#XD30 - Three - I Drank Bleach
I'm not really sure how much I trust myself to write this at the moment, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. I've been up since 4 am (the sun just came up), I might be hungry, my cat is being extremely needy for whatever reason and I just want her to go away. Sometimes I wonder if she can pick up the fact that I'm distressed, and she's really just trying to cuddle me to comfort me, or, is she thinking, "Fuck you, bitch. Love on me in spite of your aggressive depressed state because it's my affection, and I need it now!"
I really don't know. Either way, these hands will remain on the keyboard unless I'm fidgeting nervously while thinking of what to say next. She's still cute as shit, though.
1999 was a really big year. Y2K was coming, Puff Daddy was rapping to dinosaurs as they crushed New York City, Prince prophesied the apocalypse. I was skipping Christian private school that spring to go smoke weed with my then 21 year old boyfriend (we can get into that another day). I hated that damn school. Eventually (thirteen years later eventually) I'd be somewhat vindicated for the bullshit I was exposed to while attending there when Anderson Cooper dragged the fuck out of them, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Being a teenager is never easy, and as I'm now raising a 15 year old myself, being a parent to one is definitely harder, but my parents just ultimately fucking sucked at parenting. Hell, my kids probably think the same about me, but if they feel like it, they'll start their own blogs to drag me to hell one day soon enough. I grew up in an environment where hammers could go flying past anyone's head at any given moment (and they did, among other things). Filled plates, glasses, bowls, whatever would be thrown against walls and to the floor if the Lawry's was missing in the mac and cheese. In the early to mid-90's, when black feminist icons were advocating against the gross misogyny in hip hop, I was wondering what the hell they were so mad about because I heard my mother get talked to like that every day. Isn't that normal?
Oh you poor, sweet soul...
Eventually my absences began to add up at school, and I missed a major test day. The absences were excused because I was able to get my mom to falsify some notes (she knew I was skipping, but bless her heart, wasn't in her right mind to question me about them), until the school called her at work to tell her I needed to be present on a makeup day. Of course, this is where the story gets a bit messy. She forgot she had written me the absence notes, so she called my stay-at-home father pissed off to tell him that I wasn't going to school. Snitch. The whole shebang blew up in my face. He immediately called the school and requested a meeting with the principal to discuss my villainy. The school principal ultimately said they couldn't allow me to continue to attend if I was going to be forging absentee notes, and they definitely couldn't allow me to attend if there was a possibility my mother was falsifying the notes for me. So what were we going to do? While the principal seemed to be looking at me for some sort of an out, my father was absolutely convinced. He didn't believe my mother wrote the notes (he was immediately a handwriting expert all of a sudden), so he went on this tirade about how horrible a child I was and that I was so out of control he just couldn't handle me anymore (the principal looked at me like, "What am I supposed to do about this?" and I just shrugged). How he had enrolled me at that school to instill discipline in me and he was forced to put me on birth control because he was afraid I would be a sex-crazed demonic Jezebel (his fault, not mine...he shouldn't have talked about sex so much when I was four and up--I probably would've found other things to focus on). The principal had heard enough. I was immediately forced to withdraw because the school had a no sex before marriage/birth control policy. Clutch. I wanted to go back to public school anyway.
There were only two to three months left in the school year anyway, but my father knew I'd won. I was out of that god-forsaken hellhole and back with my friends. I was reasonably grounded, but essentially outsmarted him, which he hated. Worst part is, I didn't really outsmart him, he just talked too damn much. Battles, though, and that battle meant a lot to me because I actually won it. I would still have to pay the piper. A lot of my middle school friends embraced me when they saw I returned freshman year so it wasn't a complete bust. And my father would never admit to himself that it was actually his fault I got expelled so I think the issue just kind of died out after a while. I don't remember actually being let off punishment though.
That summer I was forced to go to a rec center on base because he didn't want me around him all day and "I was not trustworthy enough to be left alone at home." I actually had a really great time while I went there. I made some friends, met a boy I liked and who liked me just as much, and the administrators loved me. When my dad found out the adults approved of me and even trusted me with responsibilities, it pissed him off. He hated it when people spoke well of me. "You don't know the real her. She got y'all fooled," he'd say. The last day I recall at that rec center he was livid because a teacher asked me to help clean up after a party for the toddlers/pre-K's who were celebrating something and I wasn't waiting in the teen room where I was "supposed to be." The teachers told him that I was probably helping somewhere, and he lost it.
The man swore up and down I was fucking someone (didn't matter who) in a broom closet--which I still haven't done to this day, but it sounds lit.
Maybe? I don't know. Probably.
Anyway he cussed me out the entire way home. I just looked out the car window and "yes, sir'd" and "no, sir'd" so he'd know I wasn't completely ignoring him. Finally at the house he told me to hold the glass door open for him while he unlocked the main door, "Yes, sir." He walked into the house to turn off the alarm, and I followed. I thought I closed the second door all the way, but it was still open a crack. He screamed at me to close the goddamn door behind me, and I said, "Dad, the door doesn't have to be closed for the alarm to turn off, you know?" Oh, child, what were you thinking? He leapt on me like a cat and beat me to the fucking floor like I was a grown ass man, even got up when he was done and kicked me while I lay there. Fif-teen. Five foot 1 or 3 (I'm only 5'4 now), 132 pounds.
I had had enough. I screamed that I was sick of his shit. Tired of him always putting his hands on me. He chased me into the washroom and shook me with his keys in his hands, shoving me into the dryer. I was finally fighting back. I screamed, "Get your motherfucking hands off me! I can't take this anymore!" and ran to my room. I called my mother at work from the phone in my room, but he intercepted the call and refused to let me talk to her by screaming over me so my words were unintelligible. I gave up. I just sat in that room, at the end of my bed fuming, crying, and furious. Desperate, I screamed a few words from the room probably just calling him a liar and a brainwasher or something trying to defend myself, but it was futile. When they hung up, he said something to me and the key in my head just clicked. He was kicking me out of his house. "Get your shit and go," was all I heard.
I said, "Fine. I'll wait til mom gets here though because she's going to know the truth." I didn't get to tell her. As soon as she walked in the door he intercepted her and told her she better not go to my room to speak to me. I thought any kind of mother would tell him to fuck off and go have words with her kid, even if they weren't nice, but she did nothing of the sort. She followed his commands like a weak little puppy so I gave in. That night, when they quieted down for bed, I left out my bedroom window. He wanted me gone, I wanted to be gone, so I would go.
The first time I was gone for two or three days, then the cops found me and took me to the police station (a whole other story in and of itself). The detective who was questioning me remembered me from an incident at my house when I was twelve. He didn't want me to go back to that house. He actually stayed with me for hours and tried to devise a plan with a social worker to get me into a foster home of some sort, it wasn't legally possible. They had to return me to my parents. They had pictures of the cuts and bruises from when my father attacked me, though. They just couldn't prove it was him who did it unless he confessed. Their hands were tied.
The whole way home I had to hear his mouth about what I had been doing for the last three days. He probably said something about my mother being worried sick, blah blah blah. It was a lie. I called her each day I was gone to let her know I was safe. I didn't care what he had to say. I wanted to be free again. It felt so good. Then he said something about wanting me to leave his house. He threatened me some more. Then he said, "Oh yeah. I called the cops and they saw where you left out of your window. They said if you do that again I can have you formally charged with breaking and entering and destruction of property." That was my cue. That night, after I took a shower, I walked out the front door. Fuck him.
That time, I was gone for about 10 days. Total I had been gone two weeks. The last day I was caught by the police because I accidentally dry snitched on myself, but I was cool with it in the end. Being on my own had been hard, and shit just didn't seem like it was going to work out in my favor. I acquiesced. The cops took me downtown to the station again. I talked to another detective. There were no charges involved, so I was free to go back to my parents. Then the shutdown began. I don't remember much else after that except it was a Friday. The next day, Saturday, dude couldn't help himself. He just wouldn't shut the fuck up about anything. I just wanted peace and quiet. Then, at like five or six that evening, he announced that he and my mother were going to bed early--ew. That meant I'd be forced to sit in silence and listen to them have sex while she shrieked like a dying cat with pleasure--which was actually a survival method of her own. I rolled my eyes, said whatever in my head, and that's when it hit me.
While standing in the kitchen it was like a lightbulb flashed in my brain. You can end this now, I thought. You can end this right now. I grabbed a highball glass out of the cabinet, the bottle of bleach out of the washroom which was right behind the kitchen and started pouring. At about an inch full I stopped, topped the bottle again and put it back in the washroom. I stood there, looking at the glass for a second. Yup, I thought, this is it. I opened the refrigerator, pulled out the pitcher of red Kool-Aid and started filling up the glass. I mean who wants to taste bleach? I was shocked when the liquid turned this clear yellow color. I don't know what I expected it to look like. When the glass was full I put the pitcher back in the refrigerator. Without another thought, I started to drink.
It was absolutely disgusting. I had never had anything that tasted that horrible in my life--well maybe the chitterlings my father attempted to force me to eat one summer, but his friend, my Uncle Bergen, saved me from his drunk ass with a napkin. I can't ever thank him enough for that. After the first two or three gulps I had to quit. One because it tasted awful, and two because my mom was standing in front of me in shock. She screamed, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" and immediately knocked the glass out of my hand. It fell over into her brown faux-leather purse on the counter and the lining turned a bright lime green. "Paul! She's in here drinking bleach!" she shrieked.
"So?" I said.
She just stared at me. Probably not recognizing me, but I didn't care. She didn't know me. She didn't care about me. I didn't care what either of them thought. I just wanted to be free of their toxicity. I was over it. I was jealous of my dead baby sister because she didn't have to experience this shit. My oldest brother's mother was smart enough to leave and divorce my dad when he was very young. My other brother, my mom's oldest child, was lucky enough that my grandmother loved him and didn't want my mother to have custody of him at all so she would always make arrangements to get him back to Pennsylvania whenever he'd run away from home. I didn't have anyone who cared enough to save me.
The whole entire ride to the hospital I had to hear him talk about how stupid I was to attempt such a thing. This one moment in my life my father said he thought I was "smarter than that." I replied, "It has nothing to do with smarts, everything to do with desperation. I want to be away from you."
I don't remember much else except being rushed into the ER, getting a tube shoved down my nose to my throat and stomach, having it pumped and lined with liquid charcoal after the hotdogs I ate for dinner came up. It was fascinating to watch but painful as hell. After the procedure was complete, the doctor stayed to talk to me about what I did. He told me that death by bleach was actually quite a long, slowly painful way to go. He described how the bleach would eat away at the lining of my stomach and acids would burn holes in me from the inside out (that's why they had to coat my stomach with liquid charcoal). It would counteract the damage done by the bleach in the short amount of time from ingestion. I can laugh about it now, but again, I know I was desperate.
The doctor asked me what could be so bad that I would do that to myself. What did I want to happen from that point on? I told him, "Just help me. Keep him away from me. Help me." He said, "Ok." He asked if it was ok if my mother came back into my room to see I was ok, and I let him guilt-trip me into it. Through it all I still saw her as much of a victim as me. She came back, we said a few words. I told her I didn't want him in my room, said she could tell him I'm ok, next thing I know, these fuckers are sitting at the end of my hospital bed, her in his fucking lap. I never hated her more before than at that moment.
There was a bit of a commotion going on, and I later found out another girl had attempted suicide that day. Her name was Amanda. She was going to be ok. She was my Bobbsey twin (don't ask). We rode in the ambulance to the behavioral health center together and roommates when we arrived. I was finally getting a vacation.
I really don't know. Either way, these hands will remain on the keyboard unless I'm fidgeting nervously while thinking of what to say next. She's still cute as shit, though.
1999 was a really big year. Y2K was coming, Puff Daddy was rapping to dinosaurs as they crushed New York City, Prince prophesied the apocalypse. I was skipping Christian private school that spring to go smoke weed with my then 21 year old boyfriend (we can get into that another day). I hated that damn school. Eventually (thirteen years later eventually) I'd be somewhat vindicated for the bullshit I was exposed to while attending there when Anderson Cooper dragged the fuck out of them, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Being a teenager is never easy, and as I'm now raising a 15 year old myself, being a parent to one is definitely harder, but my parents just ultimately fucking sucked at parenting. Hell, my kids probably think the same about me, but if they feel like it, they'll start their own blogs to drag me to hell one day soon enough. I grew up in an environment where hammers could go flying past anyone's head at any given moment (and they did, among other things). Filled plates, glasses, bowls, whatever would be thrown against walls and to the floor if the Lawry's was missing in the mac and cheese. In the early to mid-90's, when black feminist icons were advocating against the gross misogyny in hip hop, I was wondering what the hell they were so mad about because I heard my mother get talked to like that every day. Isn't that normal?
Oh you poor, sweet soul...
Eventually my absences began to add up at school, and I missed a major test day. The absences were excused because I was able to get my mom to falsify some notes (she knew I was skipping, but bless her heart, wasn't in her right mind to question me about them), until the school called her at work to tell her I needed to be present on a makeup day. Of course, this is where the story gets a bit messy. She forgot she had written me the absence notes, so she called my stay-at-home father pissed off to tell him that I wasn't going to school. Snitch. The whole shebang blew up in my face. He immediately called the school and requested a meeting with the principal to discuss my villainy. The school principal ultimately said they couldn't allow me to continue to attend if I was going to be forging absentee notes, and they definitely couldn't allow me to attend if there was a possibility my mother was falsifying the notes for me. So what were we going to do? While the principal seemed to be looking at me for some sort of an out, my father was absolutely convinced. He didn't believe my mother wrote the notes (he was immediately a handwriting expert all of a sudden), so he went on this tirade about how horrible a child I was and that I was so out of control he just couldn't handle me anymore (the principal looked at me like, "What am I supposed to do about this?" and I just shrugged). How he had enrolled me at that school to instill discipline in me and he was forced to put me on birth control because he was afraid I would be a sex-crazed demonic Jezebel (his fault, not mine...he shouldn't have talked about sex so much when I was four and up--I probably would've found other things to focus on). The principal had heard enough. I was immediately forced to withdraw because the school had a no sex before marriage/birth control policy. Clutch. I wanted to go back to public school anyway.
There were only two to three months left in the school year anyway, but my father knew I'd won. I was out of that god-forsaken hellhole and back with my friends. I was reasonably grounded, but essentially outsmarted him, which he hated. Worst part is, I didn't really outsmart him, he just talked too damn much. Battles, though, and that battle meant a lot to me because I actually won it. I would still have to pay the piper. A lot of my middle school friends embraced me when they saw I returned freshman year so it wasn't a complete bust. And my father would never admit to himself that it was actually his fault I got expelled so I think the issue just kind of died out after a while. I don't remember actually being let off punishment though.
That summer I was forced to go to a rec center on base because he didn't want me around him all day and "I was not trustworthy enough to be left alone at home." I actually had a really great time while I went there. I made some friends, met a boy I liked and who liked me just as much, and the administrators loved me. When my dad found out the adults approved of me and even trusted me with responsibilities, it pissed him off. He hated it when people spoke well of me. "You don't know the real her. She got y'all fooled," he'd say. The last day I recall at that rec center he was livid because a teacher asked me to help clean up after a party for the toddlers/pre-K's who were celebrating something and I wasn't waiting in the teen room where I was "supposed to be." The teachers told him that I was probably helping somewhere, and he lost it.
The man swore up and down I was fucking someone (didn't matter who) in a broom closet--which I still haven't done to this day, but it sounds lit.
Maybe? I don't know. Probably.
Anyway he cussed me out the entire way home. I just looked out the car window and "yes, sir'd" and "no, sir'd" so he'd know I wasn't completely ignoring him. Finally at the house he told me to hold the glass door open for him while he unlocked the main door, "Yes, sir." He walked into the house to turn off the alarm, and I followed. I thought I closed the second door all the way, but it was still open a crack. He screamed at me to close the goddamn door behind me, and I said, "Dad, the door doesn't have to be closed for the alarm to turn off, you know?" Oh, child, what were you thinking? He leapt on me like a cat and beat me to the fucking floor like I was a grown ass man, even got up when he was done and kicked me while I lay there. Fif-teen. Five foot 1 or 3 (I'm only 5'4 now), 132 pounds.
I had had enough. I screamed that I was sick of his shit. Tired of him always putting his hands on me. He chased me into the washroom and shook me with his keys in his hands, shoving me into the dryer. I was finally fighting back. I screamed, "Get your motherfucking hands off me! I can't take this anymore!" and ran to my room. I called my mother at work from the phone in my room, but he intercepted the call and refused to let me talk to her by screaming over me so my words were unintelligible. I gave up. I just sat in that room, at the end of my bed fuming, crying, and furious. Desperate, I screamed a few words from the room probably just calling him a liar and a brainwasher or something trying to defend myself, but it was futile. When they hung up, he said something to me and the key in my head just clicked. He was kicking me out of his house. "Get your shit and go," was all I heard.
I said, "Fine. I'll wait til mom gets here though because she's going to know the truth." I didn't get to tell her. As soon as she walked in the door he intercepted her and told her she better not go to my room to speak to me. I thought any kind of mother would tell him to fuck off and go have words with her kid, even if they weren't nice, but she did nothing of the sort. She followed his commands like a weak little puppy so I gave in. That night, when they quieted down for bed, I left out my bedroom window. He wanted me gone, I wanted to be gone, so I would go.
The first time I was gone for two or three days, then the cops found me and took me to the police station (a whole other story in and of itself). The detective who was questioning me remembered me from an incident at my house when I was twelve. He didn't want me to go back to that house. He actually stayed with me for hours and tried to devise a plan with a social worker to get me into a foster home of some sort, it wasn't legally possible. They had to return me to my parents. They had pictures of the cuts and bruises from when my father attacked me, though. They just couldn't prove it was him who did it unless he confessed. Their hands were tied.
The whole way home I had to hear his mouth about what I had been doing for the last three days. He probably said something about my mother being worried sick, blah blah blah. It was a lie. I called her each day I was gone to let her know I was safe. I didn't care what he had to say. I wanted to be free again. It felt so good. Then he said something about wanting me to leave his house. He threatened me some more. Then he said, "Oh yeah. I called the cops and they saw where you left out of your window. They said if you do that again I can have you formally charged with breaking and entering and destruction of property." That was my cue. That night, after I took a shower, I walked out the front door. Fuck him.
That time, I was gone for about 10 days. Total I had been gone two weeks. The last day I was caught by the police because I accidentally dry snitched on myself, but I was cool with it in the end. Being on my own had been hard, and shit just didn't seem like it was going to work out in my favor. I acquiesced. The cops took me downtown to the station again. I talked to another detective. There were no charges involved, so I was free to go back to my parents. Then the shutdown began. I don't remember much else after that except it was a Friday. The next day, Saturday, dude couldn't help himself. He just wouldn't shut the fuck up about anything. I just wanted peace and quiet. Then, at like five or six that evening, he announced that he and my mother were going to bed early--ew. That meant I'd be forced to sit in silence and listen to them have sex while she shrieked like a dying cat with pleasure--which was actually a survival method of her own. I rolled my eyes, said whatever in my head, and that's when it hit me.
While standing in the kitchen it was like a lightbulb flashed in my brain. You can end this now, I thought. You can end this right now. I grabbed a highball glass out of the cabinet, the bottle of bleach out of the washroom which was right behind the kitchen and started pouring. At about an inch full I stopped, topped the bottle again and put it back in the washroom. I stood there, looking at the glass for a second. Yup, I thought, this is it. I opened the refrigerator, pulled out the pitcher of red Kool-Aid and started filling up the glass. I mean who wants to taste bleach? I was shocked when the liquid turned this clear yellow color. I don't know what I expected it to look like. When the glass was full I put the pitcher back in the refrigerator. Without another thought, I started to drink.
It was absolutely disgusting. I had never had anything that tasted that horrible in my life--well maybe the chitterlings my father attempted to force me to eat one summer, but his friend, my Uncle Bergen, saved me from his drunk ass with a napkin. I can't ever thank him enough for that. After the first two or three gulps I had to quit. One because it tasted awful, and two because my mom was standing in front of me in shock. She screamed, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" and immediately knocked the glass out of my hand. It fell over into her brown faux-leather purse on the counter and the lining turned a bright lime green. "Paul! She's in here drinking bleach!" she shrieked.
"So?" I said.
She just stared at me. Probably not recognizing me, but I didn't care. She didn't know me. She didn't care about me. I didn't care what either of them thought. I just wanted to be free of their toxicity. I was over it. I was jealous of my dead baby sister because she didn't have to experience this shit. My oldest brother's mother was smart enough to leave and divorce my dad when he was very young. My other brother, my mom's oldest child, was lucky enough that my grandmother loved him and didn't want my mother to have custody of him at all so she would always make arrangements to get him back to Pennsylvania whenever he'd run away from home. I didn't have anyone who cared enough to save me.
The whole entire ride to the hospital I had to hear him talk about how stupid I was to attempt such a thing. This one moment in my life my father said he thought I was "smarter than that." I replied, "It has nothing to do with smarts, everything to do with desperation. I want to be away from you."
I don't remember much else except being rushed into the ER, getting a tube shoved down my nose to my throat and stomach, having it pumped and lined with liquid charcoal after the hotdogs I ate for dinner came up. It was fascinating to watch but painful as hell. After the procedure was complete, the doctor stayed to talk to me about what I did. He told me that death by bleach was actually quite a long, slowly painful way to go. He described how the bleach would eat away at the lining of my stomach and acids would burn holes in me from the inside out (that's why they had to coat my stomach with liquid charcoal). It would counteract the damage done by the bleach in the short amount of time from ingestion. I can laugh about it now, but again, I know I was desperate.
The doctor asked me what could be so bad that I would do that to myself. What did I want to happen from that point on? I told him, "Just help me. Keep him away from me. Help me." He said, "Ok." He asked if it was ok if my mother came back into my room to see I was ok, and I let him guilt-trip me into it. Through it all I still saw her as much of a victim as me. She came back, we said a few words. I told her I didn't want him in my room, said she could tell him I'm ok, next thing I know, these fuckers are sitting at the end of my hospital bed, her in his fucking lap. I never hated her more before than at that moment.
There was a bit of a commotion going on, and I later found out another girl had attempted suicide that day. Her name was Amanda. She was going to be ok. She was my Bobbsey twin (don't ask). We rode in the ambulance to the behavioral health center together and roommates when we arrived. I was finally getting a vacation.
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