What the Hell Have I?

"It's hard to start things over...you can feel the fire around us all the time."
                                                                                              ---Layne Staley

Sick memories. No one to protect me. Locked in this box. There are nails driven through the wood, pricking my soft, nine-year old skin. I cannot get out because my father is sitting on it. He's reading something by James A. Michener. That's too bad. Michener is an acclaimed writer that in the future I may have been able to learn things from but at nine I hate the bastard, I hate every word because I have to listen to it while 240 pounds of sociopath sits on the lid. Trapping me. Dad. I have no idea what he is doing this for, what trespass I am guilty of...did I smart off? What did I do? I don't get it and I can't move. Moving, I am cut. Pricked. Like mosquito bites, the welts rise up. There is some blood. It takes him a very long time to finish. My concept of time is nothing. Fifteen minutes or an hour, all the same. There is only the pitch and the words read loudly in a high-whine southern accent.

Grown, I find it funny that my father had, or has, such a high-whine for a voice. I myself developed a pretty deep one, tenor-bass/baritone, depending on my mood. I do not find it funny that the above paragraph is true. All true. No lies there. No lies to follow. All true.

Another sick memory. He chases off my mother. I want so bad to be with Mom, she's so pretty and kind, not ugly and muscle-fat like Dad. I'm only a little boy but I'm still calling him a fucking fucker in my head, a goddamn piece of shit, a cunt, all words I learned from him but do not dare say out loud. Instead I watch from behind the picture window, from my prison, this glorified trailer, raised ranch, green-puke-painted house I hate with every aspect of my small, pudgy being. When he comes in and sees me watching and crying as my mother's Toyota pulls out of the driveway, he laughs, a "WELL-UH-HYEH-HYEH-HYEH!" that I hate then and hate to this day, that fucking laugh, and goddammit I wonder if he's dead and I want to reach into his throat and rip his vocal chords out while mocking him with "WELL-UH-HYEH-HYEH-HYEH!" He disappears into the basement to fuck Kim, our pretty 20-something babysitter.

Our. Mine and April's. What does April say?

"You don't love Mom anyway. Stop crying, wimp."

So I punch her in her disgusting little Miss Piggy fucking face. She wails even though with my pudgy Q-Tip fist the pain is not that bad and she will laugh about it later, and Dad comes running upstairs and drags me to my room and yanks my jeans down and whips me with his belt buckle until blood runs down my legs like warm milk. Finished, he tells me it is wrong to hit girls even though I've seen him do it, and I understand the word hypocrite, so I call him one, and he punches me in the face. I lie on the bed, too stunned to cry. Miss Piggy saunters past my room and giggles. "Stupid," she says. She sticks her tongue out at me.

One day, I think, I'll cut it off. I'll cut that goddamn tongue right out of her head and slap her in the face with it, but I know I won't. My heart tells me that I love her too much, that she, as ugly and horrible and responsible for many of my beatings at Dad's hands she is, I emulate her because she's the one with all the friends, fat or not, and all I do is get picked on and bullied and beat up by the stupid kids at school, like Scott Buttikoffer. One day maybe I'll slit his throat.

But I won't because then I'd go to jail forever and ever and ever. The horror movies I love are fake. In real life all the killers get caught and go to jail. I wish I was Freddy. Or Jason. I could chop all these pieces of shit into little, tiny pieces and laugh without consequence. Instead of doing it I write it down. I am just a little boy. Barely ten. And I realize that I've got something. I can put words together and my grades are all A's. A pluses, even. That's why I get beat up a lot, because I raise my hand in class too much. Maybe I should stop. But here, alone in my green bedroom with the poster, velvet, decorated with a poorly drawn red goat-looking animal and reading "NO GNUS IS GOOD GNUS", and my dinosaur books and my Jack London books I realize I'm smarter than all these morons and I have something. I have already read Shakespeare and most of my fifth grade class doesn't even know who he was, but I do, or at least I think I do because when I'm older I'll know Shakespeare was nothing but an amalgum at best and a plaigarist at worst and he more than likely did not write "The pen is mightier than the sword." Just like he didn't write the truth about women--a Roman poet did.

Of course at nine, this doesn't matter. All that matters is writing about how I want to kill my father and my sister. When I run out of words I stab the notebook until the pen breaks and bleeds ink all over the page. Carefully, I toss it into the small wastebasket in my room because I can't get ink on the desk or Dad will beat me some more and Miss Piggy will laugh. I am smart, I toss the pen out without making any noticeable mess. I read the pages. Dad and Miss Piggy are dead.

And it kicks ass. I've got something here. And 26 years later I cannot bring myself to read Michener; I never will. Who cares. I have this. It is mine.