The goal is 10 True Tales That Horrify and Amuse. With each telling each tale will lose its power and no longer define me or haunt. If I can muscle up and write them out I will be rewarded with total liberation. And go anywhere, do anything, be anyone again.
More is more! The country's coated with a fake sustainability, a wash of modesty, a frugality that speaks more of ordinary poor people's lives than any sort of noble humility. Being consumed by consumption is not the same as being passionate, news flash, and all you people out there acting suddenly sober about conserving and not over-doing it at Christmas and finding the real joys of life, ain't it hard, are hired. I'm hiring you as my Dream Team, to coax me out of thinking that this is as it should be, and when I leave the tunnel you'll be there with silver hard cases full of stacks of crisp bills and you'll say kindly, "Miss Underwood? The jet is fueled and waiting."
1. I had another family before my first family but died from them when I was about 3 or 4 and we were all blond. I begged "the new mother" to tell me where they were which may be the beginning of how I drove her insane, obviously laying the groundwork for future abuses.
2. I used to fall asleep staring at the skinny black girl my age, 8 or 9, sitting in my closet on a wooden chair every night, her back always to me, white bones in her hair, a dirty white sackcloth, staring at my dresses, which were few and hand-me-downs but were designed to look like a shirt and jumper all sewn into one which made them enviable.
3. Once I flew into my mother's bedroom while the man slept next to her and hovered there because if I didn't he would kill her. It was foggy and I hung around there till dawn because that man wouldn't kill after the sun came up.
4. One of my sisters tried to kill me or my other sister with a pair of scissors and/or her flute more than once.
5. My father beat my mother under the bare light bulb in the kitchen late at night (it was probably only 8 pm).
6. I was homeless through a Detroit winter as a 17 year old because I didn't fold the laundry properly and my mother was bashing my record player into my head to punish me so I left. I still got A's in my Algebra class, French, and Advanced Placement English, which I got into on the strengths of an essay I wrote defending "punk rock". We read Macbeth which was too easy.
7. I was raped which is how I lost my virginity when I was homeless, because that really happens to girls out there.
8. My mom once punched me so hard in the face I saw stars before blacking out. This was punishment for kissing a boy underneath the maple tree, a slut. It confused him that I never talked to him again, which was clearly the beginning of the end of my romantic fantasies, you would think.
9. My mother spoke to me without words when she was dying in the hospital, "I'm scared." "Don't be scared," I said but I didn't hug her because I was scared.
10. I used to steal gasoline from cars at night with a few feet of garden hose and a gas can.
I think I'm going to have to up the ante, that only gets me to age 19 and frankly barely begins.
