Dancing With the Devil: How I Came to Be in My Current State of Existence pt 3

My Aunt Jen was only a grade above me, she was in the marching band and Nana thought it would be a good idea for me to engage so I joined the color guard… I got to spin pretty flags and it filled the void that quitting the cheer squad had left. She introduced me to all of her friends and people were really nice, they were band nerds so they handled my weird better than most, but they still kind of just hung out with me because of Jen. Except two. Brooke, my bestie while I was there… and Billy, who quickly became my first real boyfriend. I was super homesick though; I still had to put on human skin in front of these people, I missed my real friends, I missed my mom, I missed my big dogs protecting me from my chronic nightmares… and I still missed my dad.

Only a couple of weeks into band season as I was jazz running across the field, I felt something kind of funny in my knee area and had to sit down… luckily I was at the back edge at the time or band nazi Lopez would have had people step on me… because there was no way I could have gotten up. The moment I parked my ass, half of the guard was there to see if I was alright, I pulled up my pants leg to gasps and screams. My knee cap was about three or four inches away from its designated area. I laughed like a maniac, my knee cap was funny enough alone, but add the girl crying behind me and it was just far too amusing. Eventually the assistant wandered over and figured out that I probably needed an ambulance, and they couldn’t put me in one without the consent of a guardian so they called my dad.

He didn’t catch me.

I sat there on the field for over an hour while they tried to get a hold of him, after a certain point they called Jen over, she took one look at my leg and pale faced spouted out every adult in our lives phone numbers. My Papa, who ran his own landscaping business, left work to come save me and he didn’t scold me when I word vomited profanities as the moved me, and had his hand on my shoulder as they popped it back into place at the ER. I’m pretty sure Dad didn’t even know what happened until later that night. He felt bad, I know that because he fell on his now typical pattern of buying me out. He let me stay home from school the next day and took me to a garage sale up the street, bought me a cane with a snake head that was really a sword. It was cool, but I was still furious with him. I was also stuck in the house for weeks, which drove me up the wall. I remember standing at the door to the garage a lot in that time, just staring into it refusing to enter. I had been in that garage a million times but from the moment I’d arrived in the summer it freaked me out, I tried to tell my Nana but I really couldn’t explain the bad vibes properly, all I could think to say was that it felt evil. My Papa proceed to splash holy water all over the house, and on me. I think we were all a little surprised that I didn’t sizzle or melt.

Jen, Nana, and I on the band trip

So I sat there stewing in all of my feelings for weeks with a busted leg, I had never been good at this reality and it was coming to a major head. I started to harm myself, stealing cigarettes, sneaking beers (which I hated but did anyway), skipping classes with Brooke… the moment I was free of my brace I was off, sometimes when we were on again with Billy (lost my virginity in a JC Pennys dressing room at the mall, suuuch a special experience right) or when we were off again leaving school with Brooke to drive around in cars with other boys. I got caught every time, Italian wives are far more effective than the FBI and Nana didn’t play, but it didn’t dissuade me. Not until she threatened to keep me from going on the band trip to NYC. That chilled me out for a little bit. Kind of… forget the excessive flirting on the bus and making out with not-Billy (we were off again) at stops the whole trip. The city air smelled and hurt my throat but we had a lot of fun, my second favorite part was honestly our repose in central park, and my first favorite was going to foot locker… I liked the song that was playing when we walked in, so I started dancing, and the guy working there just started dancing with me, and I walked out with the craziest pair of bubblegum pink with rainbow polka dot knee high converse. Broadway was pretty cool too.

The trip couldn't last forever though, and soon we were back in Port Charlotte and I quickly fell back into myself again. They had already flown Lace down for a visit to try and cheer me up and while it worked fairly well while she was there the moment she left I plumited again, so my adults thought it best to send me home for the holidays. My mom and step-dad had split up, and she had gotten her own place with my sister Ski and my mentally challenged Aunt (who had lived with us most of our lives, and was usually the one to call the cops because she would get freaked out during the fights), so they thought it would be good for me to go be with them for a couple of weeks.

I was so happy to see my mom at the airport I just about died. She looked really different, in just the six months I’d been gone she’d changed, I was too happy to see her to think about it though so we went home. Ski and I went into the basement to hang out with a couple of friends, by the time we went upstairs to send them off Lady was out. Ski explained to me that it was the meds, reached under the pillow to grab her keys and we walked right out of the front door, took her truck went to buy cigarettes, ordered pizza, picked up Ski’s boyfriend, went home and hung out, dropped him back off, put her keys back and went to sleep before she came to…

Most of the time she was incoherent, if not just passed out. She had started to see a new doctor while I was gone who is now notorious for malpractice and over prescribing. We did whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. We drank, we smoked, we snuck out to hook up with guys, by my fifteenth birthday I was doing all of those things, plus smoking weed, robotripping, popping tabs and percs regularly (every slight of pain; “I have a headache” “I have cramps” “My knee is bothering me” resulted in a narcotic painkiller, we used them like tylenol) and had made a run away attempt (evaded capture for five days), we hardly went to school, and we found out that Ski was pregnant, and had been evicted from the place we were at (hiding from the landlords in the dark was always a fun game) and moved back in with my step-dad right around the time D-man was born, he was three and a half months early… really gave us all a good scare, but he’s my little trooper and a perfectly healthy 12 year old now. Less than a month later my Papa died in that damned garage, it was my first experience with death on a truly personal level. People that I was close to had died before, but never that affected me to the core.

It was only a couple of months until we were out on our own again, and Ski went to go stay in Florida with Nana for a while, signing over custody to Lady. So there we were; Lady, my Aunt, D-man, and I…

I didn’t go to school much, I took care of little man as best as my mentally fucked up self could… I’m just glad my aunt was there, because while she was challenged she was great with kids and loved babies so she was a major help. I would ask my mom what to do sometimes but for the most part at that time I had to check on her more than the baby, she decided to live in the bathtub and was constantly nodding out, I pulled her head out of the water more times than I can count. Not including when my Papa died I had only seen my Dad a couple of times since I’d come home. This is about when I taught myself how to cook, and realized that I had an insatiable passion for it. I liked that house… sure the ceiling was falling down in places and there were water bubbles under windows, but communing via knocks with the rats and birds nested in the walls was entertaining for me, and oh my goodness was the neighbor hot.

As horrifying as this picture is to me I'm posting it anyway because its real, Me 16, Lady, Ski down in the bottom there, and my sister Boo... who was twelve at the time.

Ski came home before I turned sixteen, and we discovered things like morphine and cocaine. That was all we knew at that point, our dads had dipped and our Mom was seriously fucked up all of the time… so we just kind of were too. We were both dropped out of high school already and just living that life. It was just a couple of months after I turned seventeen that the notorious doctor cut her off of her meds… I don’t think the memories of holding her down while she kicked and screamed about cutting her leg off in withdrawal will ever fade. Happened quite a few times too, she actually screamed at both my Grandma and I to “get the fuck out of my house” once because I turned off the faucet in the tub, she got mad Grandma pointed out that the tub was going to overflow and she snapped at us hard. I was livid, she had never snapped at me before… The biggest altercation we’d ever gotten into was a few years ago I called her a bitch under my breath and she tapped me across my face, we both cried and apologized. She was never mean to me, ever. So in my rage I left. See who takes care of you while I’m gone

Also sixteen

I called my Dad at the dealership, and informed the receptionist it was an emergency. I didn’t tell him what was going on, I just told him that he needed to come get me. I knew that he wouldn’t have if he knew it wasn’t really an emergency. He came to get me though and I stayed with him for a week. He was dating someone at the time and she lived with him, they had been together for a bit… she was nineteen. Yeah I hadn’t been too happy about it, and up until that week on the rare occasion I saw them I was nasty to her, I have no idea how she held her compassion for me through it. I think she was the first person in my life to see past their own nose enough to realize that I was anything but alright. That week was my turning point with her. They would go work at the dealership, I would stay and lay out on the hammock with the dogs, Julius and Caesar. We would take the dogs for a walk around the town every night after dinner, it was a small town so Dad would tell me about the people we passed like he used to do at the Italian festival, everyone would wave or stop and say hi, I thought that it was just about the best place ever, right on the water with its little gazebos and the ice cream shop, and the music in the park nights. I felt like I was in an episode of Gilmore Girls, hand to god there was even a Miss Patty lady. I remember asking myself if this was what life was supposed to be like.

One day was different though, there was something awry in her screams of pain… and she wasn’t kicking or screaming, she couldn’t move at all really. My Aunt panicked, and thank goodness she did because the ER doctor looked my step-dad right in the eye later that night and told him if she would have been brought in ten minutes later she wouldn't have made it. Her kidneys had failed. Her body was wrecked. Besides the kidney failure she had huge sores on the lower half of her body from being in the tub with her medicated patches all of the time, infected sores, some of them reaching all the way to the bone. We thought she was going to die, and it was terrifying. I felt so guilty. I had left out of spite and she almost died… I went home. She was in the hospital for about a week, and I really spent that time babysitting robo tripps. As usual it was a free for all at my house, or going out with my twenty three year old boyfriend in his classic Mustang. I had already stopped most of my extracurriculars, save for drinking and painkillers (and again, though they were being misused I did actually take them for pain… I really didn’t understand at this point that they werent just a strong tylenol they were used so casually).

It wasn’t too long after that sheriff's showed up at our door telling us to pack our shit and get out. Nothing new or exciting about that, everyone went to my grandmas… except me. My boyfriend was apparently more perceptive than either of my dads and didn’t like the situation that I was in, and asked me to move in with him and his mom. The prospect of living somewhere stable was enticing (I’ve moved twenty eight times that I can remember… I’m twenty seven years old.), and I really liked him, his mom too, so I did.