant was a famed bandit she thought maybe he’d free her from her farce of a marriage but now she has realized they are both weak. Having roused the two men to fight, the samurai is killed and she flees. A problem is that Rashomon relates different perspectives as being told by potentially unreliable narrators, people who have reasons to lie. Just because we don’t get to the whole truth in the film doesn’t mean there isn’t a truth. Also, Rashomon is a fictional movie.
I can’t remember what martial arts movie we watched, but it was a martial arts movie. If I were to find and watch it again, I wonder if it would seem less violent than how I perceived it then, because at the time it was a new form of entertainment to me.
Back to the damn drive-in film and the car in which I’m sitting with this person. He’s drinking and that makes this outing different. Straight alcohol. Not beer. This person, I’ve not described him yet, perhaps because there was always something about him that made me queasy, but I thought this was prejudice on my part and when I was fifteen I was trying to not be prejudiced against him based on appearances. He had sandy blond hair that was very straight, long bangs he swept over to the side, which would fall down his forehead in front of his eyes and he had to keep pushing them back, a touch of sideburns, and a mustache, a look to me that I associated with the late 1960s, he reminding me of how soldiers out-on-the-town looked when they were trying to fit in with the counterculture and be “cool” but were still obviously soldiers, not quite like how narcs looked like narcs, unable to fit in, but there was a resemblance, and one tried to not hold it against soldiers, you didn’t know who might have been drafted and was in against their will. He was skinny to the point of being gaunt, which he remarked on having to do with the stresses placed on his body by his former alcohol consumption. His blue jeans were crisp, and he wore crisp button-up shirts. In my fifteen-year-old view this translated into being too straight, not relaxed enough, not hip. He was always clean, he took pride in it, this was emphasized in his look. Now that I think about it, he also wore aftershave, which I didn’t like. I tried not
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to be ever close enough to him to smell it. The way the parts all fit together, I would look at him sometimes and feel slightly nauseated. I never understood how my friend had found him attractive. But the more I found myself sympathizing or empathizing with him as a person, during the time we knew one another, the less viscerally repelled I was, though not attracted. I began to think of his face as being sometimes pleasant. It’s after he strangled me that he becomes absolutely and utterly repugnant so that I can’t bear thinking about him.
It’s tough for me, writing this. I repeatedly go in and lie down. Having to think hard about his appearance in order to write about it, his after shave coming to mind, my body starts to empty, I become light-headed, my legs are far away and I feel like the blood is leaving them. I’m surprised by how profoundly I don’t want to return to this chapter and finish it. I’m surprised by how much effort this has taken, as it’s not to me a very significant memory. What I’m relating had its effect on me, yes, at the time, but when I was fifteen I did honestly feel that not much had happened as I was unharmed. What I wanted to do was forget.
He's talked previously about some rage issues he has had problems with, and I can empathize with rage over the unfairness of life. I've seen him get upset and angry a couple of times when he's talking about things but I've seen a lot of rage in my life and his anger was nothing in comparison.
As it turns out, he doesn't take it so well when I say never, I don’t want to be his girlfriend, our hanging out time is over now, that I’m not interested in him. He gets upset. But I don't expect violence. It never enters my mind. After all, he has never been violent with me. I only realize how critically I've misjudged the situation when he suddenly pins me back so my head is bent back over the car seat, and starts strangling me. My arms must have been somehow pinned down because I couldn’t use them. I would have used them if I could have.
He says, "I could kill you right now. I can make you do anything I want."
That is the main memory that has never left, that threat that he could kill me right then, that I don’t have the physical strength to protect myself.
He says he knows martial arts (I've seen his martial arts practice uniform) and he can kill me instantly. If this sounds like "overkill", it was. There was already the handgun. There was already the knife that he wore on his belt. I'm being strangled and even I'm thinking that's overkill.
Before he attacks me, building up to it, he describes to me how there’s a martial arts technique in which you can rip a person’s heart out of their chest and hold it up before their eyes as they die. Yes, that’s why I remember a heart being ripped out in the film. He was talking about it this martial arts technique and it was extremely vivid and horrifying to me, the idea that you could look at your beating heart outside your body as you died. Being strangled will kind of wake your ass right up when you're drunk, except you're still drunk but awake. He is right, actually, he is quite strong, because I can't move. I can't do anything. I can't breathe.
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This is what happens when you are strangled. You. Can. Do. Nothing.
You can't even try to scream when you're being strangled.
When you can't breathe, you mainly think about trying to breathe.
When someone has you pinned down and is strangling you, there is no fighting them.
I am fifteen and I have always been told by people that when someone hurts you they don't really mean it. I've been told this by people who hurt me. I've always been told by people who hurt me that when I believe I’ve been threatened there is no real threat. I know exactly what I would be told about what he’s doing. I would be told, "He was acting. He wouldn't have hurt you." You only know you have been hurt when you are dead. That is the only way to find out if someone is serious about hurting you, when you are dead. If you don’t end up dead then it never happened, it’s you complaining about a mirage, nothing, they meant you no real home and can’t be blamed.
I'm fifteen and I don't know how to define this. Is it just all an act and no real danger when you are pinned down and being strangled and can't breathe? If it’s all an act, if he doesn’t intend to strangle me, have I not really been strangled?
He has said, "I could kill you right now." He has not said, "I'm going to kill you." I note this, but I'm still being strangled. What he's doing is threatening me so that I will do what he wants. I am also still conscious. I cannot move. I cannot speak. I am absolutely, physically helpless, but I'm still conscious.
I have been strangled before and been made unconscious immediately. It was when I was ten years of age and living for a short while in Missouri with my grandparents and attending Fairview Elementary. At the end of the school day, those children who were waiting for the school buses, collected in what was to be the cafeteria which was not yet in use for food service. It was a new school and things weren’t quite finished yet so we were daily bussed over to the junior high school to have lunch, where you can even buy ice cream sandwiches. It’s funny the things one remembers, like those ice cream sandwiches. The time we spent waiting for the buses I remember as being remarkably void of activity, there were no tables in the cafeteria and I remember our sitting around on the floor, at the edges of the room. I’d never left before to use the bathroom, and one had to go to a teacher and get permission, which I did. The cafeteria was itself a liminal area, as we didn’t use it for its stated purpose, but I recollect seeking out a teacher and then leaving the area by a door maybe in the right wall that opened onto the main body of the school. The bathrooms in this brand new school were nice and spotless fresh and spacious, at least to the size of my ten-year-old self. There was no one in the bathroom. As one entered, the stalls were on the right of the room and the sinks on the left. I remember going into a middle stall and afterward I went to one of the sinks to wash my hands. I remember the mirror being in front of me. I remember starting to wash my hands and suddenly, so suddenly, someone coming up behind me fast, it is all so fast I don't even have a chance to look up and see them in the mirror as they grab my neck from behind and strangle me
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with such incredible viciousness, with such strength, that I immediately pass out. What has always struck me is the viciousness, that they caught my throat in just the right way, with such force, that I immediately blacked out. My hands were free and I wasn’t able to even raise them to fight because I didn’t have the opportunity, that is how quickly it all happened. When I come to, perhaps even after only a moment, for all I know I was only unconscious for mere seconds, I am alone on the floor. Maybe I hear them as they exit the door, I don’t know. Who could do this? I'm confused. Fuzzy. Shocked. Everything feels disordered. Unreal. For a couple of days we had been playing a game on the bus in which you hold your breath and you’re supposed to pass out. Somehow it’s a game that is still played by children, and when I check for its history online I’m surprised to find that there are versions in which it’s called the choking game, and kids choke themselves with something such as a belt until they black out. In another version, children hyperventilate until passing out. That’s what we did, there was no physical strangulation involved. We were supposed to hyperventilate and then hold our breath and this was supposed to cause a person to pass out. We played this game on the bus and a couple of girls did at least give the appearance of briefly passing out, which meant to me that this had an effect on some people but I had felt none, so had I done it incorrectly? We did it again, a second day, on the bus on the way to school. I had wondered if maybe I was doing it wrong, because I’d not passed out, and I thought maybe the technique was such that if I relaxed into it seeming like I was going to pass out then I would, I wondered if that’s how this worked, because the game caused me to feel nothing. Then when I had relaxed into it seeming like I was passed out in my seat, my eyes simply closed and my head leaning against the bus window, I didn’t pass out then either, and I was left wondering what to do now, and I felt guilty because I hadn’t passed out like I’d seen the other two girls do and now I was left with pretending I had maybe passed out. I just didn’t understand how exactly this game worked that had been taught one of the girls by an older sister, which is I guess how these games continue on forever, a slightly older sibling or child passing it along to the next generation of under-classmates.
After I was strangled in the bathroom, I wondered if the game we’d played on the bus was responsible, that perhaps someone had become mad at me because I’d pretended to pass out, I was being perhaps rebuked by someone for my having pretended to pass out. But that didn’t account for the seeming rage that went into their strength, and how quickly they moved so I hardly heard them before I’d been grabbed from behind. I wasn’t even certain where they came from, maybe from the area of the far left stall, but as far as I had been aware no one was in that stall, I had thought I was in the bathroom alone, I hadn’t heard anyone enter. Even though I was standing in front of the mirror washing my hands it had happened so quickly that as I glanced up I was already passing out and didn’t see them. The shock of it was so great, that I scarcely remember afterward going to one of the two teachers who was waiting with all of us for the buses, but I know I did so. My throat is hoarse. I can barely talk. I no longer remember what happened afterwards except I know there was disbelief that this had happened, and I didn’t know what to do about that. Though the teacher didn’t know about the earlier game on the bus, I felt like the person who cried wolf when there
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was no wolf, with my pretending to pass out on the bus during the blackout game with my friends, and yes I had pretended with that but what happened in the bathroom was not pretend. Nor had I simply fainted and not comprehended this. I’d been attacked. It had happened, there was no pretend, there were even marks left on my neck. It was terrifying to me to realize that there was someone who hated me so much that they’d do this and I had no idea who they were. It was terrifying, also, the certainty in their attack. It felt like they absolutely knew what they were doing and how to do it, which was what was most frightening. I wish I could remember exactly what happened afterward, and perhaps a reason I don’t is because “nothing happened” in that I was all right and it was never understood what had happened. The incident is like a big white hole in my life. I'm at the sink washing my hands. There's an incomprehensibly fast rush from nowhere behind me and someone grabs my neck and it's so fast that when I start to look up toward the mirror I don't see anything because this is also what it's like to be strangled, I'm already passing out. Then I open my eyes and am alone on the floor. They are either already gone or maybe I hear the door closing but I don’t see them. The bathroom is empty. It's such a big white hole that I've never known what to do with it.
This is perhaps how I know this guy on top of me in the car at the drive-in isn't serious about strangling me to death. I'm still conscious. The lurid movie is running on the big drive-in screen with all its screams and yells and blood. I can't talk. I can't move. It is impossible for me to do anything. But I am conscious. My body tells me this is serious, and I'm even thinking that maybe I'm in some deep shit. But I'm conscious. And I'm not sure I'm thinking, "Oh, this guy isn't serious, he just wants to scare me into doing what he wants", because things feel serious when you can't breathe or move. I think it is more like a semi-conscious awareness.
I don't know if it's just me or if being strangled flat knocks out fight or flight because you can't fight and you can't flee. You can do nothing. So maybe fight or flight shuts down. I have only one thing I can do. I stare him in the eyes as he's doing this. I don’t take my eyes off his. Not once. That is all I can do is keep staring him hard in the eyes like I'm not afraid. Really, when all you have left is one weapon, and it's your eyes, you use that one weapon you've got left. And I don't, actually, feel fear.
I realize I don't feel fear, I smile. It is a smile that came crazily out of nowhere, and partly an intentional smile. To throw him. Staring in his eyes, I smiled. It freaked him out. I see the shock in his eyes, that I've smiled. It's not a pretend smile. It's a real smile. A hard smile. I've smiled like this before. I've been hurt before and I already know what it is to smile and laugh in response to being hurt because I’ve laughed when being beaten at home. I’ve laughed when being beaten at home because I couldn’t help but laugh, I would just start laughing and couldn’t stop. I’m feeling that kind of hard smile I’ve smiled before when you’re being abused and the hard smile is one’s fighting back against it, scorning the abuser. He starts to back off, shocked. I keep on staring him in the eyes, smiling. He lets go, sits back. He’s drunk, but not so drunk, not as drunk as I was before he strangled me, and he sheds a few tears. He may have said I made him do it, like how parents will say you made them do it when they’re beating you. He says I have no feelings. He tells me I'm the hardest, coldest
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person he's ever met. Good. He got the message. I know I’m not hard and cold but I want him to keep thinking I'm the coldest bitch he's ever met if that will keep me safe. I'm only fifteen years old, and even I know that's pretty ludicrous. But if he thinks that? All the better.
Because after that, there's still the drive home. And that’s a problem, isn’t it? After strangling me, he pulls himself together and drives me home. He promises me he’ll just drive me home, he promises me I’m safe, nothing else will happen, and nothing happens. He drives me home and parks so the passenger’s side is next to the front lawn which means we came in the back way down Edinburgh rather than coming up Edinburgh from Cambridge. It’s odd to realize that in memory, and I now wonder why we came the back way down Edinburgh. I don’t remember if he says anything. I don’t now remember the drive home, I only remember his starting the car at the drive-in to drive me home, and I think the reason I remember that is because I wondered about that drive home—I couldn’t call my parents to get me as I didn’t trust my parents, they weren’t helpers, plus I’d been drinking, and I felt I couldn’t call the police because I’d been drinking and because nothing had happened, I was all right, he’d stopped. When he said I was going to be safe on the drive home, I had to make the choice to believe him, and I did, he looked completely wrung out by the experience. I had to trust that nothing would happen on the ride home, that he wouldn’t change his mind and harm me. And he didn’t, he drove me home, the ride was uneventful, and we’re parked in front of the house. Without saying anything, I get out of the car. I tell myself as I walk away from it that I am going to forget this person was ever in my life, that I ever knew them, I will never admit to anyone I ever hung out with them, that I ever knew them. If someone ever says, "Didn't you hang out with so-and-so?" I'll lie and say, "No." That's how much I want this all gone. I want everything about this out of my life that completely. I want to forget it somehow. I don't want to think about how stupid I was to be in that position. I'm not even as angry at the guy as I am upset with myself for this big fat mistake. I reason I learned something valuable, but I want to take some big psychic scissors and cut it out of my head. If I could take some big psychic scissors and cut it out of my head, I would. Which is why I never talked about it afterward. It happened but it hadn’t happened. It was already in a box, and I duct-taped that box all around and shoved it back deep in the closet. Except for one time when I briefly ran into her at a store a few years later, I never spoke to or saw the girl again, her changing schools completely melting her out of my life, and as none of my other friends knew I had hung out with this person it made it easier to compartmentalize and try to forget because there was no one to question me about him or bring up his name. He. Simply. Did. Not. Happen. Forget.
Which means I tell no one about what happened. I tell no one he strangled me. I wait for years to tell anyone what happened.
I felt I wasn’t responsible for my being strangled, but I was uncertain about how much shame, if any, I should feel for using him for alcohol. However, I also thought that despite all our differences we had become, to some degree, friends, with everything he’d talked to me about, and my listening, I had sympathized and empathized with him. I didn’t know if that was dumb on my part, but I reasoned I had learned
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something very important that would help me not to ever be in a relationship in which I might be strangled.
He may have said let’s forget about this, but I can’t say with surety that he did as that has been said to me other times. People like to say, “Let’s forget this happened.” If he did say it, and I believe he did, I don’t think I responded. Yet, I found that in the telling of this particular story, after so long, I felt guilty, as if the fact I’ve been silent for so long was a tacit agreement to keep silence and now I’ve betrayed that. I can feel something and not agree with what I feel. I can say this is how I feel, knowing it’s a wrong way to feel. I had zero sympathy for him at the time. At the time I didn’t tell anyone about this not because I felt sympathy, or that I’d be betraying him, my not telling anyone was instead the self protection of being unable to have this in my life, I had to wipe it out, I didn’t want anyone to know I’d ever hung out with him.
Plus, there was the fact I’d used him for being a reliable source of alcohol.
Youth. As far as youth. With the exception of a couple of people with whom I was friends, I was not close to my peers in junior high and high school, but I know more than a couple were assaulted or raped by a boyfriend. More than once, a person I knew, with whom I was even only an acquaintance, would start talking and tell me all about what had happened to them. I would listen. Then they would stand and walk away and melt out of my life as we weren’t close friends. With them there was a kind of ambivalence about the abuse, a resignation to putting up with it, that this was just the way things were, they wondered if they were responsible if they had been been heavily “petting” then the boyfriend wouldn’t stop. A couple of times with these girls I felt impending catastrophe. A bomb had gone off in their lives, it was tearing through them, and I uncomfortably wondered what would happen. We were young, inexperienced, and the culture of the time extolled the “good” girl and trashed the “bad” girl. If one willingly went sexually beyond what was supposed to be the line, and if one was then raped, to tell about it would mean revealing one had been “bad”, and the girl might be blamed. Boys might be excused as being, by nature, unable to stop after a certain point. And if a girl cried rape, then it was on her for ruining the boy’s life, which was especially egregious if he was a promising athlete. One girl who was only an acquaintance in high school one morning sat next to me on a seat in the back of the school bus and confessed to me the whole story about how she had been gang-raped by the athletes at school. Her boyfriend, or a boy she believed was her boyfriend, had taken her to a party out at the lake, gotten her drunk, they’d had sex and he’d invited his teammates into the bedroom to rape her. It had happened the prior weekend and she still looked in a bad way, I don’t mean physically roughed up, but shredded, torn apart. She was traumatized, confused, dulled, in shock. She was trying to sort out what happened. Did she deserve it? She didn’t know whether to be upset with her boyfriend’s teammates or with him. Was he really even her boyfriend if he would do this to her. Had he used her. She felt like she deserved it or it was her fault because she had gone to the party. I knew I was just there to listen, that she’d chosen me as I wasn’t inside the clique and was someone to whom it was safe to tell her story. When she was done telling her story, I told her what had happened was horrible and it wasn’t her fault. I think at that moment all she really wanted was to
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hear that she wasn’t responsible. I offered no advice, I didn’t suggest she go to the authorities, she was fragile and I felt that if I ventured beyond listening and reassurance she would feel threatened, and she was already traumatized. I felt all she needed to hear me say was that she wasn’t responsible for this. She thanked me for letting her talk, for listening to her, and that was uncomfortable, to be thanked for simply listening to her story.
These assaults have an accumulative effect over a lifetime. If they don't bother you one day, they come back another. It's not easy to write them out. I try to inject myself back in the moment so I can drag out of it what I was feeling, so it will "communicate", and it's harsh. By the time I'm done, I lose track of even what day it is. I am dislocated in time and body. Even though this is something I'm willing to write about because it is a lesser offense in my life, I still feel dislocated in time and body. I don't feel relief. I just feel sad and horrified for all of us huddled together on this planet. I feel a little sad and horrified for the person who strangled me, if I take for granted he didn’t mean it. Does just strangling as a scare tactic “mean it”? Did he do this to another? Did he wake up to how violence was not an option and not do it again? Did he skate through life by committing maybe occasional battery but never get in any real trouble? When I eventually told my spouse about it, and he asked me who it was I was relieved when he didn’t know him. Why the relief? Because the incident has been set off in its own little box for so long and because as a fifteen-year-old I needed this person to be a world apart from me, an anonymous who ceased to exist afterward?
What has bothered me even more was the attack in the bathroom when I was ten. A count of the children waiting for the bus was done every afternoon, and I was the only one who had left the room at that time to go use the bathroom, because only one student at a time was permitted to go. Any child who had left the cafeteria previously to use the bathroom would have been marked as returning before another child could go. I remember the teacher stating this as if to mean it was an impossibility that I could have been attacked, because I was the only child waiting for the bus who had left to use the bathroom at that time, so though my neck was marked I felt that suspicion was on me, that I may have done this, or that the incident was so bizarre they were reluctant to explore what had happened, which left me confused and upset. Because of the marks, the teacher said they would look into it, but what did that mean? I didn’t know. I felt like they weren’t telling the truth, that it was just a pacifying maneuver. I had become an inconvenience. I had liked and enjoyed school there and suddenly I felt like I couldn’t trust the two teachers who had been looking over us, I don’t mean that I think either one of them did it, no, but something anomalous had happened, and they just wanted it to disappear. Though I know I went and told the teacher, though I remember coming to after what I assume was a brief black-out, I don’t remember rising from the floor, I don’t remember exiting the bathroom, though I can feel the fear I would have had at the prospect of going back out into that empty hall and how I might have looked hard both ways to see if I could tell where the person had gone. I don’t remember returning to the cafeteria, though I obviously did. When I returned to the cafeteria, I would have had to tell the teacher I was back so she could mark I’d returned, which is when I would have told her about
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what had happened, but I don’t begin to remember what I might have said to her. I was shocked and confused but I don’t know how this might have manifested, if it left me vague or if I managed to be articulate. My brother, B, was attending the same school, riding the same bus, and I don’t remember communicating with him, I don’t remember riding the bus home that day and that blank feels odd to me as it feels like I should remember the forbidding effort of the bus ride home, because I felt roughed up and chaotic and afraid and vulnerable. The event fell into a shadow area in my memory as it ended up being my last day at school. Plans had already been made for our leaving and moving down to Georgia with the rest of my family, and I believe I was supposed to be at the school at least another day, but I didn’t return. I don’t remember if I told my grandmother about what had happened, or if a teacher called and spoke to her, as I said I don’t even remember riding home after this on the bus, but she checked my neck and it was marked. It seemed exasperating to everyone that the marks were there. And there was no explanation had for it because I was the only student waiting for the bus who had left to use the bathroom at that time. As for me, I knew that someone else had been there in that bathroom, they had done this to me, and that the notations on the teacher’s sheet for who was waiting to use the bus and who had left to go to the bathroom and returned wasn’t the end all and be all of the matter. The two teachers said there wasn’t anyone else in the school, that everyone had left except for them and the students, who were all accounted for. That seemed like it was supposed to be the end of the matter but I knew there had been someone else there. The teachers said they’d check into it and let us know if they found anything out but I wondered how they would check this out, what did that mean, and I knew I would never hear anything else about it, that it was over and done with. Something had happened. But nothing had happened. Something had happened to me. But as far as the world was concerned, nothing had happened.
After all these decades, after much searching, I manage to find on the internet a few photos that show the school’s cafeteria, which is near the entrance to the school, there is the lobby type area outside with the front doors to where we caught the bus, and entering the cafeteria from that area, in the right wall are the doors to the hall I exited to go to the bathroom. My memory was right on these things.
I always wonder, when I see people with scarves wrapped or tied around their necks, how they can do that and not worry that someone could grab the scarf and strangle them. But a fashion must for men for generations has been the tie worn around the neck, and no one has said, "Oh, you shouldn't wear that, it's an easy way for someone to choke you."