Smoke and Mirrors

Sometimes families and relationships are a matter of smoke and mirrors, illusions that are created by us and by others. I can’t say whether they are deliberate or accidental. But until the illusion is shattered by events, it is possible to go your whole life without realizing what is really there.

The glue holding an extended family together in relative harmony is often a single individual. For mine, it was Mama (my grandmother). She raised me, and until I was in first grade, I did not know that she was not my mother. She was strong, tough as nails, and to some, intimidating. My mother was her daughter, Mickey, whose custody I had been removed from because of abuse when I was two years old. That story was told here

I always thought I was loved. I thought I meant something to my various aunts, uncles, and to a degree my mother.

When Mama died in January 1984, I learned that all my relationships with my family had been illusions. I was the black sheep of the family and I had to face that when she died.

I had left H, and through a series of misadventures landed back in Texas with Mama in November of 1983.

While I was there Mickey kept telling me i owed her a child and made several attempts to snatch Sovay with male relatives to back her up.

Mama had left me everything in her will, even naming me her executrix. While Mama was in the hospital with a massive stroke and not expected to survive (she died a week later) I started getting threats from uncles who I had once believed cared about me and the attorney, with whom Mama had filed her will with, phoned and said he could not represent me because I was a lesbian.

Frightened and with no one to turn to, as my family turned completely against me, I phoned H and he flew out to Fort Worth.

Two days after H arrived, Mike and Mickey arrived on my doorstep. I had locked the door, but Mike broke the knob off and walked on in. They had come for Sovay and a bunch of Mama’s papers. Mickey slammed my bad leg into a table so hard that it crumpled. H was a slender wuss and could not fight to save his life, but he grabbed Sovay and fled out the back while i was attempting to hold them off. A baptist minister hid them for a day and then helped H book a flight to California. Before he could get back to Texas after getting Sovay to safety, they had locked me up in the loony bin.

Bjo Trimble watched over Sovay while H contacted Robert Adams for advice. Adams suggested getting in touch with John Steakley while he made a bunch of phone calls to rally the troops. Then H flew back to Texas.

I was not allowed phone calls while i was locked up in the loony bin. My first clue to what was going on came when the shrink my mother had persuaded to lock me up got nervous, smelling a possible lawsuit, because editors and authors were phoning and faxing and jumping on him. I should have sued. But I was in bad shape from everything that had happened to me and just grateful to go into hiding in California.

I suppose the highlight of the entire thing was when I showed up at the probate hearing on the will with John and his very large friends acting as bodyguards. Mickey was hysterical and kept trying to get close to me, but John refused to let her get anywhere near me. John was my Knight in Shining Armor that day.

Recurrent Nightmare

I have not seen any of them since 1997. Yet, I still have nightmares. The dreams often launch from a memory and then turn strange. There was one that I kept having that finally stopped when it resolved itself.

I was in this incredible mansion. H was there, Mike and Don, and Mickey. I was cornered. Sovay was little and clutching at me. In that beautiful modern mansion there was a hidden stairway that i was terrified to climb. It was old and rickety and the room at the top seemed to threaten us both. As the series of dreams progressed over a period of months, I eventually forced myself to climb those stairs.

Inside the room was all the good things I had lost. My first stuffed dog, Fluffy, and all my toys and dreams. (Bear with the fact that the good things hurt worse than the bad and my eyes tear up remembering the good things). I had one more dream of that room.

I found a door on the opposite side of the room that i had never seen before. Sovay and I went through that door in the final dream and there was this huge room like a military hanger and in the center sat an F-16. I climbed into the cabin, switched everything on and blew a hole in the wall with the missiles. Then Sovay and I roared out of there.

And the dreams stopped.

My Mother’s home.

My step-father, Mike, was a big man. He stood six five and weighed two hundred and sixty five pounds Earlier in this series of memoir posts, I mentioned the sexual bullshit when I was a teenager and I have not yet told the half of it.

Anyway there I was at 41 back in my mother’s house. Once I was able to let my guard down, all the pent up exhaustion from fifteen years of ugliness came home to roost. I fell apart once it was safe to do so, and took an assessment.

My blood pressure had been out of control for years. When I would mention how I could hear my heart beat in my temples and my head felt full, H would say that i did not have high blood pressure because I did not deserve to. If anyone deserved to have high blood pressure it was him for having to deal with me. My leg had worsened because of both the accident and all the exertion it should not have been pressed into.

When I went to the doctor, they wanted to hospitalize me because I was sitting at such a high level of blood pressure that they thought a stroke was imminent. I argued with them. I had Sovay to consider and did not want to be separated from her for even a day.

I got medicaid and welfare while I was trying to pull myself back together and began seeing a psychologist in an effort to stop the crazy anxiety symptoms that included hyper vigilance.

We lived with Mickey and Mike for a year before I got my health together enough to get my own place.

However, two things happened that forced me to move before I was completely ready.

Mike had always had anger issues. Man Mountain with a bad temper. Sovay was a vegetarian from age seven. I always found ways around it.

One night, Mike decided to force Sovay to eat meat. He lunged across the table at her when she steadfastly refused, grabbed her by the collar and beat her against a wall.

I tried to stop him and got knocked aside. In the end, all I could do was watch him beat my child.

He was just too big for me to handle. Too big. Too powerful. I had seen him many times lift a car engine.

Sovay has a fixation with germs and would get physically sick if asked to wash dishes because of her phobia. Nevertheless, Mike decided to get her over it by fist.

One night, Sovay had gone to bed, and I had been too busy to remember the dinner dishes needed washing. Mike came in from working in his garden late (he was putting in a sprinkler system) and saw the dishes. He went and began washing them, screaming about what he intended to do about my daughter. I pushed in and took them from his hands and started doing them myself.

Mike flew into an even worse rage. He grabbed me and repeated what he had done to Sovay. But this time the one on the receiving end was me. He threw me across the kitchen into a wall and pounced upon me (sound familiar? It’s what Don did to me went we were young. He learned it from Mike).

My step-father kept pounded me against the wall, screaming and raging, and my head kept thunking into the wood paneling until my ears rang and I was in no shape to fight back. Meanwhile my mother sat in her recliner, watching this and telling him to hit me again.

Within two days I had gotten enough help to move into my own place, but not before my mother tried to bash me up with a broom. While I was out scouring for help, they told Sovay that I was not coming back. That i had abandoned her.

However, Sovay was a lot stronger than they suspected and she defied them.

Fast forward a few weeks — it might have been two months — and Sovay had gone to a miniature golf course with her close friends, April and Aaron. Their mother did not own a car, so we always used mine. Dianna and I drove over to pick up our kids. As we walked out onto the my leg buckled and seized up into painful spasms so severe that it felt like it was trying to break all the sockets loose from my hip down. I could not stand. The ’spasms’ lasted for a painful five days with only short breaks of ten to twenty minutes before the next seizure.

Six months later I started applying to colleges as I had finished my general ed requirements in Anthropology at the local junior college. I had a 3.65 grade point average. (it dropped to a 3.5 when I started to Mt. Holyoke). The painful spasms had moved up to my left arm. It was mis-diagnosed as carpel tunnel. The doctor refused to connect what was happening with my arm and hand to what was going on with my leg.

Two years later I moved to Fitchburg and had a new doctor who sent me to a neurologist. A battery of tests was ordered and a complete MRI. So far, the tumor appears to be benign. I have lived with that for five years now with regular checks on it. High doses of Gabapentin remove most of the symptoms, but I still have days when my left hand won’t work right and my leg does the crazy dance on my footstool.

In making comments on posts i usually leave the capitals off because I can’t get my little finger to hold the shift key down firmly enough. I am looking into getting a more sensitive keyboard that will take less pressure to hold it down.

With my writing, spellcheck compensates for that. I run the grammar checker and catch the missing capital letter and just a click of the mouse with my right hand fixes it.

Where the escape money came from.

I went to work as a secretary in the computer center at Doheny Eye Institute on the UC Medical Campus. Most of it was misery. H refused to drive me to work and I was left to make do with the bus system to get from Altadena to Los Angeles. It required changing buses twice in some of the worse areas of LA and took me two hours to get there and two hours back. By car it would have twenty minutes.

It was exhausting and I had to turn my entire pay check into H. Otherwise, Sovay disappeared.

One day, I was sent across campus to drop off some records and pick up others. The rain was sleeting down and I was already tired when the day started. I came in through the only door that was not carpeted, reached the nurses station and my feet slipped out from under me in a puddle of water. I went flying and landed on my bad leg.

The result was a worker’s comp claim. My attorney was a nice man. One day, while I was meeting with him (following a very hard round of H screaming at me for hours), I broke down and told him the whole story.

He thought I was the one sending him all those faxes. But it was not me. It was H.

Once that was out, my attorney did two things for me. He was specialist in worker’s comp, and could not help on a lot of other issues, but he began helping me in other ways.

He stopped responding to H’s faxes. We arranged a system so that he would know if the fax actually came from me or not. And he helped me hide a portion of the money from the worker’s comp claim.

He also informed me of how to do the research.

H never knew that he only had half the money in his hands. I set up a mail drop and a secret bank account. When I left with my mother, I had a car waiting for me that H did not know existed.

ESCAPE!

In 1995, my mother, Mickey, moved back to California. She befriended H over the months that their home and business in Texas were up for sale. The last thing she wanted was for H to bolt and disappear, taking Sovay and me with him. She even paid for H’s eye examine and bought him two pairs of glasses.

I had finally reached the point where I was more afraid of H than I was of Mickey. Shortly after Mickey and Mike moved, H needed to borrow a lawnmower. So he asked to borrow hers. She came, but did not bring the mower. She brought their big truck and left with me and Sovay.

I hated playing the tranny card, but I had saved pictures of H in female garb with enough makeup to make a streetwalker look tame. H went to the American Bookseller’s convention looking like a whore. Everyone remarked on it and his agent, Bert Holtje told him to tone it down.

I made it clear to H that the state of California would not look kindly on that.

Now, if you have read all the way back, you will find me talking about a certain piece of paper that allegedly gave H full custody of Sovay. He had held Sovay hostage with it.

I was doing the research for one of H’s best-selling books, and I used that time to go to the courthouse to check records and I got a copy of the document I had signed, but been too out of it to know what I had signed. Here’s the serious irony. All the document did was forbid me to take Sovay out of California.

With a copy of that document in hand and those photos, I fled to Mickey’s home with Sovay and there was not a damned thing that H could to to stop me.

Felons I have known.

You can’t live in this building without knowing at least one person who has done time. Several close friends of mine did time for murder. With all the screaming about the Myspace Mother and all the accusations that are flying around, I want to share the story of one of my friends. He’s an old man in his late sixties, suffering from a genetic disease that is causing his cerebellum to shrink. As a result of this, he has to use two canes to walk and has progressively lessening control over his muscles.

He’s a kind old man and one of the gentlest people I know. And he did twenty years in prison for murder.

He killed a child.

Back in the sixties they did not have all the methods for intervention in psychological crises that they do now. He was a young man, carrying too much weight on his shoulders. F had begun seeing a psychiatrist in an effort to head off the growing breakdown. No matter how much of his pay he sent home (he was in the army at the time), his wife insisted she did not have enough money. He became more and more distraught, doing everything he could and still he got the letters saying it was not enough.

F tried to get leave to go home and try to fix whatever was wrong with his wife. They had three children, a three-year-old girl, a two-year old girl, and an infant son. He loved his children. So F went AWOL and went back home to Massachusetts, desperate to straighten things out. He was just 21 years old at the time.

When he got home, he discovered why the money was not stretching. His wife had moved all her relatives into their home. He was feeding all of them.

As he became more and more distraught, F kept calling the psychiatrist, but not getting a call back. F could feel his mind collapsing. One morning, he was left alone with the three children. His son kept crying no matter what he did. F says that he felt as if his mind was not in his body as he went into the nursery and quietly suffocated the boy. Then he called the police on himself, and he went and waited on the steps of his home to be arrested.

Although the psychiatrist testified at the trial in his favor, F still did twenty years in prison.

I had known F for two years before he told me why people in the community hate him. The haunted look in his eyes as he told me his story will be forever etched in my mind. He had never forgiven himself.

Overburdened and unable to cope, he had a psychotic break that forever destroyed his life.

Nowadays, if a shrink had gotten those phone calls, intervention would have been immediate and the child would not have died. F would have gotten the help he needed.

Instead, he’s a kind, gentle, and very broken man.

So Philbin told us to f*** Off.

He singled out the only two women to post to that thread and told us to f**k off. He was too afraid of all the males posting.

I have a single thing to say to Mike Philbin:

Fook off, ya bloody cock-eyed creep.

Dagstine says rape is not cruel and unusual punishment.

Matt at Shocklines locked and then deleted the thread started by Nanci Kalanta about the prosecution of the mother who triggered the suicide of Megan Miers with the Myspace deception. Dagstine and Pacione had hi-jacked the thread. Dagstine kept comparing the EONs who post comments at Rusty Nail, including myself to that mother. And Dagstine wanted to see the mother subjected to judicial torture, including rape.

I got in one last comment, right after Leatherzebra, stating “The same folks who practiced judicial torture also threw garbage at bad writers. Can’t have one without the other.”

T. S. Elliot; Comprende, Dickstain?

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”

T. S. Elliot might as well have been describing the members of the

Legion

Just a quickie.

Barbara Bauer vs. Wikipedia