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Reminders of How I Changed and Why it was Inevitable
- Reminders of How I Changed and Why it was Inevitable -
Being a personal journey of mine, from some of the early stages of my life to those that came after.
Let me tell you a joke! Stop me if you have ever heard this one. Ready? Good! So, there are these two women and one of them is pregnant for her first child. She's a conservative, right-wing Christian who is anti-abortion and all that. She's also a Karen. You know the type. She meets a left-wing liberal in a bar, and the two women get to talking. The liberal woman asks her: “So where is your husband?” since she wonders what the Karen is doing in the bar at such a late hour, it being almost midnight. The Karen just looks at the woman and says: “He's working late, the same as usual. How about you, you married?” and the liberal woman answers: “No, but my life partner is this very beautiful woman sitting right next to me.” and the Karen notices a woman who looks like a super model or some kind of Hollywood star that is sitting right next to the liberal woman she's been talking to. The couple is obviously happy and were having a good time that night. The Karen looks disgusted, and says: “How nice for you.” Really she is thinking every kind of hateful thing you can imagine. “Got any kids at home?” asks the Karen, and the liberal woman says: “No, we're waiting until we're ready before adopting one. We aren't ready yet.” and the Karen is thinking hateful thoughts once again, because she thinks real women should have babies... since that was what her mother taught her. The Karen gets drunk, ends up kissing a woman while drunk and wakes up in an alley with her purse stolen the following morning. She goes home, to find out that her husband has been cheating on her at work. What does she do? She goes to the nearest clinic to get an abortion and decides to get a divorce after doing that. As for the liberal lesbian couple, they adopt a beautiful baby boy and a beautiful baby girl and raise them together. Their unconventional family lives happily ever after, despite life not always working out that way. What's the punchline? Irony, my dears! Irony is the punchline, and narrow-mindedness is always a joke. Not a very funny one, but a joke. Just like narrow-minded people are all jokes! The moral of the story kiddies... is don't be hateful and never, ever, be a Karen. Being a Karen never ends well, unless your name is actually Karen and you are not a Karen despite that being your name. Got it? Here ends the lesson for today about that! What has this to do with anything? I thought I would open this writing with a touch of dark humor. Why? Because I am convinced that sometimes life is a joke and death in the punchline. Might as well smile and laugh all the way to the grave! The first time I realized this bit of wisdom was when my beloved Andrea died and I could not save her because I was not allowed to save her. Thanks to my rotten family! There was one thing my grandmother was right about, if nothing else. My mother was rotten to the core, and it will not ever matter that she apologized to me for it before she died, she was still rotten. All she did her whole life was throw herself at men, at any men who she took a fancy to, and she and my grandfather abused me in various ways. With my grandfather it was physical, sexual, mental and emotional abuse as well as of course his specialty... verbal abuse! With my mother, it was physical, mental, emotional and verbal. And my grandmother was no slouch in the old abuse department either, no sir. She screamed at me a lot and called me just as many racist, homophobic, and transphobic and everything-phobic slurs as you can imagine. And you know what? I realize now, at this point in my life, that I hated them all. Even though I tried to love them, tried to be “good” and do “right” for them in the absurd belief that somehow it might make them love me back and treat me with respect, human decency, and compassion... it was all simply for nothing because they hated me. My mother remarked all the time that she wished I had never been born, said everyone was happier before I came around, and my grandmother used to tell me that it could be a tremendous favor to them if I killed himself. Yet whenever I tried to kill myself, they all said: “Oh no! Not in our house. If you're going to kill yourself, go drown yourself in the pond or throw yourself off the mountain or something. Just don't do it here.” and I was a young teen at the time, and I realized for the first time that they did not care if I cried because they hurt me. They took pleasure, in my pains.
So to me, my family was a big, sick joke. My mother pretended to be a good Catholic, yet she did all the worst kind of things... drinking with guys, hanging out with drug addicts at parties, and behaving as disgracefully as she could. My grandmother got herself ordained as a Methodist reverend, and acted all holier than thou and talked about God's love all whilst acting hateful and saying cruel things that had as little to do with love as you can get. My grandfather was a perverted sadist, a glutton, and a monster in the truest sense of the word. He once told a male cousin of mine he wanted the boy to suck him off, and the kid was only a little boy when he said that to him. Needless the say, the boy's father wanted to come over and kill my grandfather for that kind of sick shit. Had my grandmother not protected him and spun it as if my grandfather was only joking, I honestly believe that particular uncle of mine would have very much murdered the vile bastard. And that would really have been funny! The things that my grandfather did to me were far worse. And the one time that I actually told a state appointed psychotherapist about it, they wanted to throw the man into prison. The only reason they did not? My grandmother forced me to recant and take back everything I said to that therapist about him... saying she would send me away someplace where I would be tortured or forced into drugs if I did not do so. They ended up labeling me schizophrenic because of how I changed my story, and it was made worse when that same year they did also happen to label my mother schizophrenic. The difference? She really was, and they only thought I was. But I will not lie, I was still very messed up as a child. But who would not be? I spent my earliest school years from kindergarten to fourth grade being tortured, abused, and damaged in countless ways in a Catholic school that my mother insisted my grandmother enroll me in. All to keep me far away not only from her first husband and his adopted sons, but away from my real biological father as well. Now there is the sickest joke of all! In trying to protect me, or so she claimed she was doing, my mother put me in a place where I suffered inhuman things. Here's a brief bit of highlights of just some of the things they did to me in that Catholic school? Might want to send the kiddies out of the room for this one, it's not for young ears to hear. Okay! Before we get to the horrible stuff... I should explain that none of the girls were abused in that school, only the boys. That was the whole reason they closed that school down in the end, when parents came forward and charges were pressed and the whole sick thing was exposed for what it was. The priest was guilty, the nuns were all guilty. And by the time they were done with us students, nobody was innocent anymore. Now as you may or may not know from my writings, I was in fact born intersex but with fully functioning (not deformed or messed up in any way) male genitalia. So my grandmother insisted they put male on my birth papers even though my mother wanted her to have it put that I was female instead. Either way would have been just as legally correct since... hello!... I am intersex, which means I have traits of both genders to my body. And my mind. And my soul, and spirit. But my grandmother was a selfish bitch, only liked boys... she even hated my mother, because she was born a girl and not a boy... and so BOOM! She made them put male on my birth papers and when it was I got enrolled in that school I had to go to school as a boy. In a school where only the girls were treated like human beings. The nuns kept on saying, all the time: “All girls are little angels, all boys are devils and imps!” They insulted me... constantly... saying my almond-shaped eyes made it that I looked like a (insert horrible slur for a Chinese person here). And they constantly said to me: “Open your eyes! Stop squinting!” but I wasn't squinting, my eyes just aren't big or wide. And they would hit me on the back on my head every time they said this to me. I am part Native American from three tribes. Cherokee and Chippewa, and Shoshone. All from my grandmother's side of the family, from her father in particular, who was part Dutch and part Native American from those tribes. I experienced nothing but racism due to this, and that was only the beginning of things. They would take all the boys and show us pictures of the Devil, demons, and Hell, and say to us that we were from Hell and that Devil was our father. This did not sit well with me given my mother used to half jokingly say that my father was the Devil all the time. I had already suffered night terrors since I was two years old, and this made it much, much worse.
And that was the least horrible thing they did to me! They would beat us with paddles... and me they would take and lock me in a pitch black closet because they heard from my mother that I was afraid of the dark (which as a child, I actually was, though I got over it during my teen years), and they would be right outside the closet door saying I was in Hell and they would only let me out if I begged God for the forgiveness of my sins. I told them I had no sins to be forgiven of, and they would leave me in that dark closet for a full half hour (an eternity to a child!) before opening the door and letting me out. I was in a crying, quivering, anguished state after that... every single time. And if I cried or laughed during classes, they would tape me to my chair, tape my mouth and nose shut so I could not breathe, and beat me. Once my best friend Aaron was laughing with me, and whilst they did that to me they made me watch whilst they did the same thing to him. Then, the nuns took him out into the hallway and beat poor Aaron until he threw up. One day, he disappeared and I never saw or heard anything about him ever again. There was a rumor going around the school that the nuns killed Aaron and sent his body to a slaughter house in Mexico. If that was a joke, it was a terrifying one for any child to hear told! I was forced by my lousy mother to become an altar boy, and kept doing that up until the beginning of my fourth grade year when I finally ended up pulled out of that school because the nuns went too far with torturing and busing me. I always had to watch out for the priest because he would always try to always get me to change my clothes in a dark room in the church's under chambers. I refused every time, and got changed instead over in the confession booth, making sure the priest wasn't there when I did so. A smart move, given it turned out later he was molesting the boys big time down in that dark room. When I was not being hurt by the nuns, I was being bullied by my fellow students. One day, the other altar boys tried to knock me off a tall ladder in the church when I was trying to light a candle high up for the priest. I screamed, and I was afraid I would fall to my death, because it was just that high up, but the priest took their side and I quit being an altar boy after that incident. Following that, I discovered my lunchbox had been broken open once and my milk was replaced with curdled milk. So someone even tried to poison me! That was how fucked up things were in that school. An speaking of milk... I had a habit as a child of taking off the crusts of my sandwiches because I didn't like eating the crusts. The nuns forced me one time to put the crusts in my milk, and they called it “bread soup” and force fed it to me until I threw up. Then, they made me eat my own vomit as well saying to throw it up was a waste and therefore a sin. But the final straw was the year they tried to force us to pray to the Pope. Not pray FOR the Pope. They wanted us to pray TO the Pople, as if he was God. I said, rightly, that such a thing was sinful and blasphemous. I said I would only pray to God through Jesus and with the intercession of the Virgin Mary. They said if I did not pray to the Pope they would beat me. So I said, in plain English: “Fuck the Pope!” They beat me, they pulled my pants down, and they shoved frozen hot dogs up my ass until I bled. Then they beat me for crying and screaming. That was what finally got my family to take me out of that school. Never you mind that I nearly lost my left eye all because of those stupid nuns! At least that though was an accident caused by the only good nun in the whole school who was not actually some kind of perverted maniac... Sister Mary Edward... when she tried to rush me out of a classroom I was being bullied in by the other students. She accidentally pushed me into a wall, when trying to push me out of the door, and my eye went into a nail, causing me to almost lose my eye. I ended up in the hospital from that, but it healed up fully and I don't even have a visible scar of any kind to show for it, though I did for years until the scar finally went away. But the day I was raped and beat until I bled and had welts and cuts and scratches and bruises all over me, that was the last straw. My mother didn't even believe me when I told her when I got home that day, until I took my clothes off and showed her what they did to me. She kept saying: “No, you just want a toy! You're making things up, I don't believe you.” But she sure believed me after I showed her. But, being the coward she was, she said I had to tell my grandmother so she could handle it because my mother was afraid and did not know what to do. So, we told my grandmother... everything.
The next day, I stayed home whilst my whole family went to that school to tell off the priest, the nuns and the teachers and make it clear I was never going back there again. My grandfather was an asshole... and when they got home that night he smacked me and said: “What did you do to deserve what they did to you?” Fuck that shit! What does any child do to deserve such torture? Nothing! Insulting the Pope on the grounds that the nuns were committing blasphemy against their own religion is not something that is deserving or rape and torture. Nothing is! Needless to say, I was fucked up in the head after that. I was in and out of fourteen different schools... thirteen at first... in a single year, my whole fourth grade year, because I was to be honest quite crazy from what I suffered in that Catholic school. In the fist one I went to, a normal non-religious private school right in town... we had a music teacher who was, I kid you not, obsessed with death and made us listen to death-themed music and draw images of what she called “death bodies” in other words grim reapers and dance macabre-themed art. I was always great at art... and writing... though I cannot do math because I have the mathematics version of dyslexia where the brain can't process numbers in the same way a dyslexic's brain can't process written words fully. But that year, my art talents were wasted in that school on that morbid stuff. On top of that, I was bullied as usual and had a gang of kids force dirt and twigs down my throat at one point. They held my face in freezing cold snow once too, trying to see if I would either get frost bite or suffocate. They stopped just short of killing me on that occasion. I did only one thing! I snapped and tried to knock down some high up but low hanging icicles, hoping they would bash the bullies in the head so they would stop and leave me alone. I got in trouble and had my first ever detention for that, and was told: “You could have killed them doing that!” What a joke, given they tried to kill me by way of suffocation in ice cold snow. On top of all that, the teachers were abuse towards me and would not let me go to the bathroom when I had a very great need to, causing the expected nastiness to happen. That prompted my family to transfer me to another school. In each one of the fourteen I attended that year, there were problems. There was yet another Catholic school in which a girl who was nasty to me put glue in my hair whilst another girl who I had a crush on... her name was Veronica... I kept looking for any excuse and pretext to be around. So much so, that I kept cutting classes to be with her, which ended up with me being sent to the principal's office. I was afraid I was going to be raped or tortured like in that other Catholic school, so I ran out of the principal's office and went back to class saying all was forgiven and everything was okay. Needless to say, they made me see a school appointed psychotherapist who when I told them I suffered from all manner of night terrors tried to say it was because I was possessed by the Devil. They recommended an exorcism, and my family said: “Hell no!” and I was off to yet several more schools in which more shit happened that necessitated me being transferred. Half the time, it was not my fault, like in an academy I attended where the only thing I did “wrong” was draw during class. I drew concentric fractal designs using stick figures. Abstract art stuff... cool looking, too. They school confiscated my notebook, swore those drawings were pornographic, and demanded I see a psychotherapist because of it. They said, I kid you not: “See that inverted triangle in the middle of the drawing? That's either a girl's lower anatomy or a girl with her skirt thrown up. The other stick figures are all gang raping her.” That was how they truly interpreted it. And they said I was the crazy one? It made it worse when I went upstairs and found they had a secret library there filled with occult books and books about secret societies. That was the final straw for them, and it was off to the therapist's office for me. The boys all bullied me that year by doing something stupid and pretending to be zombies. They did so convincingly and I was so naive that to tell the truth I believed them, and got in trouble for running away from them during recess. About the only good thing we did that year was we had a field trip to Plymouth that was a blast. I saw the Ocean Spray headquarters there, got a taste for cranberry juice, visited Plymouth Rock and a plantation they had out there where people lived like it was the Pilgrim days. My friend Ike was along for the ride, and even my grandfather, who was chaperon on that trip for me was decent to me for once. The therapist? A disaster!
They said I seemed to have a thing for girls at too young an age, and to be fair I did have a very strong desire to meet a pretty girl, fall in love, and be happy in life. And it was too young to be thinking about that! I did not understand why my first crush, Stephanie, had started being nasty to me in third grade... when in the previous grades I had shared my cookies with her and she was sweet to me. People change, and I was changing too. I just did not realize it at the time. I had a close brush with something sinister in a supposed “Christian” school that I attended sometime later. The place was huge, and it was weird. There was some kind of masonic eye symbol on the floor of the school's main hall, and the teachers all were very peculiar acting. My first indication that something was really not right was when I met this one boy whose face was covered in burns. I had seen him before that around the school, and he was not covered in burns previously. On this occasion though, I met up with him during recess and asked him what happened to him. He said: “It's bee stings! Okay? Just bee stings, nothing more.” and the principal caught me talking to the boy, heard me asking him about his burns, and said: “It's just bee stings! Got it kids? Watch out for bees in the playground.” But there were no bees, and this school was in a city and there was not a whole lot of vegetation for bees to be attracted to there. The kid was shaking visibly as soon as the principal showed up too! Definitely weird. Later on, I noticed during religion class that my teachers all were teaching literal hate towards other religions, minorities, you name it. All with a focus on the apocalypse and the idea of an impending final judgment. I told my family about that, and they made complaints to the school saying to keep me out of those religion classes because “We don't teach hate and home, and it should never be taught in school either!” Okay... totally a lie that there was not any hate going on at home, since my family was hateful towards me and my grandmother and her vile husband were both as racist as it gets. My mother, to her credit, was not racist! And at heart, she was not homophobic or transphobic either even when she acted like she was. That was all why she made a point of apologizing to me before she died, because she regretting ever acting like that over the years. Anyway, during recess not long after my family made that complaint to the school, one of the older boys was bullying me and throwing a basketball and trying to hit me in the head with it, saying: “I'm gonna make you scream, bitch!” So I got angry, threw it back, and chased after the bully with it saying: “No, I'm gonna make YOU scream!” and the physical education teacher (this was all during phys ed class, not during recess) came running up, grabbed the ball then grabbed my arm as hard as he could and said menacingly: “Alright, that's enough from both of you! I'm going to make YOU scream. Now.” And he dragged me into a hallway where the principal was waiting. The two men exchanged glances in an odd way, and they took me to a small study room where there were bookshelves filled with all kinds of children's books and two child-sized cages to one side in the room. They locked me in the room and said: “We'll deal with you later!” and I took one look at those cages, noticed burn marks in them, and I realized they had set that one boy on fire and planned to do the same thing to me next. I wondered why the auditorium always had weird looking flags in it (which I realize now were Nazi flags... but back at that age the only thing I knew about Nazis was that they were the bad guys in an odd episode of a show I saw on television, and that my mother warned me to avoid anything to do with people like that due to them being evil and all that). I seriously thought I was going to be murdered. It got to be well past the lunch hour (I was locked in that room pretty much the whole school day), and before I knew it... it was getting dark out and the clock said it was five in the afternoon. I wondered why it was my grandfather, who always dropped me off and picked me up from school had not shown up to get me. And I thought I was never going to get home again. Then, the door unlocked itself and opened. There was no one there, so I crept quietly through the school and searched for the stairs (the room was an upstairs room) and I eventually got to the main hall with that weird eye symbol on the floor. From there, I reached the office of the principal. First, I tried the main doors, but they were locked. So I went into the office, and was able to call home using the telephone there. I asked my grandfather to come and get me... I was scared.
He said he tried to pick me up earlier... when school got out... but that the principal told him I had run away and apparently my family was about to call the police and report me missing after having been out looking all over that city for me. I later heard several different versions of that story, but it was all pretty much the same basic thing so I knew it was true. By the time I saw my grandfather's car pull up, I tried the main doors again and this time they were unlocked and I was able to escape that school and finally get home. Never went back to that school again! The place was truly evil, and the people who ran it all very clearly were some kind of Neo Nazis. Like I said though, sometimes it was my fault when I had to be taken out of a school. There was a very nice academy like school in a rural town north of the area I grew up in, and I did good there at first. I had my first mythology class, though my grandmother had in fact taught me about mythology at home using a set of children's encyclopedias that also contained all manner of fairy tales, fables, myths and legends. But my first mythology class in school, I learned the story of Perseus and the Gorgon, and got to hear some creepy local legends and popular horror stories for children. I did good in all my classes but math, same as usual, and that year my math disability hit me hard as I started to get all F's and D's in math like never before. Though I was straight A's and B's in every other class I was presented with. I wasn't so much bullied but teased a bit here and there, mostly people saw how I looked (very feminine looking) and assumed I must be gay. I was bisexual even then, but mostly I preferred girls and didn't like it that the boys all assumed I did not. One boy was rude, and during a game of basketball I accidentally banging into him and he yelled out: “Gross! What are you... trying to hump me or something?” I did not know what the word hump meant in this context, I thought it meant banging into someone. So I banged into him again... and laughed... whilst saying: “Look! I just humped you! Want me to hump you again?” I got beat up for that big time, and when I got home that day my mother had to explain to me what that word meant so that would not happen again. What finally caused me to have to be taken out of that school was actually a fear I had. See, the school had that one odd old custom where on your birthday you'd get a spanking. All I equated spanking with... was torture and abuse... so I was deathly afraid that come my birthday they were going to seriously hurt me. I then plotted and planned to get myself kicked out of that school before my birthday so that I would not be hurt. It was autumn, so that meant I had until spring... until fifth grade... to do this. I never made it to fifth grade in that school. I rather overachieved when it came to getting myself kicked out of there. You see, there was a girl I had a major crush on. Her name was Sally, and she always brought in ice pops she made herself to share with me. On this one occasion, I said to her: “How about a kiss, Sally?” And she said no so I went ahead and kissed her anyway. She gasped, and ran off to tell the teacher. I got a stern talking to about that, and a lecture that it was inappropriate behavior, and I figured that mean things of that sort would be certain to get me kicked out before my birthday. If all of this sounds insane... it was insane. I was insane for the way I was thinking! But it could not be helped... I was fucked up big time, and it was only getting worse. Phys ed class came around one day, and there was another girl there who reminded me of the first girl I ever had a major crush on, Stephanie. Same dark hair, same eyes... same pretty much everything. I walked over to her, and put my hands down her sweater and felt her chest. I had gotten in trouble a couple of times in other schools for grabbing girls between their legs, but I did not want to go that far in this case because I genuinely liked this girl a lot. She gasped, actually smiled a bit, and some of the boys whistled wolf whistles. The girl did not seem to mind, but the teacher went... ballistic... to say the least. That got me kicked out of school big time. That and me running through the hallways skipping and singing and dancing insanely whilst trying to outrun my phys ed teacher. Finally, fifth grade came around and my family decided it was time to put me in the local middle school right in town. I had already fucked up in thirteen schools previously, blew my fourth grade to hell because I was out of my mind, and so we figured how bad could it be going local with things. But the thing was, the problem was I had unresolved issues left over, caused by the abuses I suffered in that Catholic school.
Fifth grade was a disaster, but not as much so as sixth grade was. Mostly, the middle school was just what you'd expect a public school to be. I had one teacher who was a nasty piece of work, she yelled at me and screamed in my ear all the time. I suffered from chronic ear infections from when I was two to when I was fourteen years old, and this... this did not help matters at all. The kids I went to school with in that Catholic school and that one where the music teacher was obsessed with death... they all were in this school now, and they all remembered me. Most of the boys all bullied me, and the girls acted like they were too good to give me the right time of day. Sometimes the boys would get me with that old, lousy trick: “Hey! I just heard... your house is on fire.” and I'd insist on calling home to make sure it all was okay and not really on fire. The teachers got mad at me saying I should know better, which made me angry because I did NOT know better. Though I was learning. I got in trouble for stupid things a lot that year... like when I did not like a book I had to do a book report one, I'd change the book's ending to make it more interesting and fun. For instance... I hated the ending to that famous children's book “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” by Madeleine L'Engle, I found it boring, so I decided to “improve” it by adding a knife fight where the main villain gets gruesomely killed in it. When I read it in front of the class, you can imagine the shocked reactions it got! I thought it was hilarious... my teachers thought it was crazy. The next year, it was time for sixth grade. That was when I really lost it mentally, big time, and had the worst sort of breakdown imaginable. I was being bullied relentlessly all the time that year, and on top of that I was discovering that I really, really liked girls a LOT. In THAT way. I was eleven years old at the time, but clearly I was maturing rather early. There was Shannon, who I sometimes would call up on the phone and pretend I lost my homework to ask her what was our homework in order to simply hear the sound of her voice. I got in trouble trying to kiss her on the way out to recess one day. She kicked me hard, and kept on kicking me after I was on the floor, to make matters worse. Then there was Martha, who I chased sometimes whilst yelling: “Come to Papa, Martha!” and trying to kiss her. I told her that I wanted her to remember that I liked her so when we got older she would not forget me. I actually, very sincerely meant that too at the time. Ironically, come eighth grade, she became kind of ugly looking so when she said she remembered me and that I liked her... and she kind of stalked me saying she wanted me to do very explicitly sexual things with her... I told her I was no longer interested in her. She said to me flat out: “But you're hot! I want to take a shower with you, and I want you to rape me in the shower. Heck, I'd even rape you if you prefer.” and I called her a douche bag for saying that to me. We both got put in an in-house suspension for talking nasty like that to each other, and the whole time I was trying to write some of my first short stories during my free time after I finished up all my work I could hear her whispering to me from the other side of the suspension room: “I still love you! I still want you. I'll never forget you.” and it was kind of disturbing to me at the time how obsessed with me she was. Had she been pretty, I'd have probably even gone for it too. But, she lost her looks as well as her mind, and I was not much better off mentally than she was. A girl named Jill was the one who I ended up getting in the worst trouble over though, in sixth grade. I had a verbal fight with one of my teachers, called him “Mister Dark” to his face because he looked like the actor who played Mister Dark from that children's horror movie Something Wicked This Way Comes. Right after reading a book report in his class based on the book version of that movie, which he said I did not put enough effort into. And right after calling him that, I rushed over to the desk of a girl named Jennifer who was a dead ringer for Stephanie, and I pulled her top nearly off her shoulders before feeling her chest. She actually was into it, believe it or not but the teacher screamed and ordered Jill to escort me to the principal's office. On the way, I told her I had to go to the bathroom and when she was looking the other way I jumped out of the bathroom and kissed her. She hit me over the head with a book she was carrying, a teacher saw this, and next hing I knew I was sitting in the principal's office waiting for him to show up. I was bored, so I decided to pass the time by tying my own shoelaces together. Giggling like a maniac the whole time I was tying them.
Previously... I had been called to the principal's office for a particularly nasty breakdown I had during art class in which I cut my finger on a piece of wire and that triggered a flashback to me being cut with wire by the nuns in the Catholic school (one of the ways they used to torture me). I ended up running down the hallway outside the art class screaming that I was being cut and beat with wires and a “wire whip”. I tied my shoelaces together that time too, but I wasn't giggling that time. Long story short (too late, I know!), Jill's father was pissed off big time and wanted to pretty much kill me. The school set me up with a state appointed psychotherapist and that was the one I told the truth about my grandfather and his abuse of me to. Back during my messed up fourth grade year, my grandfather nearly drove me to kill myself. One time, when we were parked by a pond whilst he was going in to talk to the principal when I was in trouble at one of those thirteen schools I mentioned, I turned off the car's brake... I was waiting in the car... in the hopes that the car would roll into the pond so I could drown. It nearly did, and likely I would have died were it not for that a teacher noticed this and my grandfather rushed out to stop the car in time. Another time, we were riding down the mountain on the way back to town by way of the road that linked the town I grew up in to the main interstate highway up over the mountain... and I grabbed the wheel and tried to force us off the road and off the mountain. Clearly, I needed quite a bit of mental help. So that was how I ended up in that therapist's office that I mentioned at the start of this writing of mine. The final straw for that middle school though was when I tried to pull off a girl's bathing suit as we were swimming together during swimming class. I was not thinking, and honestly that could have ended up drowning her. Plus, it was a very perverted thing to do. My art teacher noticed every one of my drawings featured demonic figures with horns... and I realized it all went back to those images of devils, demons, and stuff that I was exposed to in that Catholic school. So the therapist I was seeing, who was made aware of all of these things... after labeling me schizophrenic like I mentioned back in the beginning, decided to send me to a place over the mountain where they examined children's brains to find out what is wrong with them mentally. The place was horrible, some kids were lobotomized in that place and nobody wanted their children to ever end up there. So the school called a meeting and made my family go to it. It ended up five meetings. I went to the first one, but had to stay with some relatives for the other four meetings that my family had to attend without me present. They laid it on the line, said I could be taken out of my home and put in that place over the mountain... or, I could be put in a disciplinary military program run by the marines that the school sponsored. Moving out of the school district was not going to be legally allowed, nor was a transfer to another school. This was all the doing of the state by this point, and my family had to comply. I was enrolled in the military program and spent the next year of my life in it. It was brutal to say the least. There were seven kids in that program, fully including myself, and it was all boys and no girls. The teacher was a marine drill sergeant, and he had two teachers aids present to observe what went on at all times. The best thing I can say about that year is I lost weight I needed to lose and learned how to defend myself. The year before, a boy by the name of Christian, of all things, tried to rape me in the hallways because he heard I was intersex and wanted to see if he could in his words fuck me like a girl. He tore my blouse, beat me badly, and was about to start pulling my pants down when a teacher caught him. He was never punished, because his family was highly regarded in town. So he got away with it. Whereas me, anything I ever did I was punished for, and this program was no exception. They overachieved with me though... they did not just simply teach me to defend myself. They taught me three different styles of martial arts. Tae Kwon Do, Judo, and a variety of Kung Fu targeting pressure points and other bodily weak points. I learned how to fight with a knife, a wooden staff, and a wooden practice katana sword. I learned how to use a gun. I learned how to be quiet, stealthy, and I learned that literally anything even a toothpick can be used for an improvised weapon if the need arises. I had one year to master all that, and I did. I was the only kid in that entire program who mastered everything I was taught so that by the end of the year I could be out of it at last.
Out of it and back into normal classes again. But... not before being forced to run so much each day with a full pack and weights strapped to my wrists and ankles that I ended up with trench foot out of it. I nearly lost my feet because of that, and it took six months for my feet to heal completely which thank heavens they did. They also subjected us to a very odd kind of brainwashing procedure where they took each of us and made us watch movies and look at images put up on a projector screen of all manner of horrors. Horrors of war, images of carnage, crime scenes, and pictures of corpses and dead bodies. They said it was to toughen us up, to make us strong. In reality, it was to harden us and turn us into killers. If we misbehaved or screwed up in any way, it meant a beating on the Judo mats... or in my case because I was intersex and therefore technically the only “girl” in the class I was told that if I did not do all that I was told to do... then I would be sent off to a place the drill sergeant called “The Grove” where he said that I would be made into a “Little Bitch Hooker” for the rich and powerful, where I would have to live and never see my family again, where I would have to service the elite or die if I failed to please them. I was lucky, I never ended up being sent to the Grove. So instead of being trained to become a sex slave, they trained me to be an assassin. The program was a front for something far more sinister involving some of the shadowy forces that operate in this country behind the scenes. Let me tell you the truth of the United States of America... it has two faces. The one you are taught to believe is the true face, and which is all lies and propaganda designed to make things look good. And the true face, with may just as well be a grinning skull with blood pouring out of its' mouth. All countries have a hidden, darker side, and during my year in that program I was subjected to, and victimized by, America's darker side. They went so far as to use certain phrases or words, or numerical sequences that if I am subjected to... could cause different sorts of effects ranging from making me cry or causing me to have a breakdown or even a meltdown, to things like causing me to become aggressive, or even violent. They taught each of us a unique mantra-like phrase that we can use to calm ourselves under certain conditions, but the truth is it is an imperfect bandage to use on an open wound. I was the only one of all seven students to get out of that program come eighth grade. Everyone else was in that program until was closed down years later, when it was shut down for abuse and for using illegal disciplinary methods. I never tied my shoelaces together again, I carried myself with dignity, and I tried to rise above not only that program and what it did to me, but also the craziness that nearly robbed me of my sanity in the years leading up to that. I did good in eighth grade, kept practicing art and writing and although my teachers all said I'd only end up with a factory job at best in life I still kept at it and was determined that someday people would read my writings and look at my art and realize there is something beautiful within me worth celebrating. It was a nasty time at home, however, during my eighth grade year. My mother married husband number three, a lunatic of a man who was actually wanted by the FBI for being an international drug dealer. He had a bunch of aliases, fake names, and false identification cards, and he was a sadistic nut if ever there was one. He one took a knife to his ribs and made me hold the knife. Then, he said to me: “Go on, you little bitch! Cut me. Come on, cut me! Because I want an excuse to cut you even deeper.” He even drove my mother to become nearly anorexic, cheated on her behind her back, and slipped cocaine in her soda on at least one occasion just to see if it would do anything to her. They got divorced before that year was out, and the whole time she was married to him my biological father kept calling the house to ask and make sure my mother and I were alright. My father was a part Italian gentleman who may well have had ties to Casa Nostra for all anyone knew. He was part other things as well, and my mother teased that he was everything from part alien to part demon. She never named him, she only ever called him either the Devil or simply “Your real father” when she talked to me about him at all. For years, starting the same year as the phone calls to our house, he would send a van to pull up and the van was full of Italian guys of the sort you'd see on a show like the Sopranos. They kept an eye on our house, and especially on my mother and I, just to make sure we were unharmed. It stopped after a while... as did, those phone calls.
From eighth grade through high school it was normal stuff. I stopped a boy in eighth grade who tried to rape me when we were getting changed for swimming class by screaming until a teacher showed up to stop things. All the boy got the chance to do was whip me with his towel. Later on, I met him in the hallway and punched him so hard between his legs that he was on the floor and unable to speak. After that, he never messed with me again and never looked me in the eye ever again either. I managed at the last to turn the tables on all my bullies, and I did so well in all of my classes that when I quit school the year I turned sixteen the principal said they had nothing left to teach me anyway, but that they were sad to see me quit. I had won an eighty dollar bond and a dinner at an expensive restaurant lodge when I was in eighth grade. I ended up spending it on an arcade machine, because what would you honestly be expecting a thirteen year old child to do with that much money? It says something when a literal whole arcade machine cost only eighty dollars back then. And that was in the 1980's when arcades were still a thing! But I was lucky that year. I thought I was even luckier when I turned sixteen and met Andrea. All up until she died, and my happiness was crushed to pieces. I was never right again after her death. How could I be? That same year, after Andrea's death, one of my mother's boyfriends tried to assault me in a sexual way whilst strangling me in my own bedroom. My mother just stood there and watched whilst stuffing popcorn in her mouth as if she was watching a movie. My grandmother stopped him, and I got away by running out of the house while the man was shooting at me. I can do a lot of things, I can kill a man in probably a hundred different ways... but against a gun or when someone cheap shots me like he did in order to take me by surprise like he did... that's different. I ran up to the park for the rest of that day, and got my revenge by setting part of my mother's room on fire when I got home. It was easy. I just took a pile of her clothes, used a cloth belt for a fuse, sprayed hair spray all over all of it and set the belt on fire before tossing the hairspray can unto the clothes. BOOM! There went part of the floor. Luckily, my grandmother cleaned it up before my mother got home that night. I broke my bedroom window, got arrested for it, and ended up on probation for a year after that. Other horrible things happened to me on that same same, making it the worst year of my life. One of my cousins got a Neo Nazi skinhead gang to attack me at the park. I barely escaped with my life, though I manged to make them think I was crazy before escaping. His brother, who was in that gang was pissed at him for doing that to me. Because you don't hurt family no matter what you are into. I tried to kill myself several times that year, but I wanted to kill the man who had murdered Andrea (her own father) even more. He ended up paying for his sick crimes, all of them, and I never had to lift a finger over it. Justice does happen legally sometimes, even if it is international justice given Andrea's family were Romanian citizens. I had a hard time controlling what I learned in that military program... the first year I was no longer in it. When I was thirteen... there was an incident where my grandfather called me a homophobic slur outside of a computer shop. When we got back into the car, I wrapped my hands around his neck and nearly pushed his Adam's apple all the way into his throat. I wanted him to feel my pain, to suffer, but not to die. The man had been in the army, he had been a military policeman and a sharp shooter. He knew how to kill just like I did. He also saw the look in my eyes and knew I could kill him if I wanted to. I made my point, and stopped. Then, we drove home and he yelled at me and said I was crazy before going off to bed. The man was a lazy piece of shit who beat his wife, hurt his daughter (my mother) and who ate like a pig. It was better in the times when he was asleep and not bothering anyone. Out of all my family, he alone I did not cry for when he died from diabetes in 2008. He died pissing himself and blaming himself for giving my mother the same disease, which she died from in 2005. He was the worst of them all, and deserved to die in the very agony he was in towards the end. These... were the events that from my childhood to my sixteenth year of life made me the person I became. My current therapist, told me that my life is quite a bit like Dante's Inferno... you think you've seen the worst of it, but there's something more terrible below that. Layers and layers of horror, of trauma, of madness. It was a tragedy, not a comedy, and yet still I laugh.
Being a personal journey of mine, from some of the early stages of my life to those that came after.
Let me tell you a joke! Stop me if you have ever heard this one. Ready? Good! So, there are these two women and one of them is pregnant for her first child. She's a conservative, right-wing Christian who is anti-abortion and all that. She's also a Karen. You know the type. She meets a left-wing liberal in a bar, and the two women get to talking. The liberal woman asks her: “So where is your husband?” since she wonders what the Karen is doing in the bar at such a late hour, it being almost midnight. The Karen just looks at the woman and says: “He's working late, the same as usual. How about you, you married?” and the liberal woman answers: “No, but my life partner is this very beautiful woman sitting right next to me.” and the Karen notices a woman who looks like a super model or some kind of Hollywood star that is sitting right next to the liberal woman she's been talking to. The couple is obviously happy and were having a good time that night. The Karen looks disgusted, and says: “How nice for you.” Really she is thinking every kind of hateful thing you can imagine. “Got any kids at home?” asks the Karen, and the liberal woman says: “No, we're waiting until we're ready before adopting one. We aren't ready yet.” and the Karen is thinking hateful thoughts once again, because she thinks real women should have babies... since that was what her mother taught her. The Karen gets drunk, ends up kissing a woman while drunk and wakes up in an alley with her purse stolen the following morning. She goes home, to find out that her husband has been cheating on her at work. What does she do? She goes to the nearest clinic to get an abortion and decides to get a divorce after doing that. As for the liberal lesbian couple, they adopt a beautiful baby boy and a beautiful baby girl and raise them together. Their unconventional family lives happily ever after, despite life not always working out that way. What's the punchline? Irony, my dears! Irony is the punchline, and narrow-mindedness is always a joke. Not a very funny one, but a joke. Just like narrow-minded people are all jokes! The moral of the story kiddies... is don't be hateful and never, ever, be a Karen. Being a Karen never ends well, unless your name is actually Karen and you are not a Karen despite that being your name. Got it? Here ends the lesson for today about that! What has this to do with anything? I thought I would open this writing with a touch of dark humor. Why? Because I am convinced that sometimes life is a joke and death in the punchline. Might as well smile and laugh all the way to the grave! The first time I realized this bit of wisdom was when my beloved Andrea died and I could not save her because I was not allowed to save her. Thanks to my rotten family! There was one thing my grandmother was right about, if nothing else. My mother was rotten to the core, and it will not ever matter that she apologized to me for it before she died, she was still rotten. All she did her whole life was throw herself at men, at any men who she took a fancy to, and she and my grandfather abused me in various ways. With my grandfather it was physical, sexual, mental and emotional abuse as well as of course his specialty... verbal abuse! With my mother, it was physical, mental, emotional and verbal. And my grandmother was no slouch in the old abuse department either, no sir. She screamed at me a lot and called me just as many racist, homophobic, and transphobic and everything-phobic slurs as you can imagine. And you know what? I realize now, at this point in my life, that I hated them all. Even though I tried to love them, tried to be “good” and do “right” for them in the absurd belief that somehow it might make them love me back and treat me with respect, human decency, and compassion... it was all simply for nothing because they hated me. My mother remarked all the time that she wished I had never been born, said everyone was happier before I came around, and my grandmother used to tell me that it could be a tremendous favor to them if I killed himself. Yet whenever I tried to kill myself, they all said: “Oh no! Not in our house. If you're going to kill yourself, go drown yourself in the pond or throw yourself off the mountain or something. Just don't do it here.” and I was a young teen at the time, and I realized for the first time that they did not care if I cried because they hurt me. They took pleasure, in my pains.
So to me, my family was a big, sick joke. My mother pretended to be a good Catholic, yet she did all the worst kind of things... drinking with guys, hanging out with drug addicts at parties, and behaving as disgracefully as she could. My grandmother got herself ordained as a Methodist reverend, and acted all holier than thou and talked about God's love all whilst acting hateful and saying cruel things that had as little to do with love as you can get. My grandfather was a perverted sadist, a glutton, and a monster in the truest sense of the word. He once told a male cousin of mine he wanted the boy to suck him off, and the kid was only a little boy when he said that to him. Needless the say, the boy's father wanted to come over and kill my grandfather for that kind of sick shit. Had my grandmother not protected him and spun it as if my grandfather was only joking, I honestly believe that particular uncle of mine would have very much murdered the vile bastard. And that would really have been funny! The things that my grandfather did to me were far worse. And the one time that I actually told a state appointed psychotherapist about it, they wanted to throw the man into prison. The only reason they did not? My grandmother forced me to recant and take back everything I said to that therapist about him... saying she would send me away someplace where I would be tortured or forced into drugs if I did not do so. They ended up labeling me schizophrenic because of how I changed my story, and it was made worse when that same year they did also happen to label my mother schizophrenic. The difference? She really was, and they only thought I was. But I will not lie, I was still very messed up as a child. But who would not be? I spent my earliest school years from kindergarten to fourth grade being tortured, abused, and damaged in countless ways in a Catholic school that my mother insisted my grandmother enroll me in. All to keep me far away not only from her first husband and his adopted sons, but away from my real biological father as well. Now there is the sickest joke of all! In trying to protect me, or so she claimed she was doing, my mother put me in a place where I suffered inhuman things. Here's a brief bit of highlights of just some of the things they did to me in that Catholic school? Might want to send the kiddies out of the room for this one, it's not for young ears to hear. Okay! Before we get to the horrible stuff... I should explain that none of the girls were abused in that school, only the boys. That was the whole reason they closed that school down in the end, when parents came forward and charges were pressed and the whole sick thing was exposed for what it was. The priest was guilty, the nuns were all guilty. And by the time they were done with us students, nobody was innocent anymore. Now as you may or may not know from my writings, I was in fact born intersex but with fully functioning (not deformed or messed up in any way) male genitalia. So my grandmother insisted they put male on my birth papers even though my mother wanted her to have it put that I was female instead. Either way would have been just as legally correct since... hello!... I am intersex, which means I have traits of both genders to my body. And my mind. And my soul, and spirit. But my grandmother was a selfish bitch, only liked boys... she even hated my mother, because she was born a girl and not a boy... and so BOOM! She made them put male on my birth papers and when it was I got enrolled in that school I had to go to school as a boy. In a school where only the girls were treated like human beings. The nuns kept on saying, all the time: “All girls are little angels, all boys are devils and imps!” They insulted me... constantly... saying my almond-shaped eyes made it that I looked like a (insert horrible slur for a Chinese person here). And they constantly said to me: “Open your eyes! Stop squinting!” but I wasn't squinting, my eyes just aren't big or wide. And they would hit me on the back on my head every time they said this to me. I am part Native American from three tribes. Cherokee and Chippewa, and Shoshone. All from my grandmother's side of the family, from her father in particular, who was part Dutch and part Native American from those tribes. I experienced nothing but racism due to this, and that was only the beginning of things. They would take all the boys and show us pictures of the Devil, demons, and Hell, and say to us that we were from Hell and that Devil was our father. This did not sit well with me given my mother used to half jokingly say that my father was the Devil all the time. I had already suffered night terrors since I was two years old, and this made it much, much worse.
And that was the least horrible thing they did to me! They would beat us with paddles... and me they would take and lock me in a pitch black closet because they heard from my mother that I was afraid of the dark (which as a child, I actually was, though I got over it during my teen years), and they would be right outside the closet door saying I was in Hell and they would only let me out if I begged God for the forgiveness of my sins. I told them I had no sins to be forgiven of, and they would leave me in that dark closet for a full half hour (an eternity to a child!) before opening the door and letting me out. I was in a crying, quivering, anguished state after that... every single time. And if I cried or laughed during classes, they would tape me to my chair, tape my mouth and nose shut so I could not breathe, and beat me. Once my best friend Aaron was laughing with me, and whilst they did that to me they made me watch whilst they did the same thing to him. Then, the nuns took him out into the hallway and beat poor Aaron until he threw up. One day, he disappeared and I never saw or heard anything about him ever again. There was a rumor going around the school that the nuns killed Aaron and sent his body to a slaughter house in Mexico. If that was a joke, it was a terrifying one for any child to hear told! I was forced by my lousy mother to become an altar boy, and kept doing that up until the beginning of my fourth grade year when I finally ended up pulled out of that school because the nuns went too far with torturing and busing me. I always had to watch out for the priest because he would always try to always get me to change my clothes in a dark room in the church's under chambers. I refused every time, and got changed instead over in the confession booth, making sure the priest wasn't there when I did so. A smart move, given it turned out later he was molesting the boys big time down in that dark room. When I was not being hurt by the nuns, I was being bullied by my fellow students. One day, the other altar boys tried to knock me off a tall ladder in the church when I was trying to light a candle high up for the priest. I screamed, and I was afraid I would fall to my death, because it was just that high up, but the priest took their side and I quit being an altar boy after that incident. Following that, I discovered my lunchbox had been broken open once and my milk was replaced with curdled milk. So someone even tried to poison me! That was how fucked up things were in that school. An speaking of milk... I had a habit as a child of taking off the crusts of my sandwiches because I didn't like eating the crusts. The nuns forced me one time to put the crusts in my milk, and they called it “bread soup” and force fed it to me until I threw up. Then, they made me eat my own vomit as well saying to throw it up was a waste and therefore a sin. But the final straw was the year they tried to force us to pray to the Pope. Not pray FOR the Pope. They wanted us to pray TO the Pople, as if he was God. I said, rightly, that such a thing was sinful and blasphemous. I said I would only pray to God through Jesus and with the intercession of the Virgin Mary. They said if I did not pray to the Pope they would beat me. So I said, in plain English: “Fuck the Pope!” They beat me, they pulled my pants down, and they shoved frozen hot dogs up my ass until I bled. Then they beat me for crying and screaming. That was what finally got my family to take me out of that school. Never you mind that I nearly lost my left eye all because of those stupid nuns! At least that though was an accident caused by the only good nun in the whole school who was not actually some kind of perverted maniac... Sister Mary Edward... when she tried to rush me out of a classroom I was being bullied in by the other students. She accidentally pushed me into a wall, when trying to push me out of the door, and my eye went into a nail, causing me to almost lose my eye. I ended up in the hospital from that, but it healed up fully and I don't even have a visible scar of any kind to show for it, though I did for years until the scar finally went away. But the day I was raped and beat until I bled and had welts and cuts and scratches and bruises all over me, that was the last straw. My mother didn't even believe me when I told her when I got home that day, until I took my clothes off and showed her what they did to me. She kept saying: “No, you just want a toy! You're making things up, I don't believe you.” But she sure believed me after I showed her. But, being the coward she was, she said I had to tell my grandmother so she could handle it because my mother was afraid and did not know what to do. So, we told my grandmother... everything.
The next day, I stayed home whilst my whole family went to that school to tell off the priest, the nuns and the teachers and make it clear I was never going back there again. My grandfather was an asshole... and when they got home that night he smacked me and said: “What did you do to deserve what they did to you?” Fuck that shit! What does any child do to deserve such torture? Nothing! Insulting the Pope on the grounds that the nuns were committing blasphemy against their own religion is not something that is deserving or rape and torture. Nothing is! Needless to say, I was fucked up in the head after that. I was in and out of fourteen different schools... thirteen at first... in a single year, my whole fourth grade year, because I was to be honest quite crazy from what I suffered in that Catholic school. In the fist one I went to, a normal non-religious private school right in town... we had a music teacher who was, I kid you not, obsessed with death and made us listen to death-themed music and draw images of what she called “death bodies” in other words grim reapers and dance macabre-themed art. I was always great at art... and writing... though I cannot do math because I have the mathematics version of dyslexia where the brain can't process numbers in the same way a dyslexic's brain can't process written words fully. But that year, my art talents were wasted in that school on that morbid stuff. On top of that, I was bullied as usual and had a gang of kids force dirt and twigs down my throat at one point. They held my face in freezing cold snow once too, trying to see if I would either get frost bite or suffocate. They stopped just short of killing me on that occasion. I did only one thing! I snapped and tried to knock down some high up but low hanging icicles, hoping they would bash the bullies in the head so they would stop and leave me alone. I got in trouble and had my first ever detention for that, and was told: “You could have killed them doing that!” What a joke, given they tried to kill me by way of suffocation in ice cold snow. On top of all that, the teachers were abuse towards me and would not let me go to the bathroom when I had a very great need to, causing the expected nastiness to happen. That prompted my family to transfer me to another school. In each one of the fourteen I attended that year, there were problems. There was yet another Catholic school in which a girl who was nasty to me put glue in my hair whilst another girl who I had a crush on... her name was Veronica... I kept looking for any excuse and pretext to be around. So much so, that I kept cutting classes to be with her, which ended up with me being sent to the principal's office. I was afraid I was going to be raped or tortured like in that other Catholic school, so I ran out of the principal's office and went back to class saying all was forgiven and everything was okay. Needless to say, they made me see a school appointed psychotherapist who when I told them I suffered from all manner of night terrors tried to say it was because I was possessed by the Devil. They recommended an exorcism, and my family said: “Hell no!” and I was off to yet several more schools in which more shit happened that necessitated me being transferred. Half the time, it was not my fault, like in an academy I attended where the only thing I did “wrong” was draw during class. I drew concentric fractal designs using stick figures. Abstract art stuff... cool looking, too. They school confiscated my notebook, swore those drawings were pornographic, and demanded I see a psychotherapist because of it. They said, I kid you not: “See that inverted triangle in the middle of the drawing? That's either a girl's lower anatomy or a girl with her skirt thrown up. The other stick figures are all gang raping her.” That was how they truly interpreted it. And they said I was the crazy one? It made it worse when I went upstairs and found they had a secret library there filled with occult books and books about secret societies. That was the final straw for them, and it was off to the therapist's office for me. The boys all bullied me that year by doing something stupid and pretending to be zombies. They did so convincingly and I was so naive that to tell the truth I believed them, and got in trouble for running away from them during recess. About the only good thing we did that year was we had a field trip to Plymouth that was a blast. I saw the Ocean Spray headquarters there, got a taste for cranberry juice, visited Plymouth Rock and a plantation they had out there where people lived like it was the Pilgrim days. My friend Ike was along for the ride, and even my grandfather, who was chaperon on that trip for me was decent to me for once. The therapist? A disaster!
They said I seemed to have a thing for girls at too young an age, and to be fair I did have a very strong desire to meet a pretty girl, fall in love, and be happy in life. And it was too young to be thinking about that! I did not understand why my first crush, Stephanie, had started being nasty to me in third grade... when in the previous grades I had shared my cookies with her and she was sweet to me. People change, and I was changing too. I just did not realize it at the time. I had a close brush with something sinister in a supposed “Christian” school that I attended sometime later. The place was huge, and it was weird. There was some kind of masonic eye symbol on the floor of the school's main hall, and the teachers all were very peculiar acting. My first indication that something was really not right was when I met this one boy whose face was covered in burns. I had seen him before that around the school, and he was not covered in burns previously. On this occasion though, I met up with him during recess and asked him what happened to him. He said: “It's bee stings! Okay? Just bee stings, nothing more.” and the principal caught me talking to the boy, heard me asking him about his burns, and said: “It's just bee stings! Got it kids? Watch out for bees in the playground.” But there were no bees, and this school was in a city and there was not a whole lot of vegetation for bees to be attracted to there. The kid was shaking visibly as soon as the principal showed up too! Definitely weird. Later on, I noticed during religion class that my teachers all were teaching literal hate towards other religions, minorities, you name it. All with a focus on the apocalypse and the idea of an impending final judgment. I told my family about that, and they made complaints to the school saying to keep me out of those religion classes because “We don't teach hate and home, and it should never be taught in school either!” Okay... totally a lie that there was not any hate going on at home, since my family was hateful towards me and my grandmother and her vile husband were both as racist as it gets. My mother, to her credit, was not racist! And at heart, she was not homophobic or transphobic either even when she acted like she was. That was all why she made a point of apologizing to me before she died, because she regretting ever acting like that over the years. Anyway, during recess not long after my family made that complaint to the school, one of the older boys was bullying me and throwing a basketball and trying to hit me in the head with it, saying: “I'm gonna make you scream, bitch!” So I got angry, threw it back, and chased after the bully with it saying: “No, I'm gonna make YOU scream!” and the physical education teacher (this was all during phys ed class, not during recess) came running up, grabbed the ball then grabbed my arm as hard as he could and said menacingly: “Alright, that's enough from both of you! I'm going to make YOU scream. Now.” And he dragged me into a hallway where the principal was waiting. The two men exchanged glances in an odd way, and they took me to a small study room where there were bookshelves filled with all kinds of children's books and two child-sized cages to one side in the room. They locked me in the room and said: “We'll deal with you later!” and I took one look at those cages, noticed burn marks in them, and I realized they had set that one boy on fire and planned to do the same thing to me next. I wondered why the auditorium always had weird looking flags in it (which I realize now were Nazi flags... but back at that age the only thing I knew about Nazis was that they were the bad guys in an odd episode of a show I saw on television, and that my mother warned me to avoid anything to do with people like that due to them being evil and all that). I seriously thought I was going to be murdered. It got to be well past the lunch hour (I was locked in that room pretty much the whole school day), and before I knew it... it was getting dark out and the clock said it was five in the afternoon. I wondered why it was my grandfather, who always dropped me off and picked me up from school had not shown up to get me. And I thought I was never going to get home again. Then, the door unlocked itself and opened. There was no one there, so I crept quietly through the school and searched for the stairs (the room was an upstairs room) and I eventually got to the main hall with that weird eye symbol on the floor. From there, I reached the office of the principal. First, I tried the main doors, but they were locked. So I went into the office, and was able to call home using the telephone there. I asked my grandfather to come and get me... I was scared.
He said he tried to pick me up earlier... when school got out... but that the principal told him I had run away and apparently my family was about to call the police and report me missing after having been out looking all over that city for me. I later heard several different versions of that story, but it was all pretty much the same basic thing so I knew it was true. By the time I saw my grandfather's car pull up, I tried the main doors again and this time they were unlocked and I was able to escape that school and finally get home. Never went back to that school again! The place was truly evil, and the people who ran it all very clearly were some kind of Neo Nazis. Like I said though, sometimes it was my fault when I had to be taken out of a school. There was a very nice academy like school in a rural town north of the area I grew up in, and I did good there at first. I had my first mythology class, though my grandmother had in fact taught me about mythology at home using a set of children's encyclopedias that also contained all manner of fairy tales, fables, myths and legends. But my first mythology class in school, I learned the story of Perseus and the Gorgon, and got to hear some creepy local legends and popular horror stories for children. I did good in all my classes but math, same as usual, and that year my math disability hit me hard as I started to get all F's and D's in math like never before. Though I was straight A's and B's in every other class I was presented with. I wasn't so much bullied but teased a bit here and there, mostly people saw how I looked (very feminine looking) and assumed I must be gay. I was bisexual even then, but mostly I preferred girls and didn't like it that the boys all assumed I did not. One boy was rude, and during a game of basketball I accidentally banging into him and he yelled out: “Gross! What are you... trying to hump me or something?” I did not know what the word hump meant in this context, I thought it meant banging into someone. So I banged into him again... and laughed... whilst saying: “Look! I just humped you! Want me to hump you again?” I got beat up for that big time, and when I got home that day my mother had to explain to me what that word meant so that would not happen again. What finally caused me to have to be taken out of that school was actually a fear I had. See, the school had that one odd old custom where on your birthday you'd get a spanking. All I equated spanking with... was torture and abuse... so I was deathly afraid that come my birthday they were going to seriously hurt me. I then plotted and planned to get myself kicked out of that school before my birthday so that I would not be hurt. It was autumn, so that meant I had until spring... until fifth grade... to do this. I never made it to fifth grade in that school. I rather overachieved when it came to getting myself kicked out of there. You see, there was a girl I had a major crush on. Her name was Sally, and she always brought in ice pops she made herself to share with me. On this one occasion, I said to her: “How about a kiss, Sally?” And she said no so I went ahead and kissed her anyway. She gasped, and ran off to tell the teacher. I got a stern talking to about that, and a lecture that it was inappropriate behavior, and I figured that mean things of that sort would be certain to get me kicked out before my birthday. If all of this sounds insane... it was insane. I was insane for the way I was thinking! But it could not be helped... I was fucked up big time, and it was only getting worse. Phys ed class came around one day, and there was another girl there who reminded me of the first girl I ever had a major crush on, Stephanie. Same dark hair, same eyes... same pretty much everything. I walked over to her, and put my hands down her sweater and felt her chest. I had gotten in trouble a couple of times in other schools for grabbing girls between their legs, but I did not want to go that far in this case because I genuinely liked this girl a lot. She gasped, actually smiled a bit, and some of the boys whistled wolf whistles. The girl did not seem to mind, but the teacher went... ballistic... to say the least. That got me kicked out of school big time. That and me running through the hallways skipping and singing and dancing insanely whilst trying to outrun my phys ed teacher. Finally, fifth grade came around and my family decided it was time to put me in the local middle school right in town. I had already fucked up in thirteen schools previously, blew my fourth grade to hell because I was out of my mind, and so we figured how bad could it be going local with things. But the thing was, the problem was I had unresolved issues left over, caused by the abuses I suffered in that Catholic school.
Fifth grade was a disaster, but not as much so as sixth grade was. Mostly, the middle school was just what you'd expect a public school to be. I had one teacher who was a nasty piece of work, she yelled at me and screamed in my ear all the time. I suffered from chronic ear infections from when I was two to when I was fourteen years old, and this... this did not help matters at all. The kids I went to school with in that Catholic school and that one where the music teacher was obsessed with death... they all were in this school now, and they all remembered me. Most of the boys all bullied me, and the girls acted like they were too good to give me the right time of day. Sometimes the boys would get me with that old, lousy trick: “Hey! I just heard... your house is on fire.” and I'd insist on calling home to make sure it all was okay and not really on fire. The teachers got mad at me saying I should know better, which made me angry because I did NOT know better. Though I was learning. I got in trouble for stupid things a lot that year... like when I did not like a book I had to do a book report one, I'd change the book's ending to make it more interesting and fun. For instance... I hated the ending to that famous children's book “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” by Madeleine L'Engle, I found it boring, so I decided to “improve” it by adding a knife fight where the main villain gets gruesomely killed in it. When I read it in front of the class, you can imagine the shocked reactions it got! I thought it was hilarious... my teachers thought it was crazy. The next year, it was time for sixth grade. That was when I really lost it mentally, big time, and had the worst sort of breakdown imaginable. I was being bullied relentlessly all the time that year, and on top of that I was discovering that I really, really liked girls a LOT. In THAT way. I was eleven years old at the time, but clearly I was maturing rather early. There was Shannon, who I sometimes would call up on the phone and pretend I lost my homework to ask her what was our homework in order to simply hear the sound of her voice. I got in trouble trying to kiss her on the way out to recess one day. She kicked me hard, and kept on kicking me after I was on the floor, to make matters worse. Then there was Martha, who I chased sometimes whilst yelling: “Come to Papa, Martha!” and trying to kiss her. I told her that I wanted her to remember that I liked her so when we got older she would not forget me. I actually, very sincerely meant that too at the time. Ironically, come eighth grade, she became kind of ugly looking so when she said she remembered me and that I liked her... and she kind of stalked me saying she wanted me to do very explicitly sexual things with her... I told her I was no longer interested in her. She said to me flat out: “But you're hot! I want to take a shower with you, and I want you to rape me in the shower. Heck, I'd even rape you if you prefer.” and I called her a douche bag for saying that to me. We both got put in an in-house suspension for talking nasty like that to each other, and the whole time I was trying to write some of my first short stories during my free time after I finished up all my work I could hear her whispering to me from the other side of the suspension room: “I still love you! I still want you. I'll never forget you.” and it was kind of disturbing to me at the time how obsessed with me she was. Had she been pretty, I'd have probably even gone for it too. But, she lost her looks as well as her mind, and I was not much better off mentally than she was. A girl named Jill was the one who I ended up getting in the worst trouble over though, in sixth grade. I had a verbal fight with one of my teachers, called him “Mister Dark” to his face because he looked like the actor who played Mister Dark from that children's horror movie Something Wicked This Way Comes. Right after reading a book report in his class based on the book version of that movie, which he said I did not put enough effort into. And right after calling him that, I rushed over to the desk of a girl named Jennifer who was a dead ringer for Stephanie, and I pulled her top nearly off her shoulders before feeling her chest. She actually was into it, believe it or not but the teacher screamed and ordered Jill to escort me to the principal's office. On the way, I told her I had to go to the bathroom and when she was looking the other way I jumped out of the bathroom and kissed her. She hit me over the head with a book she was carrying, a teacher saw this, and next hing I knew I was sitting in the principal's office waiting for him to show up. I was bored, so I decided to pass the time by tying my own shoelaces together. Giggling like a maniac the whole time I was tying them.
Previously... I had been called to the principal's office for a particularly nasty breakdown I had during art class in which I cut my finger on a piece of wire and that triggered a flashback to me being cut with wire by the nuns in the Catholic school (one of the ways they used to torture me). I ended up running down the hallway outside the art class screaming that I was being cut and beat with wires and a “wire whip”. I tied my shoelaces together that time too, but I wasn't giggling that time. Long story short (too late, I know!), Jill's father was pissed off big time and wanted to pretty much kill me. The school set me up with a state appointed psychotherapist and that was the one I told the truth about my grandfather and his abuse of me to. Back during my messed up fourth grade year, my grandfather nearly drove me to kill myself. One time, when we were parked by a pond whilst he was going in to talk to the principal when I was in trouble at one of those thirteen schools I mentioned, I turned off the car's brake... I was waiting in the car... in the hopes that the car would roll into the pond so I could drown. It nearly did, and likely I would have died were it not for that a teacher noticed this and my grandfather rushed out to stop the car in time. Another time, we were riding down the mountain on the way back to town by way of the road that linked the town I grew up in to the main interstate highway up over the mountain... and I grabbed the wheel and tried to force us off the road and off the mountain. Clearly, I needed quite a bit of mental help. So that was how I ended up in that therapist's office that I mentioned at the start of this writing of mine. The final straw for that middle school though was when I tried to pull off a girl's bathing suit as we were swimming together during swimming class. I was not thinking, and honestly that could have ended up drowning her. Plus, it was a very perverted thing to do. My art teacher noticed every one of my drawings featured demonic figures with horns... and I realized it all went back to those images of devils, demons, and stuff that I was exposed to in that Catholic school. So the therapist I was seeing, who was made aware of all of these things... after labeling me schizophrenic like I mentioned back in the beginning, decided to send me to a place over the mountain where they examined children's brains to find out what is wrong with them mentally. The place was horrible, some kids were lobotomized in that place and nobody wanted their children to ever end up there. So the school called a meeting and made my family go to it. It ended up five meetings. I went to the first one, but had to stay with some relatives for the other four meetings that my family had to attend without me present. They laid it on the line, said I could be taken out of my home and put in that place over the mountain... or, I could be put in a disciplinary military program run by the marines that the school sponsored. Moving out of the school district was not going to be legally allowed, nor was a transfer to another school. This was all the doing of the state by this point, and my family had to comply. I was enrolled in the military program and spent the next year of my life in it. It was brutal to say the least. There were seven kids in that program, fully including myself, and it was all boys and no girls. The teacher was a marine drill sergeant, and he had two teachers aids present to observe what went on at all times. The best thing I can say about that year is I lost weight I needed to lose and learned how to defend myself. The year before, a boy by the name of Christian, of all things, tried to rape me in the hallways because he heard I was intersex and wanted to see if he could in his words fuck me like a girl. He tore my blouse, beat me badly, and was about to start pulling my pants down when a teacher caught him. He was never punished, because his family was highly regarded in town. So he got away with it. Whereas me, anything I ever did I was punished for, and this program was no exception. They overachieved with me though... they did not just simply teach me to defend myself. They taught me three different styles of martial arts. Tae Kwon Do, Judo, and a variety of Kung Fu targeting pressure points and other bodily weak points. I learned how to fight with a knife, a wooden staff, and a wooden practice katana sword. I learned how to use a gun. I learned how to be quiet, stealthy, and I learned that literally anything even a toothpick can be used for an improvised weapon if the need arises. I had one year to master all that, and I did. I was the only kid in that entire program who mastered everything I was taught so that by the end of the year I could be out of it at last.
Out of it and back into normal classes again. But... not before being forced to run so much each day with a full pack and weights strapped to my wrists and ankles that I ended up with trench foot out of it. I nearly lost my feet because of that, and it took six months for my feet to heal completely which thank heavens they did. They also subjected us to a very odd kind of brainwashing procedure where they took each of us and made us watch movies and look at images put up on a projector screen of all manner of horrors. Horrors of war, images of carnage, crime scenes, and pictures of corpses and dead bodies. They said it was to toughen us up, to make us strong. In reality, it was to harden us and turn us into killers. If we misbehaved or screwed up in any way, it meant a beating on the Judo mats... or in my case because I was intersex and therefore technically the only “girl” in the class I was told that if I did not do all that I was told to do... then I would be sent off to a place the drill sergeant called “The Grove” where he said that I would be made into a “Little Bitch Hooker” for the rich and powerful, where I would have to live and never see my family again, where I would have to service the elite or die if I failed to please them. I was lucky, I never ended up being sent to the Grove. So instead of being trained to become a sex slave, they trained me to be an assassin. The program was a front for something far more sinister involving some of the shadowy forces that operate in this country behind the scenes. Let me tell you the truth of the United States of America... it has two faces. The one you are taught to believe is the true face, and which is all lies and propaganda designed to make things look good. And the true face, with may just as well be a grinning skull with blood pouring out of its' mouth. All countries have a hidden, darker side, and during my year in that program I was subjected to, and victimized by, America's darker side. They went so far as to use certain phrases or words, or numerical sequences that if I am subjected to... could cause different sorts of effects ranging from making me cry or causing me to have a breakdown or even a meltdown, to things like causing me to become aggressive, or even violent. They taught each of us a unique mantra-like phrase that we can use to calm ourselves under certain conditions, but the truth is it is an imperfect bandage to use on an open wound. I was the only one of all seven students to get out of that program come eighth grade. Everyone else was in that program until was closed down years later, when it was shut down for abuse and for using illegal disciplinary methods. I never tied my shoelaces together again, I carried myself with dignity, and I tried to rise above not only that program and what it did to me, but also the craziness that nearly robbed me of my sanity in the years leading up to that. I did good in eighth grade, kept practicing art and writing and although my teachers all said I'd only end up with a factory job at best in life I still kept at it and was determined that someday people would read my writings and look at my art and realize there is something beautiful within me worth celebrating. It was a nasty time at home, however, during my eighth grade year. My mother married husband number three, a lunatic of a man who was actually wanted by the FBI for being an international drug dealer. He had a bunch of aliases, fake names, and false identification cards, and he was a sadistic nut if ever there was one. He one took a knife to his ribs and made me hold the knife. Then, he said to me: “Go on, you little bitch! Cut me. Come on, cut me! Because I want an excuse to cut you even deeper.” He even drove my mother to become nearly anorexic, cheated on her behind her back, and slipped cocaine in her soda on at least one occasion just to see if it would do anything to her. They got divorced before that year was out, and the whole time she was married to him my biological father kept calling the house to ask and make sure my mother and I were alright. My father was a part Italian gentleman who may well have had ties to Casa Nostra for all anyone knew. He was part other things as well, and my mother teased that he was everything from part alien to part demon. She never named him, she only ever called him either the Devil or simply “Your real father” when she talked to me about him at all. For years, starting the same year as the phone calls to our house, he would send a van to pull up and the van was full of Italian guys of the sort you'd see on a show like the Sopranos. They kept an eye on our house, and especially on my mother and I, just to make sure we were unharmed. It stopped after a while... as did, those phone calls.
From eighth grade through high school it was normal stuff. I stopped a boy in eighth grade who tried to rape me when we were getting changed for swimming class by screaming until a teacher showed up to stop things. All the boy got the chance to do was whip me with his towel. Later on, I met him in the hallway and punched him so hard between his legs that he was on the floor and unable to speak. After that, he never messed with me again and never looked me in the eye ever again either. I managed at the last to turn the tables on all my bullies, and I did so well in all of my classes that when I quit school the year I turned sixteen the principal said they had nothing left to teach me anyway, but that they were sad to see me quit. I had won an eighty dollar bond and a dinner at an expensive restaurant lodge when I was in eighth grade. I ended up spending it on an arcade machine, because what would you honestly be expecting a thirteen year old child to do with that much money? It says something when a literal whole arcade machine cost only eighty dollars back then. And that was in the 1980's when arcades were still a thing! But I was lucky that year. I thought I was even luckier when I turned sixteen and met Andrea. All up until she died, and my happiness was crushed to pieces. I was never right again after her death. How could I be? That same year, after Andrea's death, one of my mother's boyfriends tried to assault me in a sexual way whilst strangling me in my own bedroom. My mother just stood there and watched whilst stuffing popcorn in her mouth as if she was watching a movie. My grandmother stopped him, and I got away by running out of the house while the man was shooting at me. I can do a lot of things, I can kill a man in probably a hundred different ways... but against a gun or when someone cheap shots me like he did in order to take me by surprise like he did... that's different. I ran up to the park for the rest of that day, and got my revenge by setting part of my mother's room on fire when I got home. It was easy. I just took a pile of her clothes, used a cloth belt for a fuse, sprayed hair spray all over all of it and set the belt on fire before tossing the hairspray can unto the clothes. BOOM! There went part of the floor. Luckily, my grandmother cleaned it up before my mother got home that night. I broke my bedroom window, got arrested for it, and ended up on probation for a year after that. Other horrible things happened to me on that same same, making it the worst year of my life. One of my cousins got a Neo Nazi skinhead gang to attack me at the park. I barely escaped with my life, though I manged to make them think I was crazy before escaping. His brother, who was in that gang was pissed at him for doing that to me. Because you don't hurt family no matter what you are into. I tried to kill myself several times that year, but I wanted to kill the man who had murdered Andrea (her own father) even more. He ended up paying for his sick crimes, all of them, and I never had to lift a finger over it. Justice does happen legally sometimes, even if it is international justice given Andrea's family were Romanian citizens. I had a hard time controlling what I learned in that military program... the first year I was no longer in it. When I was thirteen... there was an incident where my grandfather called me a homophobic slur outside of a computer shop. When we got back into the car, I wrapped my hands around his neck and nearly pushed his Adam's apple all the way into his throat. I wanted him to feel my pain, to suffer, but not to die. The man had been in the army, he had been a military policeman and a sharp shooter. He knew how to kill just like I did. He also saw the look in my eyes and knew I could kill him if I wanted to. I made my point, and stopped. Then, we drove home and he yelled at me and said I was crazy before going off to bed. The man was a lazy piece of shit who beat his wife, hurt his daughter (my mother) and who ate like a pig. It was better in the times when he was asleep and not bothering anyone. Out of all my family, he alone I did not cry for when he died from diabetes in 2008. He died pissing himself and blaming himself for giving my mother the same disease, which she died from in 2005. He was the worst of them all, and deserved to die in the very agony he was in towards the end. These... were the events that from my childhood to my sixteenth year of life made me the person I became. My current therapist, told me that my life is quite a bit like Dante's Inferno... you think you've seen the worst of it, but there's something more terrible below that. Layers and layers of horror, of trauma, of madness. It was a tragedy, not a comedy, and yet still I laugh.
Published 8th Aug 2023
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