You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'domestic abuse' tag.
My awareness of the situation began with a phone call. It was February of 1986. Roughly two weeks after my second piece, War of the Worlds came out in the Washington Post Bookworld. A friend of H’s called to congratulation him on several articles he had out in prestigious spots.
To my knowledge, H had not had anything out in several months. So I asked which articles H’s friend was referring to. As the answers tumbled out of the fellow’s excited mouth, into the phone, and down my ears; I became sick to my stomach. I was so stunned I could barely speak and my mind stopped working. I excused myself from the conversation and hung up the phone. I barely made it to the bathroom before throwing up.
H was telling his industry friends that every article with my byline on it was written by him, including the Washington Post pieces.
H had robbed me of my name.
They say “write what you know.”
At this point it should be self-evident why the books I write are so dark and violent. I am writing what I know.
I chose to write dark fantasy as a metaphor for my own experiences to a degree. I tried to write both mainstream and at once point a real memoir, rather than just tossing the bits and pieces into a blog.
However, I can’t get too close to the memories without putting myself into a bad state of mind accompanied by flashbacks. The memoir posts are as close as I can get to lancing the septic wounds.
I have started putting them into drafts and saving them there, trying to just post them one or two at a time as the need is on me to talk about them. My demons won’t let go of me.
A close friend of many years was reading them yesterday and he said, “I don’t know the half of it, do I?”
I replied, “You probably don’t know a third.”
I lived in fear for many years that my family would find me again with an eye to settling old grudges.
There are periods when I write obsessively in an attempt to outrun the memories. Sometimes I can and more often I can’t.
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.
This post continues the events posted here Let’s talk about my drug abuse
After drinking the bottle of Mr. Clean, I sat down and waited to die. My five-year-old daughter had been put to bed hours earlier. There was no way to anticipate what happened next. Normally she slept through the night, but that night she woke up and came into the living room where I was sitting alone and crawled onto my lap and told me she loved me.
I consider the thoughts that ran through my head next to be a moment of satori.
I could not abandon her that way.
I was not expendable
By the time that i got her back to bed and headed for my car to get help, I was staggering around and barely able to keep my feet. I had no business driving. However, six blocks away was a family friend, the guy would later be a president of HWA. He had been a close friend for many years. Or at least I had believed him to be.
I had helped him get his green card when he first came to this country.
It was all I could do to stay conscious as I went to his home.
I told him what I had done and asked for help.
His response was to get a friend to help him shove me into the back seat of his car. He drove me to my home and dumped me on the front lawn.
H came out, screamed at me for embarrassing him and ordered me to bed.
Instead, I make one last attempt to find help.
I was so out of it that i did not know I was walking through broken glass that sliced the bottoms of my bare feet open. The pain simply did not register at all. With the last of my will power, I staggered onto Van Nuys Blvd. My legs started to buckle.
A car full of young hispanic males swerved close and one of them grabbed me. The next instant a man shouted from the top balcony of a tall apartment building, “let her go. I’ve called the cops.”
And for emphasis, he shook the cordless phone he held at them. “I have your plate number. Let go of her.”
The young guys shoved me to the pavement and sped off. A pair of drag queens came and sat with me.
Paramedics and a patrol car arrived. That was my first encounter with that white haired cop mentioned in an earlier post.
The police officers waited at the hospital while the emergency room staff patched me back together. The officers told me they were going to take me home. Drugs were too prevalent in that area to bother arresting someone for an OD. It just crowded the otherwise crowded jails up.
I begged them not to take me home. Instead they took me to the county hospital for nutcases and I checked myself in.
H had very good medical coverage and the next day I was transferred to a private hospital near Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.
One of the reasons that I am reluctant to name names about those parties is that they included a former president of SFWA, a former president of HWA, and a major figure in the cyberpunk movement. Two of those three no longer live in the US, and I have lost contact with all of them during the years that I withdrew from those communities and stopped going to the parties.
I continued for many years to avoid everyone, partly because I felt that I would not be believed if I spoke out concerning what had gone on in my life. My fears were borne out when an editor said to me, “I can’t take sides. Staying on good terms with H is important to my magazine.” That was in response to my asking why he would no longer assign me to write articles.
The non-fiction agent I had at the time, also represented H. He dropped me as a client because H was the bigger draw, and once the divorce went through I was persona non grata.
Although I have read a great deal on mental health and taken a couple of basic college courses in psychology, I can only make guesses about a lot of things.
H had patterns that I only recognized as patterns after I had been free of him for many years. It took time and distance to begin to figure out what had actually been going on.
He cried at movies, cared for animals, and wrote Sovay christmas stories. Each December, on the first of the month, he would write a new ‘chapter’ of a story that featured her stuffed animals, adding another chapter each morning, and by Christmas morning the story would be complete and the stuffed animals would save Christmas. He did that from the time she was four until she was ten. We left him successfully three months after she turned eleven so, of course, there was never another story.
It delighted her.
I was married to him for fifteen years. He had cycles, just like a bi-polar, but instead of them taking days, weeks, or months; they took years. Nothing I have been able to find in researching this in the years since we parted matches up with it.
All that I can do is describe the pattern. At one end of the swing, he was sweet, caring, almost vulnerable. At the other end of the pattern, H was a raging maniac, destroying everything around him in a borderline delusional fit, certain that anything he wished to do was right and just.
As far as I can tell, the swings progressed from the bottom of the curve to the top for periods of around two to three years, cycled down and came up again. So it took years to make the complete circuit. There was always a major disaster when he hit the top of the curve.
It has been postulated that because H was a transsexual, what I was really seeing was the outward manifestations of his inner war between the female and male sides of his personality, with one half being ascendant over the other at various periods. This may well be true, and somewhere in this is the key to it all.
Certainly, once he had fully become she, the anger and rages ceased. But that happened long after we broke up. Five years ago, I received a weeping apology from H, which went on for hours. She hated the person that had been H, as much as I did at the end.
There are many kinds of violence in the world. Each person deals with it differently.
Physical violence never seemed to bother me as much as the emotional kind.
Someone yelling at me, getting in my face with rage, close in on my personal space — it always produced a kind of Body Shock Reaction.
When H went into his rages, sometimes frothing at the mouth, getting right up against me, his face inches from mine. It always produced this reaction in me. I would feel as if I had been hit in the solar plexus. I could not breathe, I could not think. My head would echo and get a cottony feeling inside it.
if he tried to hit me or did hit me, my reflexes and training took over and I decked him.
However, I had no reflexes to deal with that kind of rage.
In the beginning, the trigger word was’ normal’; later it became ‘evi.’
I had therapy sessions. Every so many weeks, there would be a group therapy and the spouses were invited. I got along with the other patients and their spouses. There was one guy in those sessions that was a large Native American. He had been born with a cleft palate and been through so many surgical procedures to repair it since childhood, that he had developed a panic syndrome about doctors and one more surgery was scheduled. H came to only one of those sessions and never went back and pulled me out of them.
The reason was this: H went to that session. When it came time to talk, he said, “yes, but the this is still not addressing the fact that she’s evil. You can’t address the rest of her problems without first getting her to face the fact that she’s evil.”
The big Indian attacked H in a rage on hearing that. The other men in the group had to physically restrain him to prevent him from demolishing H.
Because I had edited so many self help books, I tried to conscientiously apply the techniques in them to get through to H. He would listen to me and then write off everything I had said with a casual, “Yes, but you’re evil.”
As the situation worsened, I went from illegal drugs to alcohol. The pattern went like this.
I would be standing in the kitchen doing dishes and he would come and watch me. Then he would begin a tirade on how evil I was that might last an hour or longer without a break. By the time he finished, I would be shaking so hard I could barely stand. I kept the bottle of cheap vodka under the sink. i would pour a double into a glass and drink it straight to stop the shaking.
When I was working fulltime, i would come home, make myself a screwdriver that as half vodka and half orange juice, drop down in front of the tv and play ninendo games and hope he left me alone long enough to unwind.
In order to sleep through and around his bouts of screaming, I would drink enough booze to knock me out. After a few years of that, the first thing I did in the mornings when I got up was pour myself a drink.
Alcohol did not take away the pain the way that the meth/cocaine had, but it deadened it enough to get through. I went back through my diaries recently and found the pages where I had made a coded chart. After all these years, I have forgotten the codes to some of the main entries. The chart happened to be one that came back to me easily.
Over the course of a year, there was only one day that he did not go off on me. There were only seven days in which he went off into a rage at me that lasted less than four hours all together in a twenty-four hour period.
The one day that he did not yell at me was because he had spent it with his current mistress.
