For Mitch

So, here it goes. You've asked for a story. A story explaining my patterns, my self-destruction, my alcoholism, my need to be wanted/desired, my confusion with love and sex and being extraordinarily special. The better I am at sex, the more special I am. The more valuable I am. I can't be this way unless I'm drunk, I'm high, I'm uninhibited. What else is there. I shed my skin like a snake. Change colors like a chamelion...but that's a cliche. I'm a cliche. A walking cliche trying to be something genuine and authentic and only seeing the skin on the outside and the emptiness of the hole on the inside and wondering what it is that I am...Who I am. My therapist tells me everyone feels this way. That everyone feels alone and empty to some extent. He tells me that I'm no different. But he's good looking, and I like to think that he likes me and that keeps me going to him. Telling him my stories. Wondering if he'll find me special, too.



My earliest memory is of my brother....sitting on my lap. I am trying to tell him the story of "Little Red Riding Hood". I hold him tight. He is warm and sweaty. I love him. He is my brother. My living doll. We are sitting on the wood floor of our house. I am looking at the window shaped like a diamond inlaid on our front door. The sun shines through and makes patterns on the floor. The pattern are pretty. I love my brother. He smells good. I like to think he smells good, but maybe I've added that for dramatic effect. I imagine he smells like baby lotion and sour milk, and that his hair is soft against my cheek, slightly damp with sweat. I imagine that I am his big sister and he loves me, and I don't know where my mother or father are. They are missing. They do not exist.

We took a trip across the country. My father inherited some money after my grandpa died. We sold the house with diamond window and the pretty patterns on the floor. We sold the house with porch and the yard. Sometimes today I drive by it--just to see. It looks on the verge of collapse. It's on Adams Street. It's falling down. The diamond window is still there. There is a bar and a trailor park a few yards away.

The van is called 'Big Pink' after a Bob Dylan song, but I never knew that until recently, and I like Bob Dylan. We drive up the West coast. I do remember buckwheat pancakes with molasses on them. They smell good. They taste good. I am happy. I keep trying to say that I am three. Keep trying to make that 'th' sound, but I can't. It always comes out 'twee' I'm 'twee'. That doesn't sound right. It's frustrating to not be able to say it right.

One day we are in the parking lot of Safeway. I've heard this story a million times by my parents, so I know from their retelling that my brother and I were in Safeway and we knocked over a display of wine, and my mother had had it and so she sent us back to our father, back to Big Pink, where dad was washing the windows on the front of our stepvan. And I with my brother...And here is the genuine memory...Here is what I remember...Turning the key in the ignition...showing him how to turn the key in the ignition...the red light and beeping sound. A child's play thing. Turn the key. On comes the light. Out comes the buzz. And then, (but my memory isn't there now) I only remember turning the key...But from the retelling, the retelling of the story. The story that becomes a joke, and andetote to the tragedy and the horror of the van that lurches forward and my father jumping off the front and running inside and turning off the key and the plate glass windows of Safeway collapsing in one large crash. I don 't remember much more of that trip. Washing in a river in Utah, maybe...so cold, so cold....But the pancakes aren't there anymore. I'm not trying to say three anymore...I don't remember much after that.

We come back and I we are living in a trailer. The trailer is dark. The floor is ugly carpet. My brother is sitting on the floor. He's sick. I tell him I will make him applesauce. I climb onto the counter and get out a plastic cup and an apple and put water in the cup and a butter knife and try to mashe the apple with the water, but my father comes in and asks what I'm doing in that disappointed way of his, he is angry and exasperated. I wanted to make applesauce for Forest. To make him feel better. He's sick. My father is angry with me. I want to cry. I swallow it down. I learn to swallow things down. I swallow and swallow.

They take him to the hospital that night. I stay with their friends. Joe and Terry. Joe and Terry have a son, but he is older than me by a couple of years. His name is Eric and he shot himself when he was eleven, but he is not eleven yet. He is six or seven and it is morning and he is so excited about Fruit Loops. We are having Fruit Loops for breakfast. He tells me that Fruit Loops are the best. My mother and father come. "Forest is dead" my father says. 'Let's go out to breakfast'. Eric is mad, because he can't have Fruit Loops. I've never had Fruit Loops. I wonder why they are so special. I don't understand why he is so upset about not having them, but his father yells at him. Years later, I will watch a much older Eric get strapped by his father with a belt. Bare buttucks, tiny penis, belt against skin...My face will burn with shame. I will feel aroused. I be ashamed. But today there are no fruit loops. We go to Hobo Joe's. The restaurant that is now a Denny's. Hobo Joe was always in front with his little stick and handkerchief and his little black dog. I liked Hobo Joe's. I liked the statue. We sat on a maroon vinyl booth and I am climbing around and my mom  says that I should have a deep fried burrito. I've never eaten a deep fried burrito. I don't know what it is. But when it comes, it is good. I don't remember if I asked about my brother or not. I don't remember much but the taste of the burrito. It was good. It was comforting.