Faith Healers Dime Story

My mom’s friend, named Gina, freaked out. We were watching Benny Hinn the faith healer in the trailer she shared with her mother. I was a teenager. Mom told me later that Gina went to a faith healer, a dwarf who rode on a skateboard, and was cured of her stuttering. “I'm anxious. I'm anxious,” she said while we were watching Benny Hinn. My mother used Jesus to calm her down. I used to have a friend whose mother would comfort his schizophrenic older brother using Bible verses. He remembered that as traumatic as well. At least Gina wasn't a sibling, only a family friend. I told another friend about Gina's seizures and stuttering, and she said, “Poor thing.” She had empathy for her, but she hadn't been subjected to her directly. From being exposed to Gina, I learned what grand maul seizures were. I wonder what ailment caused Gina's severe chronic stuttering. The stuttering I believe was a neurological or physiological handicap. It went beyond nervousness: it had to do with the connection of neurons between her brain and the muscles that moved her jaw. I watched her struggle to complete sentences, fighting the structure of her bones, tendons, muscles, ligaments, and epithelial tissue to get words out. Anything she said would have to be Very Important to be worth the effort.

God was Worth the Effort to Speak. “I have to go to the Bathroom!” was not Worth the Effort.” Neither was, “I'm bored!” “The Kids Don't Like Me!” “Why do we live in a trailer, mom?” “Why’s Minnie Mouse acting strange again?” (Minnie Mouse was a chihuahua with epilepsy, just like her owners.) “Why did Dad leave?” “I r-r-r-r-re-j-j-j-joiced on that day!” she said, showing me an article about a court ruling allowing prayer in public schools. School prayer was important enough for her to try to speak about.         

I theorized that God Gives Poor People Problems they can't solve so they aren't too Upset about Living in a Trailer. If you have to overcome a Speech Impediment, are you going to Waste that Time on Complaining? You either pray to be healed, or pray for a better life in Heaven.

Benny Hinn the Faith Healer provided background noise and atmosphere for the trailer home where one mother and daughter set their scene of neurological dysfunction, which leads to family dysfunction and economic dysfunction. Nothing is solved. It made Renae Meade and her Mother whose Name I Can't Remember Happy to watch Benny Hinn on TV. I used to envy Renae because she was Thin. Her husband was Obese. He sat on my mother's wicker couch and Broke It. If I'd said, “Whatever, mother,” and not let it Bother Me So Much that I couldn't have a Normal Family, it might have been one more factor that could have let me keep my job. If I hadn't gotten Upset when I heard that Renae and her Husband didn't have a refrigerator or a stove where they lived in Roswell. I saw how close to the brink I was. I didn't want to go there. But God wouldn't let me be better than them.

Gina never went to college, I think. What I mean by getting a college education is getting  well-rounded liberal arts education, the type of education where you’re exposed to things like sociology, literature, and comparative religions. Gina saw the faith healer with the skateboard at a hellfire and brimstone church. What bothers me about Renae was that she never got the kind of education where she’d look askance at that type of fundamentalist religion. Also Gina wouldn’t believe in equal rights for gays and lesbians. And I do. They’re one thing I think is worth the effort to speak. I was reading a library book about the gay revolution that said it helped everybody, the way they went from marginalized to mainstream. Renae wouldn’t listen to shows like “This Way Out” on KUNM like I do. When I was doing worse mentally, I thought that God was punishing me for listening to programs like that, and for believing in gay rights. Really I was just punishing myself.

My mother was friends to the “village idiots”. Another friend, Claire, called her every day asking for rides to Wal-Mart. Claire was developmentally disabled. She went to psychosocial rehab. She’d walk around saying Wesley Snipes was her boyfriend. I know… combine Claire with Gina in some way. Such as make it so her husband gives her beatings with his cane. And I threatened to call adult protective services about that when my mom was visiting me once. (Fiction)

I read this at Dime Stories, a three-minute prose open mike. I don’t like it, though, and it wouldn’t win, because it doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end. There was a featured performer who also was part of the OutSpoken queer poetry slam. She didn’t worry as much as I do about what her family thinks of her. She doesn’t live in a stupid community for the mentally ill either. When she found herself jobless in the bay area, she advertised on Craigslist as an energy healer. She learned to do things like make “yummy noises.” She said “yummy noises” were like what you’d make if you were trying to seduce a fortysomething guy with chest hair coming out of his shirt, or were trying to get a baby to eat vegetable flavored baby food. She became a faith healer, but a different kind that the faith healer I wrote about in my story. I wonder how I can break into this market, how I can make my story about the faith healer sound as compelling.

There was also a young Hispanic guy with a detailed tattoo portrait of Charles Darwin on his arm. He wrote about his grandfather who has Alzheimer’s. His grandfather thinks that all people in their thirties are his grandchildren. Two men in their thirties tried to rob him. He saw them in their ski masks and made a comment about youth fashion today. “You look like you’re going to rob the place,” he said. He told them to get him a beer. After that, they left. He won, he outsmarted them without knowing it, because of his Alzheimer’s. My story about Gina doesn’t have a positive twist like that story does. I don’t know how to give it one.

I do remember that they laughed at the part when I said that God gives poor people problems so they can’t complain. So that’s the type of thing I need to do more of. One problem is that I don’t like Gina as a character. I’m still angry at her. I am angry because thinking about her makes me think it's not okay to be me. It makes me think that just because she was conservative, I have to be conservative. It's hard to be liberal when I equate liberalism with coolness and popularity, two things I write about ad nauseum.

I need to think about what I think is Worth The Effort to speak. Maybe I don't think anything is Worth The Effort. And that's not a good place to be in.

Adult Protective Services

At first my mother had an apartment she called "The Art Studio"
but she painted watercolors of flowers and butterflies to sell as greeting cards.
You can't support yourself that way. And
She didn't want to explore the non-Christian things she'd need to in order to be an Artist.
With a capital A and a breathy French accent.

I do want to explore those things. Some of them.

After the divorce, she never tried practical blue-collar, or should I say, pink collar, work like waitressing, nursing, or being a secretary.

Sweet. Innocent. Failure to thrive. She created a new life of bucolic naivete free from modern toil and sin with my stepfather.

“If I'm not here, I'm off walking a dog,” was a note on the door
I saw when I was making a collage of pictures of her
to display at the funeral.

In the custody agreement, she got to see us one day a week and every other weekend.
On a weekend when we were with our dad, she was raped.

Actually, she died a short time after I saw the note.
I saw it at 10:30. She died at the eleventh hour. She was ready.

“He gave me the creeps,” a high-school friend said about my stepfather.

When they met, he rode a bike everywhere. He deejayed at the local Christian radio station, housed in the same building as the adult contemporary station. My stepfather talked about the “Texicans,” and she said. He lived with his mother a la Norman Bates. I was led to believe that he lived off her Social Security checks as well. His mother's name was Goldie. In her bathroom was a sign that said, “If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie.”

What would I have wanted Adult Protective Services to do?
Investigate my stepfather for elder abuse? Should they have kept my mother from being raped, kept her from leaving her doors unlocked? There were ants in my grandmother's ninetieth birthday. Should a swat team have barged in the door and thrown away that cake? Possibly carted my dear, sweet granny off to a nursing home? Does the government exist to protect people from themselves?

Should Adult Protective Services have kept my mother from marrying my stepfather? Should Adult Protective Services have intervened when my father made my mother walk places so her baby, my brother, would come out sooner? Should Adult Protective Services have intervened when my grandmother had to wash my brother's cloth diapers?

At the eleventh hour, my mother went out walking a dog, and never came back.

Goodbye, Mom (edit)

My mom calls every Sunday. WE have the same conversation.

This time when she calls I will not answer. I also will not answer when she calls back on Monday. On Tuesday I will inform my psychiatrist of my decision. He and my therapist will be my only support until I meet new friends. I suppose, when I write this, it means I don’t want Evelyn Krueger to be my friend anymore. Sophie Chang would point out to me that that’s not fair to Evelyn, since Evelyn is my best friend.

When I first wrote this, I was 33 years old. I have not spent a single day not thinking about my mom. I wonder how much normal people think about their mothers. I think that, though I was physically in my thirties, emotionally I was about twelve. Maybe even two. I was throwing a temper tantrum. It might have been interpreted by anyone who saw it as a sign that I was suicidal. That was not the case, though. It was only me being a spoiled brat. I deserved the unhappiness that I got.

When my dad got custody of us after the divorce, my grandmother told me that when we weren't there anymore mom would just lie on the bed and cry. I was 8 years old. My younger brother was 4. There was nothing I could have done that would have changed the judge’s decision to award my father the majority of the custody for us. He looked at the facts, listened to all sides, and determined that my father was the fitter parent. It’s too bad that my mother’s feelings were hurt by that, but that’s just the way it goes.

It occurs to me that I’m assuming the judge was male. It might have been a female judge. I think, though, that the judge must have been a white male. If it had been a woman, or a person of color, I’m sure I never would have heard the end of it, in the same way I never heard the end of it when she told me about the young, attractive black judge and attorney who exchanged flirtatious glances, in her opinion, and congratulatory looks, while presiding over the case in which a family friend in Olney, TX, was accused by his ex-wife of molesting their daughter.

I am taking a college-level art class. I know I have a lot of talent and my own vision by the comments I get from my teacher. She says I have my own unique drawing style. She can recognize my drawings by just looking at them without seeing my name. These days, though I’m tired of hearing people say, “Interesting!” when I show them my drawings. I think I shouldn’t show people my drawings anymore. My initial reason for showing all kinds of people my drawings was to get over a Navajo artist named Tony Begay who would probably say I’m writing nasty crap about him if he read this. But, then, he’s dyslexic, so he’s not going to read it, and I’ve given him a different name. Since he won’t read it, it’s kind of like the Amish objecting to Weird Al Yankovic’s song “Amish Paradise.”

“I just want to say to all you Amish out there,” he starts off, like he’s about to apologize or say he didn’t mean to offend them, “You shouldn’t be watching TV!”

I'm at work, so I won't write any more. Probably a good idea, since abusing the Internet at work eventually caused me to be fired. See, it’s my fault. All my fault. I had a bullshit excuse to spend too much time blogging about my mother at work. So I did, instead of steeling myself, to get the job done and “Get the Hell out,” like a co-worker who stole computers said she did.

“You’re here to earn a paycheck,” she’d say, “so suck it up.”

I am not going to talk to mom.

I am going to cut her off.

Just to prove I can.

I will not talk to her tomorrow evening.

I will see how it goes when she doesn't hear from me.

If she really loves me, she will understand.

She will not think it's fair.

I will tell my therapist about this.

I know I said I wouldn't write any more before. Now I really will stop.

Good, bitch. Just shut up. Because no one was ever listening to you whine anyway.

What a fucking angry loser girl you turned out to be. You didn’t love your mother, and now your mother is dead. You are a waste of space. It was a waste to get to know you. It was a waste to try. There is no point in trying to dialogue with people who are different than you. Everyone is different in some ways, and the same in some ways.

I just got back from a meeting with my case manager.

That’s about it. Nothing more to say about it, really.

I was the one who got to tell her goodbye. Place my hand on her cold forehead. Hearing is the last sense to go.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso said, “Art is a lie that tells the truth.” Erica knows about all of Picasso's wives. I've got a desire to be Liberal in order to rise above Where I'm From, so I think about Colin Powell covering up Guernica, Picasso's painting of the horrors of the bombing of that town during the Spanish Civil War as a symbolic gesture when announcing that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, which the people I was hanging out with at the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice says wasn't true. Powell was like Pontius Pilate washing his hands while knowing he had to crucify Jesus, who was too good for the world. Pilate had to keep his position in the Roman Empire. He had wives and children and slaves to provide for. He had to think about government bureaucracy: taxes; rations for soldiers... He had spent as much time as he could with this ragged rebel named Jesus. Life had to be got on with. Colin Powell was like Pontius Pilate in this case. Colin Powell, the first black U.S. Secretary of State, (or was it Joint Chief of Staff? I'm not cute anymore. These things aren't cute for a 32-year-old.) he had to keep his job, he had to prove himself. He had a family to support.

Was it Powell's idea to cover Guernica? Did it really happen or was it a lie told by The Liberal Media that in some circles Isn't Liberal Enough, and is only As Liberal as the Corporations who Sponsor it? Our pampered American middle class can't stomach the bombing of some poor country. It is only those who do the Real Work in the Real America, who can entertain themselves by going home after boring Accounting 101A at the community college to “watch the war.” It's only the pampered, namby-pamby bleeding heart liberal dropout from the state university, where she drifted around talking to homeless people and arguing with leaders of various religious Student Unions, when she wasn't trying to attend classes and Date and be a normal young adult student, which was pretty hard, considering her religious upbringing, and who will never be a Woman who Submits to her Hard-Working Husband and forgets the smart stuff because she'll never make it in the Real World and when she lives in an apartment on the same street as a Planned Parenthood, she can't shut up about it. Sometimes she talks about Planned Parenthood like she's some kind of rebel to live near it, just like the kid at the community college talks about Watching the War. She gets All Upset and adds as an email signature to her email a quote from Michael Moore: “War is fun when you know you won't die.”

It's fun to talk about Planned Parenthood like it makes me all bad-ass when I'm trying to make it with – Enter Alcoholic Navajo Artist Baby Daddy Stage Right. “Planned Parenthood's right there!” I say when he says, “I don't want kids!” and any Cognitive Behavioral therapist I might have at the time would say, “What is your goal here? What are you trying to accomplish? Isn't there a Healthier Person you could Get Involved With? I thought we were working on you having Healthy Relationships?”

So yeah, I'm doing something Dear Daddy was never brave enough to do: Skewer my own Liberal Hypocrisy. It's had a high cost. Losing My Job. Fuck my job. Time to move to Carlsbad and Get Married. Or get my ass in gear and get an A in this Medical Coding class. Yeah, it's not the Art Institute of Chicago.

My step-aunt the College Professor emailed me that she didn't like the Michael Moore quote: “War is fun when you know you wont die,” in case you don't remember, because I'm trying to circle back to my original topic. And what about Colin Powell. I'm sure Powell's heard about Angela Davis and The Black Panthers. But he knows he Can't Function in That World. They fight Their War; he fights His War. He's Uncle Tom; he's the House Nigger, but there's a place for him there. Say what you will. Observe. Describe. Participate. It won't make you Cool. It won't make you a Rebel. My friend Jaime who Hears Voices isn't trying to be Cool. Neither is my friend Laura Hughes who is very Christian, and fuck what anybody says about it. She divorced her husband because he wanted to have sex but she didn't, and she went along with it, but then she heard of Marital Rape. Mozie says women don't like sex. But they lie about it. I think she could be right. How could someone live to be 91 without learning a thing or two about life? She's no or Daniel Barrigan, so Dear Daddy wouldn't want to sit in her humble kitchen and roll around on her yellow chairs and drink coffee and read the Dallas Morning News.

Asher Lev, the Hasidic Jewish boy in My Name is Asher Lev, wanted to be like Pablo Picasso. He found a way. When we were in New York with my dad, I pointed out an Hasidic man to my brother, the tall man distinguished in his black hat, dark suit, and payos, my brother said, “Oh, I just thought he was Amish or something.”

Turn on the lights, turn off the radios

“I've become like Bampaw,” said Mozie, my grandmother. “He would walk through the house, turn on all the lights, turn off all the radios, and leave.” My 92-year-old grandmother repeated this a couple of times. As I am reading this story again, I am wondering if she really repeated it or if I just imagined her repeating it, and why I find it important to think that she repeated it. As I answer that question, I realize I want her to repeat it because I wasn't listening. I want her to repeat my grandmother's story of what her father would do when he visited the house she had set up near Dallas, TX, with her husband and two children because, though I really was listening, I think she didn't feel heard, because I didn't respond. What my grandmother doesn't understand, and what I may never be able to convey to her is that what she said actually affected me enough that I would write it down as an introduction to this story, and that it would actually serve as a catalyst for the ever-growing and evolving story cycle I am now involved in writing. I want her to know that I was listening. I want her to see this sometime. I want her to know that I am a sensitive person, and that though I often seem angry at my grandmother, in fact, often am, I really do love her. In fact, her dark family stories, told with a black humor, are the greatest influence on my writing. I like how I alternate the words “writing” and “listening” in this opening paragraph, so that they dance together.

My great-grandfather must have liked light but not sound. He must have been a visual but not an auditory learner. That is a clever phrase, and a cute observation, but what proof do I have from that statement about his learning style? Instead, I should say “might” instead of “must.” Bampaw was the mayor of Olney, TX. He was also a teacher. Mozie shared her memory of her father, Bampaw, when she walked into the room. She didn't say “hello” or “do you have enough light to read?” This may have been because she was being sarcastic and in a bad mood. She also had a minimalist way of expressing herself. Mozie's youngest daughter, the baby, the one her immediate family had called “little sister,” in other words, my mother, was dying of stage four liver cancer. “There is a stage five,” Mozie said. My mother, whom my grandmother and I both referred to by her first name, Karen, was on the couch in the living room, propped up by pillows, skin jaundiced, eyes bulging, belly distended with fluid. I wrote a blog post about an appointment my mother had to drain some of that fluid from her abdomen. I wrote it two days after abruptly ending a visit because I was freaked out about the possibility of staying in Carlsbad forever, getting a job at WIPP or taking courses in heating and air conditioner repair, and marrying a redneck. That seemed, at the time, a fate worse than death. My fear is understandable considering some of the things I was exposed to in college, enlightened ideas such as vegetarianism, which I will discuss later in this essay.
I was ignoring Mozie by escaping into a book. This was typical behavior for me. Books have always been my love, my drug, my passion, my escape. By describing her father's behavior, it seemed to me that Mozie was bringing death into the bedroom I and my brother had shared when we were growing up. My brother and I had slept at opposite ends of that oblong bedroom when we stayed at our mother's house. She had custody of us on Tuesdays and every other weekend. In the bedroom I used to share with my brother, I was reading my younger brother's high school English textbook in light too dim for her taste. Meanwhile, my brother was driving from El Paso, TX, with his wife, Katharine, and two daughters, my nieces Brooklynne and Hailey Faith. My brother, Stephen, told me that his older daughter, 4-year-old Brooklynne, had asked if he had a sister. Brooklynne would call me “sister.” Someone I let read a draft of this story expressed surprise that I sometimes referred to my mother by her first name. “I can only imagine what that dynamic was like,” he'd said.

I'd slept the night before in the twin bed that had previously belonged to my brother. My brother and his family would only stay during the day when they arrived later that afternoon, after lunch, missing the altercation between me and my uncle. My brother and sister-in-law would set up a playpen for my younger niece. They would not stay at my mother's house. While sitting outside at the round concrete table and benches in my mother's neighbor Julie's front yard, full of neatly mowed carpet grass, while we were discussing what to do in the situation we were faced with, in which my mother did not want to admit that she had terminal cancer, and wanted to believe that Jesus would heal her instead of getting chemo, my brother said that he hadn't realized how bad the house was until he brought his girlfriend and now wife Katharine there. Then he saw it through her eyes. Katharine was not there to hear him say that.

My daybed was gone. As proof that I was an adult, and not moving back home to live with mommy, I had badgered my mother into selling or donating the day bed, just to get it out of the house, just so I wouldn't have that tie of dependence. My father had done his best to instill in me the idea that I was not my mother's little girl, and that it was unhealthy for her to treat me as such. When I told my mother that, she would just say that what I thought of as her treating me and talking to me like I was a child was really just her talking to me kindly.

When I say that Mozie brought death with her into the room, I mean she was remembering the dead. Her father was deceased, and, at age 92, she soon would be also, and I felt no compassion or caring for her whatsoever, only annoyance at being interrupted. If I did have feelings in this instance, they were too painful to acknowledge. In some cultures it is not acceptable to talk about the dead. For example in the Navajo culture, traditionally if a family member dies in a hogan, the family movies out and burns the hogan down. It is also not acceptable to use skulls or skeletons as imagery in traditional Navajo culture. I learned this from a woman in my Drawing 1 class at CNM. A friend I used to have who was Navajo was not traditional. He told me so. It became obvious that he was not traditional, looking back, because we would joke about skulls while hanging out, and while he was helping out at a haunted house to raise money for the relatively progressive sobriety community he participated in. We were stuffing clothes with plastic grocery bags to achieve a corpse-like effect. He was saying something about a skull, which I can't remember, and which is probably not relevant. “Not a real skull,” I said. “Yeah, a real skull,” he said.

I think that the fact that I was reading my younger brother's textbook in the bedroom we used to share shows that I have arrested development. A review of Jeanette Winterson's new memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal seems to suggest that the idea of someone who escapes from their miserable childhood into books is a tired cliche. My ex-boyfriend Jason the Cab Driver, who was interested in what I wrote if it was about sex or about him, would say that reviewers say a lot of shit. What matters is if you can get your shit published. Fuck em, he'd say. Hand 'em their balls on a silver platter, too. The sentence before the previous ones reminds me of how the Native American author Sherman Alexie determined he would leave the reservation after he was assigned a textbook in school that had previously been his mother's. He didn't just say “fuck you” to everybody and leave the next day after finding his mother's name in the textbook, however. He did find a way to get transferred to a school of all white kids, though, which he wrote about in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which I have not read. That story reminds me of a Jeff Foxworthy joke: “You might be a redneck if you walk to school with your father because you're both in the same grade.” My brother is 28 years old and a US Army Captain. For some reason I am obsessed with age, so it bears mentioning here that I am 32. It is a difficult situation to be in when you feel in some ways inferior to your younger brother. My brother spent a lot of time away from home, while I spent a lot of time in that house keeping my mother company and listening to the horror stories she told about her time spent hospitalized in a mental institution in San Antonio, TX, against her will. My mother's house had mustard-colored shag carpet that hid hardwood floors. I noticed the hardwood floors in the closet on my side of the room and suggested to my mother once that we could rip out the carpet. It would take too much work, though, because the floors would have to be sanded down and polished. My mother liked the warmth of carpet, also.
Meanwhile, while as an adolescent and teenager I was keeping my mother company and listening to her tell me her troubles, my brother was throwing himself into small-town life the best way he could, without becoming an alcoholic or meth head or getting some girl pregnant. He played sports—baseball, football, wrestling, even though he often sat on the bench—and got a job at a local barbecue house called The Red Chimney. At this point the reader might want to know what Hellish backwater I had for a hometown, so I will reveal it: Carlsbad, New Mexico, home of the famous Carlsbad Caverns. Also home to the low-level nuclear waste deposit site WIPP, which is the city's largest employer. I am being facetious when saying it was a Hellish backwater. We had the Pecos river park, after all, and some nice, rolling hills on the edge of town. Though there was a nuclear waste dump outside town, there was no oil refinery, so we were better than the nearby town of Artesia. However, no aliens had landed in our immediate vicinity, so we were not as cool as Roswell. All we had was a cowboy whose horse stumbled on a hole in the ground. Said cowboy discovered Carlsbad Caverns. At first, the people only thought to mine the cave for its bat guano, or batshit in other words, but eventually they made the caverns into a full-fledged tourist attraction complete with elevators and an underground lunchroom, at which my brother worked one summer, and where I failed to get employment because I didn't do well in the interview.
Now back to the story. As an undergraduate at New Mexico State University, my brother joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity and ROTC. He married his college sweetheart, a sorority sister he met at a campus Greek event. He served in Iraq. He's now a husband and father to two children. Compared to him, and especially as viewed by society and my Republican relatives, though I haven't taken a poll, I've done nothing with my life. Compared to my brother, I feel like a failure. At the support groups I sometimes attend, until I get frustrated, bored, or angsty and drop out, they always tell me not to compare myself to other people. I dropped out of college. It took me eight years of on-and-off school to earn a BA in English that hasn't brought me much in the way of gainful employment. I spent five years on Social Security Disability. I protested the invasion of Iraq at Kirtland Air Force Base. At UNM, I joined the Progressive Student Alliance and Amnesty International. I took classes in women's studies. I participated in Take Back the Night rallies that called attention to campus rapes. The ostensible purpose of the rallies was to make it safer for women to be out alone at night. I did question what we were doing, however. I remembered reading in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopia about a future takeover of the United States by the Moral Majority. In that novel, feminists and conservative Christian moralists become allies against pornography and rape. There is a scene where the handmaids, women who were unmarried, lesbian, or otherwise immoral by the new society's standards, attend a rally where they are told that a man is a rapist. They proceed to tear him to pieces and kick him to death. In the mob, the protagonist questions whether the accused man is really a rapist. Might he instead be a political prisoner? Might he simply be a scapegoat?

I bought a “Take Back the Night” poster at a Philadelphia thrift store. I was living on Social Security Disability benefits by this time, and had a Section 8 apartment in Albuquerque, NM. I was visiting my dad and stepmother in the railroad suburb of Ridley Park, PA, and my dad and I were exploring the touristy section of Philly near South Street with its quirky shops. It was a good time I wish I could repeat, but I feel that it is lost to me because of some of the paranoid accusations I brought up in other sections of this memoir I am writing, which I foolishly allowed my stepmother to read. I learned something from doing that which would be common sense to most people: people don't like reading negative, insulting, or unflattering things about themselves in your writing. I became a vegetarian after seeing a demonstration by PETA about cruelty to animals in slaughterhouses. It was simple in the student cafeteria to order a garden burger instead of a hamburger, and they were tasty. It was a fairly easy transition to make also because my stepmother was a vegetarian. I had a conversation about vegetarianism with a new friend in the dining hall, and automatically became defensive and tried to justify it, but then she said that she was a vegetarian, too. The summer after she met, she interned at Farm Sanctuary, a farm for animals rescued from slaughterhouses. While my friend remained a vegetarian, I did not. It was partly that I succumbed to easily to lowbrow societal pressure. The guys I tended to attract were generally Republicans who preferred simpler food they didn't have to think much about, like ham sandwiches. They were also usually Evangelical Christian. My one real boyfriend in college was a vegetarian, however. It was mostly because he was East Indian, a Brahmin, the highest caste, and a Hindu, though American, born and raised in Nashville, TN, which he said was the headquarters for Gideon's Bibles. He told me this when I expressed trepidation about him meeting my mother and stepfather, Christians who did not believe in the separation if church and state. It was his way of trying to reassure me that he'd been exposed to Christianity before, and it didn't freak him out. It was nice of him to make such a gesture, but I was too freaked out about him being my boyfriend to be able to express my relief, if I even felt relief at this at the time.

My boyfriend and I had the conversation about vegetarianism before we were dating, when we were volunteering together answering phones for the Agora Crisis Center, the UNM student-run crisis hotline. I was expressing the distress I felt over animal experimentation and how we were forced to study it and hear lectures about it, though not participate, in one of my courses, which I attended with the friend who later volunteered at Farm Sanctuary. My future boyfriend's father was a doctor, so he believed in traditional medicine, and also believed that animal experiments were necessary to advance medical procedures and develop better medications. He then asked if I was a vegetarian. As with my friend in the dining hall, I got defensive, and rattled off a list of reasons, assuming I'd get hostility from him, but he just listened to it, then simply stated he was a vegetarian, too. “That's part of being Hindu, isn't it?” I asked. “It's part of being a Brahmin,” he said.
It seems that in different ways my brother and I were both concerned about what the outside world would think of us. We both worried about what our significant others would think about our mother. My brother became ashamed of the poverty we'd grown up in part-time. I was self-conscious about the religion because of the politically correct people I had become involved with. We both found more acceptance than we thought we would. I was unable to accept the boyfriend who seemed to accept me, however. My mother's message and belief that women should submit to their husbands has made my relations with males, even as friends, uneasy. Her disapproval of gay or lesbian relationships made it difficult for me to explore dating women as an alternative. My emotional closeness to my mother, because of my failure to play sports because of my lack of coordination, for which my father made me go to physical therapy as an attempt to remedy, made it difficult or impossible for me to leave her values behind. When I experienced difficulties when I did attempt to abandon her values, I felt that God, as a strict, loving father, the kind that is unacceptable today, and in fact considered abusive, was punishing me in the same way that Mozie's father, Bampaw, punished her with a belt when he caught her walking with a boy. I will get to that story in a bit.

The V Word

I am 31 years old and single. I'm also something else that I won't spell out. I feel vulnerable enough just from writing this. But then I kind of want the woman whose blog I linked to to read this.


In The Life of Brian a crowd stands outside Brian's house where he lives with his mother, and demands to know if she's a virgin.

"That's a very persona question!" she says.

Brian’s mother is right. Admitting you’re a virgin at her age is personal and private. It takes a lot of guts to share something like that, and they shouldn’t be demanding to know.

My first sexual experience was a bit like the scene from The Breakfast Club where Bender taunts Claire with "Are You a Virgin?"

I got intimidated and made to feel insecure by a guy, just like Claire is by Bender. I wasn’t popular, like Claire, though. Not that that matters when you’re in your thirties now. I think that making Claire into a rich, spoiled socialite makes it so that she deserves to be mocked. Really, personality-wise, I was more like Ally Sheedy’s character, The Basket Case. I never lied about all the sex I was having, like she did.

I guess the teenage-virgin daughter of Christian parents wouldn’t be any fun to have in a movie like The Breakfast Club. I was surprised to learn how much I was like Carrie White from Carrie. I wasn’t as sexually ignorant as her, though. I knew what tampons were. My mother was also nicer than hers.
I have had way too many issues to even think about dating. I have issues with rape, with sexual abuse, with self-esteem, with sexuality and gender issues. Then I met someone online, a guy, the type who would be banned from many chat rooms as a troll. We were both lonely, though, and for a little while that was enough. I thought I was able to be a little bit different. He called my fears about rape, the trauma I experienced, “bullshit.”
For a little while, I agreed. When I meet men, I like to channel them.
I would not have broken down completely like Clare did in that movie. I would have been sarcastic. I would have been cold. I would have been mean back. I would have tried to channel my inner butch.
“What do you know about me?” I asked Gary and Seddah. “Nothing!”

I was in third grade and my parents were recently divorced. They both still lived in a small Texas town near the border. My dad brought us over to my mom's house for the weekend. Something had happened. She had survived something. I was a precocious kid. My aunt would tell me "You ask questions like a 3-year-old." But Mom wouldn't say what had happened. At the Methodist church we went to, people would stand up and talk about how God had helped them through their problems and thank him.

So I said, "Mom, why don't you thank God in church for getting better from _____"

It happened slowly that I figured out what happened. She had nothing after the divorce. We slept on air mattresses on the hardwood floor of the rented house. I thought it was fun. Like camping out. A boy from school named Jodie Brown said he looked into our house ... her house ... and said "You didn't have any furniture!" and I realized it was a bad thing.

She has always been bad about personal safety. The door was unlocked.

I overheard my grandmother tell her, "They always say don't look at them, or they'll kill you." or something like that.
I yelled that out loud at the latest QSA meeting. That that was an unhelpful message about how to stay safe. I didn’t get the attention or the response that I needed, though, unfortunately.
My now-ex read “The V Word” when I sent it to him, and said, “I’m sorry your mother was raped.”
I think maybe he wanted to rescue me, but he was all hands.

Sexual intercourse is a beautiful thing, my mother said.

He said he was sorry, she said. He said he was drunk.

I can see her praying for him afterward.

******

I never dated or had friends in school who dated. My best friend, a fellow bookworm who introduced me to Mercedes Lackey, would discipline herself to not read the sex scenes. (And Mercedes Lackey wrote the best sex scenes, all full of mutual consent, and communication.) My friend was a good Mormon. We started talking in the 7th-grade PE locker room when she transferred briefly to my school. We were talking about books. I always tried with the new kids, because they wouldn't know they weren't supposed to talk to me.

The boys would call me ugly. Hit me. Put things in my hair.

People can be mean, says C. softly. He doesn't say "Get over it."
When I run away from my boyfriend the Troll, he sends me nasty messages, more concerned about the books he leant me than about my personal safety. I need to think of my personal safety, and whose hands I will let rove my cunt. In a message, he calls me an Angry Loser Girl.
In person, when I meet to give the books back, a ploy to keep me in his life, I think, but when I post that on Facebook, I get no response. Just Invis causing drama as per usual. Invis just needs a man to take care of her.
In person, he’s all nicey-nice. I am shy with him, not automatically coming in, and he doesn’t try to carry me over the threshold to deflower me.
I say that my Facebook friend the Radical Feminist and Sociology Professor said that he’d say fucked-up stuff to try to get me to stay. He said that my keeping the books was fucked-up, too.
I said he said fucked-up shit by calling me a loser.
“I don’t think that,” he said softly.
I am now racking up more experience with men and comparing that to when C. said, “People can be mean.”
I am thinking that C’s soothing words didn’t mean a thing, because this guy, my ex, when I sent him an email entitled “I haven’t forgotten you,” acknowledging his emails to me and saying I didn’t know what to say, called me a loser because I was devoting so much time to “demonizing” him. In my opinion, and I am, as usual, trying to cause drama, he was intimidating and threatening me because I want to write about him. Even if a lot of what I write is actually kind of sweet and romantic.
When I go on my Amtrak trip, I’m thinking about sending him a postcard saying I’m still writing about him, and he’s probably still all pissy about that.
“Remember when you got all bent out of shape when I called you a loser?” he asked.
That meant he was still sticking to his guns about that, despite the brief softening when I appeared one summer evening on his doorstep. Just like I decided to stick to my guns in regards to condom usage.

In 6th grade the girls started getting pregnant.

*****

In college I tried a few times, but it always felt like I was letting them molest me. I kept making friends with young women who had been sexually abused. I felt attracted to them, emotionally, physically.

I wish I'd majored in art back then, and had to draw the nude models, so I could see that looking at a naked woman wasn't a big deal.
People would laugh at me and say, “You have so much to learn.”
It’s true. I knew about tampons, but it would hurt to insert them. On the box, it says that when correctly inserted, you shouldn’t feel a tampon.
During a cervical exam, which I have also avoided because of the pain, the OBGYN said I have a very long cervix. Or she said that my cervix is hard to reach. She suggested what I’ve heard before, that I take a mirror and look down there.

I started wondering why I wasn't doing what I was supposed to do sexually.

I tried coming out as a lesbian.

Then I decided I must have been sexually abused and didn't remember it.

Now I know I'm just mentally ill. I'm just like her. I take the same medications as my mother. And it's not going to go away.

I'm 31 years old and average looking.
I've lost weight.
I've decided I need to look for someone normal, but someone normal couldn't handle my issues. Then again, nobody’s normal, and everyone has issues.
I don't have the energy to go to the gym.
I worked the graveyard shift, and I was so tired. Then I lost my job and got back on disability. Failure and defeat just made me more tired.
I have artistic talent, but don't feel safe expressing it. I know it won't be a career.

I tried dating again at age 29.
We met at the art class he was teaching. I was so innocent back then. I thought when he said he quit drinking that it was permanent. I can hear anyone who reads this laughing.
Because of his perceived innocence, I found him unattractive. I found out later he was functionally illiterate.

"My daughter called me when she was having a nightmare. She called me instead of her mom."
I wanted to call late at night when I was scared, too.

I went out on 2 more dates with him than I should have. "At least we were never physically involved," he said.

Then I met someone in the community college cafeteria. He left a note on the table next to me: "I'm behind in my homework, too. Call me?"

It seemed okay talking to him at first. He even liked folk dancing. Some of my female friends do that. It's like hanging out at the senior center, though.

Now here was a young, decent-looking guy who liked doing that.

Then I was meeting a fellow student in the library to work on a class presentation and there he was, walking in and asking if I was busy.
Yes I was.

He saw me again in the cafeteria and apologized. I tried to brush him off with, "Don't do it again."

Then the day before Thanksgiving, I didn't go "home." I stayed in the cafeteria between classes. He sees me and makes a bee-line for my table.
Then he gets up. "Are you going to be here a while?" he asks. "I going to pay some bills." He leaves and comes back. "I like paying bills!" he chirps. "What are you studying?" "Medical terminology." "Oh! I had a friend who was taking that class. It was great fun helping her memorize her terms!"

I give him the stoneface look and he gets it.

"Do you wish to be left alone?" he asks. I say I do (want to be alone).

There was the Rand Paul fan I met on a hiking meetup. He said people are only liberal because it's "cool." The problem with conservatives is that I'm insecure about my political beliefs. Anyone is able to convince me. I am always questioning myself. I am diagnosed with OCD.

I also was talking to a lesbian woman in the cafeteria, who I met at a speed dating event but never followed up on. I thought I would try and see if I was really gay or just had Homosexual OCD. There had recently been some suicides by queer youth, which had inspired a Wear Purple day. We talked about it, she and I. I said I wanted to start a gay-straight alliance at CNM, because there wasn't one, like there was at UNM. She said she wasn't out to everyone.

I know I need to keep trying to date. I know it must get better. I know I shouldn't talk and talk and try to get Artist Dude back with a sob story. Tell him I changed my mind. Because he's drinking.

And that's why I'm glad I found the woman whose blog I am linking to in my post.

If you read this, Andrea, thank you.

I have heard you reading at poetry slams before.

I wanted to, but I'm too scared.

I shouldn't be.

I have survived that
I am still alive.
I deserve to be alive.
I have the right to be treated well.
To demand to be treated well.
To abstain if I’m not treated well.

I have a room of my own and enough money to support myself.
At the Queer Students’ meeting place on UNM campus, I paged through Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin. In the chapter on Virginity, she writes about that as being empowering.
Joan of Arc was a virgin.

Ashes of ex-lovers

Your red-brown skin
and red skin
wiry black hair
pale with the blood vessels making it rosy
Your hazel eyes that change color.

"Has anyone told you you have beautiful eyes,"
says Travis Bickle to his Lady.
It doesn't work out.
We are God's Lonely People.

Flaming red hair
and blue-green eyes
aviator glasses and
thick black glasses

You play the bass
You draw pictures
You write your life story.
You love your rabbit.
You love your son.
You don't believe in owning people.

You made me do things
You didn't
You let me make my own decision
And strive to respect boundaries with women.

You are a feather Indian
You are a dot Indian
You're a white heterosexual male and think people hate you because of that fact.

You don't care about the stock market because you are poor.
You are a Brahmin.

You are a vegetarian
You eat fry bread

but not in my presence
in my presence you eat fruit out of my hand
because we are in a garden of Eden metaphor outside of real life

I gave some M&Ms to a homeless guy on campus
as an undergrad because God said so.