Boyfriend’s beaten to a pulp. Left to bleed in front of the local. Cold night. Sea air. Frigid wind. Too many men. Alcohol. Small town. Intellectual poverty. Financial poverty. Cultural poverty. I am screaming. Not in fear. At them. They say it’s my fault he’s there like that. I fucked the faggot. Now I have AIDS. Unfuckable. Unlovable. At seventeen. They’re furious they didn’t get to me first. They’d been relentless, yet unsuccessful in this pursuit. As my breasts began to bud. Becoming a man in this place is eviscerating. Becoming a woman even worse. My banishment brings relief. An escape plan. Best laid. My mother senses my predicament. She kicks me out before I can leave. $20 Greyhound bus ride paid for with money stolen from my grandmother. Big smoke. Sex. Drugs. Cops. Beatings. Young homeless allowance. Indignity of the dole queue. Doof-doof music. Raves. Recovery parties. Elaborate hand sewn costumes from thrift store bedding. Rice with cumin. Five finger discount green apple and taramasalata. Fucking and drinking and loving and dancing my way through clawing hunger. Acid helps too. I look amazing in these hot pants. Can’t afford the rent. Sleeping in the shed. Of someone else’s 10-person share house. Overflowing toilet. Shit everywhere. Tripping hard again. Techno beats. Then, a big city job with a multi-level marketing company. An MLM cult. Of exploitation and male ego. My days begin with a fanatical group motivation session. Trauma bonding for misfits. Followed by hours of solitary and fruitless door-knocking in suburbia. Even the sad and lonely don’t want what I’m selling. I haven’t slept for days. Coming down again. Boss offers me a place to crash. My own room. So nice of him. I fuck him for the rent. Disgusted. I fall in love with my girlfriend whilst moving out with the hot boyfriend I met on the black and red death caps. Before long there are track marks on his left arm. They slowly work their way across both arms. He spent the rent money again. Just like my father. He distracts himself from the increasing viciousness of his come downs. By insisting I’m cheating on him. He enjoys the primal surge of the yelling; likes the feeling of shoving me around. It dawns on me that now - at nineteen - I’m already too old for this shit. It turns out I’m also quite pregnant. I seriously consider a disastrous plan to pull pints and dicks in the titty bar with my ex girlfriend. Before I really start to show. I don’t know. I’m a swirl of pregnancy hormones. I do know I am going to be clean and sober. I need to eat. I need calm. Be nice to patch things up with my mother. I hitch a ride to the truck stop town she moved too. Arrive at dusk. Fall into a deep and exhausted sleep. Wake to her new boyfriend creeping outside my window. He’d kicked her around like a football. She’d tried to leave him. It's impossible in a small town. I can’t be here. I hitchhike back to the city with the truck driver my mother insists on. After no more than five minutes of sizing him up. The city is more forgiving. Through word from a friend, I find a room in a fourteen-person commune. I’m now twenty-ish weeks along. I will end other less meaningful pregnancies with relief, but it won’t be this one. I understand the potential of this; of community, of home. I will not squander this moment. Home turns out to be a slummy haven for anti-establishment vegetarians who thrive on policing the kitchen. It suits for a while. It is the community I need. The sad, poetic junkie in the room next door pays the rent with her pussy. My sister soon moves into the room on the other side. I can breathe. Even if I hardly see her for her shift work. We are bonded in fire. Not long after her arrival I wake alone. Labour pains. So excruciating I am for once, floored. My sister’s at the club. I leave a note with $20 taped to her bedroom door. Meet me at the hospital. I take a taxi to emergency. He hates me for screaming in his cab. But not as much as the nurses I avoided for nine months. They inform me I am squarely and officially in the at-risk category. Slowly they warm to me in the chaos of my making. Peace comes later, when my sister finds me in the dawning light of the birthing room. With her, a G-string thong. A punchline contained within the going home clothes we had not known to pack. I give birth to the father we lost to heroin seven years ago. She is beautiful.
Comments
No posts