Dancing with the Devil: How I came to be in my current state of existence pt. 1

I received an ultimatum over the weekend…

My required action being to put up a post about my childhood on steemit. Personally I found the notion rather ambiguous, yet here I am attempting to capture in words the perplexities of my youth (on a tiny ass keyboard by the way, I think it was made for mice, and it took me about ten minutes to figure out how to turn this stupid tablet thing on and stick it to the keyboard and another five to get it to stand up properly, but I digress). Here starts an expansion of my introduction, how I came to be where I am now… I suppose I should start at the beginning…

but first look at how adorable I was

okay...

I was nervous, I remember that very clearly. I looked up at my Daddy and I made him promise to catch me if I fell... The next thing I remember is coming out of the ER with a cast on my arm, my Mom handing me my favorite blue cloth dollie and yelling at my sister for teasing me. He did not catch me.

That is my earliest memory, I was maybe three years old, and thinking about it now that plays well into Sedna sitting directly on my ascendant. I suppose a fairly good euphemism for my life thus far.

He didn’t catch me.

What an asshole right?.. He’s really not that bad, but we’ll get to that later. My Mom was sixteen when my sister Ski was born, and still sixteen when I rolled around ten months later, my Dad was twenty. Young and rash, they were married and divorced and into their next long term relationships by the time I was two. I grew up with two sets of parents Mom and Step-Dad during the week, Dad and Step-Mom on the weekends so my family was very big and very close. It will be easier for me to segregate the two, hopefully it will be easier for y'all to read it that way as well. I’ll go up to age ten today, because after ten years old things began to change drastically in both of my lives. Considering I started with my Dad, I’m going to roll with him for a bit.

This is my favorite picture ever with the old man, and his current wife

Weekends with my Dad were interesting, we started out on the West side of Buffalo, on West Ave, a few blocks away from PS 18. If you were from the West side of Buffalo you’ll be familiar with the ‘house in the yard’ thing. I guess way back in the day families would build little bitty shanty houses for their returning war veterans to live in for a time… Well that's where we lived, in the yard house. My Great Grandmother, three of my Great Aunts, and the various children they fostered (most later being adopted) lived in the main house, so we shared a yard with our cousins which was cool because we weren't really allowed out front… not the best neighborhood. We had the duck and cover down before we could say duck and cover.)

I remember a few things very vividly from that time; I remember the neighbors, a big Puerto Rican family… I believe it was one of them who coined my lifelong nickname ‘Beener’, their pig roasts and mango smoothies; I really loved them. I remember being fascinated by my Step-Moms art supplies, the way the fat markers smelled, all the colors, the different ways you could make lines with them. I remember the animals… being chased and kicked in the stomach by my Dad's pet Emus, which for a small child is pretty traumatizing I must say I still hold a grudge against the species… my first dog Jester, our mean ass giant rottweiler Guardian (I’m not exaggerating when I say this was the biggest rottie you’ll ever see, beast dog, and his name was Guardian for a reason let me tell you, with the exception of who lived in our little yard house he tried to kill everything that moved and the drool uuuuugh I can still feel it dripping down my next when I think about it, blah, he was a good boy though), our pet pig Oscar Mayer, a couple of cats, snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, praying mantis… I was always a Zoo Keeper, but sometimes I was other things as well.

Imagine being two feet tall and being chased by one of these fuckers... TRAUMA

Sometimes I was a soldier under fire in my pillow trench, crawling under barbed wire trying to escape. Sometimes we were shipped out on leave to battle Charlie and the elements as we traversed our way down a local gorge aptly named Devil’s Hole. Sometimes when Dad would take us to work with him we were his mini drill sergeants, screaming at delinquent teenage boys in the mountains of Pennsylvania to drop and give us twenty. That was always fun. Cadences and Metal songs were our lullabies, drills were our games.

We would spend a lot of time as Mermaids in our Nana and Papas pool with our two adopted aunts and one adopted uncle who are our age, I mean a looooot, they had to fight us out of that pool every half decent day for yeeears, if they did manage to get us out then I would be Sandy from Grease, or and eskimo throwing snowballs in the middle of summer using the shavings from the ice skating rink down the street. We took all sorts of fun family excursions with Nana and Papa; Fantasy Island was a favorite spot of ours, on those days I was a Pirate; or haunted train rides where I was Princess Jasmine. Once a year I fancied myself a Don as we walked around the Italian festival picking at Calamari and fried dough... occasionally I was a martial arts expert when I played with my godfather, my Uncle Eddie, who was in fact a martial arts expert. My Papa would warn people to keep an eye on me when we went places because I would get lost in my head and just wander off, he had titles for all of us, I was ‘the dreamy one’. He taught me not to take life too seriously, and Nana taught me it was okay to have a style all my own.

Sometimes Papa was the Mermaid

I was six or seven I think when we moved to a real sized house in Kenmore, because it was right after my little sister Sammy was born, my Great Grandmother and two of the great Aunts came with us and lived upstairs… which probably had something to do with the fact that it was also right after someone got shot just down the block. They would have family card games up there, the adults would play while we picked at the shrimp platters and cannoli, and mostly ignored the plates of Italian cookies because Italian cookies are shit. I will be cliche though and say I give zero fucks what anyone says, my great-grandmother made the best sauce. Oh and just in case you were wondering, yes bigger house meant more pets. Dancing Bear, our blue and gold asshole Macaw was a particular favorite.

Rascal the Raccoon was a pretty cool one too

That was about when my Dad got his boat too and we were on the water every chance we got. I didn’t really like fishing, I was far too impatient and easily distracted for it… I was all about laying out on the bow with a good book soaking up the sun. The bow of my Dad's boat out on the lake is still one of my favorite places to be, he ingrained the water into my soul.

I was nine when my Nana and Papa packed up the kids and moved to Florida, Papa had had a couple of heart attacks and decided a milder climate would suit him better, which was cool with me because while I missed them terribly, I did get to go on vacation in Florida at least twice a year for the following few years… and because of that the magic happened. It was on a layover at some airport where our next flight got delayed, December of 2000. I remember because it was a Christmas trip and I was severely disappointed on my next (11th) birthday, we were bored out of our skulls and my Dad handed me my first Harry Potter book. I was instantly and forever obsessed.

I suppose this would be a good place to jump to my other set of parents.

Weren't they cuuuute?

My Moms house was a completely different world. We moved around a lot, a very, very lot so I wont bother even mentioning most of the geographic details. I called her Lady and she was my ultimate hero. It was pretty great there too. Lady worked overnights for a while, went to school while we were at school and still managed to get dinner on the table at 5 o'clock every night when my step-dad got home from his construction job. I remember that the most from Moms house… the family dinners, laughing and joking and just being with them. I remember my step-dads family owned land out in the country where we would have huuuuge family camp outs in the summers, four wheeling, giant bonfires, breakfast pizzas, creek swimming, the grown ups letting us run the Nascar pool, the tire swing… it was my second favorite place in the world after the boat.

Don't mind me being weird at the bottom there

It's almost hard to write about life with Lady actually, because from the moment I said I wanted to be a Miami Dolphins (don't judge me its my Grandmas favorite team and I didn’t know any better) Cheerleader when I grew up at six years old I was fully consumed by it. She signed me up for the local squad and that was my life for the next seven years. My younger sister Boo was signed up as soon as she was old enough, and after a season of beasting it on the football field Ski realized it was pretty fun and joined in too. Official practices were three nights a week but really every spare second was practice, then there were games, and competitions from Canada to Disney World where it was a whirlwind of hair curlers and blue and gold ribbons, we loved it. We ate, dreamed and breathed in cheer, and Lady was always the loudest parent in the stands.

If I wasn’t at Dads or cheering I was hiding in closets. I’m not joking I would hide in closets with books, pens, and paper to write stories and sketch. While I was a happy kid and technically socially active, I was always a little weird, a ‘freak’ as my sisters liked to put it. I was never fully in touch with reality as others perceived it, I was always in my own little world. I didn’t like people very much either to be honest so I had “friends” but I didn’t really have any real friends who would hang out with me if it wasn't obligatory. It was either family or cheer-leading friends, never anyone that got me.
I scared people, even my parents on occasion.

While the adults in my family were generally very kind and supportive of my… me-ness… they didn’t come close to getting me either. No. One. Got. Me. (I’m not being dramatic either because I’m still really weird, and I’ve had a lot of practice with becoming socially acceptable, just imagine what I was like before that. I even had Sammy convinced that I was an alien in a people suit… I think she still kind of believes it)...

Until fifth grade, we had moved and I switched schools again… Well I got parked at a table with a seemingly unassuming girl. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was out there, and it was about ghosts. Her response was incredible, she looked me in the face completely deadpan and told me the one house she’d lived in was haunted. We exchanged maybe a few sentences, and I knew… she got me… and we’ve been best friends since. So there I was at ten years old, my life all wonderful, I’d finally found a real best friend of my very own (I had filtered through some imaginary ones) who never ever gave me funny looks no matter what I said, who was impressed when I showed off my bleeding shriveled hand candle, and would make up fantastical stories with me on the drop of a dime.

I suppose it's fair to say it could not have gotten any better. You know there were some not so pleasant things of course; death in the family, parents sometimes fought, Dad would not show for Daddy daughter lunch at school or to a competition here or there and other Dad would show up with Wendy’s so I didn’t cry, Boo was a biter, those two times I got attacked by a hive of bees (though Ski saved me, I so didn’t get stung but she sure enough did), my sisters teasing me about being a weirdo, few broken bones… but my childhood was about as perfect as it could have been as far as I’m concerned…

How could it not be perfect with those rockin' 90's clothes?!

Until the accident, that is...

That's when I began to wander towards hell.