If I said it was surreal to be here, I’d be understating it. I never thought I’d make it to thirty-four and I certainly never thought I’d have survived a long war, a thousand battles, a handful of converging and confounding lives to enjoy the awe of my own existence. I have to remind myself constantly that when people meet my awkward irreverence, they don’t have the context of the first few books. They don’t know that I’ve cried bathtubs of tears over the loss of time, opportunities, dear friends and loves. They weren’t there when, blood staining my neck, craze gripping my eyes, I crouched in the mirror and worked to wrench my own tooth out with pliers. Anything to stop the pain. They didn’t see the concessions I made for a moment of peace, the submission to a devil who couldn’t be satisfied. Most days I forget my past, but it never forgets me. I am the product of this conflagration and it seeps into all aspects of my life.
Yesterday I was seventeen years old. I had no anchor, no compass, just the want and wander that led me to strange new places. If I close my eyes I am still her, gasping for air and grasping for someone to pull me above myself. If I wanted a good thing, I certainly didn’t know what it looked like. I stopped writing and gave myself over to a man who didn’t know what to do with me but to abuse. Systematically he destroyed, masterfully like all thieves. He pulled the switch, first stealing my heart, then my joy and lastly my sanity. His brain was sharp, dangerous and uncommon. He could have done anything, he could have had it all.
Ed had an unmatched confidence, but I wouldn’t say it was unearned. He had survived 1000 doses of LSD intravenously administered, being a drug runner for John Gotti Jr. and most extraordinarily, a family full of fruitcakes. A few years before we met, he had been pistol whipped in a gang initiation and left for dead. He had total amnesia and when his mother came to visit him in the hospital, his head swollen to the size of a healthy melon, he demanded to see her ID. Unappeased, he threatened to turn her in to the FBI for impersonation. The most remarkable part of this experience was that, according to his sister, as he relearned how to walk and talk, he turned back in to the same fucker he was before. Even amnesia couldn’t set him back right.
Sometime around 2001 (who can remember?) the course of my life changed. It changed and I wasn’t even remotely aware. Ed, being the entertaining moron he was, jumped off the roof of his house during a party and landed on a cement slab, breaking his back in multiple places. When he fell his phone auto-dialed his mom. I like to think she heard his moaning and the chaos of the party and just hung up, because that’s the type of heinous bitch I knew her to be (later). Ed’s friends gave him ecstasy, propped him in a La-Z-Boy and left to lick their own drug induced wounds.
While Ed was suffering a back brace, I was just being seventeen. I had dropped out of high school, enrolled in college early and was working a crap job at a packaging store. I also had the most amazing dog, who I had rescued from death not long before. She could open our front door and let herself out. I had no way of knowing she was making her way around the neighborhood everyday, jumping fences and playing with other dogs. Then our new neighbor’s mom (heinous bitch) hit her with her car, and my life changed. That was the moment I met Amy, Ed’s sister. We met the same day I was fired from my job and it wasn’t long before she was asking me if I’d like to fill in at Ed’s business, since he had stupidly leapt from his roof and couldn’t walk. Looking back, it seems impossible that the dominos fell as they did by mistake.
Ed hated me. He hated that his sister had hired me on his behalf. He hated that he was in pain and in a back brace. He hated that he didn’t choose me, that I was whatever I was, that he needed the help and that he wasn’t mobile enough to get trashed at the Men’s Club. He took to giving me the worst possible duties at his jewelry store. This meant I stuffed the batteries, cleaned people’s disgusting gold grills, got cussed at by customers and occasionally he bested me with a Greco-Roman wrestling move, right there on the store floor. Obviously I fell in love, or the closest thing I knew to it. He told me about his girlfriend and how she was run over by a dump truck, got fat and withheld sex. It only makes sense that I would fall for that, right? But he was and still is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and looking back, I can’t blame my seventeen year old self for being so easily groomed.
We eventually bought a home on the lake, a sports car, a jet ski and another business, and by we I mean he bought them and put the car on my credit because he had too many DUIs. It took me years to realize that my existence depended on him, and by the time I knew I was too far in. Thousands of dollars every week went up our noses or walked out the door in a thief’s hand. Our commingled drug problem was just a symptom of our converging mental issues. My dad had left me, his was a drunk with tons of money who’s affections couldn’t be earned. My mom had found a new life that didn’t include me and his was a cold, heartless bitch. Together we dragged what they had created, us, straight into the mire. Sucking on fentanyl pops, I shivered in the cold of our house as I crafted little bows for our Christmas tree and he sorted through mounds of dusty DVDS, all the while we died. Every day runs together as something wholly unworthy of remembering, but still I do. Dog hair on the couch, the floor littered in lottery tickets, oxycontin dust on the bathroom counter, splices of hose clamps scattered about, the sounds of asian porn and there’s a fiend at the door.
One day, somewhere along the way, I left him. Then I came back, somewhere along there also. One day, somewhere along the way, he told me he had cheated on me, was getting married, his mistress was pregnant and oh, I was fired. Somewhere along that path she had lied and I went back to him and to find her pants in my bedroom. Somewhere along the way I took the wrong medicine and tried to drown myself for three days of hallucinations as my sister held my hand and my mom prayed and the doctor said I was a junkie and sent me home. Somewhere in that time my friend murdered a man and dumped his body under a bush and ran from the police on live TV and sometime this month he comes home. Sometime back then, near the end of the chapter, Ed’s hands around my throat, my head slamming against the wall, I can recall his mother calling me a bitch. Bitch.
Somewhere along the way the years slipped by me and when I awoke, I found that I only knew how to live this way. Seventeen was a broken girl.
When I left that house, I thought I’d seen the worst. I thought the dysfunction was his and I had been lucky to walk away unscathed. I was wrong and I wasn’t unscathed. It was only preparation. The death and dying and demons waited for me. If I said it is surreal to think this time in my life was only the precursor to hell, I’d be understating it. Had I known that a few years later I’d be a far greater monster than Ed could have ever dreamed to be, I would have finished what I started in that bathtub. There is mercy in not knowing the future. Today, when I laugh at things that ought disturb or hope for people seemingly beyond redemption or try for better than I deserve or talk to you like you are more than what your words pretend, reference this book and the one you’ve lived and haven’t told. Because I’m reading it without your consent. You can thank Seventeen.
The Reprobate's Guide to Pancakes 