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aleatoryalarmalligator · 7 years

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My life story - part 14

7th GRADE - beginning of

A few weeks before 7th grade started for me, my mother moved out of the Welfare Apartments – as my father called them, and into Roxanne's father's upstairs. Roxanne moved into the basement. It was the same home he had always lived in. The same home she had married him in nearly 20 years before. So I imagine it was strange. He was getting sicker. I am not sure what he had. Cancer I think. His feet were always swelling up. Because he was a dying drunk nobody came around. He had at one time many drinking friends, but this is generally always what happens to drunks when they die. Everyone disappears, all the fair weather friends – unless they are family and they are looking for money. I think my mom was probably considering this situation as having potential for her own self.

I had always been afraid of Roxanne's father and I tried to stay away from him. The house was creepy as fuck, by the way. I have talked about ghosts off and on in this story of mine so far. I have more ghosts stories yet to unfold. But I will tell you one thing. This house had something very wrong in it. You just felt sick energy in this place. I mostly hung out in the upstairs room, and I started drawing. I had pretty much conquered the Alien Girls by this time. I had created a legendary fantasy map of their entire continent. We made all the places where our millions of girls could live. Fire people lived in the fire area. Tree people lived in the Forest Realm – ecetera ecetera. I ended up finding this big box of bad 70's porn in the closet. I remember finding this magazine that had a closeup of a vagina. I stared at it forever, trying for the life of me to figure out what I was looking at. It was like the eye of a disturbing space alien from an 80's television show, at least I thought so – until it dawned on me. The box of magazines disturbed me more than it made me curious, and I put the magazine away.

There was another room upstairs that was entirely dedicated to Dick's love for pornography I was told later from Roxanne. I never went in there. After a few weeks of this, I told my mom I didn't really want to be there anymore and I was given permission to just stay at my father's during the weekend until she figured out another place to stay. It was at the edge of town – closer to this wheat field area called Tammany. You always felt like something was angry and glaring at you. It just felt weird to be in this dying man's home with evil spirits.

It was my birthday on the 25th of August. I have always resented the date of my birth, because in my part of the world it's hot and dry and awful. And school starts generally if not on that very day – then a few days before or after. This means that most of my birthday presents are actually school supplies. I don't know how many pencil holders I have unwrapped. How many rulers, eraser sets. It's a little disappointing, especially when you get older and you become privy to the shtick.

On the 25 of August, 2001, in a rare turn of events, I was invited to Samantha's home for a sleepover. This did not happen often. Sam didn't really like me, so I didn't get invited over that often. Also, her father just didn't give Sam any breaks at all. He was an alcoholic lawyer (strangely, Dick whom I mentioned above had also been an alcoholic lawyer), and her life was micromanaged. Her grandma lived in another part of the trailer court, and she had nothing better to do than to call Sam from across the way every thirty minutes to make sure Sam was NEVER wasting time. Her father made her work in the garden – they had a rather large garden you could see from the highway, and with that money what he didn't pocket he put in her college savings. Samantha, as the only girl in the house was everyone's maid. She was to keep her room absolutely spotless. Her father's room and her brother's room as well. Her grades had to be 95% or higher or she was grounded. Almost everything she did would cause her to be grounded. There were times when she was staying the night at Sarah's and her father would randomly call and be yelling at her over the phone and make her come home. Her life was so unfair. I know my dad was abusive towards me at times. But honestly, I probably suffered from a lack of structure more than I did an overabundance of authoritarian rigidity.

So it was unusual that I was invited for several reasons, but I was. And it was my birthday so I thought, 'why not?' I was warned that Samantha's fourth cousin – Katie was visiting. Katie, as I was told, was actually in the class above me, but I had never paid great attention to the kids in the class above. I was warned that Katie would be rough with me. And she was. As soon as I got there, she said things like “Who the fuck are you?”. She was very tomboyish. She didn't say things in the valley girl snotty way you might imagine, but more like a trucker who you had pissed off in some dive bar somewhere between here and South Dakota. When we were playing Pokemon Stadium 2, and I was winning at Chansey Egg Catching – or whathaveyou (of course I would win because I had dedicated the previous two years to Pokemon), she called me a bitch and threw the controller at me. I didn't take this all that personal. I was told that this was just the way that Katie was towards new people. But once she liked me, she would be a loyal friend. I shrugged the whole thing off. I wasn't particularly interested in a friend like that.

Sarah-Mae really wanted me to make a good 'cool' impression of myself in our new positions as 7th graders. 7th graders are always given kind of an unfair time. I imagine this is just as true in the 40's as it is today. Everyone scoffs at them. But I mean, at some point everyone has to be a 7th grader, and there has to be a bottom to the school. Not everyone can be a senior. I probably made a terrible impression though, because my mom had these hippie tunics with wild hippie designs on them. I really liked them. I remember being so excited when my mom was packing and she gave them to me. I had always looked at them in her clothing drawer, and always thought they were really cool. They were comfortable, and they actually fit me. And they had all those colors. The rest of the school made a big deal about them though. I guess they bordered on absurd, and each day I wore them Sarah and Samantha made sure I knew that I looked really bad. Peer pressure finally had the best of me, and I put them away for good after a few months.

At the peak of drawing Alien Girls, Sarah and I decided as a group to stop drawing them. The thing was, their eyes were so large and on the side of their heads. You got the very good impression that their eyes swooped around the other side of their skulls, in behind their hair. There was no clear indication that they had a real nose and their mouths were super low. They had no cheekbones. They were designed from the imagination of an eight year old girl, and it would be hard to improve as an artist if I carried on with them. On one angle, they were drawable. But you could never make them look reasonably okay from the side, or at any other angle. Their anatomy left more questions than answers.

So, Sarah had been watching Card Captures Sakura, and I got really intrigued by anime, so we started drawing that instead. My first comic idea was pretty lousy. It was the typical three school girl deal – based on me Sarah and Samantha kind of, where they all get swept into a magic place after school and had to fight evil monsters. I was extremely jealous of Sarah's comic. On one hand, I had always been very good at designing clothes and pretty faces. My first story was no good, but overall, my story lines were more compelling and my character profiles were better developed. But Sarah had a much better concept of drawing movement and facial expressions. She could draw wings, and she could do interesting shadowing. There was something about her art itself that gave it more life than my art did. I grew pretty jealous of her art actually, and this feeling of inferiority set me back quite a few years in the long run. We kept drawing together though.

Sarah's mom moved into a new bigger home. It was an old home, not as old as mine was, but pretty old. It was at the top of the hill that I lived at the bottom of. It was next door to where that old man, Bucky used to live. The back patio looked down over a steep ledge that led one hundred feet more or less straight down to the main road towards the end of town. You could also see the Junior/Senior high school from there (they were one in the same since the community was small). There were rumors that a native American girl had fallen to her death on that ledge in the 20's, and when I looked out the window and really thought about it, I worried that something might erode under the house and cause the building to topple down the cliff.

The house had been the Browns house, so it was a bit gross at first and had to be cleaned up a fair amount. Carol had always been good at renovating places though, so she got it cleaned up quite nicely. My niece, Sagen's uncle on her father's side had killed himself in the front yard we were told back in the 80's. So the place carried with it a sense of disaster. Most of the time it was peaceful, but there were some strange things that happened later on that I will get to at a later time.

Sarah's mom also got a new steady boyfriend. His name was Jim. He was this quiet nervous little man with a round face and a Santaesque beard. Like Carol, he was really into old antiques. He lived in this little hut thing that was part of a brick building in the back streets of Kendrick. He fixed cars to get by in a garage next to his hut. He also did some kind of work out in the woods, but I was never sure what that was. His dream was to someday go prospecting and find a rare precious Idaho gem that would set him up for life. He collected lots of old stuff. He was borderline a hoarder. There was old things all over the outside and inside of his little building. His claim to fame was that he had at one time owned one of the very first Indian motorcycles, and he had sold it to Jay Leno. So Jay Leno had come to our little town. He moved in with Carol when they got together, but he still kept his little hut.

My dad around this time started worrying that I was spending too much time around a 'liberal' adult. My father being a republican, was not too pleased with the fact that Carol was a liberal. In his mind, he seemed to think that she actually had the will and want to indoctrinate me to her political beliefs. My dad listened to conservative talk radio all day. I think in his mind, the world was getting very black and white. In all reality, Carol really wasn't the kind of person to even consider it important. And if she had any will or want to indoctrinate me with anything, I believe she would have indoctrinated me with the common sense not to stomp and speak loudly after she went to bed around 7:00 pm – insanely early, or to wipe my feet before I came into the house. Or perhaps to put my dishes away.

It was the fall of 2001 that my dad got our first computer. Up to that point, I hadn't really known what the internet was. I had heard that it existed, but given that what interested me was mostly doing things in the real world, what I could put on paper or read off one, I didn't see the point in it. My father was given a used computer from my Uncle Bob, who, given his position as a regional super attendant's super attendant, was well familiar with computers and wanted to be able to communicate with our family more. So he gave us his old Window's 98.

My dad actually went to these really corny classes, with the corniest how-to manuals on how to use the computer in the most basic of ways. We went to a local woman's house who facilitated the classes. We actually had to be told that the thing that we used to move the cursor on the screen was called a 'Mouse'. I remember as they told us this, I looked out the window, and there was a cat in their drive way torturing and slowly eating a you guessed it – a mouse. So from then on, I have always associated the computer mouse with that tortured mouse I saw that fall evening of 2001. I had used computers and all, I just hadn't known that the computer mouse was called that.

At first all I really understood was my father's email address. So I figured that you sent letters to someone every single day – that must be something you should do. I started writing my Aunt Sylvia. I didn't really know her at all. I decided to make up this fantasy tale about these brothers and sisters who all had these magic powers and had to get back their places as princes and princesses. She really liked it, and I think this was probably because, though I didn't know it at the time, my aunt Sylvia was obsessed with fairies. Her job was to design those kind of corny fairies that sparkle that people used to put on their websites or personal pages. I also looked at every single Pokemon site I could find. I distinctly remember this website with terrible graphics. You basically just put Pokemon on a frying pan and fried them up. It wasn't really graphic, and it looked more like colors smooshing together. I also found every cheat for my gameboy, and I essentially ruined the game for myself by having too much power.

Samantha had started going to chat rooms to talk to boys. I didn't see the appeal to this at all, but since Samantha was doing it, and Sarah had done it a few times, I decided to do it too. I was the absolute worst. I went into these chat rooms, and I didn't want to tell them I was a twelve year old, so I lied about my age. When they asked me questions, I told them really dumb stupid things. I generally didn't do anything productive or say anything meaningful. I more often than not, would go into a chatroom and do something like say the same stupid word over and over again till everyone in the chatroom was gone. I don't know why I did this really. Once again, power trip I guess.

When I witnessed the first pop-up telling me that we had won a million dollars, I believed it. I remember feeling shocked and almost frightened. I got up and told my father the news. He laughed and let me know that it was just an ad. Again, I also believed the Nigerian Queen who needed to funnel money into the US or something like that. I wholeheartedly believed that queen was in need of help and we would be rewarded handsomely for our troubles. I think my father wanted to believe it, but in the end knew better. I also immediately took to MS Paint. I started drawing pictures to explain my entire day. Usually just three or four moments of the day that really stood out. Like, I forgot to do my homework, or I tripped and fell. I eventually had hundreds of pictures illustrating my life. When we had gotten our first virus, my father deleted all my pictures, foolishly believing that having too many paint pictures saved was somehow the cause of it.

One of the problems I sort of caused with these pictures was – I think I must have had a lot of pent up anger and resentments for Sarah and Samantha by this time. For years, they had told me I was ugly, stupid, annoying. I had been told to shut up I don't know how many times. I felt embarrassed by my very existence. I always felt there was something wrong with me. I distinctly remember Sarah telling someone else that I was more of her dog than someone she would consider a friend. I just carried this ball of self loathing and anger with me at all times. When I was given the power over the computer, I used it to draw ugly versions of both of them. I drew Sarah with a point banana nose and tiny little slanted eyes. I highlighted the fact that she had zits like me, only her's were tiny and colorless, but I made sure that the illustration I did of her came with a magnifying glass to highlight this underlooked fact. With Samantha, I made her eyes bulgy and boyish. I made it so her brain only thought of math. Her face was spotted like a pizza. I drew one of myself – ugly as well, with chubby cheeks, frizzy hair, double chin, stupid big lips and zits as well. These pictures were mean, but I took strange joy in making them. I showed them to Sarah and Samantha. They were upset. I think Sarah almost cried. I think these pictures probably reflected a certain resentment that I wasn't even conscious of at the time. I didn't understand why they were upset. I had gotten very used to their insults. It seemed strange to me that when I found my own way of doing it back to them. I didn't have to say mean things. I could just draw it instead.

My very favorite thing to do though, was to look at anime pictures on a website that doesn't exist anymore. I can't really imagine it now, though I am on tumblr all day sometimes so I should probably not be that shocked with myself, but I honestly loved nothing better than to stare at the same twenty or so anime pictures all day. I somehow didn't tire of this at all. I remember also that I fell in love with the first – and aside from Jack the Skeleton when I was very young- only complete and total cartoon character. It was the main male protagonist on a show called Escaflowne. I never watched the show till I was way older, and I was disappointed and annoyed at the animation when I finally did see it – couldn't even finish the first episode, but for some reason just from seeing some fanart I was totally into this dude – don't know his name now and don't care to look it up. Now, as an adult, and as someone who can draw anime a little bit but doesn't want to anymore, I try very hard not to judge all the young nerdy teenagers who are in love with anime characters and go about drawing them in romantic settings all the time. I try very hard not to judge, but I generally fail and I judge them anyway. However, I have had a few times in my life when I got really interested in anime. I think those spells are over for me now – we'll see. I loved these anime pictures so much that I sometimes would check out and go home early on days when my father wasn't home just so I could have extra time to look at these pictures.

In the eyes of some, this was the beginning of the end for me. I have been addicted to the internet ever since. I found an escape ladder out of reality, into a world with unlimited information and inspiration, where the painful biting reality had lost it's edge, and I was heightened somehow into an ethereal version of the world that I could make for myself. A place where I could express myself freely, or find just about anything I needed, and somewhere that I could avoid feeling anxious. I could be a new person, or a better version of myself. I would go on and off with having access to the internet throughout my young life, but ultimately, I became an addict the second I figured this all out.

A week before our classes started at the new big school, we went to this orientation. We had this freakish man at the time as our principal. I am not the only person who thought he bore a striking resemblance to Hitler. It was hard at the time for most people not to see the comparisons. He had the same mustache. He was twitchy and tried very hard to be commanding, though it came off weak and stiff. He would follow up with nervous laughter. Much thinner than Hitler, and less angry. He wasn't Hitler. That isn't a fair analogy. It is almost never fair to compare someone to Hitler. His name was Mr. Hendrickson. Naturally, he didn't grow too fond of me over the years.

I had to give up band. I really loved playing the bass drum. Was I great? No. I was okay. I had played the instrument for two or three years. Samantha was the snare drummer, and she actually was very talented. And it was the one thing that Samantha and I had in common. She ordinarily didn't like me, but when we played drums in the back of our band practices every other day, we were basically friends just as we had been as kindergartners. I had wanted to stay in high school band, but there was already a bass drummer and he had seniority over me. Plus, he actually was talented. I was not particularly talented. Samantha was accepted as a drummer, and Sarah – who had always played the clarinet stayed in band. They tried to put me in choir – but I protested, which was understandable since the very thought of singing in a group was horrendously embarrassing to me. The eventually put me in a Study Skills class.

Study Skills was run by a very tall square headed, plain looking man who had this threatening vibe, but was probably the calmest and most boring fellow who ever worked in that school. Mr. Forestman. The only thing that seemed to get his goat was when you called him Mr. Foreskin. He was actually just the basketball coach. He just overlooked the Study Skills class as an extra detail. We were given planners. All we had to do was demonstrate that we used our daily planners and the rest of the time we could use to do homework or to chat. It was in this class that I got to learn the more juicier details of my classmate's lives, and the lives of different kids in the school in general. There was a group of boys, and a group of girls. I sat alone at the weird person table in the corner by myself and drew. He didn't like it when I drew, and would tell me to stop sometimes. I am pretty sure I didn't use any of this time wisely. I would mostly listen to them gossip. I had no idea my classmates were having so much drama. I had been caught so deep in my own Alien Girl – anime girl land that I didn't realize.

One day this crazy fellow walked into the Study Skills class. I had heard him being talked about for years of my life. Everyone said he was crazy. And yet, I had never actually taken a look at him before – at least not consciously. I wasn't even sure if he was a student or not at first. His name as people called him was Double D. His real name was Daniel. But almost nobody but a few of the more sensitive teachers called him by his real name. He had facial expressions that were always shocking. His mouth stretched across the entirety of his face. His eyes were giant and bulged and black. He never seemed to blink. He spoke in a loud overly pronouncing voice. It was the voice that someone would make if they were to imitate a geek, only more extreme. He used phrases you might hear an elderly person make. Like, you knew the phrase, but nobody in high school would ever describe something in that way. Every single thing about this guy was weird. His movements seemed unnatural. He also wore women's matching sweaters and sweater pants. And he had a cape. He wore a cape half the time he came to school. He also had one of those small cd holders you put on the mirror holder thing in your car. He wore it on his hand like a super hero. And when he went through the hall way between classes, it was really something else.

He came in this one day, and I could barely believe this guy existed. He claimed that he was psychic, and had telekinetic powers. He told people this daily. He also said he was a karate master. And he was a super saiyan. He really believed these things were true. It was weird seeing this guy. Of course I judged him, but he was alarming and I didn't feel the need to give him problems. There were plenty of people in the school and in the town who liked to pick on him. It was strange because up to that point I had been somewhat certain that I was the biggest freak. Apparently, compared to some I was normal, painfully. Double D came in when the teacher wasn't there this early evening. He challenged a boy in my class, Corey to 'BE A MAN' and to fight him to the death. Double D warned him in all loud seriousness with not a tinge of humor in his facial expression that he could explode Corey's mind. I remember Double D went on to do some kind of strange air kick. It was truly a sight to behold. Corey ducked Double D's strange movements laughing boyishly and hysterically. All the boys were laughing. The cheerleader girls in the other corner laughed nervously. I just stared on in disbelief. This was my first, and not last introduction to Double D in the years as a high school student. So this guy was the school freak. I would always be one of the weird ones for sure, but this guy would always outdo me.

I didn't really know how to feel about high school. Technically it was still junior high. And we were still taking a few classes at the elementary school for some reason. But since the junior and senior high schools were one in the same, it was strange to be in this new atmosphere. The teachers seemed a little more lenient. Teachers in the elementary school were a bit caught up in their positions. You got the feeling that they didn't trust you to be able to tie your own shoes. They were very controlling. If they had to deal with the older kids in this climate, they would have lost their minds. Between classes was pure chaos. There was one hallway and everyone's lockers were on it. For someone with the anxiety that I had, it was hard for me to even think straight. It was basically like being dunked into freezing water every forty-five minutes. I was always in a state of shock. The fear I felt when I at first could not find my locker was unbearable. It was hard to believe that I had made it this far. Roxanne and Maria had gone to school here. But it always had seemed to me that I would always be a child, and the day where I too was to do my time as a high school student would never come. Strange too, the seniors were all enormous to me still. The hallway smelled like football player sweat – quite unpleasant, random smells of perfume, books, the smell from the lunch room of the cheapest food imaginable, generally something brown in a big vat with gravy on it. And underneath that, for me at least, I could smell anticipation, fear, sex, chaos, the thoughts of thousands of people who had come before – not just the students that were there then. I was overwhelmed. It was all too much. Too many people. I figured it out somehow, almost.

The one thing I did like about this new high school thing was after school every Thursday, from 3:15 when the school bell rang till somewhere between five and seven – we got to go to Art Club. Art Club was ran by a woman named Ms. Fiske. She never really liked me all that much, but she seemed okay with me. She really enjoyed Sarah more. This didn't actually bother me, despite my inferiority issues at the time. Mrs. Fiske was extremely unstable. You could tell by the way she laughed. Her moods were up or down. She would get mad and she would frantically begin talking in a way that nobody could understand. Once a month she would scream and cry at us when we took art class. But Art Club was totally worth it. You could never really hate Ms. Fiske because she had set up a place where I sort of belonged. She was more than generous with her supplies as well. We never had to pay for anything. She brought cookies and soda, and we would listen to music and make art. The canvases were free, the paint was free, the freaking clay was free, and there was a kiln we could use and that was also free. Sarah and I would go every Thursday. Usually it would be about five to ten other students. Generally they were either older art nerds, or maybe even a football player or a girl's basketball girl who had a secret artsy side.

It was one thing I really did enjoy. Several times in my years at that school, the principals and teachers tried to ban me from being able to go to Art Club, but they never succeeded. For this, I really didn't care if Ms. Fiske secretly didn't like me or get my art. I mean, I think it bothered me later on a little. But it was never that bad because she made Art Club happen.

To be continued. And if you are interested in this and want to catch up, here are the other parts i have written thus far.

PART 13 - http://tinyurl.com/yalanq9s

PART 12 - http://tinyurl.com/yc79mw94

PART 11 - http://tinyurl.com/yc9qhj84

PART 10 - http://tinyurl.com/yb734w24

PART 9 - http://tinyurl.com/yc2t6vfw

PART 8 - http://tinyurl.com/ybl37utq

PART 7 - http://tinyurl.com/ybvo283g

PART 6 - http://tinyurl.com/kbc9dwu

PART 5 - http://tinyurl.com/msnz4am

PART 4 - http://tinyurl.com/k9x8esg

PART 3 - http://tinyurl.com/mwp9atx

PART 2 - http://tinyurl.com/lbt6xq2

PART 1 - http://tinyurl.com/l8xbvg8

#text #life story

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