The Truth As I Have Known It

INTRODUCTION

I always thought of writing a great story. Something that would uplift a person, bring them some homespun honesty, and teach a lesson. In the meantime, I have written songs about absolute garbage and depressing metaphors of my life. Comedic epitaphs about growing up poor or the trials and tribulations of being single. Did I ever write about fiction? Constantly. I would beginning epic tales that had full stories still trapped in my mind as I write this sentence. However, I have never been patient or brave enough to finish them.

Sadly, I think it is because I never really wrote down my story. I tell people all the time, in the ‘getting to know you’ stage of conversation. It just comes pouring out of my mouth like some kind of bleeding wound. Some say it is the PTSD that causes me to think I have to explain every motivation, but I think it’s because I never properly expressed it, so I express it to everyone. Even my conscious self is in the background watching me blather on about my abusive childhood. It screams at me in my head, “Hey idiot, that sales lady doesn’t need to know about your Dad’s gambling habits!”

I think secretly, I want people to know that I am not just a pudgy, lumpy clerical chick, with artistic talent. Somehow, I am not just another worker drone, I am something special, which I have been reminded I am not, throughout my childhood, and adult life, by people who were supposed to love and support me. I certainly hope that it is not an inherited attempt to gain pity and drama from others; something my mother was so famous for, because I find that behavior stomach turning. If no one ever reads this besides myself in the numerous drafts and rewrites, at least I’ll have finally given the whole story. This is the truth, as I have known it.

CHAPTER 1

Paint It Black ~Rolling Stones

My father joined the US Army in the late 1960s to follow his brother, who had been drafted, into the Vietnam War. As I have come to understand it, this particular war was the beginning of America’s modern politics and profiteering interfering with the main objective at the cost of human life and decency. It is ironic to me that we had just finished trying to stop a genocide in the 1940s, only to create one with our own people on the line.

After his first tour of duty, my father tried to come home, around 1970 or so, to a country that wouldn’t give him a job and random people calling him ‘baby killer’. After months of unemployment and my oldest brother on the way, my father only felt he had one option left. He reenlisted and was shipped off to that jungle again, before the birth. My brother was almost a year old when he came back, a very broken person.

As usual, it never occurs to the ignorant that the level of savagery in war is only measured by the equal savagery of the opponents they were fighting. A child being used as a weapon, with a grenade in its diaper, is as much a casualty, as the soldiers it would have taken out if they hadn’t killed the child. Both scenarios are horrible and disgusting situations, but you make a choice to survive, and then that choice haunts you the rest of your life, chipping away at your humanity.

Add to the fact that the particular war you are fighting was to stop oppression, but you learn the pointlessness of it all. A soldier begins to realize their company advances a few miles for the right reasons, and politicians would give it back for concessions. The villages you helped free are under enemy occupation again, just in time for their army to come in and forcibly recruit all the able-bodied kids over 10 years old to fight for their cause. Under orders, you have to get up and fight against the same people you fed, for that same patch of land you lost your best friend on a few days before.

I am against war simply because of the loss of life, but when someone has no compunction about ending life, sometimes you have to fight for the right reasons. World War I & II were not exactly rocket science: Nazis, fascism and genocide are bad. The problem with today’s battlefields is that they are too convoluted by the motivations of those who are in power and not by the people who actually have to fight in them.

At the beginning of the Vietnam War, if you would have asked Vietnam soldiers what they were fighting for, most probably they would have said to give people freedom and rights or for their country. It never occurred to them for some politician to make money for his in-laws, who have numerous arms contracts with the government. I guarantee you none of that money went to the guy with no legs.

It is no wonder that my Dad came out that war a changed person. What I came to understand was probably a goofy, charming guy, turned into a selfish, controlling, gamble-holic. He was still goofy and charming at times, but others he would be autocratic and controlling. It was like there was a shroud of absolute terror surrounding his personality because of what he had seen and what had jaded his soul.

I can’t explain untreated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder any better way. They didn’t have a diagnosis for it back then, and that was the man I grew up with. You still are yourself, but what you have been through gives you a unique perspective on just how out of control the whole damn world is, and a little piece of you just completely loses its sanity. As a person diagnosed with it, we just do our best just to keep our shit together long enough to get through each day.

CHAPTER 2

Papa Was A Rolling Stone ~The Temptations

My mother was the other side of the PTSD coin. Her trauma wasn’t so clearly defined because she grew up in a nice house, with money and siblings who loved each other. Her father worked off shore, the oil and gas industry if you don’t understand the term. He made great money and was well traveled for a high school dropout.

My Grandfather was also a raging alcoholic and womanizer, with an emphasis on the “raging” part. He would work fourteen days on the drilling platforms and get seven days off. The first three days he had off was a tour of every seedy dive bar on the way home. From what my mother told me, he would be 3 sheets to the wind when he got to the house, usually smelling of sex and cheap perfume. She even recounted a tale where my grandmother actually had to help him clean off crabs he had gotten from some random hook up, while he was passed out on the bathroom floor.

He was a mean drunk from all the family descriptions of his behavior. My Grandmother, my mom and her siblings received many beatings over the course of their childhood, over whatever convoluted slight my Grandfather would come up with. Being an angry alcoholic, I imagine it didn’t take very much to set him off. Even sober he could be intolerably cruel. I learned the hard way that if you shook hands with him, he would grind your knuckles together until you cried out in pain; I think I was seven when he did that to me.

I later learned, through overheard conversations amongst family, that my great grandmother was a prostitute in the 1920s. After my Grandfather was born, she pawned him off on who she thought was his father. That guy was a straight up monster, who barely cared for him and pimped him out to friends. To say that my grandfather was angry as fuck and used alcohol to escape, was nowhere close to exaggeration. It was just too bad that his wife and kids were the targets for the untapped rage of what happened in his past.

I know you are asking, “Why in the hell did my grandmother stay with him?” The answer was simple: It was the 1940s when they got married. By that time, my grandmother had already been married and divorced, which was a huge fucking scandal back then. She had one child from the first marriage and another child, for a different man not long after, out of wedlock. The only thing the town didn’t do was slap a scarlet “A” on her chest and have a little boy with a drum follow her around town.

Grandma was only in her 20s and still pretty hot looking, but the men treated her like a rusty used car, fun to drive, but no buyers. Then my Grandpa shows up. He’s handsome, knows how to dance, and he is younger than her, but seriously interested. You know the story: Love, Marriage, Children, then Drunken Beatings and Whoring. They were together 30 years and she raised five kids under his thumb.

In the end, after all the abuse and shit he put her through, she was still in love with him and, I think, grateful to be rescued from her loneliness and the stigma of her past. Stockholm syndrome can be a bitch when all your other needs are met.

In this day and age, my grandmother would have been a MILF. There are all kinds of programs and assistance for single moms, and the reputation she had would have been nothing more than a ‘meh’ in today’s society. No woman would have put up with even a portion of that garbage my grandfather threw at her, or the house of horrors those kids had to grow up in.

***

My Mother was nearly 18 and graduating high school when she met my Dad. His parents had a kid just before the Great Depression and then didn’t have his brother or him until 16 years later, in the late 1940s. Dad’s sister had a daughter that was only 2 years younger than himself. She ended up being best friends with my mother, and my parents met when she came to a sleepover. They got married 6 weeks later. Pretty simple, but a whole lot more complicated than you think.

Mom was given a choice on a savings her parents had made for her. Go to college, or get married. To any other person the choice would be clear to better your education. However, going to the local college meant two or three more years living with her abusive father, and Mom had also kind of gotten the reputation of being the high school ‘easy’ girl. My dad was about to ship out to his first tour in Vietnam and they both thought he was going to die, so why not get married and save her. They weren’t in love, but they were kids that were told they were adults, and it’s a whole lot easier to weather a storm with someone, than all by yourself.

CHAPTER 3

Harper Valley PTA ~Jeannie C. Riley

How do I know my parents weren’t in love?

Around the time my parents were planning their wedding, prom was about to happen. My father had already promised to escort a friend’s sister, so my mom went with her first cousin. That night my mother fucked her first cousin, while being affianced to my Dad. My mother told me this story when I was about 13 or so. She wanted to make sure that I knew a guy spending money on prom for you was not a reason to have sex. God, she was a dumbass sometimes. I never told my father because it hurt me hearing it. I would have had to be a sociopath not to feel something, which I think was one of my mother’s issues that was undiagnosed. If there was one thing I could change about the State Medicaid system it would be less drugs and more counseling. A lot of the people coping with trauma just need someone to talk to, not another damn prescription.

Mom had a tendency to over explain everything. I knew more about the menstrual cycle when I was 7 than I ever wanted to know. The two deciding factors for my mother to do this had to do with the fact that she had her first menstruation when she was like 6 or so, and was given medicine to stop it. It fully started when she was only nine and a half years old.

The second factor was how my grandmother handled the situation. When it did happen, her mother told her absolutely nothing. Imagine a little girl screaming in the bathroom because she thought she was dying; her mother comes in, throws a maxi pad at her, and tells her to talk to the slutty girl down the street if she has any questions. How true that story is, I will never know, but it was my mom’s reason for telling us all the information she had accumulated. She didn’t want us to be frightened if the same thing happened to us.

I, thankfully, had normal pubescent development, but fate was not so kind to my sister, who was only ten at the time, she had actually started before I did. Maybe my mom had overshared a lot, but my sister wasn’t terrified either because she was prepared. I certainly don’t recommend the massive detail and personal stories my mom used to have ‘the talk’, but I do recommend answering your child’s questions in a clear and clinical way. If they are old enough to ask a question, at least give them a straight answer.

In my mother’s defense, there weren’t any guidance books on how to handle those situations back in the 80s. Small towns lived in a very convoluted idea of a cloistered existence where children never grew up. I think the entire place had a heart attack when my mom bought condoms for my older brothers. In their ignorant minds, my mom was condoning teenage sex. However, my mom’s plan was to stomp out teenage pregnancy because my brothers were good-looking little man whores. Yeah, I said it. I lost several friends to my older brother’s love’em and leave’em mentality.

I would be remiss in not writing that my two brothers each had babies blamed on them that never panned out when the DNA tests were completed. They did go on to have children with their wives, after they were married. If that isn’t a testament to sex education, I don’t know what is.

I had a lot of clueless friends in high school, and had even resorted to selling the free condoms, I got at the clinic, to some of my classmates. By the time I was a senior in high school, half of my class had kids, or were pregnant, and some of them were already married. Literally, I was standing next to one of my friends who was seven months pregnant in her cap and gown at graduation.

CHAPTER 4

Karma Chameleon ~Boy George & The Culture Club

How do I know my parents weren’t in love?

My father told me that when he first went into the Army, he was stationed in Germany and met a single mother named Gruelinda. He was nineteen, very much in love with her, and they were living together. Marriage was on the table, until my father came home early and found her with another enlisted man.

Broken hearted, he came home, before going on his first tour of duty to Vietnam, and met my mother on the rebound. Knowing he was going back in, he told me that he was just trying to save my mother because she needed him and he needed that. My Dad thought he was going to die alone in a jungle with no one to love him. In truth, they didn’t know each other barely at all, and that all became startlingly clear when he came home.

Both sides of the family did not like each other. I couldn’t tell you why, but it was basically one side always saying some of the most biting crap to cause trouble with the other, and it was never their child’s fault. The best I can tell you is that my father would complain about my mom to his family, but neglected to admit any mistakes on his part, and my mother would do the same with her family.

Two peas in a pod who never actually spoke to one another to work things out. How they managed to stay together for so long was a mystery to everyone. Unless you believe in karma that is. In essence, my parents were exactly the same kind of messed up, like two pieces of a broken magnet that kept sticking to each other, but would never actually meet perfectly to be fixed.

My father said that he realized he was in love with my mother when they were stationed in Germany for the second time. He smiled while explaining that they had their two boys and just spent time together and enjoyed being a family. There were no in-laws or gossipy relatives stirring crap, because they were an ocean away. It was the happiest time of their lives.

I was in my twenties at the time my Dad revealed this information to me, so I had to crack a joke that there must have been something in the beer over there. He laughed, but then said, if it hadn’t been for that second time in Germany, I would never have been born. They had been so happy that they had decided to try, just one more time, to have a girl. June 25th, 1978, I popped out at 3:33 pm on the dot, courtesy of the military hospital in Heidelberg, Germany.

I don’t know if this story is true, because my Dad loved to tell a good story, but I would like to think it is. It’s nice to think that through all the pain and destructive behavior, there was once something beautiful and good between them.

***

Six months after I was born, we were back in the states and my Dad discharged out the Army because of an unreasonable weight requirement. Apparently, my six foot father was 225lbs of muscle, but was still 25lbs too fat for the Army. My Dad spent 14 years serving his country, had knee replacements, watched friends die, got exposed to toxic gases, and was still carrying shrapnel from war time. He was six years from retirement when they sent him home.

Yeah, I smell the bullshit too. Mainly, it was the idea of this obese general, to cut military spending and weed out all the draftees still on the payroll. If you watched the movie, or read the book Forest Gump, this was illustrated when, after many years representing the U.S., the Army discharged Gump for no reason. At least Forest had Ping Pong.

Dad enlisted when he was 16 and got his GED in the Army. He could speak French, fire a sniper rifle, he could run diesel trucks, and his Drill Sgt. Voice could scare the piss out of soldiers. Speaking French in Louisiana was pretty common, being a drill instructor wasn’t needed, and contract killing is impossible with a wife and 3 kids, so he started driving 18-wheelers to pay bills and support us.

Mom’s birth control device malfunctioned and my sister arrived in August of 1980. Brandy was the new baby of the family and only 2 years younger than myself. My brothers liked to tease her that she was an ‘accident’, but when we were older Mom disabused us of that notion. She said knew exactly when conception happened because she found out Dad was coming home from a long stint on the road, got a baby sitter and attacked him when he walked in the door. Really? You could have just let us tease her Mom.

If you are not up on history, financially, the 1980s were a horror story for the lower 80 percent of the population. The upper crust gloried in a life of excess and bad fashion decisions, while not paying taxes and not paying their workers a livable wage.

My Dad got paid fifteen cents a mile to haul freight over 48 states. I saw my father a few days, every two or three months for the next twelve years of my life. I didn’t know his actual full name until I was almost ten. When Dad would call on the phone, my sister and I wouldn’t recognize his voice, so he would have to say “Mickey Mouse” when we would ask who it is. I never asked him, but I bet it hurt that he had to do that. Now that my Dad is gone, I can instantly recall his voice. I can’t forget because I miss him so damn much.

CHAPTER 5

Been Caught Stealing ~Jane’s Addiction

One of my earliest memories involved stealing. I don’t know when it got stuck in my brain, but with the financial struggles we had, I was convinced we always needed something. I think I was about four or so when I saw my mother on her knees begging the meter guy not to turn off our power.

I am all for allowing your child to see the value of money and how to become self-sufficient, but that is not something for them to learn as a pre-schooler. In a three bedroom trailer home and four children running around, it was not easy to get privacy to talk about finances. Honestly, it wasn’t something my parents even considered, but if you are reading this, I hope you will consider it the next time you and your partner need to have a talk.

My mother was the high queen of drama, so the money arguments always happened front and center of our living room, with her crying and my Dad yelling. Mom would cry about not having enough money, then turn and say Dad was never home for his sons. Dad would bitch about the fact that Mom couldn’t seem to manage money properly because she came from a family that spent exorbitantly, and complained that he couldn’t stay home because the jobs don’t pay, if you don’t work. They were both right in their own way.

My Dad spent so much time on the road, that it incurred meal and toll expenses that were subtracted from his checks. He also had a gambling problem that he never could admit to. I recall one job with an independent outfit where Dad was sued because he was paid at the freight drop-off, which happened to be just outside of Las Vegas. His employer never saw that money, and neither did we.

Mom really did have a problem managing money. I don’t think she ever bought groceries where she didn’t go over budget. The one time it happened was when she had knee surgery and trusted me to go in with a list. I stuck to it and we actually had some Food Stamps left for another gallon of milk halfway through the month. Actually having a breakfast of cold cereal every morning for the entire month was very special for my sister and I.

She really had a problem making a plan and sticking to it. More importantly, my Mom had a habit of writing hot checks. If you are not familiar with this term, ‘hot’ means my Mom knew there were no funds in the bank, but would write the check anyway and pay the check and the extra fees on her next pay period. Zip-Check and Debit Cards weren’t around back then, and if you were lucky, the store would take their time to process the check and it would hit after money was deposited in the account. My mom couldn’t calculate the timing for shit, and I think she spent more on the fees than she did on her 2-pack a day cigarette habit.

Needless to say, at an incredibly young age, I was far too aware of my family’s financial burdens. The first time I stole anything was around the same time my mother begged that meter man when I was four.

We were visiting some of my parent’s friends when I went to their bathroom and saw a slot machine. I saw these in cartoons and they always gave you money. I checked the slot tray and, sure enough, there was some quarters in the tray. On some basic level I knew what I was doing was not right because I hurriedly stuffed them in my little jean pockets. I never spent it. In my little four year old brain, I really believed I was trying to save money for the family.

My mother found the coins and asked me where it came from. I told her the truth and she freaked out because those friends were, in fact, my mother’s new employers. She was going to work at their restaurant because my oldest brother was now old enough to watch us. She brought me to their house, yelling at me the whole way about how she should call the sheriff on me and put me in jail. Yes, I was in tears, but I still didn’t understand. Didn’t we need that money?

I want to say that this was the first and last time I ever stole anything, but we are being honest here and nobody writes a whole chapter over being a toddler felon.

When I was twelve, my parent’s split up. My oldest brother had married and lived with his wife’s family; my other older brother chose to leave with my Dad. So it was just Mom, my sister and I living in the projects with no real income and no transportation.

We had starting making friends with the neighborhood kids and they invited us to walk to the local grocery store because they were getting ice cream. It didn’t occur to them that we didn’t have money, and it didn’t occur to me that they weren’t paying because we didn’t have money. As we were leaving the store, my sister started to cry because all our friends had treats and we didn’t.

I didn’t even think twice about it. I went back and told the old owner I needed to check something for my mother. When I got to the freezer, I quickly put a cone down at my side, knowing I could only do this with one. I hurriedly walked back out the door and waved thanks to the old guy. My sister wasn’t going to pay for my fuck up.

Not all of my transgressions were altruistic as that one. As I got older, it became a reflex to put things in my pockets at stores, or to keep a loose, baggy purse on hand. I didn’t always need the items, and sometimes I would even come home and not realize I had done it. Other times, it was an out and out heist of food items. The excuse I used to placate myself with was that these big companies probably had a profit loss margin and would get a tax break for it. Those accounting classes I took when I was eighteen did nothing to disabuse me of this idea.

At the height of my thievery, I could easily walk into a store, pick up one of their brand name bags, fill it to the brim with expensive DVDs and items and walk out. All I had to do was go to the bathroom and use a manicure kit to open and remove all the security tags. I once walked out with a $150 sewing machine. It was all about speed, observance, and my ability to blend in.

I was, and still am, a bland looking obese white lady with a pleasant smile. I have a warm and charming demeanor, I love children and dogs, and like making people laugh. If you met me, I would be the last person you would think had an addiction to shop lifting. I’ll go as far as to say that when I would go through a security detector and it would go off because I missed a tag, if someone else was going through it as well, they would get stopped, and security would wave me on.

Any big store you go into has lax security, unless they start having a profit loss margin greater than their estimates for the quarter. I’m pretty sure that I created jobs for heightened security at several places of business by becoming this walking parasite. I had become a criminal in the truest sense of the word because I would shop at these stores for a month or two, just scoping out the gaps in their security cameras, what areas had the least attentive staff, and how much I could get away with on the bar code entries at the self-checkout before a staffer would show up to ‘assist’ me.

Most importantly, I would make human connections with the people who worked at these stores. It was probably the most deceitful and terrible thing I have ever done as a human being. I learned their names, asked them about their family, and even bought the security guys a 20oz. drink of their choice on a really hot day.

I purported myself to be the nicest, best customer they ever had. Cashiers would clear their check outs, just to have me talk to them while they took care of my purchases. All of this was done with smile on my face, as stole hundreds of dollars of products from under their noses, and I put their jobs in jeopardy.

This was my superpower. Only I wasn’t a hero, I was a villain, and not even the simple type who smashed things and went to jail. In all the ways that I hated those evil jerks who would use people and take everything they could from others, I really was just hating myself. And just like the complex villain, I even kind of got away with it.

When I was 28, I was caught by security stealing some food, which included a half-gallon of ice cream. The irony was not lost on me that I was finally brought down by what kicked off a 16 year life of crime. It was my first actual offense and the judge went easy on me, offering to expunge my record if I paid $300 in fines, did some community service, and went to counseling.

It was basically a slap on the wrist and I knew I had just been given a second chance. If there had been a file, I would have been ruined. My little hobby did not pay my bills, and my kind of work requires a clean record. I had to look myself in the mirror and see what I really was.

The urge is always there, even now when I can afford things, I still get the itch, but I know it isn’t worth my humanity to deceive people who trust you, or disappoint the people who love you. I lost the love and respect of some family members who held me in high regard because they found out about my secret. I have never seen them graduate from the school they worked so hard to get through, or even met their children. That regret stays with me, but I know that I earned it for what I did.

Over a decade has passed since I got caught, and I haven’t stolen anything since. At first, I had to treat myself like an addict and not go to any stores that I had frequented before. Also, I made sure I had funds and a list of items to stick to, so that I wouldn’t be tempted. Finally, I had to realize that the person I purported myself to be at those stores was actually the person I wanted to be in real life. I wanted to be worthy of trust and care.

Now there is a bland looking obese lady with a pleasant smile. She has a warm and charming demeanor. She loves children and dogs, and likes to make people laugh. This lady makes friends with all the waitresses, and makes sure to tip. She even buys the cart and security guys the occasional 20oz. on a hot day. There is no motive, and it is a beautiful feeling to be kind. I am nowhere near perfect, but I love the person I am now.