the dangerblond story, part three June 17, 2006
When our father picked us up, he looked like he had just walked out of the jungle. He had long hair and he had a tooth missing. He was very glad to see us and even though he acted strangely preoccupied we were happy to see him. First, we drove to St. Francisville to see our Aunt Martha. She and our four cousins lived at the Cottage Plantation. We always loved visiting them because they had a swimming pool and a Coke machine. Aunt Martha had four boys and no girls. My older cousins had to give plantation tours of the Cottage, and I loved tagging along and learning the history of the house and the Butler family who built it in 1795. The Cottage had an excellent spooky attic and a spookier graveyard out in the cow pasture.
After that, we went to Beaumont, Texas, where my father was to start working. He rented a “townhouse” style apartment in an area near Lamar University. Most of our neighbors were students there. We were happy with the apartment because there was a swimming pool. Among the neighbors I remember were a houseful of Iranian guys and a lesbian couple who had the first Afghan hound I ever saw. My father would leave for work in the morning and I was in charge of my sister and brother. I did the cooking, so we had some variation of tuna salad or hamburgers every day. Every weekend, he took us shopping. I got clothes and my sister and brother got toys, including two very expensive bicycles that we had to keep in the living room.
I waited until August, and then I told my father that I wanted to stay with him and not return to Florida. He said he would call and ask my mother about it. The next day, he reported that he had spoken with her and she said it was fine. I couldn’t have been happier. I was old enough to know that my father was unstable, but I thought anything would be better than being under the same roof with Jerry Nipper.
Somewhere along the way, a girlfriend of my father’s came and went. I think her name was Marsha. She showed up in her car with her two daughters, who already knew my father and called him “Art,” which no one else called him. Somehow, I caught on that she was married and that she had left her husband. She and my father spent a long time talking behind closed doors, then she and her children left. I have no idea what ever happened to her and those two girls.
My brother and sister left and went back to Florida. My father drove me over to the high school and dropped me off. I went inside and enrolled myself for the 10th grade. It was a rough public school, but I had learned how to deal with rough trade in Florida. I started clowning right away and made a good impression. Two sisters, whose names I can’t remember, befriended me and I was thrilled to learn that they smoked pot.
One night, my father and I were watching TV. I decided to tell him about Jerry Nipper. told him that Jerry had been trying to molest me and I described some of the things he had done. I was expecting my father to get on a plane that night and fly to Florida and kill him. Instead, he got a very strange look in his eyes and told me that he wanted to show me something. He reached for the button on my jeans and tried to undo it. I jumped up and ran across the room. He moved as fast as lightening, grabbed me by the throat and slapped me twice across the face. Then he threw me down on the floor and straddled my chest with his knees on my arms. He unzipped his pants and pulled out a penis that looked enormous to me. He shoved it into my mouth. There was a dining room chair overturned next to me. He put it over my head, leaned his elbows on it and pumped his penis into my throat.
I was in complete shock. When he was finished, he got up and went up stairs to his bedroom and shut the door. I lay on the floor, spitting out the bad taste in my mouth. That’s the last thing I remember until I woke up the next morning on the couch. My father was gone and he had left a note on the back of a photograph, “I’m sorry,” and $100. I showered, dressed, and went to school. I found the two friendly sisters and I told them that I had a fight with my father and I asked if I could spend the weekend at their house. I told them I had some money for pot. The older sister had a car, so after school we went to some older woman’s apartment who sold marijuana. I had 5 twenty dollar bills in my purse, and I took out one of them to pay for the marijuana. I followed her into the kitchen and we talked for a while. When I went back to the living room, the rest of the money was gone from my purse. I knew the sisters had taken it, but I had no where else to go except with them, and I just felt like I needed some time to think, so I didn’t say anything.
I went with them to their house. It was like Tobacco Road. It was a very old wood-frame house that seemed to be rotting. Inside, they had no doors, just blankets over the doorways. There was nothing hanging on the walls, and there were no curtains. They had a huge family and everyone lived there. The house was full of men with no shirts on. Maybe it was the state I was in, but I remember her father and all the brothers leering at me like the rednecks in Deliverance. We spent the whole weekend in the sisters’ bedroom, getting high. I talked about everything with them except for what had happened to me. The thing that kept me from telling anyone about it was pure shame. I realized that they were going through my things every time my back was turned and taking what they wanted. On Sunday, I announced that I was going home. I got a paper bag from the kitchen and went to their room and ransacked it until I found everything that was mine and put it in the bag.
I walked back to the apartment and my father was there. He apologized for what he had done and he told me that he had gone crazy and thought I was my mother. He said he had done that to me because he missed my mother so much. He promised me he would never do anything like that again. None of that made any sense, of course, but I only listened to the part where he said he would never do it again.
Everything went fine for about a week. It was the beginning of October, and somewhere in there I turned 15. Five days after my birthday, my father came in late one night because he had been out drinking. I was sitting on the couch writing a letter to my grandmother in which I was lying and telling her I was fine. I had on a man’s football jersey that went down to my knees. My father came in and he was acting happy and drunk. He sat down next to me and I could tell that something was wrong. I stood up, and he grabbed me and threw me back down on the couch. He held both my wrists in one hand and took my panties off with the other. I was pleading with him, saying “please don’t, please don’t.” He became angry and started slapping me, “you scared! you scared!” My fear seemed to be making him angry.
I started to try to reason with him. “You can’t do this, you are my father.” He slapped me again. “You want a cock up your ass?” He let go of me and started pulling his pants down. There was a very heavy ashtray on the coffee table. I thought I could grab it and hit him on the head with it. He saw what I was reaching for. “You gonna hit me?” He grabbed the ashtray and slammed it against my forehead three or four times. Each time, he hit me in the same place. That place, just beyond my hairline, is the only place where I still have physical scars from this attack. Then my father raped me. I don’t remember the pain. I just remember closing my eyes and thinking, “this is not me. This is not me.” I was unable to transport myself to anywhere else, though. He dragged me upstairs and made me get in his bed. He put his arms tightly around me and went to sleep. Eventually I fell asleep, too.
The next day was Saturday. I went downstairs and saw a great deal of blood on the couch that had come from my virginal body. I turned the cushions over. My father was drinking coffee. He sat me down and told me that many fathers and daughters lived like husband and wife, and he wanted us to do that, too. I just wanted to humor him and keep him from hurting me again until I could get away. I told him that it sounded fine to me, but I wanted to visit my mother first. I reminded him that we still had the two bicycles for my brother and sister, and that I needed to take them to Florida. He agreed to it. I told him that I felt like seeing a movie, so we went to the theater and saw “Hard Times,” a very violent movie about fighting in New Orleans. Then, I told him that I wanted to see another movie, so we bought tickets for “Rollerball,” another ultra-violent movie. I thought I was going to collapse sitting through these unbelievably violent movies, but I didn’t want to go back to the apartment. When we finally did go back, it was late and I held my breath until he went to sleep.
The next morning, he was strangely docile. He was very quiet and just did whatever I told him. I pretended like I was going along with his plan. I told him I would come back before Christmas. We went to the bus station and arranged to have the bicycles shipped, then he bought me a ticket and put me on the bus for Ft. Myers. I was going back to live with my mother and Jerry Nipper. My mother didn’t know I was coming until the bus stopped somewhere in Louisiana and I called her on a pay phone. I didn’t tell her a thing. I felt embarassed, ashamed, in shock, and numb. I thought I had brought this whole thing on myself, being too smart for my own good. I had been in such a hurry to get out of that frying pan that I had gone to Texas and walked right into the fire.
the dangerblond story, part two June 12, 2006
[Notes from Part One: I left out a few things that are important to me in Part One. The main thing is that I don't think I wrote enough about my father's manic side, which made rare but memorable appearances. He was capable of huge gestures. He showed his love as insanely and inappropriately as he showed his anger. Once, when I was sick and had a very high fever, my father came home from work with four large bags of books, crayons, coloring books and toys for me to amuse myself with. He loved to take us shopping for expensive clothes. Other adults loved him and he was great fun to be around unless his mood turned sour, which could happen in a flash, especially when alcohol was involved.
When we were in Jamaica, we went to a wedding reception where a steel band was playing. At some point, the band stopped playing and said they were done for the night. The bride and groom were upset, because they thought the band was playing for another hour. My father took out after the entire band, intending to beat them all up because they wouldn't keep playing. One of the band members pulled out a gun and everyone scattered except my father. My mother said, "Arthur! He's got a gun!" My father said, "you think I'm scared of a GUN?" Someone calmed him down and we left, but after that everyone loved him and called him "the American who is not afraid of a gun." He was constantly buying things he could not afford. One day he came home pulling a huge boat on a trailer behind the car. After a few months the boat was gone, and I don't remember ever riding in it.
I also have some great memories of living in New Orleans and LaPlace. When any relatives visited, we always loaded up in the car and drove down Bourbon Street before stopping at restaurant like Maspero's. I can remember the strip-show barkers who would open the doors to the clubs just a flash, and I was dying to see what was in there. Going to Bustout Burlesque reminded me of it. I also remember that a bunch of my father's relatives came to our house to visit at the same time as the first landing on the Moon. We were all packed around the television watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. I remember thinking that we would surely be landing on all the other planets within a few years. My father's sisters were determined to have normal families, so most of the time when they were around things were pretty normal. At least for a while. Now, on to Part Two]
My mother was as giddy as a girl as she told us her plans. I was a pretty observant child and I knew this marriage was going to be a mistake, but I also knew that nothing could stop it. In my family, any news that a female is getting married off is good news. Nothing deflated the excitement. Not the fact that none of us had ever met this guy and we knew nothing about him. Not the fact that he and my mother were planning to take us back to Florida. Not the fact that he had the absolutely ridiculous name of Jerry Nipper.
Somehow, he appeared in Greenville and the preparations were made for the wedding at my mother’s cousin’s house. Jerry was younger than my father and he had blonde hair and a mustache. He was quiet. He was elaborately polite, in a way that I have come to associate with deception. The day of the wedding arrived, and it was also my 13th birthday. Jerry sat me down on the couch in my grandmother’s living room and produced a small present from his pocket for me. It was ring, with an opal and small diamonds. He took it from the box and slipped it on my finger. He smiled and hugged me. I knew it didn’t feel right, but I assumed he was trying to win me over.
I don’t remember much about the wedding, but I remember the long drive back to southwest Florida. I had a cassette player and a pair of headphones, and I listened to music in the back seat of the car all the way there. I associate that trip with the development of my ability to transport myself to an imaginary place that is outside of my real life. Occasionally, Jerry would look at me in the rear-view mirror and smile. Something told me not to smile back. I somehow knew I had made an enemy, but I didn’t understand why.
When we arrived, we found out something that my mother had not mentioned to anyone. We were moving into another fucking trailer. A few months in yet another school for the beginning of 8th grade, and then we moved again. Actually, now that I am thinking about it, I attended Coleman Jr. High in Greenville for a month before the wedding, then this school, then we moved. So that’s three schools for 8th grade. Jerry, who was a home-builder, had been fired from his job at the place where he and my mother both worked. They told us that we had to move in with Jerry’s parents for a few months, outside of Ft. Myers, Florida, until we had enough money for our own house. The family lived on a 40-acre farm. The old man was very disagreeable, but Jerry’s mother was nice enough. She had a framed photograph of her oldest son, who had been killed in a car accident in Puerto Rico. I overheard my mother telling someone that Mrs. Nipper’s son had been “pulverized” in the car accident. I looked up “pulverized” in the dictionary, and it said something like, “ground up into a fine powder.” I tried to imagine a car accident so bad that it would grind you up into a fine powder.
We had to be driven down the road to the bus-stop to catch the schoolbus at dawn. I went to Alva Middle School, which was in a small town on the Caloosahatchie River named after Thomas Alva Edison. There was a smaller town on the same river named “Olga,” after Mrs. Edison. Thinking about it now, it seems like there was 2-hour bus ride to the school. It was very far away. I had never been able to read in a vehicle without getting a headache, but I trained myself to do it for these long bus rides. I also had clued in by this time that the way to win people over at a new school was to be funny. I was already very tall and starting my gawky adolescence. I was kind of a late bloomer and I didn’t realize this was a new ballgame until some smart-ass guy at school said, “hey, Pogue. When you gonna start shaving your legs?” You better believe they were shaved the next day.
The farm was out in the middle of nowhere, and I hadn’t made any friends yet, so I offered to help the Nippers with farming chores. They had a few cattle and a big vegetable garden. I was fascinated when Mr. Nipper told me that cow shit was fertilizer. I went around picking it up with a shovel and a bucket, mixed it with some leaves and vegetable peelings, watered it down and covered it for a few weeks and made up my first batch of compost.
At some point before the end of the school year, we moved into an actual house, not a trailer or an apartment, in Lehigh, Florida. This was a town that started out as a retirement community but then turned into a suburb of Ft. Myers. Most of the people who lived there were retirees and the others were working in some kind of construction or land development business. These were the years that South Florida was booming. Except for the Nippers, I don’t remember meeting anyone else who had actually been born in Florida. All the kids I met were from the Midwest or the Northeast and their parents had moved to South Florida to make money. The kids all had an on-going war with the elderly neighbors, who were almost always cranky. The town was made up of concrete-block houses that were all dresed up in different ways. There were no trees except Palms. It was hot as hell, and having lived in this place is the reason why I don’t find New Orleans weather all that bad.
Moving to Lehigh didn’t entail another change in schools, so I continued going to Alva Middle, but the bus stop was now across the street from our house. At the bus stop, I met Dina and Chris Rivelli, sisters who lived down the street. Chris was my age and Dina was a year younger. The Rivellis were a Greek-Italian family with six kids, ranging in age from 17 down to 5. I had never met such a big family. Their parents were partners in a enormous trailer-park community for old people that was being built nearer to the coast. They called it “The Park.” They left for work early in the morning and came home late in the evening. The oldest siblings, Daniel and Cheryl, took care of the younger kids. Their mother would leave them a blank check and they would buy groceries at Publix and write the check for $20 more. With the $20, they would get the other kids whatever they needed and sometimes take all of us to the pool and buy us a Coke, or whatever.
At around this time, a lady asked me to babysit for her one night. She had two foster children, a boy my age and a much younger one. She didn’t trust the older one to watch the younger one, so she asked me to come over one night while she went out. After the younger one went to bed, the older one went into his bedroom and came out with a joint of marijuana. He asked me if I wanted to try it and I said, “sure.” I had already smoked a cigarette with the daughter of a friend of my mother, who was a wild child. Well, I loved smoking marijuana and I couldn’t wait to try it again. Anyone who didn’t live in South Florida at that time has no idea what it was like. As Carl Hiassen says, there was marijuana falling out of the sky. Everyone who was younger than my parents smoked pot. An ounce of incredibly potent weed was $25. I never had to buy any because it was always being offered.
The Rivelli clan shared this taste with me, as did our friend, Jackie, who had an older boyfriend. Her parents had forbidden her to see him, so she would tell them she was going to one of our houses and we would go over there and get high and listen to music. On a record player, mind you. I enjoyed getting high and listening to music and I sought out the weirdest sounds I could hear. I loved Led Zepplin and Jackie’s boyfriend started me on a headbanger phase for a while. I listened to The Who and Pink Floyd over and over and over. I was pretty ecumenical, though, and I still loved the blues and R&B music that was played on the radio in Mississippi, but not in Florida.
Getting high served another purpose in my life, which was passive resistance. I could use it to facilitate my out-of-body experiences and ignore what was going on in our home. After we settled in Lehigh, my mother started working as a secretary to a land developer. Jerry was working building houses. Since I am telling about this in the past tense, I can see patterns that were forming early on, but at the time I was oblivious to them. I wanted very much to live in my own little world and I spent a hell of a lot of time there. I was very self-centered, probably more than most adolescents, because I had to be self-reliant. I now know that this is called “surviving,” and everyone does it in some way.
Jerry began coming home for a few hours in the afternoon every day. I remember this being in the summer of 1974. One day, he was home and in their bedroom and I heard him calling my name. I went to the door, and he was lying in bed with the covers up. I thought he was sick. He asked me to bring him a glass of iced tea. I went to the kitchen and brought it back. As I put it on the table beside the bed, I saw that he was looking at me strangely. I got out of there quickly and went back to watching televison. He started coming home and getting in bed more often. I finally realized that he was asking me to bring him things and when I brought them, he was masturbating under the covers. I stopped anwering when he called me, and I started spending more time at the Rivelli’s.
The obvious question is why I didn’t tell my mother, and the answer to that is so complicated that I can’t figure it out all the way myself. I can tell you that when a smart, strong-willed child is beaten into obedience, strange patterns of thinking are going to result. I was constantly getting mixed messages and struggling to believe both. It never occurred to me to question what my mother decided to do, but the results of her bad decisions were obvious to me. I didn’t want to cause an upheaval because I was afraid of where we would land next. It might be worse. I was also afraid that she wouldn’t believe me. My self-esteem was beginning to take its swan-dive, so I figured she would believe Jerry over me. I was still naive about sex, and I wasn’t even really sure I knew what he was doing. I just knew it was bad, and it made me feel bad, so I didn’t tell anyone about it. It seems ridiculous now, but I had never heard of anyone acting like this. I definitely remember thinking that if I told anyone, their first reaction would be disbelief that someone would do such a thing. The feeling that came over me was shame. I didn’t want to be in the situation and I wanted to make the shame go away, so I pretended I wasn’t in the situation, and it worked. My allies in this were books, pot, school and the unwitting Rivellis.
Jerry tried various different tactics. Another phenomenon from this era was that we all drove cars for years before we obtained licenses. My cousin Martee had taught me to drive her Mustang when I was 12. My friend Jackie drove her own car before she had a license. One Saturday, Jerry announced that he was going to show me how to drive. I said I already knew how to drive. Both he and my mother acted like it was strange that I didn’t want to drive the car. I tried to get my sister to come along, but he manipulated things so that we were alone. He acted very nice at first and we stopped for some soft drinks. We went to a subdivision that had roads but no houses yet. I got behind the wheel. As I was driving, he lit a cigarette and offered it to me. “Come on, I know you have been smoking.” I told him I didn’t want to take my hands off the wheel. He then unzipped his pants and started masturbating. This was the most overt thing he had done. I stopped the car and stared out the window. He was talking to me, but I can’t remember what he said. I was no longer there. In my mind, I was outside the car walking through the empty lots. I didn’t do it because I knew I would not get far. He got out of the car, shut the door and stared at me for a few minutes while he masturbated. As he came around, I slid over to the passenger side. He got in and we drove home. I didn’t say anything to anyone.
I felt like the cigarette thing had been meant to let me know that if I made trouble he would tell my mother that I smoked. I wasn’t afraid of that, but it gave me the idea of turning the tables on him. I decided to use the situation to get the upper hand with him. When my mother wasn’t around, I would leave the house and go somewhere, mostly the Rivellis. If he tried to make me stay home, I would say, “fuck you,” and walk out the door. Sometimes, he would say, “let me see your panties.” I would say, “fuck you.” Saying “fuck you” to him wasn’t nearly enough of an outlet for my anger and fear, so I started having nightmares. When you swallow bad feelings and don’t ask for help, they invariably come out somewhere. I had a lot of nervous energy and, even though I ate a lot, I was very thin. Moving to Florida introduced me to the Palmetto bug for the first time, and I found them abhorrent. I was very frightened of them and if I saw one in the house I became hysterical. Somehow these creatures became the focus of all my fears. I started dreaming about them and waking up screaming. I would jump out of bed convinced that there were bugs in the room.
At the time I was unaware of it, but Jerry also came into the room that I shared with my sister at night and pulled down the covers. He never actually touched me, just himself. A therapist that I was seeing many years later put it exactly right when she said that I lived with a stalker under the same roof. My instinct for self-preservation led me to many different attempts at solutions, but none were overt and none involved telling other people. I was very passive, unless I accidently discovered an action that worked. One night at dinner, Jerry tried to make me eat everything on my plate. We had never made kids eat food they didn’t like in my family. My mother just sat there and didn’t back me up. He kept on and kept on. I picked up the plate and stuck it under his nose and said, “you eat it.” I looked him straight in the eyes. The look in my eyes said, “I am about to go crazy.” I guess he got it, because he backed off a little after that.
We had actually stayed living in the same place long enough for me to attend the whole 9th grade at the same school, which was now Riverdale High School. It was an enormous school with about 2,000 students and it looked like a prison. I think it was designed by the same architect who designed Columbine. A field trip for my English class took me to Ft. Myers to see the Restoration comedy She Stoops to Conquer. I thought, “I can do that,” but I didn’t have enough self-confidence to try. I added plays to my reading consumption and imagined that I was in them on stage. I had quite an imagination by then, so it was no trouble at all. As usual, I excelled at school in everything except math. The Rivelli sisters were in the Principal’s Club, so I joined that, too. Our main activity was putting on a Christmas party for the inhabitants of a home for people who were physically and mentally retarded, some of them profoundly. I wasn’t really depressed at this stage of my life, so seeing those people made me thankful for the things that were good about my life, like having a highly-functioning brain.
I became more and more a part of the Rivelli household. With six kids, it was easy for me to just tag along for everything. I spent the night over there as often as I could. Jerry had started encouraging my mother to let me do what ever I wanted. He rarely attempted anything and I assumed I had scared him. I now know that he was still creeping around the house at night, but my fantasy world combined with staying every possible night at the Rivelli’s or someone else’s house gave me the illusion that I was safe.
At the end of the 9th grade, we suddenly heard from our father. He was back from Africa and he wanted to see us. In the whole time he had been out of the country, he had not sent a dime toward our support. We hadn’t heard from him at all. He and my mother made arrangements for us to fly to New Orleans. We were to spend the summer with him. I saw it as my salvation. I could not have been happier to be getting out of that South Florida frying pan.
the dangerblond story, part one June 4, 2006
One of my original goals with this blog was to start to tell the truth about my life, something that I have never done. I have kept so many secrets for so long that it is impossible for me to undo all the loop-de-loops without writing it out. It also became a habit to keep secrets. The reality of my life is so different from what even my friends think it is that I think it will surprise some people. Many people have an impression of me that is completely inaccurate, but the reason is because I have given it to them. It’s not that I want to lie about my life, I have just been ignoring some things and kind of repressing them or minimizing their importance. I think it has been unhealthy for me, but for various reasons having to do with other people I have had to keep quiet. For example, people associate being married to Don Marshall with being wealthy, educated or at least sophisticated. The truth is that I come from the worst kind of uneducated poor white trash and I have had to struggle against some pretty heavy shit. My background is nothing at all like Don’s, although it has little to do with our breaking up.
My parents grew up in Greenville, Mississippi, very far away from the Yacht Club and the Cotillion. My mother’s parents were decent enough, although completely uneducated. They were young during the depression. My grandmother’s family was wiped out by the flood of 1927. Go back to my great-grandparents and it’s a case study of the havoc alcoholism can do to a family. Both of my mother’s grandmothers worked and supported their families while their husbands drank themselves into early graves. My mother was a spoiled beauty, but she had a bad case of low self-esteem that put us into situations that we are lucky to have lived through. Her first and biggest stupid move was marrying my father.
My father’s name is Arthur Pogue. He was one of four children of Ed Pogue and Katie Wise Pogue. I never knew these Pogue grandparents. We were always told that Ed Pogue left one day to go to the grocery store and never came back. He left his wife with four small children and she died soon after. About 10 years ago, my cousin, Martee, told me that she thinks Katie Pogue actually died after a botched illegal abortion. I remembered being told that she had kidney disease or something. I don’t know why Martee thinks it was an abortion, but it makes sense because Katie Pogue had four children in five years. This was in the late 1930s, before birth control pills were widely used. My Uncle Richard spent years trying to track down Ed Pogue and found him in Natchez about a month before he died. He claimed that the Wises kept the children away from him, but who knows what went on.
The four children were parcelled out among Katie’s four sisters and brother. The Wises had the morality and family feeling of a pack of wolves. My father and his brother and two sisters became the family maids and workhorses. They were shuffled around among the aunts and uncles and never lived together again. My father wound up with his Aunt Oleta, who was married to a man about 25 years older than her named Washington Smith. Everyone called him “Wash.” They owned a store, Smith’s Grocery, on the corner of Union and Edison, in the part of Greenville that my mother’s family called “Niggertown.” They lived in the back of the store. There was a big kitchen back there and Aunt Oleta was a really good cook. The matriarch of the Wises, called “Granny,” lived with them and I just remember being told never to go near her. My mother told me that when Granny was on her death bed, her daughters nearly ripped her hands off trying to get the rings they wanted. Ironically, with all this ugliness around them, they had a beautiful rose garden and the kitchen was always full of fresh roses.
When we used to visit the store, Wash would give us each a small paper sack and we could fill it up with any kind of candy and gum. The biggest treat for me was being able to stand on a stool and run the cash register. There was a young black man named Douglas who worked there as a stock boy. I used to order Douglas around with the same imperious tone that Wash and Oleta used. I bet he would have been happy to kick my little white butt for talking to him like that. There was a box of open cigarette packs and black people would come in and ask for a “single,” meaning one cigarette. By this time, Oleta had mellowed, but she would still laugh and tell stories about how she used to beat the hell out of my father with an iron skillet. Ha Ha.
My father built up a great deal of rage and mental illness during his horrible childhood. One of his sisters was a nutcake and the other one was an incredibly upright and uptight woman. My uncle Richard became a minister and moved to Oregon to grow fruit. A man in town named Elwyn Ward, who was wealthy and well known as a civic booster, took my father under his wing and taught him how to dress and behave himself. He got him started boxing in Golden Gloves. Sadly, in the early 70s Mr. Ward was arrested for drunk driving and he hanged himself in his cell. His son later took his own life, as well. They were the only people who were ever good to my father as far as I know. My father was tall and good-looking, and he was a big football star at Greenville High School. He never actually learned to read or write beyond about a third grade level, so he kept failing all his classes. Someone talked him into quitting school and joining the Army. His military career was cut short, however, because he beat the living crap out of his superior officer and was dishonorably discharged. He was sent back to Greenville and back to high school, where he met my mother.
My mother’s parents, the Clarks, did not approve of my father at all. He was too old for her and he was from an even worse part of town than them. His family didn’t go to church. At that time, Greenville had an Air Force base and my grandmother worked there as the switchboard operator. Someone over there told her that my father had been dishonorably discharged from the Army. She told my grandfather and he forbade my mother to ever see him again. So, naturally, in December of my mother’s senior year in high school, they ran off and got married. Within a month, she was pregnant with me and all her friends kept the secret so she could graduate from high school. In those days, a girl who got pregnant, even if married, got kicked out of school. That makes about as much sense as some of their other quaint old customs. One of my mother’s best friends got pregnant by a rich guy from the other side of town and underwent a back-alley abortion that almost killed her. She was never able to have children after that, and everyone in town knew what had happened. Those were the good ole days.
I was born in October of 1960, and up until about a year ago I thought John F. Kennedy was the president when I was born. It finally dawned on me that Kennedy wasn’t elected until November of 1960, so Eisenhower was actually the president when I was born. I don’t know why, but that really bothers me. Maybe because Ike and Mamie were so unhip. My parents were very unhip, too. They loved Elvis Presley and thought the Beatles were idiots. My parents lived with my mother’s family when I was born. My great grandmother was still alive then and she lived there, too. It’s hard to imagine them all living in that tiny house with a baby, but apparently they loved it. When I was about 18 months old, my parents moved to Baton Rouge. My father was a construction laborer and I think he went there to work for more money than he could make in Mississippi.
Sometime after that, my mother received her first beating at the hands of her handsome husband and wound up in the hospital. She and I moved back in with my grandparents and my parents were divorced. My father married another woman named Camille and they had a daughter, whom I have never met. My mother got a job in a jewelry store. She was miserable living with her parents. Her father wouldn’t let her smoke and made her follow the rules as though she was a teenager. Even though my mother was very pretty, no one was going to date a divorced woman with a baby in those days. After a couple of years, my father left Camille and came back on the scene. He promised my grandfather that he would never hit my mother again, and they got remarried. When I was four, my sister was born, but not before my father beat up my mother again while she was pregnant.
I guess the family must have realized that this was some kind of fatal attraction between them and they would not stay apart. I don’t think anyone else felt like supporting my mother and her two kids, either, so there we were. I don’t think my mother realized that this could be dangerous for us. We moved to New Orleans because my father got a job with the contruction company that built Interstate 10. We lived at the Parkchester Apartments which used to be on Paris Road not too far from the lakefront. I started kindergarten at Bienville School and began my love affair with reading. We always had my parents friends and relatives staying at the apartment with us when they came to town to look for jobs. For a while, my mother worked at the Orange Street Wharf answering the phones and a black woman named Bernice took care of us. I remember her rubbing baby oil into my hair and tightly braiding it because I wanted it to look like hers. One day Bernice had a friend over. Her friend said, “Girl, why don’t you wash her curtains?” Bernice said, “Shit. She don’t ‘preciate it.” I repeated that to my mother, and that was the end of Bernice.
My mother had a white toy poodle named Pepi and he was stolen and recovered twice. All they had to do was walk around and listen for his yipping, go to the door and knock, and there he was. I don’t remember my sister at all until she was around two. I remember that we all had to make a Mardi Gras float from a shoe box for school. My mother and our next door neighbor got so into it that they made the whole thing themselves and I didn’t make any of it. There was a contest and the float that won was completely made out of popcorn, obviously another parent creation.
When Hurricane Betsy came, my father’s friend Pat Miller was living with us, sleeping on the couch. My parents had no idea that they should evacuate. They didn’t get scared until trees started falling and blowing down the street. Pat Miller was very excitable and he was so freaked out and scared that I was more afraid of him than the weather. The lights went out. We lived on the second floor, so the downstairs neighbors came up to our place for the night in case it flooded. My mother spread blankets under her bed for my sister and I to sleep on in case anything came through the window. During one quiet part of the storm, possibly the eye, my father and Pat Miller ran down the street and managed to buy some ice. The power was off for about a week, but we had a gas stove so we could boil water. I ate so many bologna sandwiches that I can’t eat bologna to this day.
When the power came back on, we gathered around the black and white TV and watched the news. A reporter was standing in front of a row of bodies covered with blankets. I think it was in Chalmette. It was really horrifying and it gave me nightmares for years, as did the giant spider movie that I also saw around this time. I think five or six is the worst time for fears to form. Because of my father’s violence, we moved back and forth from Greenville to New Orleans several times, and each time I went to a different school. I don’t think I completed a full year at the same school until 6th grade. I became afraid of my father because he was subject to sudden rages over small things, followed by slapping me down to the ground. My mother was also given to slapping the shit out of me when I did something wrong. They both used belts to beat me with and I sometimes had red welts on the backs of my legs and had to go to school in long pants to cover them. In order to avoid being slapped and beaten, I became a very perfect child. I never questioned them, tried to anticipate what they wanted, and all my school work was perfect. I was put at a special table in the back of the classroom with two other kids because the three of us were passing up the other kids in reading. In second grade, I was reading on a fifth grade level.
Every once in a while, my mother would agree to take my father back if he would do certain things, like buy her a new car. One time, she wanted a house, so he bought her one in LaPlace. It was a cheaply built subdivision-style house, but she loved it and decorated it in garish red and gold. This was where we lived when I was eight and my brother was born. The excitement over my parents “finally” having a boy was so great that even my sister and I could not help but agree that girls were inferior. Around this time, the math at school became more difficult and I started having trouble maintaining my usual straight “A”s. My mother was secretly taking tranquilizers, and I was sent down to the drugstore to pick up her precription. I had to sneak into the garage door and leave the prescription in the washing machine for her to retrieve later. This was to keep my father from knowing she was taking “nerve pills.”
My father started traveling to his out of town jobs by himself and we would stay in LaPlace. I can remember huge fights between them over such things as my mother buying him a piece of luggage for Christmas instead of what he wanted, which was a gun. He started collecting guns after that, so there we were living in a house full of guns with this very violent and volatile man. One day when my father was out of town, I came home with a math test on which I had gotten a grade of “C.” My mother became livid and grabbed a belt. I ran from her as she lashed out at me and I tripped over my brother’s plastic scooter and broke it. She then beat the shit out of me for breaking the scooter. Of course, after any insane rage was over, we all had to pretend like nothing had happened. I got very good at pretending nothing happened, and I think this was the beginnings of my becoming an actress. I also got the plum part of the Christmas Angel in the school play that year.
On the day report cards were handed out, I looked at mine and saw that I had received a “C” in math. I started shaking with fear. The teacher, Mrs. Adams, asked if anyone could bring Susan Snyder’s report card to her house because she was out sick that day. I volunteered. I ran to Susan’s house and handed her report card to her mother. Then, I kept running toward Highway 61, dropping my report card in someone’s trash can along the way. I didn’t know where I was going, but I just wasn’t going home. I got to the highway, turned right and just started walking. I walked for a very long way and then a big black car pulled up beside me. The power window came down on the passenger side. There was a man in there wearing dark glasses. He asked me where I was going, and I told him I was going to my friend’s house. He said, “where does she live?” I named another subdivision down the road. He said, “I really don’t think you should be walking down this highway by yourself. Why don’t I give you a ride?” I refused to get in the car with him and he drove off. I kept walking. A few minutes later, he was back. He opened the passenger door and said, “please let me get you off this highway. You are going to get run over. Where are your parents?”
I started crying and got in the car. I tried to get him to let me off at the shopping center, but he insisted on bringing me home and turning me over to my parents. When we walked up to the door, my parents were both there and their faces were white as sheets. I expected to get beaten to death, but not one word was said. I had been gone so long that they had called everyone, including the teacher. When my mother found out I got a “C” in math, she knew exactly why I had run away. Pretty soon, the whole neighborhood knew about it. The next day at school, Mrs. Adams sat beside me at lunch and shook her finger in my face and said, “don’t you EVER do anything like that again.” There were no further repercussions from that incident, but just to be on the safe side, I never made another “C” until I was in high school and doing drugs.
I went to the fifth grade in Jamaica. This was the fun part of living with my father. He sometimes had to work in exotic locales. We lived in an apartment in Montego Bay with a swimming pool. I went to an Anglican school, where we wore white dresses with blue ties and little straw hats. There were all kinds of competitions at the school, and I was very good at memorizing and reciting long poems. I was the finalist for my class and was preparing to recite The Pied Piper of Hamlin when my parents got an emergency phone call. Someone had broken into our house in LaPlace and taken everything but the furniture. My mother hurriedly packed us up, and that was the end of school in Jamaica. We later found out that there was a married couple in the neighborhood organizing burglaries in the middle of the night. My mother was able to get some of her stuff back, but it was all scratched up and things were broken.
We moved back to Greenville for the sixth grade after another violent split up. My father left to go out of town and my grandmother and my mother rented a U-haul and packed up our entire household by themselves and drove everything to Greenville without telling him. My mother bought a house in a nice neighborhood. This was the year of integration, so my sister was sent to the neighborhood school and I was bused across town to the run-down black school that had half the cafeteria roof caved in. There were seven sixth grade classes, and they were divided up according to student ability. Since I was new, I was put into the lowest level. By the end of the second week, I had been placed and replaced in every sixth grade class until they finally put me into the highest level. This was the first time that I spent a whole year in the same school. I wrote a play, a courtroom drama about animals and plants putting a polluter on trial, and the teacher actually put it on for the whole school with costumes, set, and the whole nine. This was really my first brush with celebrity.
It didn’t last long, however, because my parents got back together and announced that we were moving to Florida. I was really excited about it until we drove into Orlando and my father promptly moved us into the trashiest apartment complex we had ever lived in. From there we moved three times and then finally into the nadir of our existence, a trailer park. This was the seventh grade, and I again went to a new school, but this time there was a very rough crowd. I had to catch the bus at the front of the trailer park and there were loud, yankee-talking girls on the bus who picked on me unmercifully for living in a trailer park, my clothes, everything. When Don and I lived in Covington, this sappy ex-nun came up to me one time and asked me why I always had to be so “tough.” I felt just awful and embarassed, thinking I must look like a prison guard, but I later thought that I had to toughen up at an early age so that I could deal with what life threw my way. If people don’t like that, then maybe we shouldn’t be friends. This ex-nun would have fainted at the sight of those girls coming at her on that bus.
I was very happy when my mother decided that my sister and I were spending the summer of 1973 with my grandparents in Greenville. My brother wasn’t going because he was only four and too much of a handful for my grandparents. We had a wonderful, stress-free summer, playing with our cousins, being with people who had soft southern accents, and enjoying the attention. Then one day in late August, my father suddenly drove up in our station wagon with my brother. We were in the front yard. It was obvious that something was wrong because they both looked like they were filthy. My father looked like a wild man. My grandmother ran to the car asking where my mother was. My father started crying and fell to his knees in the driveway. My brother said, “my mama’s dead. My daddy killed her.” I thought I must have misheard him. My grandmother ran inside and called her sister to come and pick us kids up. Then she called the police in Florida, and it began to look like my mother was still alive.
My father was having some kind of nervous breakdown and they took him to the hospital. Eventually my mother called and said she was driving up to Greenville in our other car. When she got there, we found out that she had rented a big carpet shampooer and was shampooing the carpet in the trailer when my father came home. I think she told him she was going to leave him and he flew into a rage and beat her until she was down on the ground. Then he picked up the huge carpet shampooer and was going to slam it down on top of her, but he slipped on the soapy carpet and fell over backwards. She ran out the back door and went to the neighbors. He banged on all the neighbor’s doors trying to find her, but she and the neighbor hid until he had put my brother in the car and driven off. He apparently drove straight through only stopping for gas. For some reason, he thought he had killed her even though he missed with the carpet cleaning machine.
He was in the hospital for a couple of weeks and then he disappeared. He turned up working in Gabon, Africa. When my mother arrived in Greenville, she was strangely happy. We soon found out why. She was getting married. She had been having an affair with a guy at work, and now that my father was out of the picture they were going to get married. They had chosen my 13th birthday, October 5, for the wedding.
Up until now, my story has been kind of bad with a little good mixed in. With the arrival on the scene of my mother’s second husband, I’m afraid it just gets ugly.
