Crystal Clean (4 page)

After my brother disappeared, I started spending even more time with Garnett. Most of the time, he would come to the house late, after Andy was asleep, and we’d listen to music, get high and talk. Occasionally, though, Andy would spend the night with Mom and Dad and I would go to his house instead. That was my introduction to the Gentleman’s Club.

The Gentleman’s Club was simply Garnett’s basement, but the name stemmed from the fact that no women were allowed. It was where “the boys” hung out, played cribbage or cards, smoked, did drugs, played guitars, and mostly, hid from the women in their lives. When he first moved into the house, the basement was nothing but the unfinished, dirt-floored, spider-infested bowel of the house. The boys told me it took him a while to turn it into his own private Idaho. The result was impressive. The dirt floor was compact with rugs laid down, and the walls were clear of debris. Personal items hung here and there, as they would in any home. He built a table that stretched from the rear wall far into the room, dividing the basement into what eventually became part laundry room, part Gentlemen’s Club. Tiny Christmas lights lined the beams of the low ceiling creating a lovely, intimate lounge-like atmosphere. A little table and a few chairs sat beneath a small window at the back of the room, alongside the table he’d built. There were a couple of bookshelves with a mish-mashed collection of literature and videos, and another shelf with a TV and VCR.

I was the only woman ever allowed in the Club, including Garnett’s wife, who’d lived in the house prior to their recent divorce. She was a taboo subject. The boys told me never to bring it up, and I never did. I figured if he wanted to talk about it, he’d let me know.

When I was there, he never invited anyone else. The two of us played cards sometimes, but mostly we talked. An evening shared will turn a stranger into a soul mate when you’re using meth. Meth lowers inhibitions, and that combined with lack of sleep, often leads to all night talk marathons where people will unabashedly offer up their deepest fears and darkest secrets. More often, the mundane feels like extraordinary bonding.

“Have you ever read this book?”

“Oh my
God
.
Yes! You have, too?”

“Yeah, but no one else I know has read it.”

“Did you get the part about...”

“When the guy...”

“I know! Have you read...”

“I was just thinking the same thing. The one by that other guy? Where he talks about kind of the same thing?”

“I can’t believe you were thinking that, too.”

“Well, it’s so
obvious
.”

“To people like us, I guess. Ha ha ha ha.”

“There’s a movie out right now based on the book. Want to go see it?”

“No. Let’s just stay down here in the basement. I don’t want to leave.”

“Cool! Me either!”

“Want to smoke another bowl?”

“Hell yes!”

That’s what it’s like. You talk and talk and talk and share all these drugs and pretty soon you realize you’ve finally found the one person on the face of the earth who understands you and doesn’t judge you, and you feel the same about them. My
God
! How did we make it this far in life without each other, and isn’t it fabulous that we’re finally together?

That’s what happened with Garnett and me down in that basement. Too many hours, too much meth and zero interruption from the world outside. I felt a bond with him that I’d never shared with another human, let alone a man. That’s what the meth told me, and I believed it because I so desperately wanted to. It told me I was special enough to take precedence over everyone else in someone’s life and it wasn’t because he wanted sex. He was truly interested in me as a person. He told me I was smart, he laughed at my humor and he made me feel pretty, complimenting me when I wore something new or fixed my hair in a different way.

My history with men is one of mistrust. There were incidents throughout my childhood: brothers of friends, fathers of friends, friends of my brother, and once, a friend of my parents. These were not incidents of rape, but of inappropriate touching and teasing, or a mid-night awakening to a cold, rough, unwelcome hand in my panties when I was nine.

One night when I was sixteen, my parents and another couple came home late at night after being out doing whatever it was they were doing that involved drinking. They were drunk when they got to the house. They came into the living room, talking and laughing in that sloshy way that people do on late Saturday nights. I don’t remember how it started, but the man began to tickle me. One minute, I was sitting on the fireplace hearth, and the next, I was on the floor in the living room and this man is on top of me. He’s stinking of whiskey and tickling me, working his stiff fingers into the flesh of my stomach while the backs of his hands brushed
against my breasts. My parents and his wife, who’d been sitting on the sofa, adjourned to the kitchen for another drink, leaving me on the floor with this man. A couple of minutes later, his wife called to him, yelling at him for being immature. He got up and left me there on the floor like a used condom.

I felt ashamed and wanted to cry. I wanted to go into the kitchen, slap him across the face, and make him leave the house and never come back. Actually, I wanted my dad to do that, but he didn’t. It was as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal. No one else thought it was. I remember laying there for what seemed like forever, confused, not knowing what to do, listening to the four of them laughing and talking in the other room, feeling ashamed that my parents had seen what had happened.

I learned long before that, though, that men and boys are not to be trusted and will always hurt you. I was eleven years old in the sixth grade when a group of my classmates, all boys, and our teacher, who was also male, taught me lessons I will never forget.

There was never anything “cool” about me. I wasn’t the dorkiest kid in the room, I was just there, craving popularity and boyfriends just like all my other members of the not-the-dorkiest-kid-in-the-room club. My best friend and I spent hours after school at her house daydreaming about boys and wishing we were as pretty and well liked as some other girls in our grade.

Why couldn’t we be like those girls? Why couldn’t we have perfect hair and afford cute clothes? Why couldn’t we be Sandy and find our Danny and live happily ever after? I loved the movie
Grease
and I fantasized about one day breaking out of my geek-shell and showing everyone how cool I really was by wearing black leather, teasing my hair and dancing in the Shake-Shack at the school carnival. Well, maybe not that exactly, but I dwelled on the metamorphosis fantasy. One day, something would happen that would make people, boys in particular, notice me and say, “Holy shit! Where did
she
come from? That’s Kim? Why didn’t we notice her all this time? She’s gorgeous. And just look at how cool she is.”

So there I was: a typical pre-teen girl with stars in her eyes and dreams of one day becoming homecoming queen.

To this day, I don’t know why the following events took place. Maybe I wear my heart on my sleeve. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was one of only four little girls
in an all male class taught by a male teacher in a school with a male principal in the late ‘70’s. Whatever the reason, I became a target.

It started with a note passed to me from the cutest boy in my class who I’d had a crush on since fifth grade. He was one of the most popular boys of all three classes that made up the sixth grade. He passed a note, folded and smudged, to his friend who flicked it onto my desk. I had to double check the name on it to be sure it was for me. Taking care to keep it out of view of the teacher, I unfolded it in my lap and read it.

Will you go with me?

Yes

No

It happened! My wish came true. I looked at the sender to see him flashing a million dollar smile, and in that smile I saw junior high dances and roller skating dates, football games, Saturday night movies, high school pep rallies and bon fires.

I checked the yes box and sent it back, barely able to contain my excitement. I couldn’t wait to tell my best friend at recess. Would he kiss me? Would he sit next to me at lunchtime? Would he want me to sit with him and his friends? I wasn’t clear on the rules of “going together,” but I was anxious to learn.

I looked over to smile at my very first boyfriend
-
who was laughing and passing the note around to his buddies who were all laughing with him. “Aaa ha ha ha ha! She fell for it. Hey, stupid, you really fell for that, huh? You really thought he wanted to go with
you
? Aaaa ha ha ha ha!”

I’d like to say I was humiliated, but there are no words that describe exactly how I felt. Those boys confirmed what I’d only suspected all along: I was an ugly, dorky little girl, just like I thought, and now I was stupid enough to fall for their trick to boot. I should have known better. How could I be so stupid? Why would any boy, let alone one of the elite, want to be my boyfriend?

But it didn’t end there.

The group of boys took turns writing those notes with the stupid check boxes, and I kept falling for it. The note from the next boy would be longer, apologizing for his friend, saying he would never do that to me. I would get what was left of my hopes up, only to be smacked back down. In retrospect, the reason I continued to fall for their asinine game is the same logic that’s caused me a lot of trouble in my life. I want so much to be liked that I’ll do things for acceptance that are not in my best interest. I think I knew that none
of those boys would want to be my boyfriend. I just wasn’t in their echelon. But maybe there was a chance that one of those notes would be genuine, and maybe if I just stuck it out and kept taking it in the chin, everything would pay off eventually.

Finally, the embarrassment was too painful and I stopped checking the yes box. When it became harder to get a rise out of me, they started calling me at my friend’s house, sweet-talking over the phone only to bash me the next day at school. When I stopped falling for their bullshit altogether, that’s when the abuse began.

Standing in line to go to lunch or to recess, I heard the stage whispers and hisses. “Bitch. Stuck up cunt. Slut.” Walking in the hallway to the library or to music class, a hand would reach out and grab my chest or sometimes my crotch. The grabbing turned to pinching and twisting and I would go home some nights and look in the mirror at the yellow and green bruises on my budding, little girl breasts.

I had terrifying, reoccurring nightmares of men dressed in black turtleneck sweaters, pants and ski hats coming over the backyard fence to get me. In my dreams, they would carry machetes and knives to stab me with, or catch me and drag me into the garage where they would pour scalding hot water down my shirt while laughing. These dreams went on for years and while I don’t know when they stopped, I remember them vividly to this day.

It started happening all the time: recess, lunchtime, music, during class, in the hallways, during class films when the lights went out. The abuse was blatant. I knew everyone saw what was happening to me, but no one tried to stop it. No one stepped forward to say it was wrong, so, ashamed and confused, I laughed it off at school and cried myself to sleep at night. It felt like everyone not directly involved, including the teachers, just pretended not to notice. Maybe that’s why I never told my parents what was happening. No one at school seemed to think it was a big deal, so it must not have been. But I felt dirty and ashamed. If I cried, they made fun of me and the pinching and twisting and grabbing and name-calling got worse. I didn’t understand why it was happening. I was confused, and the worst part may be how I felt about it at the time, because I still wanted those boys to like me. I wanted the other kids to like me, too. I wanted everything to stop, but I didn’t want people to think I was un-cool or a bitch, so I never stood up
for myself the way I should have. I guess I thought if no one else was going to protect me, I wasn’t worth protecting.

I hated that year. I hated that teacher and hated those boys, most of whom I would spend the next six years going to school with. I tried to block it all out and never think of it again. But inevitably, those memories would sneak up on me, catch me off guard and hurl me into a black hole of self-hatred and fury so overwhelming, it was all I could do to lock it all away again. During those times, I would think about those boys. Those mean little fuckers with smug looks who were popular all through high school. The asshole pricks that played football, always had dates to the dances and to movies on Saturday nights. The guys who were honored at pep rallies, whooped, and hollered during the school bonfires. I never went to any of those things. I never dated anyone I went to school with. No parties, no kisses, no fooling around. I watched from a distance as those boys grew into young men, and I wondered how they treated the girls they dated.

I would often think about that group of boys throughout high school and even into my twenties, and I would pray harder than I’ve ever prayed for anything that they would all have daughters. And I would pray that their daughters would go through what I went through and suffer the way I suffered, and that those boys-turned-dads would one day feel a little of my agony. For a long time, the thought that this indeed might someday happen was the only thing I had to help me keep those memories from engulfing me. Jagged thoughts of long, cold revenge were the only thing that would chase the self-loathing and fury away.