#so I wanted a handwriting first graders/kindergartners could read

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story - Part 2

So, this became a little longer than i expected because i started remembering stuff, and i didn’t want to spend two weeks editing it down, and i still have more to go obviously. I am really glad so many people liked the first part of my life story. I would definitely have posted it sooner, but i was in the middle of my work week, so i spent most of my free time getting as much sleep as i possibly could.

In case you didn’t read the first part, here’s part 1.

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/160186590059/about-me-life-story-part-1 

Due to the font on my page, which perhaps i should change, but won’t at the moment, i would highly recommend copying and pasting it onto something you could see better without destroying your eyes. 

Anyway, 

The hardest thing about Kindergarten ultimately, even with everything said and done, was not any of this other stuff in my personal life so much as it was my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Denler herself. There was never a single child who ever came out of her kindergarten class who liked her, in fact she traumatized us all, some more than others, but everyone has their scars. She would steal toys from kids, and one time she even stole money. I can speak to her victims as adults, and it doesn't matter if it was a class she taught in 78' or 97' – we all feel the same way. She liked to psychologically and emotionally abuse small children. And even though the adults would watch her do this, it was like there was some kind of filter in their minds where they just refused to see it as a problem. She was a very mean person, but she would act a little nicer too when the adults were not in the room. She wasn't mean the way that the janitor is mean. She was not hardened by life, or under-appreciated. I say this as an adult who has the benefit of looking back at the behavior. She was mean because she wanted to see suffering. She was probably a sociopath.

I don't remember my first day of school, though the first part of it is on tape, so I know how it went. It's a somewhat boring videotape, that shows me taking about twenty minutes tying my shoes, eating pop's cereal, and Roxanne making faces at me while I cried about it, but most people seem to enjoy the video quite a bit. On the first day of school, I met the friend I would end up keeping in my life until I was in tenth grade of so. Her name was Sam. She had very short blonde hair, and I might have thought she was a boy, as this was what Colt's hair looked like. I was probably looking for someone who reminded me of him. She shared her cookie with me at lunch time. She was a very sweet little girl. My mom didn't know that I was supposed to bring my own lunch. We sat next to each other, she saw that I didn't have anything to eat, and she split her lunch with me. That was all it took for us to develop a friendship. It's hard to believe that it was once that easy to make lifelong friends.

Mrs. Denler would teach us the alphabet in a way that was unpleasant. She would sort of yell out words and sounds angrily. I was a very stressful for me. If we didn't perform to her liking, she would single us out and scold us in front of the class, make us recite our mistakes to everyone over and over, put us in the corner, force us to keep our heads on the desk for an hour. Make us stand in front of the classroom and be used as a demonstration to the rest of the kids was the worst. I was always in a state of shock. I could barely function. She was all about shame. It turned out that I was emotionally more fragile than my classmates. If she called me name I instantly became frightened and would not answer. She started singling me out. As the weeks progressed, I would feel waves of dizziness and fear every morning I walked into the classroom. My hands would shake. If I hadn't made a friend I might have broken down completely.

I didn't know how to explain to my family what was wrong. While I was in school, I could hear my heart beating in my chest frantically at all time. She never said anything in a nurturing way, she never hugged or comforted the students. And she didn't like me in particular. She eventually told my parents she thought I was 'mentally retarded'. And what made this even more difficult is that Mrs. Denler had very old fashioned superstitions that left-handed individuals were marked as naturally evil in the religious sense. And it just so happened that I am left handed. So my handwriting was poor writing with my right hand and this confirmed her suspicions that I was mentally challenged. But if she saw me use my left hand for anything, she would suddenly be upon me from behind, where she would either yank my hair, twist my ear, slap my hand with a ruler, or just grab my hand with hers, crushing it and force me to write with my right hand. I never knew when she was behind me. She would silently walk behind us as we worked, waiting for my devil hand to instinctively use the pencil. There was one day where she grabbed my write and hand squeezed it and forced me to write with it the for the whole class hour, all while telling me what a terrible child I was.

My parents eventually saw the bruises on my hands, and they had a meeting and told her she was not allowed to do that to me. This seemed to help somewhat and it forced her to stop grabbing my hands so hard, but she picked on me even more in class. When Christmas came around, I colored my reindeer coloring book print out as a red deer, rather than a brown one. Mrs. Denler was furious. As an adult, I absolutely cannot imagine being furious at a five year old for coloring an animal a different color, but she was completely out of sorts about this. She called a meeting with my parents to warn them that I showed signs of 'deviancy. My parents were sarcastic back to her, possibly because they could not imagine why they had to take time from work to talk about a crayon colored red reindeer.

I think the grand finale of that year with her was when I peed my pants. I was of course too afraid to ask to use the bathroom. You were not allowed to do that, and you would have to apologize to the class if you asked. She grabbed me by the collar and shamed me in front of the other students, telling them what a gross child I was, before dragging me up to the office to sit in a room and wait for my mother to come and get me. She told my mother in the office that she didn't think I would be capable of first grade and that I needed to be in her kindergarten class again next year. Thankfully my mother declined and I didn't have to spend another year with Mrs. Denler.

That was most of what occupied my life at that point, but there was also a boy who I became infatuated with named Dustin McFarland. He was a kind of pretty little boy. He had very long eyelashes and dark hair. I always imagined he was some kind of a prince. He was five or six, and looking back at my old pictures, he truly was just a little boy, nothing more, nothing less, but in my five year old mind he exemplified all that was handsome. I became obsessed with him in secret. I was so infatuated with him that I could hardly even think in his presence. I used to try drawing him over and over during the weekends. I made up stories in my head quite often where he would rescue me from someone evil, where we would get married and drive away on a motorcycle.

Roxanne found out I had a crush on him. I imagine she just put the pieces together or read the expression on my face. She had to know all my weaknesses. I don't know if what Roxanne did the coming week was an attempt to humiliate me, or an act of altruism to get me set up with the boy of my dreams, or both. But she decided to get involved, much to my anxiety and fear. Roxanne was a sixth grader, and the kindergartners were to read books with the sixth graders on Thursdays on the gymnasium floor. I wasn't allowed to be in my older sister's group since she was my sister. But we would usually change off what older student would read to us. Anyway, Roxanne gave me this funny smiling look that day, and she and her friends rounded up Dustin to be a part of their group. Something was definitely up. She did this with intent. I knew at that moment that Roxanne was going to blow my cover. For me at that young young age, NOTHING in the world was worse than someone finding out that you had a crush on them. You were better off dying. And Roxanne had something in mind, though she would not tell me what. I remember just melting. My insides felt like worms on fire. I was almost hyperventilating.

So, I remember feeling mortified as I watched her and her friend talk to Dustin from across the room. I could not hear them though. I saw her asking him questions and smiling to herself. She kept looking over at me. She was enjoying her power in the situation. At one point they both looked over at me. I was dying. I knew my cover was blown, but what could I do? I don't know how long things went on this way, but when the bell rang, Roxanne and her friend walked up to me. Roxanne told me that she had told Dustin everything. And then she told me that Dustin had a crush on me as well and wanted to be my boyfriend. I assume she expected this to be a relief for me. It was not. At was at this point that I broke down and started crying, in front of Dustin, my whole class, and all the of the sixth grade. I was horrified. My life was ruined. This was the worst news in the world to me at that time. I felt exposed. I was taken out of the gym crying. Roxanne didn't understand. She thought I would be happy to get a boyfriend. At my age she was taking boys into the bushes and kissing. But for me my feelings were ruined, the world I lived in was ruined. I was embarrassed and extremely ashamed. I instantly lost interest in Dustin altogether at that very moment. Something in me just shut down. And after that, I didn't have a crush on anyone until I was in 7th grade. My love life for quite some time after, was presumed dead.

I ended up seeing Dustin McFarland years later. He worked at the factory with me in 2013. I barely recognized him. He wasn't particularly handsome, or ugly. He was just a dude with a cap on his head. There were not beams of light radiating from him. He actually was a bit dumb to me. Still had the same eyelashes though. He basically looked like a redneck with falsies on. He introduced himself to me because he remembered me from school – probably not remembering what could have been between us, but just maybe. It was kind of a strange moment there and then.

My sister Allison was born at the end of that year. My mom spent most of these years pregnant. She had William, who died of course, and then four months later she was pregnant again with Allison. One month after Allison, she was pregnant again with David. My mother was attempting to have a son, to replace William, which I guess finally happened when they had David. Allison marked the end of me being the youngest child. I was then conveniently pushed as the middle child for those formative years, which has it's own blessings and curses.

Allison was considered a lot cuter than me. Where I had mousy brown hair, she had thick eyebrows with long lashes, and had perfect dark hair that curled into tight sausage curls and dimples, like Shirley Temple only with dark hair instead of blonde. People would always stop and want to touch Allison's hair. She could never keep her tongue in her mouth, which always seemed to be poking out from the corner of her mouth. I remember feeling a bit jealous of her, wishing I had curly hair that people wanted to touch and ask if it was real, but as Allison grew older, I tried to befriend Allison. She didn't like me – and there seemed to be no clear reason for this. She would not let me pick her up, or let me touch her stuff. If I got close to her, she would be very snotty and start to cry. She would throw things at me. It was like she was born from the womb with resentment for me. I have since racked my brain on what it could have been that caused her to dislike me so intensely. Perhaps in a past life I had really been a pain to her. She didn't get close to me at all till she was nearly four years old.

My mother bought an unruly female dog and they called her Sidney for that year. It was one of the many animals cycled in and out of the home on my mother's whims. Sidney often would try to run away. We had to keep the door shut. I was five and was not so good at keeping the door shut. One fine spring day, Sidney got loose, most likely because I forgot to shut the door behind me. Two minutes later I remember hearing this blood curdling wail and a screech. Everyone in the house ran down the street. Sidney had been hit by a semi. Her guts were strewn all over the street. We loaded her up and took her to the vets, but ultimately she had to be put down. Roxanne cried all night, and would often let me know that I had killed Sidney, which made me feel horrible. I felt guilty about that for years.

I had a extremely strict schedule in those days. Nobody made me have this schedule. I just seemed to make it happen for myself. I woke up at 8:30 am. I laid in bed till nine. I would then get dressed, have the same breakfast every morning. And I would go outside and sweep the driveway. I became very obsessed with sweeping. I could never get all the fine dust out of the driveway that I wanted. It was something I did every morning. People thought I was very odd. A lot of people would see me each morning and they tended to think I was pretty cute. And it was in this daily routine that I eventually made the best friend I ever had.

I was still five at the time, but getting close to six. I was doing my voluntary sweeping job, and there was this three year old girl who kept passing my house. Eventually one day she came up and asked me what I was doing. She was very bold. I don't recall exactly what our exchange was from that point, but she became a fixture to my life from that point on. Her name was Rachelle. Her family was incredibly poor. Nobody watched her. At three years old, she would travel a two mile radius away from home, on her own, and with absolutely no one's permission. Her mother was a religious nut, and her father was always drunk locked in his home repair shop, where they made just enough money to pay the bills. In the summer though, they didn't even have electricity. Rachelle was scrappy in a third world kind of way. She didn't get Christmas or a birthday. She only had one pair of clothing. Often the family did not get dinner. Her mother donated all the spare money the family had to charity. She likely befriended me at first because she thought our family could spare her a meal or two. She didn't have toys. She wanted to see what I had, and to see what she could get from me. She wasn't above stealing if she had to either.

In a way, this was really good for a kid like me. I was very much a dreamer. I was kind of controlling in my little world, and stuffy. I was fearful of most things, and clumsy. Rachelle over the six years we were friends, really pushed me to be a bit more rebellious. She got me in a lot of trouble. There wasn't a day that went by that we didn't do something we should not. She's the one who taught me to ride a bicycle, even though she was almost three years my junior. For all the years that my parents fought, my sister's partied, and so on, my childhood from that point on was more defined by my friendship with Rachelle. She essentially was my childhood. Because of this, I believe I have shaped myself to be more defined by my friendships than by my family.

We literally spent every day together for years. We would find each other after school. We were almost never separated. I don't think either one of us had a full personality without the other. We were completely in sync with one another, and we just operated as this single entity half the time. Occasionally, she would choose some neighbor girl over me to hang out with. This always upset me, but we always made up. My friends in my own class hated her, and they tried to shame me for hanging out with her. She eventually almost lived with us. Her mother made Rachelle go to be at 6:30 pm even in the summer when it was still daylight outside in every way, so she had a much better life over at our place where we went to bed at ten in stead. The only clothes she got were my handmedowns. Eventually everything she ate came from my house. All of her birthday and Christmas presents came from us. But she never seemed to feel sorry for herself. She was extremely resilient in that way.

On New Years in the beginning of 1996 my father and I went to the theaters to see Toy Story. This was a monumental occasion for me. I had been to the theaters a few times before, having gone to Jurassic Park, Lion King, The Mask, A Goofy Movie, and Joe's Apartment. But Toy Story looked different than all the other movies. I remember just feeling totally enchanted by that. After Toy Story, we went to see the park where they put up lights for Christmas. This was a very special night for me.

Roxanne and my father were getting along worse and worse. Roxanne was not pregnant yet at the time, but she would be within that year. Roxanne had run away for three days and nobody could find her. The police were called. When the police found her with a friend who's mother was cracked out, I remember the police holding a flashlight in Roxanne's eyes. I guess by whatever they saw in her eyes they could tell she was high. About a week later, Roxanne and I were playing in Allison's baby room. The intercom was on. My father could hear from downstairs. Roxanne took one of my toys, and she began breaking it, and pushing the button. I cried for her to stop but she would not. Roxanne had made a habit of breaking my toys in those days. She would break my toys, and then she would break her own stuff, and frame me just to see me get in trouble. She even shaved my legs when I was sleeping. Then she later pointed out to my parents that I was shaving my legs. I remember feeling very confused. Nobody believed me. I was ordinarily a very calm child, but I have always gotten pretty loud when I feel unjustly accused of something I have not done. I remember screaming and crying begging people to believe me, but since I was little nobody did.

Anyway, Roxanne was in the room with me, picking on me. Usually my mother just let her do whatever she wanted, and I would get punished. But my dad favored me, so today the tables were turned. Ordinarily he would have been at work this time of day. But he was not. He heard the whole thing from the baby monitor. He stomped up the steps and unexpectedly charged into the room in a flying rage like I had never seen. He was way crazy furious. Roxanne denied picking on me. I don't remember what he called her. I think he might have called her something pretty awful that you should not call a twelve year old. He then grabbed her and slapped her hard across the face. I started crying. Roxanne ran away and got a hold of her dad. Her dad called the police. My father told me to lie to the police and attempted to convince me that what he did was right. I lied to the police, but it was very obvious I am sure that I was lying for my father. In any case. Years later when my father was slapping me across the face I rethought about this incident some.

There was another incident later when I was in second grade that came to clash between my father and Roxanne. They basically hated one another at this point, and this was when Roxanne decided to tell our mom that my father had molested her years ago. She wanted him out of the house. Anyway, they had this kind of dumb program where a big set of chicklets was brought into our classroom, and everyone for a few dollars could take one home with them over the weekend. Little baby chickens are the sweetest little beings. They just want to be gently cared for and treated like the little angel beings that they are. I remember I was sitting on the floor, holding my little chicklet when Roxanne and my father began fighting, presumably about Roxanne wanting to go to one of her less than savory friend's parent's homes. It escalated somehow. My father ended up grabbing Roxanne and shaking her screaming at her. He was very loud. I remember curling up and trying to protect the little chicks ears. Baby birds are very sensitive and loud noises like that can simply make them keel over and die. I tried to ask him to be quiet, but in my father's rage he told me to shut up. As Roxanne walked off, He screamed at her and called her 'white trash'.

Later on, I asked my father what that meant. All I could think of was some postmodern art sculpture made of trash, except all of it was monochromatic and painted white. Why was Roxanne to be compared with something like that? At least that is how my mind invisioned it. This was the beginning of understanding for me that my dad was racist I think. He sat me down, like he was going to give me some nod of great wisdom. “White trash,” he said, “was when white people acted like black people.” I tried to understand this as he told me, and I imagine in some way I internalized this notion into some subconscious racism that I had to face at a later time in my life without realizing it had been ingrained in me when I was very young. The premise of this statement essentially, though he tried to explain to me that there were 'a few good black people' was that most people of color were essentially 'trash'. I didn't feel all that compelled by what he stated. What he said seemed wrong. What watered down version of MLK I had learned in school seemed to contradict my father's ideology in a pretty basic way. Furthermore, I didn't understand why he felt so much animosity for black people. There weren't even any black people in any of the neighboring towns. I had seen maybe two people in my entire life who were of color. And yet, he seemed to feel that they were some imminent threat to 'our way of life' and all things decent. Naturally being considered trash seemed very low. Because according to my father's values, you only had to state the color if it was some exception to the rule, implying that to be white was to naturally not be trash. But to be black, well, by your very nature, unless you tried very very very hard to live up to white people's expectations of you, well then you were just naturally trash.  

The town of Kendrick flooded in 1996. I remember looking out my window and down the hill. There were houses that were nearly entirely covered with water. There were people paddling around in canoes. School was canceled of course. It was the craziest thing I remember seeing at that point. On rainy days, when occasionally Rachelle had religious duties with her mother, I started playing Sega genesis quite a lot. More often than not, Roxanne would be listening to music on these rainy weekends. She listened to Ace of Base, Salt n' Peppa, Shania Twain, Oasis's famous Morning Glory album – which I grew to love and still do like quite a bit, and 'What if God Was One Of Us?' on repeat. For my sixth birthday I begged for a Howdy Duty Doll. It was kind of a gross strange doll. My goal in life was to be a comedienne

The house above ours was pretty big. At some point the Johnsons moved in. The Johnsons were Mormon. The father was a creep. I don't know much about him, other than he beat his children with a belt, a lot. The mother was a very high strung neurotic sort of woman who eyed and judged us non-Mormons suspiciously from her doorstep, and had trouble keeping her mouth shut. The oldest girl was named April. April was considered very unpopular in school. She really loved Baby Bop and Barney when she was a teenager. She still acted like a little girl. I think she probably had a rougher time at life than I could have known at the time. She adored Roxanne. Roxanne didn't want to have anything to do with April. Roxanne would try to pretend she wasn't home, but April would find walk around our house and look into our windows. It was a little weird.

Then there was Adam. Adam was a year older than me. We eventually became really good friends one summer, but then it kind of fizzled away soon after. Adam was always getting beat on by his father particularly hard. He always had bruises all over him. I thought he was pretty cool for the most part, but he avoided hanging out with me, since I was a girl.

Then there was Ashlee and Ayla. Ashlee and I never really got along well. She also had mysterious bruises all over her, and she talked an awful lot about sex. I kind of wonder if something was happening in their family that should have been reported. I tried several times to hang out with her, but she said and did things that bothered me. She was kind of mean, but it was more than that. As an adult now, I can''t pinpoint why I stopped hanging out with her per say. But I recall a very disturbing thing that happened that made me leave her alone. Ayla was the only one of them without bruises. She was I think, the father's biological daughter, and she was treated a lot better than the other kids were. She was about four around this time. Ashlee, Ayla, and I were hanging out in their fort in their backyard, when Ashlee told me she wanted me to see something cool she could make Ayla do. So, we were up in this fort, and she began forcing Ayla to french kiss her. The little girl resisted and was crying, so Ashlee slapped her in the face. I was not impressed. I told Ashlee she was gross. I tried to leave the fort, but she blocked the entrance. I had to fight to get my way out of there. She would not stop making her little sister kiss her. I got out of there somehow eventually, and I avoided being alone with Ashlee after that. There mother was always accusing me of corrupting her children anyway, and we weren't allowed to have most soda pops in her house.

In the summers of first and second grade, my parents were fighting a lot. This was the beginning of the end for them. It started with fights that seemed to stay at an agitated, but not outlandish level behind closed doors later in the night, but soon escalated to my father screaming so loud that neighbors three doors down called the cops alarmed. They sent me down to stay with my grandma Betty for the summers down in southern Idaho I think to keep me away from some of that. It was very hot and dry down there. Southern Idaho is a total desert. I can't say I am a very big fan of southern Idaho. It's basically like Utah. My aunt lived down there as well. She had a few horses that were on this woman's land. They had acres of corn fields, and I got to run through this endless corn field. It was quite liberating. There are things about childhood that you forget. You know you forgot something, but you don't know what that something was exactly. I spent a few summers at my grandma Betty's like this.

My grandma Betty was a bit boring. She chain smoked. She had a new cat, a Siamese fluffy cat named Shanghai. We would television together. She had an oven, but my grandmother was too afraid to use it. She was also too afraid to use the microwave unless someone was there. I got to visit my second  cousins who were a little younger than me once or twice a week. My cousins on my dad's side are all a lot older than I am. I don't know that they really liked me all that much. I still have a grudge against my cousin Matt. He put me in the corner for not eating my cole slaw. I hate cole slaw. Unless it's so un-cole-slaw-ish that they have basically taken away all but the very basics of cole slaw, I can honestly attest that it's one of my least favorite meals. I spent a good three hours sitting in a corner for not eating something my parents were fairly understanding about me not eating. I felt highly resentful for this, and never once did I give in even a little and decide to put that bad tasting stuff in my mouth. I had given it a genuine try. I genuinely did not enjoy it. I did not understand what the point of this exercise was other than for an adult to punish me for their own personal issues they had with themselves.

One thing I do remember that I did love a lot though, was a place called Discovery Zone. This place was basically like a McDonald's play area, only 30X bigger. It had several stories. You could get lost. Everything was extremely bright colored. Being let loose in this otherworldly maze was mind altering. I felt like a wild animal let loose for the first time in it's natural habitat. If there is such a place as limbo, than I am fairly certain that Discovery Zone modeled itself after such a place. The vibes were like joy and hell all in one.

At some point when Allison was two or so, I found her with a giant stab wound in her stomach. She had been playing be herself, but I really could not find the cause of the cut. Nobody saw it happen. We found no sharp objects. Nobody else had been around. She didn't seem to know either, though her limited speech prevented us from understanding her explanation. She was walking around naked, and didn't seem all that upset that blood was gushing out of her little belly. My mother rushed her to the hospital, and she got stitches. I remember they sent me to the store for something. I honestly thought she was going to die. I had never ran so fast in my life.

Most of my life though, was just me and Rachelle hanging out. We turned a shed like room that came off the side of my house into a fort. We hung out there for hours. Rachelle, assuming she had not stayed the night, would show up as soon as she woke up. She often had to stop me from sweeping, as I was still somewhat obsessed with the task. There were other things to be done. I would always begrudgingly stop and decide to do what she wanted, generally after squabbling to a certain degree. She always wanted to play with the Johnsons. I didn't want to. She eventually made the Johnson mother so angry she wasn't allowed back. Rachelle was a Catholic, so the Johnson family felt threatened by that I think, them being so Mormon. One of our favorite things to do in the whole world was steal. We would steal sugar packets from the diner. I believe this is why I developed a taste for aspartame. We would go in there for a glass of water, and then we would start filling up our pockets like crazy with the stuff. We would then go home and eat it. We tried hanging out at the creek, but I was honestly so clumsy as a child I could barely walked through those rocks.

There was also this old man named Bucky. Bucky wore suspenders and a little 20's style hat. He had a dog that looked like Wishbone. He walked around town all day. He always had these hideous cherry flavored hard candies he would give us when he saw us. I believe he stashed them in his back pocket just for the chance at spotting us. So part of our day was going about the business of finding Bucky. There was something more than a little off about Bucky, but we didn't realize it quite yet.

When we could, we would try to get to a nearby town where there was a library. In the library, they had MAD magazines. Rachelle and I thought the raunchy cartoons were the absolute best. We would flip through the magazines for countless hours, reading every dirty joke. There was one page once, that had a scene of hundreds of people fucking one another. It was so outrageous to me then. I could not believe what sin we were seeing. There was a thrill for me in doing bad things. It ended up becoming a bit of an addiction for both of us. Rachelle taught me how to ride her bike, and eventually one birthday I got my own, but eventually that was not enough for us. I was not to keen on stealing from the actual grocery store. There was a birdlike woman named Debbie that worked down there (still does in fact), and her entire life was built on the hope of being able to catch some dumb kids like us stealing a candy bar. Plus, I was afraid that if we started Rachelle would not know when to stop. She had absolutely no gage on when to stop doing something and it made me a little nervous. And if we got caught I would not be able to purchase ice cream after we swam at the pool, on those rare and wondrous days where we were given $4.50, which miraculously would pay to give us the entire day to swim in the pool AND we could buy ice cream cones.

So I begged Rachelle to not steal from Phil's, and instead we decided to start climbing into homes and apartments through the windows and exploring other people's houses when they weren't home. I never took anything, but Rachelle did. It was never anything seemingly that important. It would be a gallon of milk, or a pair of socks. One time someone came home while we were in the apartment. This forced us to jump out of a two story window, land precariously on a tin roof, slide down, and land on our feet painfully and then climbing under a fence that scraped our backs. It was loud. I also was about 50/50 on just turning myself in. I protested. I had to have been heard. I eventually just jumped and got it over with. Most of the people in town didn't like Rachelle. I don't believe this was fair given that she almost literally didn't have any support growing up. But they did have their reasons.

Rachelle's mother made Rachelle go to church functions 2-3 times a week. I always went along as well, given that this gave us the perfect opportunity to write 'fuck' in all the bibles. I never could quite accept Christ I guess. Christianity for me was a gaggle of angry elderly old women who hated me no matter what I did. It was some strange bum in a robe, staring at me from the clouds. I suppose I wanted to believe in something, but everything about church was extremely earth-bound to me. It catered to old people the same way that newspapers and canned peaches did. Nonetheless, I started going to Sunday school when I was six and stayed until I was nine. I learned absolutely nothing from these years.

I decided to make up my own religion. The Catholic church was a two minute walk from my house. It was surrounded by overgrowth, and it was coming off of a hill, that was covered in all kinds of mystical looking plantlife. It was a miniature forest. I imagined there was some God much bigger and older than the one inside the building. Rachelle and I were not allowed to go into the area because there was poison ivy. But it still got my attention. I think after awhile, we made this God very real in our imaginations. We decided to baptize ourselves with this new religion. I was a religion that only girls could be a part of. Our god was the earth. I didn't realize that I was simply recreating Paganism. One day, as it rained and we created little altars for the dark forest goddess, it began raining very heavily. We anointed our heads under the drainpipe that came off the church's roof.  Never in my life had I felt so liberated. I know this was just in my head, but I felt like I was capable of flying. I felt so happy I could laugh and cry. Rachelle did the same thing. Whatever we belonged to, it was something else from everyone else then. I guess I had caught religion there for a spell. Statistically, religion works like a drug at times for some people. And since then, I have had no experiences that I could say were religious. The situation is what it is. I am sure any people who heard this would make assumptions about what it was Rachelle and I experienced. I am going to go ahead and say it was due to brain chemistry and social conditioning.

There were two murders in Kendrick that took place around this time. Kendrick had gotten to be a somewhat violent little town for a few years. Drug use was extremely high among the teenagers of the 90's, and the groups of kids my sisters hung out with. The first murder was of this one kid, I don't remember his name. He was borderline mentally handicapped, but someone had been foolish enough to give him a bunch of drugs to deal to his fellow high school classmates. They gave him tens of thousands of dollars worth of drugs. He didn't sell much of it. Instead, he used a lot of it, and gave it away for free. So another guy named Cody from a town twenty miles away took him out into the woods and shot him and hid the body. Nobody ever found the body, and there was never enough proof that he did it, but many people heard the gunshot, one of them being my former roommate Josh (way way later in the tale). A lot of people in town knew what happened, but nobody did or said anything. It was kind of like that movie, Rivers Edge. Except there was no justice for this kid. The police did a lazy job looking for him and gave up very fast. Police around here really don't like to get out of their vehicles. Everyone just accepted it and moved on.

The second murder happened up in the hills a ways. He was Chuck Palahniuk's father. Chuck Palahniuk, is the person who wrote Fight Club, for those who may not know. I don't think him and his father were very close from what I gather. The details of the story are slightly hazy, but basically Chuck's dad stole some other man's girlfriend. Somehow this guy also knew people in Kendrick. So, he killed Chuck's dad in order to get revenge for him having stolen his girlfriend. I don't recall if he killed his ex girlfriend as well. But in order to hide the bodies, he and his friends, who happened to be my school bus driver at the time, and his wife, helped him attempt to set up the whole scene like it they died in a fire. The whole thing didn't work, and my bus driver, his wife, and their vengeful friend all went to prison. I remember being young, and wondering where the heck our bus driver went that looked like a pirate and hated children. There were whispers that he had done some horrible crime, but I actually didn't find out exactly what till I had a chance encounter with a clerk at Hastings fifteen years later.

My mother had complications with giving birth to David. I am not sure of the severity. I was sent into this playroom that was the biggest disaster big sty ever in the hospital in Moscow ID. My father was shaking and seemed panicked and frightened. This might be an overreaction on their parts, given they lost William. I am not sure. My mother claims she almost died. The doctors say she didn't, and since my mother makes up illnesses all the time (she has a complex), I am going to believe my father and the doctors. David's head however did get misshapen slightly getting pulled out. It gave his head an egglike appearance for several years of his life. He now looks mostly if not completely normal, and what strangeness there is with his head-shape he covers it with thick dark hair. But there might have been some damage. We will never really know.

He was the ugliest baby I have ever seen though. His jowls were enormous. His eyes tiny. His jowls hung low,and seemed to almost be connected to his neck. Onlookers who ordinarily get excited when they see a baby looked at him and turned their heads away. He was very fussy. He had lots of allergies. He was always sick. I didn't see him that often. She sort of became obsessed with him and kept him in a room with her alone most of the time. Allison was no longer all that special to her, so she was left to Shirley Templing up to Roxanne. My mother really never did like Allison and I quite like she liked David.

It was around this time that Roxanne got pregnant. She was still twelve. Roxanne had hooked up with her best friend's way-too-old older brother. He had no interest in being the father. Roxanne was still playing with dolls occasionally when she got pregnant, and now she wasn't going to model for seventeen magazine or even finish eighth grade. She was going to be a mother she decided. The whole thing was very alarming. The plan was at first, concocted between my mother and Roxanne, my grandmother Marie, and Maria was to pretend that the baby was Maria's somehow. They would send Roxanne to live up north with my grandma Marie, and she would have the baby in secret away from my father, so he would never know. This didn't work out eventually. And eventually he was told. This is when fights started bringing the police out to our house. In a way I can sympathize with my foolish father. My mother had stopped working, though she was getting her license to be a nurse at a nursing home or to take care of elderly people in their home. She had spent 80,000 dollars on garbage essentially and this forced him to take on three jobs, two of the full time just to pay the bills. She kept bringing pets home. She put him in a situation where he was expected to reprimand Maria and Roxanne and then when he did the best he could (which was usually a chauvinistic failure), all three of them would turn against him. He was drinking too much to cope with it all, there were babies all over the floor and my mom stopped changing diapers so he had to rush home to do it for her, and then he found out that Roxanne was pregnant, and he wanted her to give the baby up for adoption, but nobody wanted to do that. I can definitely sympathize with how trapped he must have felt. On the other hand, he had this coming.

So, with all this turmoil at home and stress, he decided to focus all his energies on me. I was the only positive thing in his life at the time. We went camping every weekend. We generally went out to a place called Buffalo Hump. It was a place that could not be reached most of the year. Idaho has a good deal of areas where people cannot go called The Wilderness Area. You can see it in the center of Idaho on just about every map. We camped on the outskirts of these places, and then we would backpack up these great peaks. He started talking badly about my mother a lot, and about my sisters. He became obsessed with doing this. I started copying him in order to gain his approval. It became something we did a lot. I remember it kind of felt gross somehow. Like, I felt like I was being very disconnected from my mom and my sisters. It wasn't that we were very close, but it started to feel like I really wasn't allowed to love them anymore. I didn't know what the right thing to say in any given situation was anymore. Because my mother clearly could tell that my dad had been 'talking to me', and she started quizzing me. I tried to stay loyal to my father and didn't tell her anything. It became this really unpleasant thing. I eventually simply chose my father's side, because he seemed to at least like being around me. My mother only seemed to care about David.

It was in these trips that I would also ask my father questions about life. I had already doubted the existence of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and God. My father admitted to me that non of these entities were real. I think out of all of them, I was most disappointed that the Easter Bunny was not real. This might have been because I could not imagine what sort of Rabbit could maneauver his paws well enough to place eggs in hiding places all around the yards of every boy and girl in the nation. I liked to try to imagine this Easter Bunny, an ordinary squishy little rabbit with long man arms coming out the sides. I grew fond of this idea, and it was sad to let that go.

My mother became intensely jealous of these camping trips, so one day she came out to find us. She had baby Allison and baby David with her. It was a four hour drive. Nobody was really expecting her to come, and I am not even sure how she found the camp grounds we were staying at. Just as she got close to the camper, I started talking about my mother, and I don't know what I said, but it could not have been more perfectly – or horribly planned. My father had, in his own need to be validated, trained me like a parrot to say anything negative about my mother in order to make him feel better. Just as she was approaching the camper I think I might have said something about my mother being stupid, about not loving her, and about how glad I was that she wasn't there with us.

And then she was standing right there in complete shock in the camper doorway. She looked completely floored. My dad looked incredibly guilty and stupid in that moment. He momentarily tried to punish me for it, as though all of this had come out of the blue. But it seemed phony. My mother was a mess of tears and honestly looked like someone had just punched her. I don't recall what happened after this. I think my dad tried to chase her down, but she drove away. I was left scratching my head. I realized I had said something I should not have said, but my father had seemed to be really clear that up to that point, me saying these things was the right thing to do. I felt really alienated at that moment.

One of my father's part time jobs was at a health food store in Lewiston. The building is empty now, but next door to this was this joke store. There aren't very many of these stores anymore, but there used to be these weird ass stores where they actually turned a profit selling creepy greeting cards with overweigth women with missing teeth eating whole cakes, fake puke, jumping beans, fake ice cubes with a fly in the middle, fake cigarettes with some dust in them to look like smoke, magic sets, woopy cushions, and tons of comic books by Robert Crumb, and I presume because of the 18+ only signs above a curtain that always seemed shut, they must have had porn in the back. I spent hours and hours in this building. I wanted to be a ventriloquist after all. This was my kind of stuff. I was sitting in this room looking at one thing or other, when on the radio it was announced that Bill Clinton, our president had been caught having an affair with Monica Lewinsky. I honestly thought it was part of the store. I thought it was like a gag along with everything else.

My father became OBSESSED with hating on the Clintons after that. He started listening to Rush Limbaugh every day. He started saying stuff about feminists ruining the nation. He often made jokes about Monica Lewinsky though I noticed, more than he did Bill Clinton. He talked often about how gross and fat she was and how nasty our president was for wanting to have anything to do with a woman that looked like her, even though his wife was 'bad enough.' I am sure he must have been channeling some of his anger at my mother onto Monica Lewinsky. But it seemed like this was something he could just not get over. He made fat woman jokes all the time about her. It felt like this woman was the nation's punching bag. Years later, she did a Ted Talk. Having the experience of watching her get taken down like that really did in some way shape the opinions I had of myself in my teen years. It was not healthy for me to have listened to so much of. Because at the time, I didn't really believe my father could be dead wrong about anything.

A few weeks later there was one final fight between my mother and father. Roxanne I don't recall being there. Basically, it was the one fight that was going to in my father's mind – change my mom's mind about Roxanne being allowed to be a mother at such a young age. My mother would not be dissuaded. She seemed to think that Roxanne, in all her twelve years of life had the experience to be a mother, and that her pregnancy was a very normal thing. My father on the other hand was losing his mind and could not seem to cope with this. Everything had played out to this final fight. I don't know if I was crying. I remember most of these fights as being somewhat like a movie playing out. My dad is an extremely loud person. Nobody can really win because he will yell over anyone and his voice being louder will go over yours, and you will lose. So my mother was trying to fight back, and what essentially my father kept saying was 'THE BABY WILL BE A BASTARD!!!! THE BABY WILL BE A BASTARD!!!', which was another word I had to ask about later. He ended up also calling my mother a selfish pig. I am sure everyone down the street could hear the whole thing. My mother's teeth were gnashing angry as she said whatever it was she was saying underneath my father's repetitive bastard shout. My mother ended up pushing my father. He fell into the couch. I don't know what really happened after that. I think I was upset. I do remember later that night, I tried to talk to my mom. I felt very confused, and pressured by both of them to pick a side. I tried to talk to her, but I remember her very clearly telling me in a monotone quiet voice 'You are ruined. Your father has ruined you. I don't want to see you anymore. Go away.” I left the room.