The Past Rides Behind Me.

I know little to nothing about my ancestry. My birth father's father was in WWII. He has a lot of stories which all end with him doing something crazy and dangerous- just for kicks. My father's grandfather was a map-maker and a wood carver. I used to visit him when I was a kid and he would give me ducks and deer and elephants that he had carved, as well as a few dollars so that I could buy books. It was a weekly ritual. My mother and I would drive over to visit them and then we would go to the bookstore on the way back.

My mother's family is quite a bit more upsetting but I believe I told you about it when you were here. She had an incredibly rough childhood. Her father died in prison. He was murdered by someone who disapproved of his crimes or at least I believe that was the assumption. He was a child molester, as was his father whom my mother had to visit on a regular occasion. An offering by her mother, if you will. An exchange for money, food none of which she ever gave to my mother or her 7 siblings.

Most of her siblings are dead. Died in prison from drug overdoses. One of her brothers was let out of prison pretty much accidentally. He was a very bad person in many ways and somehow they had confused him for someone else. On his way out of the prison he was walking across the street and was run over by a truck. Killed instantly. This was something like 10 years ago, perhaps 15. The only sister who she speaks to has several retarded children and is currently involved in a severe law suit as a result of the fact that her dog bit off the face of someone whom she had met on the internet. She told my mother, "He wasn't all that to begin with." The dog ripped off his lip and when she was sent back to the house by the hospital to retrieve it she returned to the hospital with the brilliant discovery that, "He musta ate it." She called my mother the day after it happened to see if he could sue her.

She tried to commit suicide at 7 and then again at 13. She ran away from home at 14 and lived in Mt. Washington with a family she knew. She married my father when she was 17. He had shouted to her from his car when she was walking to work. He was addicted to heroin and various other recreational drugs. He was small but violent and he beat her with regularity. She beat him back often but he was a dirty fighter. She got pregnant at 18 but got an abortion. She was 22 when she gave birth to me and I was 4 when she finally left him. That wasn't until he knocked all her teeth out with a baseball bat one day when she was sitting with her friend watching TV. She didn't even know that he had come home.

Sufficed to say, I grew up a rather angry child. I spent the first 9 years of my life involved in a rather violent legal dispute. My father didn't even want me. It didn't make much sense. His stepmother, Ava, wanted me more than he did, surely. I would have to go visit him every other weekend. We met in the parking lot of Bob's Big Boy. They would drive me back to Pennsylvania and we would always stop to get beer on the way there. I don't remember very much of it really. Only a set of ceramic animal shaped bells. Little chipmunks dressed as old maids and farmers. And a set of audio tapes of readings of Mother Goose stories and such. They gave me a lot of gifts. My father told me, much later, that I said to him when I was about 3 that I didn't think that my birth father loved me because he never made me go to bed when I was supposed to and he always gave me presents. I was a smart kid. I was in therapy, discussing my feelings and eating M&M's and playing with carved wooden jungle animals for a few years. I remember feeling comfortable there.

I read constantly beginning at a rather young age. I was always super smart in school up until 5th grade when we moved and I had to be with a bunch of people I didn't know or like. I lived in Georgia in the second grade which is how the court trials finally ended. My birth father owed something like 10,000 dollars in back child support and my father agreed to let him off if he signed the papers giving up custody. He sent him the corner of a newspaper in an envelope and on it was scrawled, "You can keep her." We moved back to the house my father owned, his father's house. (His father was a chemist who worked on the Manhattan project. He was cold and empty and died a terribly sad death recently.) We moved back only to be greeted by the fact that the people who had sublet were some crazy devil worshippers. This is going to sound very crazy but it's true. The house was covered in blood from weird rituals, circles on the carpet and the walls. They had a bunch of praying mantis' as pets and they were running wild about the house. I remember standing outside and waiting while my parents went in and then I had to stay at my grandfather's house for a week. It was awful. He was married to a terrible terrible balding bitch. Florence. I hated that woman. She made the worst oatmeal.

We moved out soon after for many reasons all of which are long and involved stories, regarded as simply unbelievable by most normal individuals. I'll spare you the long and grisly details. The house wasn't the same after those people lived there, though. My uncle wouldn't go in it and he didn't even see what happened and that was the house he grew up in. He lives in New Mexico now. He does healing with crystals an channeling and things of the sort. I believe in many things that few people believe in or understand but it is simply because I have seen and experienced them. My father has a number of very long and complicated "other realm" stories which I know he wouldn't make up and which are simply insane. One day, perhaps, I will tell you some of them. They are good stories. One of them involves Captain Beefheart and a thunderstorm.

I was a rather angry child. When my sister was born I was very jealous because she belonged to my father, who I had come to know as my father, and I was a product of a terrible thing, something my mother was still struggling with. Her health was always bad. She grew up severely malnutritioned and therefore struggled with many debilitating illnesses. She was in therapy most of my young life. She was not terribly stable and I hated going on errands with her, to the grocery store, etc. I hated my sister and tortured her endlessly. I was a vindictive and terrible child. I was always getting in trouble for lying and for beating up on my sister. I watched far too much television and played with Barbie's only when I had friends who wanted to. I had an undying love for the New Kids on the Block. Fifth grade was my worst year. I had been with my friends whom I had gone to preschool and even nursery school with except for that one year in Georgia. And suddenly we had to move. I went to fifth grade in a school which was full of supremely wealthy jews. I was terrified. There were girls who wore blazers and brooches in fifth grade. It was terrifying, really. And I decided to wear all black, all the time. I was disliked by my teachers and picked on. I was borderline suicidal.

It got better in 6th grade, though I was an awkward child at best. Braces at 14, didn't begin developing physically till about 17. I was often made fun of for being flat chested and was as relieved as I was confused when I finally grew breasts. I remember thinking, "Where the hell did these come from?" My mother never thought it was important to be in advanced classes. They were going to put me in GT but she thought it would be the same, just more homework. I didn't try to get in on my own. I figured she was right. In high school I was rather confused. I wrote all the time and read too. I always knew that writing was the only thing that ever let me understand myself. I wrote all the time but never really liked any of it. My parents encouraged me and they liked my writing. I struggled very much in Math though. I hated it. I spent my time editing the school literary magazine and yearbook. I realized that most of the people around me were idiots. I drank too much sometimes and ended up in the hospital more than once. I had refused to deal with many things until after I was out of high school. I wished that my parents had the money to send me to college and I knew they didn't. I didn't know what I wanted to do but write and I didn't want to write a bunch of garbage.

This is probably a lot more than you intended to hear. This evening the bistro buzzed with giggling, giddy guests. Everyone was glowing; the fire crackled and snapped and the flames flew. I raced around, smiled, spoke. I took what came to me and did what I could. I don't know what I long for but there is some sinking emptiness which I can't seem to get a grasp of. Perhaps it is the imminence of age, the knowledge that the future will come and go just like the present does and I am still here doing what I have been doing for years. Perhaps it is the cold weather sinking in, the frost covering the trees and streets shines and it reminds me that I am living through yet another east coast winter, still waiting tables and still a just barely finished book of short stories beneath me. I know that if I wrote more often, if I made real literary progress that the emptiness which wavers, haunting- would somehow subside or at least temporarily quiet itself. I am too often asking other people what they want and too rarely asking myself. I am less than I should be. I am exactly what I let myself become. I am always using the same words. I am living in the shadow of how I'd like to live. I am billowing beneath the weight of my own expectations. I am being too hard on myself.